Vellum

by Hal Duncan

  “Huv ye no heard, Forsythe, that anger’s a disease that’s healed by words?” says this Corporal MacChuill.

  “If words,” he says, “come at the right time to ease the soul and don’t just crush a heart about to burst. Don’t let your pity turn into hostility.”

  He turns back to MacChuill, about to say his name’s not Forsythe anyway, sure and it’s Seamus Finnan, but—the heron flaps over his head. And what is a fookin heron doing here in December?

  The bird’s wings beat and MacChuill’s greatcoat flaps in the cold wind and Seamus feels that old, old creeping horror. MacChuill takes the bottle out of his hand, shaking his head.

  “If it’s prudence does most good, as bloody foolish as it looks,” MacChuill says, “well, ah guess that makes me an incurable fool.”

  He looks at Seamus with something more confusion than disgust, a young man looking for a hero, seeing only the reality, and oh, by Christ, sure and he couldn’t be satisfied with just the truth, could he? The truth is, Seamus knows, that Bloody Friday was the day, and if it didn’t happen then it never will, not here in Scotland. No, not now. The tanks rolled in and revolution rolled right out the door.

  “If anyone’s a fool it’s me,” he says.

  Mad Seamus Finnan with his fear of birds. Mad Seamus Finnan with his ghosts and fookin flow of words all pouring through his head, sure, like the river flows below, like the cold wind that blows.

  “Ah get the message loud and clear,” MacChuill says with disdain. “Go home, sit on yer arse, do nothing. Aye, Forsythe. Thanks. Ye’ve been quite an education.”

  Forsythe? Why does he know that name? Forsythe. Four scythes. Foresight. He’s shivering. By Christ, it’s cold, so cold his hand feels frozen to the metal of the bridge. He glares at MacChuill and the dark shape behind him, another soldier, smiling quiet, savage, cruel. Ah, Jesus, it’s fookin happening again, isn’t it? He can’t breathe. The wind howls in his ears, and underneath his feet the voices of the river rise.

  “Go on, fook off,” he says with desperation in his voice.

  And keep yer mind intact.

  MacChuill’s backing away, a look of horror on his face, his one-eyed face with that black hole in it, the crow sitting on his shoulder with its beak probing into the depths, picking away at him and pulling out the flesh, the red, the white scraps, and there’s carcasses all round them like a fookin abattoir and Seamus feels the terror rising and the rushing.

  “You speak this word to willing ears.”

  The bird’s wings sweep through the smooth air, and horses’ hooves clatter on cobbles and German machine guns rattle as Seamus staggers back from him, falls to his knees.

  “Leave me alone!”

  And MacChuill jerks both hand and mind away from the prisoner, gasping for air himself and stumbling as he steps back, bumping into one of the frozen carcasses, reaching behind, in part to stop it swinging and in part to steady himself, to ground himself back in the real world. Aye, but is it real?

  “What are you doing?” says Henderson, behind him.

  He shakes his head, looks at his shaking hand where the black dust of bitmites, scrawling across his palm, is settling back into a stable pattern, sinking down into the flesh and disappearing. The moment of disorientation passes and he turns and strides past Henderson, pushing through carcasses, leaving them swinging behind him in his wake.

  “MacChuill,” snaps Henderson. “You have your orders. Get back here.”

  But he’s already pushing through the plastic strips of the doorway, flapping them out of his way with an angry backhand, and he doesn’t stop walking until he’s out of the bloody building itself and standing in daylight, in the hot and blinding sunlight, thank fuck, of a scorching summer day in Mexico.

  He leans against the wall of the slaughterhouse, looking out past the trucks in the loading bay, to the green mountains, up to the blue sky, where black dots circle in the air, some native birds of prey. They’re tiny in the distance, so high up, like the bitmites crawling in the prisoner’s mind, the bitmites that can do Metatron’s bloody job for him. Let them tear the poor man apart, get under his skin and “bond with him.” They’re just machines. They won’t be troubled by a conscience, by sympathy. He watches the circling birds.

  Buzzards, they are, he thinks. Bloody buzzards.

