Vellum (66 page)

I close my eyes.

“It's your choice,” he says.

“This isn't about Jack,” I say. “This isn't about me, or Endhaven, or any of that shit,” I say. “This is about you.”

“It's your choice,” he says, voice wild, desperate.

I bow my head.

“No,” I say.

“Then follow me.”

His rough, gloved hands pull me out of the chair by the shoulders and I shake him off, pull away.

“Leave me alone,” I say. “I know where we're going.”

THE DISSOLUTION OF MEANING

The evening comes in from the east like an ocean tide or a winter storm, washing across the jetty in a world-blurring gray confusion of wind, rain, mist and night through which I can just make out Jack standing on the balcony of his burnt-out beachhouse bunker, watching us with a calm contemplation. Around us and under us the water and shadow seem to merge in a chaos of—

“The involutions of entropy,” says the rag-and-bone man. “The dissolution of meaning.”

He waves his arms in a gesture that encompasses the sky, the ocean, the land, all the depths of the coming night.

“And the world was without form, and void,” he says. “Still want out of the contract, m'lad? Think you can keep your own soul safe without an anchor?”

I look out into the darkness.
What's the alternative?
I think. Back on the land, Jack's hands grip the edge of the balcony. I can feel the panic rising in me, as the Evenfall sweeps in from the east. Hyperventilating, clutching the wooden rail along the jetty, I'm so strung out already I don't know whether I'm losing myself in the howling rain or in my own terror and confusion. I cough and lean over the railing, a dry heave. He laughs and I shake with anger and fear.

“I don't know,” I manage to say, throat thick with nausea. “Maybe you're the only one who can keep me real. Maybe Jack is…”

I feel the rain, the night, soaking through my clothes to the skin. I feel the chill in my flesh, in my bones. I feel my pounding heart, each deep, gasping breath of my lungs, the rough, chafing wood under my fingers, the tension in every muscle. I feel my body, wet skin, shaking bone, taut muscle, pumping blood and fevered head. I feel small and afraid, but at least—and I feel this above everything—I feel.

“Maybe
I
am,” I say.

The rag-and-bone man holds up the little scrap of skin, the tiny sigil of my soul, between thumb and forefinger, and he grins his death's-head grin.

“Will I whistle up the wind, then?”

The gray misery of the Evenfall whips around him like his own ragged clothes. Out here on the edge of the jetty it's all closing in around us, and Jack and his beachhouse are smeared out of sight now. I can't see the shore.

Out here I have nowhere else to run.

The sound of the bells on the rag-and-bone man's shoes. Seagulls.

“Let it go,” I say, “just let it go.”

And a hand squeezes my shoulder.

“As he said,” says Jack. “Let it go.”

Like the wrapper of a chocolate bar or a discarded lottery ticket, I watch it, snatched up by the storm and almost immediately, twisting and turning through the dusk, lost in the Evenfall. And I just stand there.

“You're lost,” says the rag-and-bone man, but his reckoning is a weak whisper.

I don't feel myself melting in the rain. I don't feel myself blow away in the wind, disappearing into the shadows. I just feel Jack's arm around my waist.

“No,” he says. “You are.”

The rag-and-bone man stands only a few feet from me on the jetty, but in the Evenfall, his shape is blurred, a scarecrow wraith of fluttering cloth.

I don't know if it's Jack's arm around my waist keeping me anchored to the wood of the jetty, to the beach and Endhaven and life, existence. I don't know if I have an anchor at all now, but, as cold and biting as the Evenfall is, I know I'm not afraid of it anymore.

“I have something for you,” says Jack. “A little something to think about.”

We back away down the jetty, the raggedy, bony rag-and-bone man following us, buffeted by the wind.

“Your contract isn't worth the paper it's written on,” says Jack. “You think those are the souls of Endhaven? Are you sure they're not just…marks? Maybe there's no secret essence inside me or you or them or anybody,
nothing
except what we choose for ourselves. No fate, no future, no past…except what we choose. No slaves and masters for the soul, only whores and politicians. Think about that when you feel the contract biting deeper than the skin. I suppose I could be wrong. What do you reckon?”

And as we turn to leave, the rag-and-bone man watches us with eyes ten times as human as his face is monstrous.

THE NIGHT IS JUST DARKNESS

“Are you awake?” says Jack.

“I am now,” I say. “What time is it?”

“About midnight. Come and look at this.”

He stands at the muslin curtain, silhouetted by the moonlight. That's the thing about it. Once you get past the Evenfall, the night is just darkness, with its own quiet mysteries, maybe, but still. But still, I hesitate. Beyond the muslin curtain is a world that doesn't care for us at all, for none of us.

“It's too cold,” I say. “You'll have to get some kind of rug for this floor. And
some
kind of heating, if you think I'm going to stay here.”

“Sure, whatever. Just come here.”

“What is it?” I grumble, wrapping the blanket round myself and tiptoeing up beside him.

“Damn…your hand's freezing.”

