Vellum

by Hal Duncan

  “You can see a butterfly in it, then?”

  “Or I could see a bat. If it’s a butterfly, how can it be a bat? If it’s a bat, how can it be a butterfly? But if it’s just an inkblot, maybe, with a bit of imagination, it could be anything.”

  Starn closes the folder over the black-and-white picture. A pointless exercise.

  “What are you trying to tell me, Jack?”

  “Shadows and reflections. You look into them, you see just what you want to, what you desire, what you fear. That’s the idea of that inkblot, right? I don’t need your fucking inkblot, Doctor. All I have to do is take a look in the mirror. Tell me—Reinhardt, is it now?—what do you see when you look in the mirror?”

  Starn shakes his head, turns to the mirror at his back, hand out to show.

  “Jack, all I see is—”

  But there’s a young English army officer sitting in the chair where Jack should be and, in the mirror, Starn himself is wearing an SS uniform.

  THERE’S SOMETHING WRONG

  ANALYSIS: Evasive maneuvers successful.

  OPERATION: Reinitiate scan for reality breach; authenticate metaphysical incursion.

  He lays out the Tarot cards on the table one by one, facedown, four in a row, then another four underneath them. He’s only using the Major Arcana—Cagliostro Deck; those are the only ones he really connects with, gets any ideas from. Maybe the face cards of the Minor Arcana just a little bit—probably, he thinks, because they have actual images, because they’re visual ciphers, symbolic artifacts rather than just spurious significances attached to random cards. The four of diamonds means travel? The eight of clubs means bad investment? What a crock of shit.

  He starts to turn the cards over, one by one, slowly.

  Death—that’s OK, it’s not about actual death but metaphoric death, spiritual, transformation. The Hanged Man—sacrifice. Eternity. There’s something wrong. The Road. There’s something wrong. There is no Eternity card in the Tarot. There is no Road.

  On the one, there’s an image of green fields, two crows sitting on a fence, a blond boy running through the wheat. On the other, a straight road cuts its way across a desert and a man with a book under his hand stands on the road beside a cart, shading his eyes from the harsh sun, a dog following at his heels. Two Tarot cards that don’t exist.

  He turns the other four cards over, quickly, one after the other, after the other, after the other. The four Jacks. He’s only using the Major Arcana.

  There’s something wrong.

  “There’s something wrong,” he says.

  “You’re fucking bonkers, mate,” says Joey. “That’s what’s wrong.

  “You don’t feel it? You don’t feel anything? You don’t find anything strange?”

  “I feel a disruption in the Force,” says Joey in faux throaty boom. He flicks an unlit joint across the room to Jack. On you go, space cadet…fucking crazy man.

  ANALYSIS: Memory repression.

  OPERATION: Reroute digression; authenticate metaphysical incursion.

  Jack sparks it up and takes a deep toke.

  “What if,” he says, “what if the crazy people are right? What if there really are these…things, angels, aliens, demons, just things, but we don’t see them except in our dreams…or delusions? But in there, in there, they’re real?”

  “They can’t be real if they’re only in your head, mate.”

  “But if they’re in other people’s heads as well? If all the crazy people see the same thing, hear the same thing…”

  “If all the crazy people in the world see the same thing, they’re still fucking crazy.”

  “And what if all the crazy people in the world don’t see the same thing, even when it’s standing right in front of them?”

  Jack turns his head to look from Joey to the creature watching him from the corner of the room, standing behind Guy where he lounges on the bed, flicking through a stolen wallet for ID he can alter, so they can buy some beer, travel outside of the Scheme, and—

  There’s something wrong. Jack can’t quite figure it out. It’s not the creature that only he can see. The delusions, the hallucinations, they’re like an acid trip. You still see reality, you just see the other stuff on top of it, under it, coming up through the cracks. It’s like two celluloid diagrams on a projector each done in different-colored ink. They might obscure each other, they might complicate each other, make a more intricate pattern, but you can still tell them apart. Strangely, he’s actually getting sort of used to it. No, there’s something else.

  Since when did they need ID to travel outside the Scheme?