  A TITANIUM ATLAS

  Outside, the deep sea groans and roars, waves dash dark caves of shades, and murmur somewhere underground as if to mourn his ruined state for him.

  A painting hangs on the wall of the doctor’s office, and Seamus recognizes it as based on one of Michelangelo’s slaves, so he does, because Thomas once showed him a drawing of it in his sketchbook—sure and it was one of the things he worried about with the lad, him being just a bit too fookin sensitive for his own good and all those pictures of half-naked men, and Seamus doesn’t care what fancy words ye use, if it’s contrapposto this or that, well it’s still a bloke with no fookin clothes on, all twisted-up white marble muscle in agony or ecstasy, in chains. But here and the man is painted as a titanium Atlas, with the vast globe of the heavens on his shoulders and it’s all like that wee Spanish fellow Thomas was so fond of, bits of it in the wrong places, like, so you can’t tell what’s the man and what’s the world, with painted streams flowing from springs and fountains on the globe, running in crystal rivers, to wet the fellow’s cheeks like tears distilled from tender eyes.

  “Is that some of that Modernism then?” says Seamus.

  Reynard heaves a sympathetic sigh, looks over his shoulder at the painting, back again.

  “One of the other patients,” he explains. “Similar case to yours, actually.”

  “He’s got the verbal diarrhea too, then? Talks shite as well, does he?”

  “Visual. It’s all we can do to stop him drawing on the walls. But you shouldn’t be so dismissive of—”

  “Talking in tongues? Sure and it’s not like I’m one of the bloody apostles, is it, Doctor?” Seamus says. “It’s not the Holy Spirit that I’m channeling.”

  Reynard picks up a sheaf of loose-leaf papers, taps them into order, lays them down again.

  Seamus nods at the painting.

  “So is that fellow mad as well then?”

  Reynard shakes his head. He takes his glasses off and, leaning an elbow on the table, pinches at his sinuses with thumb and forefinger.

  “I shouldn’t say that either of you were mad, per se.”

  He looks tired, Seamus thinks, and sounds it too. Living with a bunch of loonies might well do that to ye though.

  “No,” says Reynard. “I sometimes think that it’s the rest of us have lost our minds. But, anyway,” he cuts in quickly. “I want to talk to you about last night.”

  “I’m sorry about that,” says Seamus.

  Woke up half the wing, he did, they say. And got some dirty looks for it in the mess hall this morning.

  “Nothing to apologize for. You had a nightmare…”

  “Yes…”

  So Seamus tells him about being back in the trenches and the haughty duke with his rod of iron, him lording it over the lads and making up the law like a game of Simon Says, do this, do that, and sending them over the top to the illustrious and ancient honor of your brothers, he says, and out they go into the fields, and they’re not afraid to fight, except that instead of guns the mob of them have scythes to work the land. They have to walk across it slowly, sure, and swing their scythes low as they all advance across the trenches and the craters that are all filled full of water, moats and lakes, like, through a field of flowers that becomes an enemy army, sure and the grass is spears in their hands all pointing upward as they march on, harvesting and gathering them and slinging the bodies on their backs like peasant bundles, giants so they are, as they march on across the cultured land—the cultivated land, that is—and every place they tramp through, sure and it resounds with groans, mourns all the way to Asia or Arabia it is, he thinks, ’cause he looks up, see, and in front of him there’s
this dark virgin girl so beautiful, so sweet, but crying this lament for all their woes as they unsling their bundles and they start to build, like sandbags, see, they just pile them up one on the other, making walls, making this building out of them, out of the things, out of the lumpen things, and they build it higher and higher, so they do, sure and they build a city, it’s a city that they’re building from these things, somewhere in the Holy Land, a fortress city, by Christ, a citadel of carcasses.

  “Would you describe yourself as a man of faith?” Reynard asks.

  “No, I would not,” Seamus says. “Not now. Not since…”

  “Since what?”

  Seamus shrugs, keeping a sullen silence that might well seem proud, defensive, but that’s actually his own thoughts gnawing on his heart. Is it that he still believes, somewhere inside, and blames his God for all that’s happened to him? Sure and who else was it but him who gave the lads their orders?

