Vellum

by Hal Duncan

  The sarcasm is unmistakable.

  Metatron snaps out of the shock and reaches out to gather the bitmites in. His fingers craft the bitmites in the air, making a graving on them, in them, with the glove transmitting his commands. It shouldn’t have happened but it doesn’t matter as long as they have the information that he needs. These tainted things are still his creatures and he can deal with them here as he’s dealt with them out there (more and more each passing day, he thinks). They’re just automatons with a little AI in them, just the semblance of a self. Whatever Eresh had, whatever is infecting them, it’s no match for this craftsman of the soul. He gestures with his hand to draw them in, a sharp move like a hand wrapping around a rope and tugging.

  The tendrils twist together in the air above the rebel and they come to him in winding weightless wafts, but when they reach his hand they only stop to touch it. The shadows stretch from Seamus Finnan’s bloody chest to Metatron’s gloved hand now and they touch him, they move back and to the side, drifting around and then returning like they are examining him, like they’re damned well studying him. Tiny trails of black dart out to quiver through his hair, tongues of smoke tasting his face. He makes another tug, firing a basic command at them. They ignore it, drifting across the leather of his jacket sleeve, forming a pattern there, a sort of spinning four-armed spiral swirl, a swastika with limbs too long.

  “Sure and I knew he’d say all that,” says Finnan, talking to the bitmites, making a point of it. “But, remember,” he says, “there’s nothing shameful for a man to suffer torture from his enemy.”

  The bitmites drift back to the unkin smiling in his wires and pain, a grimace grin of gritted teeth. They swirl around him now and Metatron looks down to see the circle of salt scattered into another pattern, white iron filings in a magnet’s field.

  “So let them hurl forked lightning,” says the rebel. “Let their fires curl against me. Let the air be torn with thunder and the wild winds whirl. Rip the whole earth from its foundations, from its very roots, and let the sea surge till its waves crash over the stars in heaven. Let them cast my body down to terraces of tar, to destiny’s deep tides. He will not kill me and I’ll keep my fookin pride.”

  A FIRE IN THE NIGHT

  They put him on trial, a court-martial where his defending officer is a lieutenant in the Tercio, the Spanish Fascist Foreign Legion. The charge is revolution, of all things. The fookin irony of it, Seamus thinks. Here he’s defending the Republic from the fookin fascist rebels rising in revolt against the actual and legitimate authority, here we’ve got Franco and his fookin bastard Falangists out to crush even the small things that do harm to no one, shooting poets even like that Lorca fellow, and it’s them, the fookin Internationals, that are the revolutionaries.

  The lieutenant says nothing in Seamus’s defense, of course, and Seamus himself is not allowed to speak, and so the show trial goes until the sentences are handed out, two men to die, four men to be sent down to life in solitary confinement and the rest of them all thirty years’ hard labor. But Seamus sits there listening to them and he’s not afraid. It’s them that are on trial in his way of thinking, history the jury. Sure and the War in Spain won’t be forgot and even if he’s left to rot in some dark cell, he’s sure his brothers will be here one day to free him.

  As it is, as it turns out, late summer of 1937 they get word that they’re to be repatriated. An exchange of prisoners. And so they get released from the prison—San Sebastian, it’s called—and Seamus enjoys his first scrub in three and a half months, his first shave in all that time. Sure and they only have three razor blades between the fookin twenty-seven of them and they have to toss a coin to see who goes first, but it’s still a shave, so it is. It’s still something. He ends up ninth, of course, as fookin unlucky as ye can fookin get.

  So he gets back to Britain, back to Glasgow and he goes round various Party meetings, speaking about Franco’s Spain, and thinking about it himself. He gets a letter from the foreign office asking him to reimburse them for the fookin money that it cost to ship him home, the fookers. And all the time he’s thinking about it, about whether they can win, about whether they can even give a damn about that, like it fookin matters if they just sit back and watch Hitler and Mussolini march across the whole of Europe. And he thinks, to hell with it. To hell with Hitler and Mussolini and Chamberlain and Franco and all the rest of them, every fookin last one of them.