  “You know,” says Guy, oblivious to Joey and Jack’s entire conversation. “I’ve heard of this great new underground club in town. We really ought to check it out.”

  CLUB SODA

  “Guy Fox,” I say, and the bouncer nods and steps back to let me in. It’s a name that opens a few doors here in the Rookery.

  The club is swinging with a casino kind of groove, all leather seating in plush booths, psychedelia projected, colors swirling on the ceiling. Very Bacharach. Filled with a crowd of decadents and deviants, Club Soda has to be my favorite scene—easy listening on the turntables, hard drugs in the toilets. Cocktails and cocaine at luncheon. Lounging, scrounging and high-living. Onstage, the Fisher-Price Experience are opening their set. Playing the idle playboy, I lean lazily against the bar, my cricket whites illuminated by the ultraviolet lighting overhead, my gin and tonic glowing an iridescent orgone blue. With my casual attitude and penciled-on mustache, I’m in disguise: public school anarchist; aristo and rake. Guy won’t be chuffed that I’ve nicked his identity for the evening, but I’ll try not to do anything too bad with it.

  The barman serves another customer as I gaze into the mirror on the other side of the counter, rather admiring my own reflection. I watch as he pours out absinthe over a spoon of sugar, lights it, stirs it in, and pours the water over it. It seems an awful waste of alcohol to me. His customer takes the glass, hands over the money, sips. She turns and smiles at me.

  “I don’t believe we’ve met,” she says.

  “I don’t believe we have.”

  I raise one eyebrow, indicating that the leather fetish mask which hides her face might well preclude my recognizing her, even if we had made some previous, perhaps transitory, acquaintance. Of course, I know exactly who she is.

  “Miss Kitty Porn,” she says, stretching out a hand for me to shake.

  “I’ve heard of you.”

  I take her hand and kiss the inside of her wrist.

  “And I, my dear, have heard of you.”

  “All bad, I hope.”

  “Wicked,” she says deliciously. “I have a job for you.”

  I can’t help but grin. It’s always refreshing to work for such a noble cause as the Sensual Revolution. I’ve never been one for the whole SM thing; my automatic response to domination usually involves a nail-gun and some duct tape, and has nothing to do with home improvement. No, I’d be a bad puppy dog. Still, under all the inflatable rubber suits and nipple clamps (somewhere), I’ve always felt that they’re my kind of people.

  “Sex or death,” I say. “I have to warn you—”

  “Hush, dear. Death, of course. I know your preferences.”

  So we sip our drinks and discuss the terms of our agreement. Honestly. Sometimes the working life of a freelance spiritual contracts executive is such a drag.

  THE DEUSTREAM

  INFORMATION UPLOAD: Metaphysical incursion authenticated.

  OPERATION: Scan for contact situation; establish degree of revelation.

  The voices pour into his head like a river, emotionless shrieks, voices of electronic gods and gibbering, giggling devils, angels, artifices. And in all of the babble, there’s one word that keeps coming up…kill. Kill yourself. Kill him. Kill her. Kill them all. For a while it was touch and go but he has them under control now, as he stands on the roof, smoking a cigarette and feeling the wind upon his face. Fuc
king lying fucking unkin—

  ALERT! INFORMATION UPLOAD: Exposure; disclosure; lexical verification; operation exposed; subject dangerous.

  —they’ll try anything to get him dead, locked up, secured. How many people have ended up in padded cells or prisons because they got a glimpse of these fucking unkin and then had to be made safe? Shout in anyone’s head nonstop for five years and they’re bound to end up trying to start a cult or murder their parents—something traditional, conventional, something the prisons or the hospitals can handle.

  He taps at the walkman’s volume control, raising it to its max.

  Well, it’s all right now.

  Fuck the unkin. He can deal with them.

  OPERATION: Trace leak to source; locate contact situation.

  “Show me,” he says, to the creature kneeling at his feet, and the ghost soul dream creature angel god thing—which he’s sure was once a human being no matter how much it denies it—points out to the west without once lifting its bowed head. Way off in the distance, now that it’s been pointed out to him, he can see it, that palpable nothing that just hangs in the air, not being there, not being there at all, an emptiness, an absence…an opening.

