Ink (24 page)

The picture cuts back to the studio, to a sleek anchorman looking solemn and concentrated as if he really understands the import of the pictures playing in the inset over his shoulder—it's the faint and flickering signal of KWTV, the hayseed anchorman fumbling with his papers, hand to his earphone, looking off stage left.

“—picked up these pictures,” says the CNN anchorman, “these reports of a terrible tragedy in Lincoln, where Joseph Darkwater—”

Joey mutes the TV. Without the speed and the stress of his rich-timbred voice, the machine-gun rattle of solemn fact, the anchorman's dumb mouthings actually say more about the situation. He looks like a fucking animatronic, one little part of a vast Disney-ride media machine kicked into action at the taste of blood.

The inset changes to a still; the still zooms out to fill the screen. It's the definitive moment of the whole bloody event—and it's all over the newspapers and on the cover of that
True Crime
digest, ft shows a skinny lank-haired boy in long and ragged overcoat, looking straight at the camera and pointing a motherfucker of a gun straight at the cameraman, straight out at his imagined audience, at the viewers of the show, the readers of the papers and the magazines, at everyone and anyone.

Joey points a finger-gun at the image.

Bang.

Knowing that he has this freedom within the fields of time, Joey has sometimes wondered—if he can go back and change things, should he? He could quite easily kill this boy and save the countless lives he claimed before vanishing into the night without remorse or pity, without even having the decency to turn the gun on himself once he had expiated all his rage. That film, taken from a bloodstained camera and dumped in the mailbox of the local paper, was the last that anybody ever saw of Joseph Darkwater, and for decades afterward his whereabouts would be as much a mystery to the world as his motivation. The
True Crime
magazine delves into his past with the shallow profundities of Psychology 101. Photos of his paintings—clear indicators of a disturbed mind— rumors and innuendos about sexuality or psychosis. Did the boy feel unloved by his adopted parents? Was he bullied at school about it? The surfeit of explanations only deepens the enigma.

Why did he really do it?

Joey wonders what it would be like if he just killed the boy before it ever happened, exchanging that enigma for another: Why should anybody want to kill this poor, poor boy? What kind of monster would do such a thing? And, oh, the tragedy they'd make of it. The tears, the cards, the flowers laid at his place of death by those who made his
life
a misery. And how they'd curse the angel of mercy who had saved their worthless lives, ft would be interesting to see if that kind of tragedy would make the same splash that the murders did, if one little murder would be enough to amplify the KWTV signal so it reached out across the fields of time and space to remake an old connection.

In the magazine there's a reenactment of the rediscovery of Lincoln. A technician in a TV station, one hand on the dial that he's been twiddling trying to get rid of this strange interference, other hand up as he turns to shout—
hey, look at this, look at this
—while on the screen in front of him Joseph Darkwater, gray and blurred, points his gun at the camera.

Joey turns off the TV and angles himself round backways in time again. He stands still and glides, lets the seconds and minutes wash over him. 20:43. 20:42.20:41.

Knowing this future past, and on his way to meet it in this world's yesterday, Joey knows he may be the only person in this town, in this world, in all the worlds even, with the opportunity to change it … but he has no intention of doing any such thing.

On the contrary. He's looking forward to yesterday.

The painting is already framed; it was a cheap print that he got out of a thrift shop, a reproduction of a seascape with white horses running on a beach in silver spray and foam and mist of wake and moonlight, their manes blowing in the wind, their heads tossed back. Perfectly executed and perfectly vacuous. He didn't waste any time before coating the print with gesso primer, running the paintbrush over it in thick, soft strokes to murder this moronic kitsch. The mount is black velvet. The frame is plain, polished steel. With the gesso dry, he'd sort of liked it like that, just a white rectangle with a hint of texture, on a black fabric mount, in its frame of steel. It took him weeks to think of something that he actually wanted to paint on it. It was only when he turned the thing on its side, thinking that maybe he could use it as portrait instead of landscape, that he started to get an idea.

He sits on his haunches now, squats on a chair that's turned away from it, his folded arms on the backrest, trying to decide if his Jesus is finished. He's not really satisfied with it.