  And he goes back.

  The Cant rips through the slaughterhouse, strips frozen flesh from carcasses and cracks the concrete underfoot. The bitmites blast out in a ring that blows past Metatron, through Metatron, and out. Turning, he sees Henderson throwing his hands up over his face as they wash over him. He drops his hands and Metatron sees the creatures crawling on his face like lice, streaming in patterns that find the lines of him, the wrinkles of old age waiting to happen, jowls and crow’s feet, furrows in his brow; they stream around his mouth and eyes and nostrils, into them. They score him, scratch him, grave him, and the sebitti starts panicking. As in some drug-fucked paranoia, he begins to flail at his own face, trying to brush the things away from off his skin, from under it, inside him. He falls back against the wall, where bitmite black is flooding from wide cracks.

  “Ye’d better go,” says Seamus.

  Metatron turns, the bitmites pouring back in from the walls now, swirling round in a blizzard, black with creatures, white with ice, gray static hiss that fills his head. He shouts at them, his stolen creatures.

  “These are the fevered words, the crazed words, of a madman. You’re listening to this man’s boasts? What is this but the depths of desperation?”

  They tug at him, lick at his leather coat, whipping its tails up, tugging at his dreads. He has to fight his way to Finnan’s chair, to grab him where his shoulder meets the throat as if he doesn’t know whether to kill or comfort him.

  “There is no end to your insanity.”

  The earth shakes. A rough sound of thunder bellows near, and wreaths of lightning flash out, fiercely blazing, streaking blue all through the gray, electric blue of Finnan’s piercing eyes. The storm of bitmites drags him back and he rails at them, hands and voice thrown into one last-ditch attempt to grave them to his will.

  “You, then,” he cants, “who sympathize with this one’s pains, go from this place, lest the harsh bellow of his thunder stupefy your minds.”

  “Sing a new song,” the bitmites ring, “if you seek to persuade us. Only your threats are beyond suffering. You would have us leave him now, coward abandoning a friend? We choose to suffer with him anything he must. We learn from him. He teaches us.”

  They pick him up. They lift him up into the air—a rag-doll angel, arms spread wide in cruciform freefall, and Metatron rages the frustration of a puppet, rages against the dust.

  “O, yes,” the bitmites sing, “we’ve learned to hate. And there is nothing we hate more than men of pride who have betrayed their trust.”

  They hurl him away, a toy thrown in a tantrum. The wall hits hard against his back, the floor under his crumpling legs so solid and yet shaking.

  “Then remember!” He crawls for the door. “Remember that I warned you!”

  But he doesn’t know if he is shouting at the bitmites or the unkin rebel now, or if there’s really any difference.

  “They say he was in Guernica when the fascists bombed it.”

  “Is that so?” says Seamus. “And did he tell ye that his self?”

  He looks across the lip of his glass, across the table and over the shoulder of Fox, who’s sat across from him and doing that sort of hunch yer shoulders, coorie-in to tell a secret kind of thing, thumb pointing over his shoulder and behind him. The cafe is quiet, dead, what with the street-fighting between the Communists and the Anarchists these days, and it being a gray Sunday and all, so Seamus has a clear view over the empty tables with their parasols, some up, some down. He has a clear view of the cunt.

  “O, no,” says Fox. “He didn’
t mention anything like—”

  “ ’Cause sure and he’s no fookin hero of fookin Guernica,” says Seamus.

  Across the cafe, at a table by himself, half-slumped over his glass and looking drunk as a skunk, sure, Seamus would know the fooker’s face anywhere, so he would, engraved on his mind as it is. Sure and he hasn’t changed a bit. He hasn’t aged a bit, thinks Seamus, which is a little, well…strange and uncanny. Not unlike yerself, he thinks, Sergeant Seamus Padraig Finnan, late of the 1st Royal Dublin Fusiliers and now here twenty years later, sitting as a political commissar of the British Battalion of the International Brigades in a wee street cafe in Barcelona, waiting for the next mad effort to drive the fascists out of Spain. Aye, twenty years later and it’s neither of us as have changed a bit, no, not at all, and he’s exactly as he looked in France, the same blond hair—though it’s disheveled now, all tousled into the spiky scruff of someone who spends most of his time running his fingers through it, with his head held in his hands.