  “What’s on the other side?” he asks.

  “Death dream delusion deustream desire destruction doom despair dis.”

  He presses the point of his retrofitted bowie knife—blade burnt in fire, cooled in holy water, ripened in graveyard dust, sigils scratched into it, positively loaded with badass motherfucker mojo—to the creature’s throat. Funny, for something claiming to be beyond the flesh it seems remarkably worried about being cut up into little pieces. He’s not quite sure if, when he punched the creature in the face, grabbed it by the back of its head and slammed its nose into his knee, whether it was him stepping over into its world, or reaching out to drag it into his. Either way, these unkin aren’t nearly as untouchable as they’d like to think.

  “Be a little more specific, munchkin,” he says.

  “Eternity,” it says. “Empire.”

  “Oh, that sounds peachy. Let me guess. Long, dusty road through oblivion, you people wandering up and down it, setting up your little dreamtime realms here and there along the way, maybe the odd glorious battle for the kingdom?”

  “How do you—”

  “Been there, done that, bought the book, same old story. Just wanted to get it from the horse’s mouth.”

  And Jack Flash slashes the knife across the creature’s throat and kicks it over the edge of the roof.

  NEC SPE, NEC METU

  “What do you see when you look in the mirror?”

  Starn almost turns, then smiles and shakes his head.

  “Shadows. Reflections. You’re talking about what we call the subconscious, Jack. Do you feel—”

  “So you’re a Freudian.”

  “Pardon?”

  “‘Subconscious’ rather than ‘unconscious.’ Interesting choice of words. I’m more of a Jungian myself. Don’t like to think of that part of my mind as lower, lesser. ‘Unconscious’ is more…egalitarian.”

  “Well, Jack, in my field, we don’t tend to concentrate on those aspects of psychology—different theories, names, definitions. Which exact words you use isn’t really that important. We have a more…pragmatic attitude.”

  “Words are very important, Reinhardt. Words command us. Names define us. Definitions bind us. Words are where we keep our sacred secrets, Reinhardt.”

  ANALYSIS/INFORMATION UPLOAD: Subject armed and dangerous; advise search all named felons/fugitives.

  OPERATION (IMPERATIVE): Establish subject core identity, name, number, DOB.

  He sits, back to the rough brick of the wall so that he’s sheltered from the wind, flicking the Zippo lighter open and closed, open and closed—clunk, chik, clunk, chik, clunk, chik. The pile of writing, of notes and diagrams, theory and extrapolations, schizoid ramblings and sophomoric philosophy, sits in the shoe box in front of him, top few pages flipping in the breeze so that he has to weigh them down with something. He digs into the inside pocket of his leather jacket where he carries the bowie knife—black hilted, it has the words Nec Spe, Nec Metu scratched into its blade—No Hope, No Fear. He stabs the knife down, twisting and pushing to get through the paper which gives more resistance than he would have thought. He wonders if flesh would be so tough, and he kind of thinks it wouldn’t.

  He’s put his heart and soul into this little pile of words and images, a five-year study of his own demented imagination, analysis after analysis, exegeses of exegeses. He thinks he’s got himself pretty well pinned down in it, knows exactly what makes him tick.

  Clunk, chik, clunk, chik, clunk.

  Chunk.

  Burn, baby, burn.

  ALERT: Subject intransigent.

  OPERATION (IMPERATIVE): Establish subject core identity, name, number, DOB.

  “Who are you?”

  He hisses it at his reflection in the mirror, at the thing he can feel inside his head, the thing he calls Jack Flash, the things that he can see standing behind him. Some people have demons. Christ, he feels like he’s got fucking heaven and hell itself inside his head. Hey, guys…party in my head and everyone’s invited. Bring your own battle-axe.

  “Who are you?”

  He wants to punch the mirror, shatter it and cut his own throat open with the shards. Fuck the wrists. This isn’t fucking suicide. This is sacrifice, something inside him crying out to die, something else roaring to taste that blood. He can’t stand up to all the forces tearing him apart. He’s not the cool one. He’s not the badass one. He’s not Guy. He’s not Joey. He’s not Jack Flash. He doesn’t know who he is anymore. It’s like whatever he was before is dead now. He’s dead. Is that crazy?

