Vellum

by Hal Duncan

  It took him decades even after Inchgillan to fully realize what had happened to him that day, what it was that touched him, transformed him; and there’s parts of it he still keeps buried down deep in the corpse-strewn mud of his nightmares. It took him decades of looking in the mirror and not seeing any physical signs of aging, decades of glimpsing things in shadows and reflections, hearing whispers on the wind and thunder in his own voice, decades before he had the strength to really look at himself, to hold his hand in front of his face and watch the strange, dark sigil forming on his palm as this line and that joined, like an acid vision, to form a sort of writing that he somehow knew was what he heard himself gibbering during his turns, written on his own skin, in his body, bonded with him somehow when he stood caught in the German wire for twelve hours, looking down over a battlefield where all the lads of his platoon and Christ knows how many others all lay dead as all the bullets just whistled past him. Charmed, he was. Blessed. Cursed. He touched eternity that day and it touched him and left its mark.

  And the Word was made Flesh and Seamus Padraig Finnan was the angel with a dirty face that Anna always said he was.

  He looks at the back of Henderson’s head and wonders what kind of cunt signs up to this fucking game of war. If it’s an angel with a dirty face that Seamus is, this bastard is an angel with dirty hands. Blood under the fingernails. Blackened with the smoke of burning villages. But Seamus doesn’t care if it’s Satan himself rising up in rebellion in the Middle East or Africa or wherever, and the archangel Gabriel can blow his horn to shake the very ground under his feet, ’cause Seamus isn’t fighting in no fookin war for any of the fookers. He’s a conchy. A conscientious fookin objector to the War in Heaven. No matter what they do to him.

  Finnan clenches his fists and cricks his neck. Swallowing hurts.

  He wonders if they don’t want to break him so as he’ll sign up with them as much as they just want to make him hate them strong enough to sign up with the opposition. Either way would suit them well enough. As long as he’s not a rogue unkin running wild and doing just what he damn well pleases, even if it is only keeping his fookin head down. Whether it’s the King’s Shilling or the thirty pieces of silver, at least then the bastards know where they stand. But—and he looks down at the black liquid dust crawling round his wound under the ripped and bloodstained T-shirt—this is all too fookin elaborate for that.

  Which leaves a third option.

  He’s heard of the bindings that take place when an unkin signs to the Covenant or to one of the Jesus-knows-how-many insurgent groups formed round some Sovereign still out for his chance to rule the world. There’s a lot you have to do to turn a man into a soldier; you’ve got to drill out the individuality, get some discipline into the lad, get them identifying with their battalion, thinking in the regimental colors of black and white, give them a new name from their surname and their rank, a serial number, a haircut and a kit like every other fucker stood beside them on parade. The unkin take that one step further. When you know the language that controls reality you can take a man apart and put him back together again from scratch with a brand-new identity…straight off the shelf.

  Henderson’s one of those. Man in Black. Mafia foot soldier. Spear carrier.

  But it seems like whoever’s directing this whole complicated operation has him cast to play a more…individual role, no matter what he has to say about it.

  Finnan knows there are more creative things you can do, and more destructive things. Sometimes it’s just a matter of helping some stray unkin who doesn’t even know what they’ve got in them find their graving, realize their potential—if ye want to get all fookin self-help about it. Christ, but even then you can end up damning someone that you’re only trying to help.

  He hopes that Phree managed to get away.

  If you’re willing to go to town on someone, though, you can rewrite their very soul, and Finnan has a feeling that’s exactly what’s lined up for him. He looks at the bitmites scrawling across his chest, weaving their intricate pattern like iron filings in a fluctuating magnetic field.

  Christ, but he hopes that Phree is safe.

  The Entrails of His Dreams

  “Now’s not the time to think of helping others,” the bitmites whisper in his head. “Do not neglect your own sad state. It’s sweet to lengthen life with hope, and feed the heart on joy. We shudder, seeing you tormented by a thousand pains. Not fearing the dukes, you have too high regard for mortals in your private mind of foresight.”