Behind it there's another painting hanging on a hook on one of the wooden posts that supports the barn's upper level; it's a painting of the diary that he doesn't write, the big leather-bound book that—if he wrote it—would be filled with page after page of the same cycling words.

Dear goddamn world, he would write each night, like he was writing it for them to read after he's dead, to shake them with his vitriol. Like he was telling them how it is. The Gospel of Joseph Darkwater. Don't ever turn the other cheek, he'd write. The meek shall inherit the shit.

It would just be bullshit, he thinks.

He burned Jack's diary after he'd read it, because Jack's parents, he told himself, didn't really need to know any of that stuff about their son. That's
what he told himself then, but now he knows, looking at this other diary, it was as much shame as anything—shame, and anger about feeling that shame. Jack's diary was a symbol of his failure, an emblem of hopelessness and despair, so he put it to the torch, carried the small metal bin from his bedroom down to the barn, doused the diary in paraffin and dropped it in the bin, a lit match after it.

A sacrifice.

His paintings are too much like that diary. They're still too caught up in the banalities he wants to get beyond. None of them say what he wants them to. They're not cold and empty enough. In the gruesome brutality of the crucifixion picture, it looks like he's out to shock, to create horror, to engender empathy. But, damn it, that's not what he's trying to do. He's trying to strip the humanity
away
from the Christ, show the moment not as human suffering but as the sublime butchering of this animal god. A detached, clinical observation of a sacrifice. But it's not working.

He twiddles the brush between his fingers, like a magician with a coin, toys with the idea of painting a leering centurion in the foreground, or maybe some saintly figure with beatific grace upon his face, as if praising God that they're all saved now Jesus's blood has washed them clean. But that would make it look even more like he was—what would they say?—just trying to be controversial.

Goddammit, he thinks, he doesn't care anymore if they don't get it. Screw them. At least he's got the backbone to see a crucifixion for what it is and what it says about the human race. Maybe he could rip out their goddamn hearts and feed them to the fuckers; maybe that's something they'd understand.

If he wrote a diary maybe he could find the words to explain it all, but he doubts it. So instead he has his painted book, the favorite painting that he's done. Just a closed book with a dark-brown leather cover. Burnt sienna and burnt umber, yellow ocher highlights like it's lit by candles.

Another picture: a group of girls standing at the door of a school bus, but girls with the pale glazed faces and glassy eyes of porcelain dolls—the same artificial faces, the same blank eyes, on each of them. Rouge and eye shadow on the cold masks only add to the eerie soulless quality that the image has. Here or there one of the eyes looks chipped, one of the faces cracked. He imagines them as creatures that would laugh without expression, talk without the slightest movement of their cherub lips.

The menace of the image, the meaning of it, is something he can't put into words but something he's familiar with, as familiar as the jocks who hound him through lunch break, their hyena yips and snarls and high-pitched laughs, like they're so goddamn funny. He doesn't even hear what they say anymore, doesn't know or care if it's him they're laughing at. It doesn't matter; the sound of laughter makes him tense with rage and shame now automatically. They're too dumb to realize what they're doing, of course, but every chewed-up piece of paper flicked at the back of his head in class is another lesson to him that their pleasure is his pain, that joy and suffering are never shared, that empathy is for losers.

He looks at the Christ in its frame of black velvet and plain, polished steel, trying to figure out just what it is that's missing.

“Tell me about that night. Tell me about the ritual. Tell me how your brother … did it.”

“Did what?” says the man calling himself Reynard.

Pickering checks his watch. It's getting late and they're not getting anywhere.

“I don't have time for this,” he says.

There are still another two interrogations to get through before the night is over: one fascist defector linked to Freikorps activity in London; one “Lithuanian” known to be a Futurist agent. Operation Hawkwing brought in twenty-four suspected war criminals and spies in its sweep. Men and women suspected of working in the concentration camps or on the Russo-German A-bomb projects. Individuals caught on the wrong side of this country or that when the Armistice was called and the Iron Curtain came down. Individuals with invented identities, secret crimes. Ultimately, it's Pickering's job to decide who lives and who dies.