  “Who are you?”

  But there’s nothing in there.

  “See,” says Joey, “there’s fucking nothing there. It’s just a big fucking hole in the ground. It’s just a fucking drain.”

  He’s already turning and walking away from the concrete cylinder, shaking his head.

  “You think?” says Jack. He looks down into the darkness that starts at the very brim of the hole—as if it’s almost ready to overflow—darkness that goes down, and goes down, and just keeps going down, maybe forever.

  “I think it’s death,” he says.

  Joey stops.

  “Or dreams,” says Jack. “Or fucking quantum chaos. I think it’s the fucking rabbit hole that takes you into Wonderland. I think it’s the fucking Gates of Hell, the fucking Doors of Perception. It’s the way out.”

  Joey starts to walk back toward Jack, holding his hands up, palm forward, as if he’s afraid that Jack is going to do something crazy.

  “Reality doesn’t have any exits, Jack.”

  “I think it has fucking tons of them. They just have keepers. Can’t have the dogs getting loose and tearing up the garden.”

  THE SIGHT OF GREENHOUSES EXPLODING

  They corner me in the abandoned train station underneath the Botanical Gardens, cutting me off before I reach the subway tunnel’s entrance to the Rookery. As I sprint over the gravel, down into the dark, their sudden beams of light cut through the shadow in front of me. More beams of light slice up the dark behind me. I’m trapped.

  I know, I know, I tell myself, I shouldn’t have blown up the Tropical Palace—they would never have found me otherwise—but then I never could resist the sight of greenhouses exploding, the bigger, the better, all those sprinkling, tinkling, shattering shards of glass just flying through the air, falling like stars. So pretty.

  My moment of regret cut short by the pounding of machine-gun fire beside my feet, I leap into the dark recess of what was once the station’s stairwell up to the surface, now closed off. There’s no hope of escape in that direction, precious little hope in any other. I fire out into the darkness, picking them off as they get nearer, razing them like ants under a magnifying glass with my chi-gun. But there’s plenty of them and they keep on coming. When one of the
ir bullets knocks the pistol from my hand, I barely have time to draw the katana before they’re on me.

  I go into Kendo mode, the sword a mere extension of my arm, the arm a mere extension of my will. I hardly even know what moves I’m making as the limbs and bodies pile up around me. Eventually I miss one crucial move; I feel a sharp jab in the side of my head, and everything goes white.

  Fuck, is my last thought, I think I’m dead again.

  SHATTERING

  ALERT: Subject unstable; death fixation; identity dysfunction.

  OPERATION: Scan for death imagery; enhance instability, dysfunction.

  IMAGO:

  He turns to Joey with a manic grin, crowbar in hand, a black hole in his heart and a fire in his head. He knows who he is now.

  OPERATION: Mental incision; expose memory; cut this fucker wide open.

  NARRATIVE DETECTED:

  And it’s a summer’s day, and he’s seeing Reynard step out into the sunlight streaming through his hair and blinding him to the approach of death, and being struck, sliced into the air, across the hood of a silver car, head cracking on the concrete, cut down in a random accident, empty of meaning and bereft of all significance but the statistical.

  IMAGO:

  Death swings his scythe over the cornfield, every stalk, or every grain, a human life.

  IMAGO:

  Standing at a graveside, dressed in black, a hollow shadow of a man, an emptiness where what was once a person has collapsed.

  IMAGO:

  He stands over the sink, in agony, washing burning bleach from his scalp as he looks into the mirror where he has become the image of a lost boy.

  IMAGO:

  He sits in a silent room, staring at the wall and nurturing his hatred for the sheer banality of this mundane world, screaming in his head.

  IMAGO:

  Reynard stands on the road that goes nowhere, a book in his hand.

  IMAGO:

  Jack stands on the road that goes into eternity, crowbar in hand, angels all round him, screaming, shouting at him to step away from the truth.