Vellum (63 page)

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

T
he 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.

“Mad Tom. We should call you Don Quixote,” I remember Jack saying, tilting his head to look at the windmills.

And then he has to explain to me that, yes, Coyote would be a cool name, but, no, he knows I'm not Native American, and that wasn't what he meant at all.

A FEW SNATCHED IMAGES

I don't know, you see. I don't know anything. I don't know if this is civilization or a pretense of it. I don't even know my own name. I couldn't tell them, so they just picked a name for me, called me Tom because I looked like a Tom. I remember hardly anything about before we came here, just a few snatched images that don't make sense. The world was already starting to come apart, they say, before I'd even reached my fifth birthday.

I mean, I remember playing catch with a little girl in a dress too big for her and wishing that my mother would go back to being a grown-up; I remember her running away giggling across a park, and me looking for her, sitting crying on a swing; I remember an uncle tickling me and the smell of his pipe tobacco and the chirping bird whistles that he spoke in; I remember feeding children at the zoo. All my memories of civilization are of a world that can't be real.

So all that I've really got to go on is what we were taught by Mr. Hobbes, and he always said that Endhaven is the very core of civilization. He taught us about the social contract, how it keeps the town together, how each of us knows who we are because the rest do, because we stand defined each by the others, our status, our purpose, our meaning; in a contract. When you're six you don't realize that they're talking literally.

“I used to imagine,” I remember saying to Jack, “that we didn't really need the rag-and-bone man, that the windmills were what kept the Evenfall away from us.”

But whether we live, inside our heads, in these fictitious holiday homes or in a refugee camp at the world's end, when Evenfall comes in, people remember how precarious our new life is, how literal that contract is, and what happens to anyone who breaks it. How one word from the rag-and-bone man might dissolve our agreement, and our sense of place and belonging, our sense of identity, would be dissolved along with it. None of us even know what Evenfall is, but when it comes in we stay hidden and secure within the boundaries of Endhaven, afraid of losing ourselves in the twilight, of disappearing.

“It's just another handful of hours,” Jack says when I ask him. “It's just the same as what happened in the cities.”

“Then you can see why we're afraid.”

“No,” he says. “I never really understood why people let that happen.”

“They don't exactly
choose
to disappear.”

And he just shrugs.

“It doesn't have to be like that. It doesn't have to be like this.”

LESS THAN NOTHING

“Aaaah! Fuck you!”

“Fuck you too! You're nothing.”

A gang of kids is playing in the tall grass down around the high wooden walls of the rag-and-bone man's barn, which sits just in the shelter of the ridge, and I figure that I must have heard him on his way out of town; the kids would never have gone near the place if he was anywhere close. I scan the horizon and, sure enough, out on the far edge of town on a dead road broken and overgrown with autumn brown, I just make out the rag-and-bone man yoked to his wooden cart like a horse, pulling it slowly westward, inland, to god knows where and god knows what, piled up in the back with surplus dried beans and peas.

I wonder what it's like now in the fallen cities. There are survivors, I assume, that the rag-and-bone man trades with; but you can see, looking across the bay, the ruins of the buildings, just how little is still standing. Do the street plans even make sense now, is there any tiny scrap left of normality at all, or are there just other wanderers scavenging in the desolation, armored somehow, like the rag-and-bone man, like Jack, against the Evenfall that we in Endhaven are too weak to face? If the rag-and-bone man can face it, I wonder sometimes, if Jack can face it, why can't the rest of us?

Old Man Blake thought he could face the Evenfall. I remember him spitting on the rag-and-bone man's shoe, and cursing him to his face, saying that the deal was off, that he'd be damned if he'd live under some tinpot tyrant's insane ideas of decency. I remember him standing among the windmills on the ridge, leaning on one and bellowing drunkenly, wordlessly, at the sunset, then turning, and staggering as he turned, to face the Evenfall as it came in from the sea. I was only eight or nine at the time and I remember lying in my bed being too afraid to get up to close the window, so I could hear his voice, little more than an animal howl of outrage, slowly drowned out by the roaring of the storm, and the wind and the rain wrapping itself around him. I don't know if he faded away slowly or if the storm ripped him out of existence suddenly, as a tornado might tear a tree out of the ground leaving only a few broken roots behind. I just know that the next day he wasn't there anymore and the rag-and-bone man was.

“You're less than nothing.”

One girl is dragging an old pram behind her along the track, a second younger girl riding inside. They stop in front of me and the younger one leans forward to whisper in the first girl's ear; both of them laugh, and the older girl makes some comment about how she reckons that I'm sick. Children playing at judgment; it shouldn't bother me, but it does. The whispers of children in Endhaven's still, dead air are far harsher than the wind upon the beach.

I reckon you're alone, I want to say, every one of you in this plastic concentration camp, with nothing to hold on to in the night, nothing to keep your soul alive, nothing to remember you when you're lost. I want to say it, but I don't. I walk on, silent, hunching my shoulders against the cold, scared laughter.