  Or at least that’s something like what they say to him, in another language entirely, one that he understands now a whole lot better than when he was smashing his head against the walls of Inchgillan War Hospital or drifting in and out of consciousness, weak from a hunger strike in Peterhead. He glances up at Henderson still standing guard at the door.

  “Come, friend,” the bitmites carry on, “where’s the reward for what you’ve done? Do you get any help from the ephemerals? Can you not see their impotence, blind, entangled in their dreams? Mortal wills will never break the order laid out by the dukes. We learned these things looking on your destructive fate. But even so, we pray that you’ll be freed from these restraints and will someday have no less power than the dukes.”

  Well, that’s a turn-up for the books, thinks Seamus. Jesus Christ, it talks.

  “Fate’s never yet decreed to make it so,” he mutters under his breath. “I have a myriad ills and woes more still to suffer, and only then will this oppression end. My art’s far weaker than what has to be.”

  It takes less time than if he’d said, yeah, right, which is what he meant, really. That’s the thing with the Cant. The sounds and senses of it all curled up, compacted into balls of meaning, even just listening to yourself speak you have to do a lot of…unpacking. Christ, but after a hundred years he still feels like it takes him a minute of catch-up to actually understand a sentence properly. And the bitmites are using it. Jesus, they’re fucking talking to him in it, saying—

  “And who decides what has to be?” they say.

  What has to be. Necessity. Destiny. There’s a whole network of meanings in the Cant phrase, a hint of inverted commas even, a smidgeon of confusion or contempt. They have…an attitude, opinions. They’re fucking conscious.

  “The triple fates,” he finds himself answering, “and the remembering furies.”

  Wait a minute. Wait. We pray that you’ll be freed. Are these things Covenant or what? He’s sure Henderson is Covenant; you only have to look at the fucking buzz-cut hair at the back of his neck to know he’s regulation issue. So what are these things doing saying that they want to see him free?

  “The dukes are weaker then than these?”

  And that’s a leading question if he’s ever heard one.

  “They can’t escape what has been fated,” he’s replying.

  “What is fated to the dukes except to rule forever?” they say, and he’s almost sure that they already know the answer, like they’re laying out the logic of a problem, step by step, a teacher leading an idiot child.

  “That you’ll never know,” he says. “Don’t ask.”

  And then they whisper in his ear.

  “Surely it is some awful secret you withhold.”

  And he knows. They’re right. He fucking knows and—

  —for a second, he’s back in Inchgillan by the ocean’s endless straits, with Doctor Reynard like a father confessor with his hands on his shoulders, then he turns round and it’s Peterhead and MacChuill there, but fookin O’Sheen, O’Sheen his name was, not MacChuill, because MacChuill was the soldier on Kelvinbridge on the day after John Maclean’s funeral, so it is, and Seamus telling him it’s no good, no good, don’t set yer mind against the dukes, don’t even offend them with yer words ’cause it’s all fookin pointless sure and Reynard is pushing his glasses up his nose and Maclean taking his off, and Finnan saying “I want to help” and standing in George Square with fire in his veins and wire round his wrists as
he sits in the chair as he stands caught on the hill and the birds are pecking at the bodies which are falling under the hammering of the guns the shells the chains in the dugout Christ and he hears the white wind howl in his head a song that changes and a chant around the bath where he and Anna lie laughing lovers naked in the bed and Anna lying on rough hessian making faces as the birds sing outside the barn and the crows caw over the corn and may this moment stay in us forever and never be dissolved away and the stalk of corn in his teeth and the grain in his hand for her a gift just like the gifts he brought to her door his hair all combed and everything for Thomas to answer the bell and introduce him to his friends in the parlor with all their foolish talk of wars and revolutions in the pub sure and we’ll never stop till we’ve got to the lords and in the park where the singing of the birds is different so different from the harsh caw of the crow all black like soot as black as coal thrown in a Fire he’s shouting, Fire!

  And he drags himself back out of it, back into the present, into the abattoir with its holy offerings of slaughtered cattle, and Henderson standing at the door and the bitmites crawling through his body and mind. ’Cause fook ye all, he’s thinking. I won’t fookin break.