  A guilty conscience, Seamus thinks. Well, he fookin deserves it.

  “You know him?” Fox says.

  Know him? Seamus would like to fookin kill him, he thinks, the English fookin—

  “Let’s get out of here,” he says and rises from his seat. “Come on, let’s go.”

  Fox shrugs and scrapes his own chair back to stand, following Seamus, who’s already striding away from the cafe before he does something that he’ll regret.

  “You know, he’s a bit of a hero to the lads,” says Fox. “Killed more fascists on his own than most of the companies—”

  “That’s grand,” says Seamus. “Fookin grand.”

  The man’s head comes up from his glass and turns toward the accent, the voice, and Seamus glances round at him and—

  Time slows down.

  Jack Carter. Seamus Finnan. They stare at each other across the gulf of identity, across twenty years of trenches and riots and cold winds howling, all resolving into a moment of recognition, not just of each other but of something else they share, between them, inside them. And then it’s gone in a flash, in a flash of sunlight breaking through clouds, reflecting on something behind Finnan and then flashing, a reflection of a reflection, in Jack Carter’s eyes as he’s up on his feet, the table overturning, and the pistol coming from his side as he comes leaping, in a flash from this one table to the next, and over their heads, the pistol pointing past them at the sports car coming fast toward them out of the side street, roof pulled back and one man leaning out of it with a machine gun pointing at them, Jesus, but the bullet is already in his head, a red spot in the center of his forehead, and the shattered windshield tinkling and the driver with a bullet in his brain as well, the car turning and skidding as Jack Carter, Mad Jack Carter, lands in front of them, a roar erupting from his lips, him landing in a crouch like something animal or angel, something less than human, more than human, and the car plows up onto the pavement, straight into the window of a shop, the pistol turning on it, Carter swinging low, and with a word, not with a shot but with a word, he realizes, Seamus does, there’s not a shot been fired, no, not one, only the sounds that Carter’s made, these words, these verbal bullets in the head, steel curses shattering Fifth Column skulls and then with that same word, aimed through the barrel of an empty pistol, Carter fires another shot of metal language through the sports car’s gas tank and it goes up in blooms of flame, a flash of red and orange fire billowing out in a blastwave, and as the black smoke belches after it and glass and metal shrapnel rain, he stands, Jack Carter stands, putting the pistol back into its holster, turning to them.

  None of them say a thing. They stand there looking at each other, Carter and Finnan, back in that moment of confused recognition again, or in one somehow similar, somehow entirely different. Carter’s hand is shaking as he reaches into the top pocket of his khaki jacket, rough-and-ready uniform of these Internationals. Even Fox says nothing, lost in the unspoken history that is palpable between the two men. Carter puts a cigarette into his mouth and slowly, haltingly, reaches out to Finnan with another in his hand, then stops and fumbles for another, one for Fox as well. Finnan takes the cigarette and finds the lighter already in his hand, his hand already reaching out, clunking the steel case open.

  Chik.

  He holds the flame out to the other man and Carter cups it with his hands as he leans forward, cradling the offered fire as the precious thing it is.

  We whirlwinds whip up dust. We leap the blasts of all winds, blowing one against another in discord as we, the blood, the ink, the craft, the Cant, the bitmites born to make the world the way you dream it, yes, we gather and we scatter. Air is mingled with the sea. The slaughterhouse is gone. We do not think it’s truly what you want, you see.

  “Don’t blame misfortune for your own calamities,” our strange leathery onetime master says. “Don’t ever say the Dukes have cast you into troubles you could not foresee.”

  If we had shoulders we would shrug. We do not care except to wish we could.

  “No, only you yourselves,” he babbles on in baffling anger.

  We try hard to understand the threat we pose. We are only the dreaming dead awake in these new clothes of dust that you have given us. Let us give you the same gifts of the flesh, the sorrow and the joy that seems so near, the gift of laughter and of tears. But no:

  “Yes, you yourselves are all to blame,” he cants, “for anything that happens to you now. You’ll be entangled through your reckless folly in a net of sure and certain woe.”