“I have the hangman waiting outside the door, you know,” he says.

The threat makes him feel dirty because it isn't empty, and it should be. The man shouldn't even be here among these murdering bastards, wouldn't be if his name hadn't been added to the list at the last minute, by Pickering himself. Reinhardt von Strann, he thinks. For the love of God, man, he worked for the Resistance. Are you really going to have him executed as a spy?

He closes off that line of thought. If von Strann won't crack, neither will he.

The man remains silent.

“You know what he did,” says Pickering. “You were there. You saw it. How did he become this … thing, this creature?”

“Why
don't you
tell me?” he says. “It's your story. I don't know anything of this. You seem to want me to be this … this incredible von Strann character, but I'm not. It's a fantasy, a fabrication. It's all very fascinating, but it's ultimately … I don't know … is this really what you want, Major? Cursed jewels? Magic rituals?”

He lowers his head, hands on his forehead, elbows on the table.

“There is no magic in the world, Major Pickering. I knew men like you in Hitler's Germany, men who wanted to believe so much. But there is no magic in the world. Do you mind if I smoke?”

“I told you to go ahead.”

“Do you have a light? Thanks. Please, where were we?”

A moment of disconcertion.
There is no magic in the world.

“I've seen it,” says Pickering. “I've seen … the impossible.”

“Then you tell me. Tell me what you've seen.”

“I've seen your brother. I've seen Jack Flash.”

The prisoner looks up at him as if Pickering is insane. Perhaps he is.

“A myth. A legend. I've heard the tales—”

“I've seen Jack Flash,” says Pickering. “I know his face, and I can see it in yours. I know who you are.”

“Tell me, then. Go on. If you keep telling me long enough I might even believe it myself. And then we ‘d both be wrong.”

“I've seen your fucking brother. I've seen the fucking monster that he made himself. I was in London during the Blitz, on leave, and I saw him. My family, my wife, my son. Oh, Christ, I saw him in the fucking ruins of my home, walking out of the ruins of my home with my wife's—”

“—head in one hand, and your son's head in the other. And he laughed at you.”

Pickering echoes him, hollow horror in his voice.

“He laughed at me.”

He can't get the memory out of his head. The siren that came too late and the thunder of anti-aircraft guns—
come on now, hurry
—and a house across the street goes up, the windows blow in—
Oh Joe, we'll never make it to the shelter
—and the keen of the rockets and—
into the cellar
—and she has the baby out of the cot and
in her arms, brushing glass off him, she's out of the room but he's still standing at the empty window, looking at the flames across Hammersmith, caught there, transfixed in the moment—
Joe, hurry up
—her voice on the landing—
hurry up, Joe
—on the stairs, and the rockets go silent, and then … and then … the first chime of midnight… and then …

“And then you were lying on the ground.”

He was lying on the ground, outside the house, in the backyard. A roofless broken wall, a stone curtain with flame behind it, windows like eyes filled with flame, the back door like an open mouth, a stone mask of death. Oh, Christ, the bomb must have hit the front. It must have hit the front where the stairs come down to the front door, where she stands and kisses him goodbye. Oh, Christ.

“I was lying on the ground, and I saw him. I was—”

“—wounded and dazed, but you saw him clearly in the smoke and flame—”

“—in the ruins of my house, and he had—he had—”

“—your wife's head in one hand and your son's in the other.”

“I saw him,” says Pickering. “I saw Jack Flash.”

“You can't see what isn't—”

“Don't tell me what I can and can't have seen! Don't sit there and try to tell me what I've seen! I want the bloody truth from you.”

He takes the pistol from his holster and puts it down on the table, his hand still on it, finger curled round the trigger. He pulls it up, pointed straight at the man's head. He can hear his own breathing. He has to control himself. He's missing something important, in this state of mind. He slams the gun back down on the table. He has to control himself. It's pointed at von Strann's head again and his finger is flicking the safety off, cocking it. He has to control himself.