  Sure and it’s a binding all right. They’re stripping his soul down piece by piece, the bitmites eating their way through his memory, worming their way down through the layers of personal history that constitute identity, but he doubts if they give a damn what’s left afterward. They’re not trying to bind him into a new self like their foot soldiers, like even their own warped fookin selves. All they want is to open up his soul, like, really open up his soul so they can look right through it down into the Vellum. Binding? This is a fookin divination. Peel him open, splay him out and use him to summon some fookin archetype deep in the unconscious mind. He doesn’t know who or what they’re looking for inside of him, but he knows now that they’re reading him, reading the trails of betrayals of foolish schemes, the fookin entrails of his dreams. We pray that you’ll be freed?

  He thinks of an army captain he once knew, offering sympathy over a grave mistake, and the opportunity to redeem himself.

  Good cop, bad cop, is it? he thinks. I know that one, ye bastards.

  “Let’s talk of something else,” he says. “Right now my lips are sealed; now’s not the time for it to be revealed when, by concealing this, I may one day escape these chains.”

  But that’s just fookin unkin talk for fook right off, ye fookin fookers, ’cause Sergeant Seamus Padraig Finnan knows exactly what yer up to and ye can fookin sit on it and spin if ye think he’s going to help one little bit. No, he’s not going to break.

  Finnan’s awake.

  The bitmites swirl up into the air again, away for a second and then back, touching his mind again, looking for another memory to expose, another layer to peel back…

  A FURY OF FLIES

  A lass, alas, a hungry, wretched one afflicted with a fury of flies, she’s frenzied, forced along the sand-dune shores, hunted and harried by a hundred watching eyes of images of argil, herdsmen made from clay that haunt her, all the statues of the saints and Christ upon his cross and in the paintings in the chapel, looking down on her with blame. Six feet of soil don’t hide the prying, pious eyes of all the glorious dead that scrutinize her from the heavens. Jesus and the blessed saints, they see her shame. Somewhere, a reed of wax, it seems, blows low, sounding a soporific song, the wind through coarse, tall grass. A lass, alas, O gods!

  Ah, god, the pain! Some wretched fly stings her again, the midges of the rock pools all buzzing around her head like the saints themselves come down to punish her for her sins.

  And Anna stumbles in the sand, and sinks down sobbing, in her skirts.

  Where, Lord, where will she go? In what sin is it she’s been found, what sin, sons of the Crown, that she’s now damned to this unending misery? O, but she knows only too well. Burn me with fire, she thinks, or bury me in earth, or feed me to the creatures of the sea, but grant me mercy, God. I’ll stray no more, I swear. Wild ways have troubled me enough; I’ve learned my lesson. Only let me know now when this suffering will be over.

  She feels the hand touching her hair, the tender hand of her sweet Irish rover, Seamus, tentative now, as if he doesn’t know if it’s his place. He wipes a tear off of her face.

  “Ah, hush now, Anna,” Seamus says. “It’ll be OK. It can’t be that bad, can it? What could be so bad as to deserve all this palaver?”

  How can she tell him in the state he’s in? How can she tell him of the state she’s in? Him stuck in this ungodly loony bin and her stuck here between the devil and the deep blue sea, between a rock and a hard place, sure, between her love for Seamus and the terrible thing she did in hatred of him when he told her of her brother’s death in France, between her heart given to one man and her body to another. Father, forgive me, she thinks. Seamus, forgive me. I was angry. O, but the anger and the grief were just too much to bear and you were the one said you’d look after Tom and keep him safe, but Tom was gone and you were lost in your own head and…and he was there. O, Seamus, I wanted to hurt you. I wanted to hold you. It was your blue eyes I saw in his, and your hair that I ran my fingers through as I pushed it from those eyes.

  She wrings her hands and feels the ring hidden under the glove. How can she tell him that she’s marrying a man she doesn’t love and not the man who had his mind all broken for the promise that he made to her?

  “What kind of place is this,” she says, “what kind of people in it?”

