Vellum (32 page)

Everything changed when I found Jack. Angel, incubus, silkie Jack. The good people of Endhaven have never accepted Jack, and if I do, if I do more than just accept him, well, that makes me like him. Other.

Half the time now I feel like I'm on a bridge over a ravine, with Endhaven and its rag-and-bone man on one side telling me that I belong with them, that I belong
to
them, and Jack on the other side not telling me anything, just reaching out a hand to let me know I'm welcome. But I've lived most of my life in Endhaven and it's hard to just walk away from everything you know, even when your friends have given up on you one by one, and the people who raised you think you need some sort of treatment. There's still the rag-and-bone man and there's still the Evenfall.

I wish I had the strength to make an outcast of myself.

THIS PARADOX OF PATRIOTS AND PACIFISTS

He sings a song of cattle or of souls as chattels in illusion fields, and of the ancient power, horned and bellowing, they all revere.

“Now close, you nymphs, you nymphs of creation, close the forest glades, in case somewhere our eyes might meet the wandering footprints of that bull; perhaps, lured by the greener grass of other pastures or the scent of his own herd, and guided by the cattle's tracks, he may come home someday, come back, back to the stalls, back to the garden.”

“And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden.”

This one she knows. She looks around at all the quiet faces, wondering how this can be something they relate to. Jesus, 1960s hippy music just doesn't belong here. This is a small-town world that's split right down the middle, one foot in the twenty-first century and another in 1950-something. VR simlinks and apple pie. Sure the technology is modern, mostly, but the ideology is retro in a whole other way to, say, big-city kids with forelocks and nose rings. She's seen the flags flying from all the houses and the churches, even yellow ribbons tied around the trees. She knows in places like this you just don't mention the war—the wars, rather. You certainly don't question.

She studies them, trying to get a handle on the contradiction. A guy in a sleeveless checked shirt, army corps tattoo on his shoulder, nodding his head to the hippy music. The waitress mouthing the words to the old song, silently singing along.

This paradox of patriots and pacifists is utterly alien to her.

“How should we tell this tale he tells of fluttering cilia of night, this aftertale of white loins girdled with barking monsters, of harried Ships of July dragged down, deep in the whirlpool, down to drown, their trembling sailors torn by hounds? Or how he sings of all the transformations of the Limbs of Tears? Or of that feast of gifts, that full meal all prepared? Or of her flight on wings of anguish, high over her ancient home and out to desolate deserts?”

There are no windows in the place that she can see from here, but she knows from the time it must be getting dark outside. Maybe this is how Evenfall kicks in around here, with a subtle shift in ambience, in atmosphere. The days are certain, clear and light, but the dusk is a different story, a whole different kind of story. Shit. Sometimes in these diners and roadhouses, at the drive-thrus where you can pull up to a window and order the same cheap and greasy fast food you ate a hundred miles back in the same terrain of neatly numbered road signs carving up the world into ordered routes, sometimes she forgets this is the Vellum.

You only realize when you turn off a main route onto a road that's not marked on the map, that takes you out into a desert of rust, or switch on the TV in a motel room to see CNN reporting on the sinking of Atlanta, or on guerrilla battles in the Middle East waged with machine guns against swords of flame.

DECAY, DERELICTION, DESPERATION

I think what makes their hatred worse is that they need him. For twelve years before he washed ashore we suffered and survived. The rag-and-bone man's trade brings us most of the essentials we can't make ourselves—medicines, machine parts, waterproof textiles, things like that. You could almost say that it's a sort of rural idyll, a quiet, stable society, getting by on its own, oblivious to what's going on back in the cities. But Endhaven is a town made up of bank clerks and lawyers, and personal assistants and checkout girls and hairdressers and a thousand other professions, vocations or plain old-fashioned jobs that have nothing to do with anything anymore. We have houses that suffer wear and tear and generators that break down. It's the twenty-first century and we're not Amish or hippies or anything like that. So when I was growing up, our little machine town, even with the rag-and-bone man helping to sustain it, it was slowly grinding down into decay, dereliction, desperation. Kids have short memories, and the adults are practiced masters of self-delusion, but I can remember.

I remember how it was to go without hot water through the winter or to live by candlelight in a house with boarded-up windows. I remember the anger and resentment it fostered, and the retributions—the reckonings—those bred. I remember days when whole families would be shouting and swearing at each other on the streets and someone would be sent running to fetch the rag-and-bone man. I remember him walking into fistfights, screaming judgments on people like some old-style bible-thumping preacher. I didn't know why, but I realized, in the rag-and-bone man's reckonings, that the worst thing that could ever happen to you was to be exiled, ostracized. I didn't realize until later just what the Evenfall could do.

Jack, when he arrived, was a god-sent repairman with a nuts-and-bolts know-how of the mysteries of machines. Endhaven needs him, maybe even more than the rag-and-bone man, and still they'd like to throw him back into the ocean that he came from.

It's his strangeness, I think, his otherness; it seems to remind them that things aren't what they seem, that while we shelter like trinkets under a rag-and-bone man's coat in Endhaven, reality elsewhere is torn apart and blown away like leaves, that dead men walk the world while, in the cities and on the edge of town, the living disappear into the night. He came from the sea, from the east, like the Evenfall.