A POSTER OF MARLENE DIETRICH

The pastel-green plastic prefab bungalow that I call home sits raised off the ground as if it doesn't want to be there, as if it's been dropped accidentally from the back of a truck. It has the crawl space under it, the porch, the low, slanted, overhanging roof, the fake wooden board walls; it's near enough identical to every other house in Endhaven, and I hate it with a passion. There's no garden as such, just a square of land churned up and planted with root vegetables or trellises of legumes. I cut round the back, between the water tank and the hydroponics unit, get a leg up on the cellar doors (fake, they actually open up onto the generator) and climb in through my bedroom window.

The room is small and spartan: an air mattress and a couple of quilts for a bed; a chair; a desk; and a bookcase of lost-and-found junk. A faded black-and-white poster of Marlene Dietrich is taped to one wall for decoration and, on the back of the door, there's a grainy polaroid of Jack. My lunch has been left for me on the desk, a plate of the usual slop, covered with a bowl to keep it warm—a minute portion of some chopped, canned meat and a large dollop of bean stew, bland but substantial fare. There's been a run on spices in the last few months. I eat it almost unconsciously, without tasting, without thinking.

Ms. Dalley opens the door and stands on the threshold of the room, not a toe inside, saying nothing, just staring at me with silent judgment, picking invisible hairs off her black suit jacket and skirt. She should be worrying about the all-too-visible hairs on her grizzled chin, I think. When I look up at her she holds the eye contact and, after being avoided so long, strangely, the gaze of accusation is actually a relief. There's still the strained silence, though.

“That was nice,” I say, and swallow the last cube of processed ham (I think).

No answer. Ms. Kramer appears behind her in the doorway, equally silent, equally fierce. I can't say it doesn't hurt; they're the closest thing I've got to family and even as they stand there doing their best impression of bitter old maids, I can't forget the time when Ms. Dalley was Aunt Stef and Ms. Kramer was Annie, and one of them had multicolored beads in her gray hair and a nose ring, and how Annie kneeled down on the ground to wipe away the snot and tears from my filthy face and I couldn't remember my name I told her and she just said, well then, we'll call you Tom then.

“I was ready for that,” I say. “I was hungry.”

“The rag-and-bone man was here,” says Ms. Dalley. “For you.”

She bites her bottom lip.

“For a reckoning,” says Ms. Kramer.

I swallow.

“When?” I say. “I mean—I saw him leaving for the city. He's out of town.”

“He'll be back tonight. He's coming back to speak to you tonight.”

Ms. Dalley steps into the room to take the dirty dishes from the desk, eyes flicking here and there, the same old unreadable distance as a barrier between us. What is it in that look? Hatred, fear, guilt, hurt? Probably a mixture of all and maybe, I think, the slightest hint of love. Jesus, I remember her singing to me, before we came to Endhaven, or to Ms. Kramer—to Annie, rather. I haven't seen the two of them even hold hands in what? five years? or more? The ugly sisters, Jack calls them. But it never used to be like that.

“I'm…sorry,” she says, and leaves the room without another word.

CLEAN LINES AND MODERN SURFACES

“Jack? Jack?” I can hear the slight edge in my voice hysterical, notice my hand rattling the doorhandle as it just doesn't seem to turn. I'm already turning from the door to circle round and climb up the driftwood ladder from the beach up to the balcony of his apartment when I feel the arms enfold me from behind and the cool skin of his face nuzzle the back of my neck.

“Hey,” he says. “Qué pasa?”

I twist in his embrace and bury my mouth in his shoulder, cling to him like the ground alone can't support me but he's one of the pillars of the cosmos itself.

“You OK?” he says. “What's up?”

I don't talk, just kiss his neck, his chin, his lips.

“What's…happened?”

I kiss his lips, his chin, his neck, his chest. His right hand works my belt.

“Tell me after then,” he says softly.

“Are you awake?” says Jack, and kisses the inside of my thigh. “Tom?”

“Not yet,” I mumble, groan and stretch. God, I could use a shower right now.

We lie in what was once the master bedroom of this expensive beachfront property, in a king-size bed that has no mattress, just a pile of thick blankets, rugs and quilts and pillows that I have to force him to keep clean. His room is even emptier than mine, the rest of the house the same, long since gutted of its glass-and-mahogany coffee tables and chromed breakfast stools and framed abstracts or whatever. I picture an architect living here before the world went crazy, designing and building his own beachhouse all in clean lines and modern surfaces. Minimal, severe, like Jack sometimes.

He sniffs me, snuffles at me like a dog.

“You smell fine to me…sweat and sex…rich stink of life.”

“Charming,” I say, give a quick kiss to his hip and twist round on the bed so that we're face-to-face. “You're a real romantic, Jack.”