  She trembles, shaking like the poor unfortunates sitting at the tables in that awful room, the men with missing arms or legs, blinded or worse. She saw his own hand shake when he reached out to touch her fingertips across the table, every bit as gentle as back home when they were all so young and wild and he’d come calling all spruced up and in his Sunday best. His hands are rough but they can touch so soft you barely feel it through a calfskin glove except you feel it pounding in your heart.

  She looks at him sitting on the rock she’s slumped beneath, his legs spread wide, his dirty blond hair blowing in the wind. Behind him, beyond outcrops of rock and over moor, the cold gray edifice of Inchgillan stands looking as desolate as himself. What has he done to earn this punishment from her? What miserable outpost of society is this they’ve found themselves in?

  And stumbling, sobbing, she begins.

  “Please listen to me, Seamus.”

  Seamus, forgive me, for I have sinned.

  A TERRIBLE DARK THING

  He tries to listen to her, watching her flick a calfskinned hand around her fly-furled head, as she tells of a duke’s heart warm with love for this young daughter of Enoch Messenger, but he can’t take it in. Here and her father always hated her seeing Seamus, he interrupts her, laughing, and the lengths they had to go through, all the hoops they had to jump through just to get some time together. Do you remember, eh? Yer old man and his talk of decency.

  “Why do you have to talk about my father?” she says. “Tell me, O Jesus, Seamus, poor suffering Seamus, because you’ve always talked the truth to me, are we just born to suffer? Who of the wretched, who—O God—suffers like us?”

  Because decency, she tells him. Decency. He’s put a name to the very heaven-sent source of it all that sent her to him. He asks her why, what is it, why and she tells him how she came rushing headlong, how she hasn’t been able to eat since—and the rough ride of the ferry over from Dublin, and how they all end up suffering from the plots that people make in anger, maddened by spiteful thoughts like insect bites.

  He doesn’t understand her tumbling story, as she tries to get it out but keeps going off the rails before reaching the point. Or there’s a part of him that understands but that won’t let the truth through to the rest of him. All that he knows, all that he’ll let himself hear in her mixed-up rambling confession, is that she has some terrible truth that she can’t bear, but she can’t bear to tell him.

  “Do we go to Heaven or Hell after we�
��re dead?” she asks him. “How much more can await us after what we suffer in this world? Surely Jesus must forgive us.”

  Tell her, thinks Seamus, tell the poor girl that God is in his Heaven and forgives us all our sins, even shooting the brother of the girl ye love for cowardice, not the cowardice of a young lad cowering in a dugout, but the cowardice of his friend, his Sergeant, who followed the fookin order. Tell her there’s forgiveness for that.

  He can’t.

  It’s been a terrible dark thing between them ever since he got back from the front to give her the news himself of Thomas’s death, to say that the shame was on him, on Seamus, on himself. He sees it in her eyes, that she can’t really forgive him even though she wants to. And he can’t really forgive himself because when he looks into her eyes, he sees the same dark green and brown as Thomas’s looking out at him.

  But what has she got that needs forgiveness, sure?

  He remembers arriving at the door of the Messenger family home in the well-to-do Dublin suburb of Rathgar just like so many times before but now so different. On leave and waiting for the results of the Medical Board, sure, and shaking like a leaf, he hadn’t a clue what he was going to say to her and whether she would cry or curse him to his face or both. Should he tell her the untarnished truth, whatever she might want to know in simple words, leaving out the euphemisms and not weaving some grand mystery of tragic death out of it? Surely she had the right to hear it from the horse’s mouth. Should he tell her she was looking on the face of the man who gave the lads the order to take aim and fire?

  And when she came to the door she had a look so lost, so wandering, that he knew she needed something to latch on to as a sign that the grief might someday end, and would it be better for her not to know or—Jesus Christ—for her to learn? Could he hide it from her, have her find out later, suffer even more? He couldn’t grudge her this one thing, this tiny thing, this awful tiny truth so why the fook did he delay? It’s not that he doesn’t want to, is what he told himself. But he couldn’t help but hesitate on account of what it would surely do to her.