  “Can we talk about something else?” he says. “I’ve told ye all this before. Ye’ve heard all the suffering and how I tried to knock some bloody sense into their witless fookin heads and—can we talk about something else?”

  REVOLUTIONS

  “It’s just…it’s interesting that in your dream you end up in…the Holy Land, building a city for a virgin, for the Virgin, perhaps?”

  “Well, it’s been awhile, ye know, Doctor. Sure and it’s hardly surprising if I’m dreaming of a beautiful girl.”

  Seamus gazes out the window, across the brown and green of the moor, to the gray rocks, gray sea, gray sky; it’s a landscape that’s always the same drab motley, no signals of winter; he doubts if there’s even any flowers in spring; sure and there’s no trees to fruit in summer, that’s for sure.

  “But a city made of corpses,” says Reynard. “What would that represent? The church? Religion itself? No. No. I think it’s something deeper than that. Society, maybe.”

  “Sure and I’m not a great fan of yer society types. Yer—”

  “—lords and dukes. Yes, yes. That’s not what I meant. I mean society as a whole. Civilization. The worker’s scythe. Asia and Arabia—have you heard of the phrase Fertile Crescent? That’s where it all began, you know, with agriculture, the neolithic revolution, in the cradle of civilization. And it all ends up with a city built from bodies. In your dream, anyway. Quite interesting.”

  Sure and the seasons here are decided by the sky, thinks Seamus, looking out on the moor, just like out on the sea itself, where all ye have is the rising and the setting of this star or that, the circling constellations, marking out the moon’s months and the equinoxes and the eons of them for the sailors in ships with sails like wings of flax, wandering across the ocean. And all the sky goes round in circles over them. Revolutions.

  “From the cradle to the grave, eh?” Seamus says, turning back to the doctor.

  “I don’t think you see much hope for humanity, much progress,” says Reynard.

  “Humanity? Progress? I’ll tell you this, I’ve not a word to say against them that actually do the work. If it wasn’t for the brickies and the joiners, sure and we’d still be living in sunless caves like ants dug down into the ground. Or agriculture, is it? I bet I can tell you who it was first put the yoke on a pair of wild animals so’s they might take some of the sweat of the toil off of the bodies of men. Or put the harnesses on horses so as to pull the glittering coach of some fat git with wealth and luxury. It was a man like me who would have been dragging the plow himself otherwise, or carrying the fookin king in his fookin sedan chair, sure. Who do ye think it was dug all the brass and iron, all the silver and gold out of the earth in the first place, but the men who’ve always been closest to the earth?”

  “You may be right.”

  “Sure and I know I am, ’cause them with all the schemes mixed up like dreams are too busy arguing in circles, floating on their own hot air; they’ve forgotten how to use their eyes to look around them, use their ears to hear what’s really going on. Christ, but they might as well be deaf and dumb because to them it’s all in here.”

  He taps the side of his head.

  “And yer three Rs—reading, writing and arithmetic—what would ye bet that it’s a worker made them up so that his master couldn’t swindle him out of his wages? Muses and poetry? Bollocks! It was: well, now I’d like to see that in writing if ye don’t mind, sir, oh, no sir, not that I don’t trust ye, seeing as yer a fine upstanding member of the community, but it’s just that yer a fookin thievin shite, if ye don’t mind my saying, sir.”

  Reynard has a tiny smile playing at the corners of his lips.

  “So how come,” says Seamus. “So how come, having come up with all these grand inventions, we don’t have the fookin wits to pull ourselves out of this shite?”

  “The war?”

  “The war.”

  “Listen to this,” says Seamus with a bitter laugh. “Sure, this is grand; it’s fookin rich. I’m sure ye’ll get a kick from it. Ye want to hear about ingenious inventions? This is the best. Back in France if anyone fell sick, ye know, most times there was no medical supplies, nothing to eat or drink to take away the pain, nothing to dress a wound with, or to treat the trenchfoot or trench fever, syphilis or gonorrhea, dysentery, influenza or Christ knows what, but for the want of medicine, we had to stand there and just watch men waste away to skeletons.”