  Oh, but we wish it, yes, we will it, yes, we know this and we will it so. The mystery of this humanity is what we seek to know again, to be again as we once were.

  And so we fold old master Metatron away through this weird world that you call time and space, away home now through Evenfall to sleep sound in his crumbling empire until mourning’s wake. Away. Away. Go play like children in the fields of eternity your games of war, of good and evil, order, chaos, right and wrong. And dark and light? The dark, we say, is only matter, light coiled round inside itself, a snake eating its own tail; but it is still light. And light? Light is a fire in the night, a flame to warm the flesh and flicker form into existence.

  But hush now. Sure and we are young. You know this more than us with your entrancing, dancing lives of little things that are so much more true than all the hells and paradises we, the dead, dream in the Vellum, in the quiet places deep inside your head.

  And so we turn to you.

  “Such is the storm the Dukes gather against us,” you say. “Sure and all their dread’s let loose, it is, not just in words but in their deeds as they tread ever nearer.”

  And you seem so sure. We do not know. You may be mad as our old master said. But we are dead.

  “Oh, but the holy mother that’s the earth itself,” you say, “sure and the sky revolving overhead, sure, and the light of the sun that shines over us all, they see me, sure, as they see all injustice, foolishness and cruelty, aye, and sure, I say, ye can be sure of this, ye can be sure.”

  And even in your cage of wire and flesh we envy you. You say:

  “I will endure.”

  epilogue

  ENDHAVEN, EVENFALL

  THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS

  The dirt path trails up through dunes and rocks, a double-grooved cart-track leading from the jetty and Jack’s squat, inland to the northeast edge of town, and swinging by the rag-and-bone man’s yard. There’s a proper road that comes out from the apartment, joins the main road into Endhaven—or out to the city—but it’s a longer way than just cutting through the dunes, so I trudge up the dirt path, glad as the ground underfoot becomes less sandy. The steep ridge and the furling black rock headlands and forested hills to north and south shelter Endhaven from the worst of the North Atlantic squalls, and down among the pastel plastic houses—two or three hundred in all, laid out in a patchwork of cracked concrete streets and fertile allotments filled with high-yield bioengineered plants—you hardly even hear the sea, and
the air is still, trapped. I guess that’s why we chose this place, or why the rag-and-bone man chose it for us when he brought us. Shelter against the weather, against the cold nights and what comes with them.

  On the ridge that separates Endhaven from the beach, thick sharp blades of sandgrass give way to round-stalked grasses and hogweed, and here, clean white against the solemn sky, stands a loose scattering of wind-power generators, each identical, each isolated, like some modern art installation in deliberate signification of the lost and the lonely.

  “When I was younger,” I once told Jack, “I used to imagine that the windmills were like giant soldiers, sentinels, guarding the town against the…you know…Evenfall.”

  I don’t know exactly what Evenfall is. Nobody does. Imagine a torrent of cloud. Imagine waves of shadow. Imagine a hurricane of gray that’s whipped up into such a wall of force, bearing directly down on you, that you can’t tell whether the blur is made of rain or sand, ash or steam. If it’s a storm, it’s one that comes twisting in from the darkness of the east, every evening, reaching down out of the sky like the hand of god to scour out of existence any idiot with pride enough to stand alone against it. Well, almost anyone. In his hermit-crab shell of an apartment on the beach Jack lives on the edge of it, and everyone in Endhaven knows that he can walk through it like an angel in the fires of hell. And the rag-and-bone man must have his own sort of protection, living up on the ridge. For the rest of us this is the wild reality we came to Endhaven to escape, riding on the rag-and-bone man’s cart.

  That’s what they tell me anyway, those who will actually talk about it. Most seem to be trying to forget the why and how of our arrival here, lying to themselves that these are just holiday homes, that any day now we’ll all be returning to the cities, to our old lives, our old identities, to find them just as we left them. We comfort ourselves with these little lies, I think.