Down by the jetty that juts out from the dunes, pointing out across the water to the rust-red, brown and gold-flecked headland and the concrete bones of giants half-buried, gulls are fighting over scraps of food; carrion or catch, I can't tell from this distance. More swoop down from the roof of Jack's beachside burnt-out squat of an apartment, cawing raggedly as they join the battle.

Jack stands there with the off-white building, once some fashionable city dweller's expensive escape, lurking behind him. Raised on square stilts at the beach-facing side, with its balcony running all the way along in clean, modernist lines, the empty frames of windows and sliding glass doors running along behind, it looks like a bunker. A lookout post or gun emplacement.

“Stay?” says Jack, one last time.

I shake my head, and he looks at me with a wry smile.

“One of these days,” he says.

“I've got to go.”

THE GOLDEN AGE RETURNS

“Now the last era of the sibilant song has come,” he sings, “and time itself is pregnant. The great series of the centuries is born anew. The pattern of the centuries to come is in concord with destinies decreed by Fates who tell their spindles: run. Now virgin justice has returned, the reign of Crow restored, and with the poll as consul, leader now, an age of glory dawns and the procession of great months starts to advance. Look at the world rocked by the weight of heaven pressing down on it.”

The old guy turns to her at one point as he sings; she holds her eyes on his for a second before looking away, not sure of what she saw there—something drunk but wise. He puts the mike down on the top of the karaoke machine. He doesn't need it now. The whole bar's quiet, listening to him in rapture, transported. She rises, dropping a fifty into the saucer to cover her bill. It's late. It's time to leave.

“We'll banish the last trace of sin,” he sings, “and, as it vanishes, we'll free the world from its long night of fear. See how we all sing for the century to come. For now the newborn of the new age comes, comes down to us out of the deep blue sky, the wide lands, and the reaches of the sea, now, here.”

And Chrome and Mainsail watch like hawks as Silence gives his gift to Eagle.

“This boychild now being born,” he sings, “through him the iron race will end, and men of gold rise in the world again. So bless his birth, immaculate lacuna: your own Apple comes to rule at last.”

He stops her with his hand as she walks past, his hand lain soft and low upon her full-filled belly.

“He'll gather with the gods,” sings Silence, “see them mixed up with the heroes of the past. And they themselves will see him take this world subdued by ancient virtue, the traditions of his ancestors. Where faint traces of primeval treachery survive, we'll venture on the sea in ships, build walls around our cities, carve deep furrows in the scorched earth. With a new typhoon as steers-man, another argot will set out to carry chosen heroes.”

“There will be other wars,” he sings, “and great Achilles will be sent again to Troy.”

She backs away, turns round him. She doesn't have to hear this. She knows. The world is coming apart outside, beyond the sealed-up towns and cities of this little state of Middle America. And she knows she's pregnant.

“Begin,” he sings, “the hour is near, dear offspring of the gods, great child of Joy. Embark on your illustrious career and when age makes a solid man of you, the merchants will give up the sea, the pine, wood ships carry no goods. Each land will bear all that it needs. Soil will not suffer hoes, nor vine the hook; the oaken plowman will at last loosen the yokes upon his bulls. The wool will not be taught to fake this color or that; instead, the very ram in the meadows will transform his fleece, now to sweet red purple, now to saffron yellow; lambs gamboling in pastures will wear scarlet coats.”

At the bar, the blond guy's leaning forward to curl a note into the tip glass on the inner tray that runs around the bar. He turns to look at her as she pushes the wood-and-glass door out of Ivan's open, and she sees the fire reflected in his eyes. He must be wearing lenses, a heads-up display of a news channel showing an explosion happening somewhere out there in the fucked-up world. Or maybe he just has fire in his eyes.

ALL THAT REMAINS

“To me,” he sings, “all that remains is the last days of a long life and breath that will not be enough to tell your deeds. Neither the thrashing calliope of Orphan nor the beauty of an Apple's lines can sing beyond me though, not with their mother's help nor with their father at their side. Pan even, with Arcadia as judge, if he compete with me, Pan, even with Arcadia as judge, would tell of his defeat.”

She steps out into the darkness of the parking lot and it parts around her. Evenfall. A flood of black, of something more substantial than a shadow, less substantial than a form, flowing like liquid or like dust in the wind, blurring the world around her in a haze of darkening gray. The floodlights of the baseball field have been switched off and she can just make out the bleachers by a solitary light fixed on the sports hall like a beacon in the night. The children and parents are all long gone, of course.

“Begin then, little boy, with a smile, to know your mother who has brought you here with her ten months of suffering. Begin, boy. Anyone who does not smile on a parent will be found unworthy by a god of board or by a goddess of her bed.”

The door swings slowly shut on its spring, muffling the song still coming from inside.

The evening swirls around her but, somehow, it doesn't touch her, these tiny particles of darkness swirling in vortices in the air, dancing away from a wafting hand. They're everywhere, it seems now, sweeping in with the night to change the world, estrange it from itself, only slightly and subtly, but night after night, shifting it gradually away from what it once was. People call them dust angels or bitmites. Evenfall. In some of the little bubbles of reality she's stopped off in on her long flight, there have even been attempts at explanations. Secret black ops government nanotech gone wrong. The vials of God's wrath poured out upon the world. She might well be the only one in the whole of the Vellum who knows exactly what they are.