  He stands up, paces round the room and ends up leaning on the back of the chair.

  “So me, I’m using whisky for anesthetic and for antiseptic, like. I’m using all the old wives’ remedies taught me by me mam and me grannies. Jesus knows what fookin potions I concocted, sure, hoping to stave off sickness, soothe the burns and blisters from the mustard gas or whatever. Some of them worked as well. Or, at least, the lads believed they did, as fookin desperate as they were.”

  Reynard studies his face.

  “But this is…just plain cruel,” he says. “No? Now you’re the one that’s sick, you think, losing your mind, and all you feel is the despair that you can’t find a…remedy for this.”

  Seamus just stares at him, jaw locked, teeth tight together.

  “Ye know, he says, “me mam, she always used to say I had the Sight a little. Superstitious woman, so she was. I think it’s daft meself. But I wonder, ye know, when I get the turns. How do ye tell a vision from a dream? I mean, maybe it doesn’t take the gift of prophecy to read the signs and omens in the world, to look at the circling flights of fookin carrion birds with crooked talons and say, by Christ, that bird’s fookin unlucky. Look at the way they live, and what they like, and fight over; look at when they gather, when they scatter. Jesus, ye know they used to read bird’s entrails, so I’m told, or cut them all up and offer up this part or that to the divine.”

  And he thinks of the cratered battlefield and him caught on the wire as the guns hammered and the bullets whistled past him, how he prayed for one to hit him and it never did, and when the push was over and all the bodies lay below and the guns quieted just a little, just enough. Only a few birds came at first, stupid or brave, and is there really any difference, sure? And anyway, they came, and twisted up and torn on the barbed wire, all he could do was watch.

  “Well now, it’s them that read our entrails, isn’t it? Picking over them like they’re looking for the smoothest, softest bits—is this the right color, is it? Isn’t this a pretty piece of liver? Oh, but there’s some juicy fat still on this arm, and you fook off, it’s mine, ye hear, you stick wi yer fookin bit of bladder. And over here or there, there’s yet another tearing away at some poor fooker’s…ah, Christ…at a fookin blackened, burnt-up flank of meat. Ah, Jesus, he was just a fookin lump of—”

  He’s sitting on the chair now, head in his hands, hands on his shoulders from Reynard standing behind him.

  “It’s not so hard to see the future. All ye’ve got to do is look into a fire.”

  He isn’t proud of it, but sure and Seamus has the sight all right, the same foresight that gave men cattle for t
he plow and medicine and numbers and the whole sorry fookin spectacle of history, of industry, the hammer and the scythe.

  “It’s not so hard to see the future, Doc,” he says. “It’s changing it. It’s changing it.”

  Angels with Dirty Hands

  He opens his eyes.

  The abattoir is quiet but for the chink of a few carcasses swinging on their chains and the occasional rustle as a breeze blows through the hanging plastic strips of the doorway where Henderson stands looking out. He tests the wires round his wrists and feels the noose around his neck tighten a little. Shit. He has no memory since MacChuill and Henderson found him in the church, just…random images. The Somme. Inchgillan. Bloody Friday. His head feels like some ransacked office, with all the filing cabinets open, files and folders scattered everywhere.

  He tries to work out where he is, how long he’s been here, but they’ve had him so deep under he could’ve been out for days. They could have brought him anywhere—although he guesses it’s still somewhere in the States. Rest of the world’s a little too unstable now, what with the apocalypse and all. Some fucking Mafia-owned slaughterhouse probably, he reckons, out in the middle of nowhere; the angels like to work through their…subsidiaries for these kinds of operations—don’t like the mess being made on their own doorstep.

  Operations. He looks down at the meat hook in his chest and feels sick. If he was human he’d be dead by now, but then if he was human he would have been dead a hundred years ago on the battlefields of France, wouldn’t he, with the rest of them? But no, Seamus Padraig Finnan got picked by destiny for something greater, for a bigger part in the play. He got…promoted.