Outside the sky is clear deep black and scattered with a myriad stars, a full moon iridescent in the darkness, painting the jetty, the beach and the waves beyond with a solidity only moonlight can give. At the end of the jetty, a rough shape is painted in white and shadow—a pile of clothes, a bowler hat on top—and, hung on a mooring post, like a coat on a peg, something stirs in the breeze as a flag shifts lazily in the wind, a human skin that dances weightless and hollow, and seems to beckon as it dances, like a torn paper doll.

“What should we do with it?” I say.

“Leave it there,” says Jack. “None of our business.”

I wonder—I wonder aloud if someone else will put it on, and Jack lets the curtain fall closed.

“Probably,” he says, “but it won't be me, or you. And all the rag-and-bone men in the world can't keep the lie going forever. Sooner or later, Endhaven will fall apart. Sooner or later, the same thing that happened in the cities will happen here.”

And we sit down on the bed and I ask him what he knows about what happened in the cities, and he tells me, and I ask him who he is and where he came from, and he tells me, and I ask him what he's doing here, what we're doing here, and he tells me, he tells me everything he knows, he tells me everything I need to know and everything I need to hear.

So we lie there on the bed, and I feel him warming up in my embrace, flesh against flesh, ephemeral creatures bound to our own reality not by empty symbols but by our bodies, locked around each other. I tell him that I want to leave Endhaven, that I want to get the hell out of this hollow sham of a place and see what's out there, what I've always been too afraid to see in the gray gloaming of the Evenfall, the shapes dissolved in the ocean of memories. I'm making plans, and I blather excitedly as if my words will pull him along with me.

“One moment at a time,” he says.

I think of Endhaven as a harbor, of us anchored here, lashed to each other by our limbs, but with our own separate…integrity. Ships are meant for sailing, I think.

I think of how beautiful he is, his smooth skin, and the mystery of the scars we share but which are each unique to us. I love him. I do love him, but I realize that I don't love him the way I did just a few hours ago, that dumb, boyish need that I can hardly understand now. I love him because I don't need him anymore.

“Jack?” I say.

I sort of realize now that actually he needed me. I think he needed someone to need him, so he could show them just how empty that need was, so he could show it to himself, perhaps. What do we really need in this world? What do we really need?

“What?” he says.

I smile to myself.

“Nothing.”

Acknowledgments

I
t will probably not have escaped the reader's notice that large portions of this novel involve adaptations of various ancient myths, poems and plays. Since I'm not even remotely fluent in Latin or Greeknever mind ancient SumerianI've had to rely on the translations of others in creating my own idiosyncratic versions of these antique texts. It would be unforgivable if I did not acknowledge those debts.

For the Sumerian section dealing with Inanna's journey to the Kur and Dumuzi's flight from the
ugallu,
the excellent translation of “Inanna's Descent into the Underworld” by Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer (
Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth: Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer,
Harper & Row, 1983) was invaluable, together with “The Descent of Ishtar to the Underworld” by Stephanie J. Dalley
(Myths from Mesopotamia,
Oxford University Press, 1989).

The “Eclogue” section at the start of Volume Two is, in part, a remix of Virgil's “The Golden Age Returns” and “The Song of Silenus,” for which I drew on J.W. McKail's 1934 translations (Virgil's
Works: The Aeneid, Eclogues &
Georgics,
Kessinger Publishing, 2003) and the translations by E.V. Rieu (Virgil,
The Pastoral Poems,
Penguin, 1949).

For the rewrite of Aeschylus'
Prometheus Bound
woven throughout Volume Two, again I found two different translations indispensable, the Thoreau version
(The Works of Henry David Thoreau: Translations,
Princeton University Press, 1987), and the more modern translation by George Thomson (Dover Publications, 1995).

Without these works this novel could not have been written, and I highly recommend them to any reader keen to read the source texts in faithful translations, free of all my literary meddlings.

I'd also like to pay particular tribute to Ian MacDougall's
Voices from the
Spanish Civil War
(Polygon, 1986) and to those whose tales are told in it. Having taken many of the details in the last chapter directly from this book of interviews, I only hope that I have treated these veterans' memories with the dignity and respect they're due.

On a more personal level, the members of the Glasgow Science Fiction Writers' Circle whose long-term support and critical feedback have helped rein in my literary excesses over the years are far too numerous to mention. While it seems unfair to pick out individuals, I have to thank Duncan Lunan for founding that literary “anarchist collective” in the first place. I'd also like to give particular thanks to Jim Campbell, my adviser on all things military, and to Phil Raines and Neil Williamson for their steady supply of comments, critiques, cocktails and encouragement throughout the writing of this book. Thanks also to Jeff VanderMeer, who's proved himself a saint in this madman's opinion, and lastly, of course, to Peter Lavery and all those at Pan Macmillan, for letting the scurrying bitmites of my ideas loose on an unsuspecting public.

Born in 1971,
HAL DUNCAN
grew up in small-town Ayrshire, Scotland, and now lives in the West End of Glasgow. He is a member of the Glasgow SF Writers' Circle and is currently working part-time as a computer programmer.
Vellum
is his first novel.

By Hal Duncan

THE BOOK OF ALL HOURS

Vellum

Ink
^*

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