Vellum (52 page)

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 their 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.

OPERATION:
Harness paranoia; focus; establish name and context.

It's one year after Guy's death, and as Jack Carter steps out of the Victorian station of sandstone and girders and glass, into the streets of a city carved out of volcanic streetlight night, he knows that he's mad and alone in his own hell, his hair long and lank, and something wild let loose within his head and howling in his words, a whirlwind wolven wrath.

But he feels fucking reborn, an angel or a demon, something beyond either, something older, something newer. He can feel it in his bones. He might be mad, touched in the head—touched in the head by Death—but he can feel it. He can feel the call of the creatures singing to gather their changeling brethren, to fight for them on the battlegrounds of eternity or existence, with all humanity as their cannon fodder. And he knows he stands on the threshold of the two worlds, one foot on the earth, another in the liquid light of dreams. And he'll never be one of their fucking dogs of war.

ALERT/INFORMATION UPLOAD:
Rogue unkin; unaligned agent; extreme threat.

In the unspoken parts of conversations, in the unwritten truths in a newspaper article or a book, in the white noise of day-to-day life, he can feel the order, the pattern, the scheme. He can see the world of the unkin spreading out into existence, so gradually that you could blink and miss the way a housing scheme becomes a prison, an ID card becomes a travel permit. Tabloids calling for all pedophiles to be castrated. Internment for terrorists. Fascists on local councils, in parliament, on the cabinet. They brought back the death penalty last week and no one noticed except him.

He hasn't figured out exactly what's happening yet but he knows this world is just one little corner of something that the unkin call the Vellum, folds of reality shaped by their words; and maybe they began with good intentions and they just got lost along the way, but he's seen what they've got in store. Call it schizophrenia. Call it prophecy. Call it foresight.

But he's going to find the fuckers that are turning his world into their little Empire, if he has to tear the whole of fucking reality apart to do it.

DREAMTIME'S UP

OPERATION:
Enhance and focus; establish contacts.

NARRATIVE DETECTED:

Jack picks the book off of the library shelf
—The Book of All Hours,
it's called, by Guy Reynard Carter. He likes the names, the author's and the book's—because Carter is his name and Reynard sounds like the fox in the fairy stories that's always up to no good and
The Book of All Hours
sounds important and mysterious. He likes stories which are important and mysterious. But the book has really small print and he thinks that it's a grown-up book, so after a quick look inside he puts it back on the shelf. He wipes his hands on his trousers to get rid of the dust from the old book, and heads back toward the children's section.

“You're not special, Jack,” says Starn. “You're not chosen. You're not a hero. It's called paranoid schizophrenia. You think you're on a mission from God, but you kill people.”

ANALYSIS:
Irrelevant; subject irrational/resistant.

OPERATION:
Scan for all contacts, rebel operatives, operational base.

And he watches the world changing around him, stripped back, through the fantasy beneath reality, to the reality beneath the fantasy: not existence, not eternity, but something built out of the ruins of both. There are worlds built upon worlds, a whole fucking dreamtime. He doesn't know who is in charge but he knows they're there. In every head of every person in this city, in the world itself, in every shadow and reflection. Something old as time and bad as hell is shaping the world, shaping the dreams that shape the thoughts that shape the acts that shape the world. Building an Empire.

“There is no hidden Empire, Jack. You know that. You have to face reality. This ‘Jack Flash' is just a puerile fantasy that you're hiding behind. What is it you can't deal with, Jack? What is it that you're running from?

OPERATION (IMPERATIVE):
Scan for all contacts, rebel operatives, operational base.

Dream on, motherfucker.

ALERT—

Shut up. Yeah, you, Pechorin, let me tell you how the story ends…

And inside of him the sleeper meme, the dormant dream god, grinning thing of chaos, is shaking off its drowsiness, and finding itself inside an empty body. And no, he thinks, it isn't his imagination. This thing of darkness isn't his. It belongs to everyone.

“Who are you, Jack?” says Dr. Reinhardt Starn.

He looks sad, thinks Jack.

“I'm exactly what you think I am. But who are you?”

And Jack Flash, older than the gods and newborn spirit of fire, looks at the fragments of personal history, memory and fantasy, truth and invention, still littering his host body's head, and gazes at itself in the mirror of its…his…mind. A dreamer, a lost boy, a golden boy. And Pechorin sees the calm look on the face of this rogue unkin, this fucking avatar of chaos, and feels something buried in the back of his head, shifting.

“You want to know what makes me tick, Reynard?”

“Jack…”

“I'm a time bomb. Tick. Tick. Tick. Dreamtime's up. Narcissus has woken.”

THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS DARKLY

“
Narcissus has woken.”

I utter the trigger phrase and the preprogrammed meme bomb implanted in Pechorin's head undercover of his dumbass fucking Rorschach maneuver blossoms, flooding imagery from the dead soul deeps into his mind, a host of gods and demons, angels, aliens. Like a river thundering through the ruins of a dam. You know, baby, if there's a stream of consciousness, somewhere there's gotta be a river bursting its memory banks. Information is power, honey, language is liquid, and I got a fucking firehose in my head. Am I mixing my metaphors? I'll put it this way:

Narcissus has woken.

Narcissus has woken.

OBSERVATION:
Status—danger desire despair desolation dream dream dream.

REPORT BIOFORM STATUS:
Bioform not found.

ANALYSIS:
Narcissus has woken.

OPERATION:
Reboot psyche. Psyche not found; locate psyche; psyche not found; evacuate enemy agent consciousness; reboot ego; ego not found; evacuate.

OBSERVATION:
Narcissus has woken.

OBSERVATION:
I am the me that I am that I—

ANALYSIS:
Dream is Reality. Reality is Dream. Narcissus has woken.

OPERATION:
Emergency maneuvers; scan for scan for scan for scan for—

ANALYSIS:
I am legion; the kingdom is within us.

ANALYSIS:
Narcissus has woken.

“What—” is all the doctor has a chance to say before my chi-enhanced Dragon Punch smashes him backward through the one-way mirror. Through the looking-glass darkly, you might say. Shards of mirror rain into the darkened room behind, where Pechorin stands, one arm against the wall supporting him, eyes rolling up inside his skull. Somewhere in his head the remnants of identity are drowning in the raging ocean of his own unconscious, dissolving to distorted reflections. I leap through the glass-edged frame to grab Pechorin, peel his eyelids fully open and stare into his soul. It's helter-skelter in there, a whole host of mindworms being sucked down into oblivion. Poor old Joey. He always knew he'd be a soldier of the Empire. I only hope he'll pull through.

He has my Mark I Curzon-Youngblood in his hands—was probably using it to form the psychic link—so I take it off him, flick the safety off. The chi energy flows into it and I can feel the power in my hand, that mystic orgone life-force of the universe. Never mind the bollocks; here's the real sex pistol. And you can analyze that however you want.