Ink (26 page)

He wakes up, the bed soaked in sweat, and he knows he should be screaming. He should be screaming, crying or
something
after a dream like that. His heart should be pounding, his hands gripping the sheets in terror. That would be the sane reaction. But he feels so in control. He doesn't think he's ever felt so calm in his life. He can close his eyes and see his peers feeding on his soul. The boy in the school was him. That was him. So who was the driver? He called him Jack but it wasn't Jack, it was … something else.

He closes his eyes. He can see the hand in the grave, see the bird skulls crushing under his own palms. But what
he feels
… what he feels is the weight of a gun in his hand. The solidity, the certainty, of a gun in his hand.

“Thomas,” he says, “will you put that over there.”

My brother wanders around the room, dragging chairs back to the walls, setting up candlesticks, while the boy pulls the table across the floor as directed. Dressed now in plain white linen, shirt and trousers, barefoot, he looks even more the naif, a humble initiate following his master's voice, unquestioning. I watch the devotion in the way he answers Johann's instructions and it worries me.

“Come on. Make yourself useful and give Thomas a hand, Fox, eh?”

I grab an end of the table and together we lift it to one side of the room.

“You
are
aware my brother is insane?” I say to the boy.

Johann laughs. He walks over to us, slaps me on the shoulder, runs a hand through the lad's hair. He can't be more than eighteen, I think.

“Oh, don't get so worked up, Fox,” he says. “It doesn't suit you.”

The boy laughs with him, gives him a look that hints at worship and anticipation, and Jonni returns it.

“Would you fetch the knife please, Thomas.”

“So this is it?” I say when the boy has left the room. “This is the spiritual love you're so obsessed by? What did you say? The love of warriors and gods, of Achilles and Patroclus, of Heracles and Iolaus?”

The tone comes out harsher than I intend.

“Well, it isn't the kind of lust that's for sale in Berlin's fleshpots,” he says.

“No,” I say. “You know … I'm a man of the world; it takes a lot to faze me. But if you really care for this boy, Jonni, shouldn't you be, I don't know, taking him for a cruise round the Aegean or something? Not playing spiritualist parlor games.”

He looks at me amazed, like I am the insane one.

“Have you listened to anything I told you, Fox? Really? Were you listening at all?”

“Oh, I was listening all right,” I hiss, “and I've never heard such nonsense in my life.”

My voice is low and I glance at the door, an involuntary reflex that I realize, suddenly, is inherited from our parents. Never let the servants hear you argue.

“Aleister Crowley is a complete charlatan,” I say. “And Nietzsche's
übermensch
is a metaphor, Jonni, a
metaphor
.”

He has told me his plan now, of course, to draw down a god into a human body, no less, to create a superhuman being, Crowley's moonchild.

“Jack,” he says. “I'm Jack from now on. And it's not a metaphor; it's a myth.”

He points at the book, sitting on a chair in the corner of the room.

“And every myth has truth in it,” he says. “You should read the book, Fox. You should see the things I've seen in there. The firebombing of Dresden. The atomic bomb, Hiroshima, Nagasaki. You'd understand.”

“What am I supposed to understand?” I say. “These are just words.”

“But words can be made flesh,” he says. “You say fascism is a dead idea. I say
it will never die,
because
it is an idea. You crush it here and it will spring up there. It will always find a new form, new flesh. Why should that form not be a man? Why should that flesh not be mine? You can't kill a myth, Fox. You can't kill a god, don't you see? That's what a hero really is—part god, part man—and that's what Germany needs now. It's what the world needs: a moonchild.”

I pick up the book and sit down in the chair, laying the damned thing on my lap. I have spent the last hour trying to talk him back from the brink of this utter abyss he seems set on throwing himself into. But even with the most modern doctors, the best sanatoriums, is there any sanity left to salvage in him? If I can show him that this book is just a prop in an absurd fantasy, I wonder, would it all come crashing down, and would he be left with
anything
to believe in then? I have a terrible feeling that, were I to kick this elaborate dream castle of his back into sand, my brother would himself scatter into a million grains.

I fear I have no other option.

I run my fingers around the heavy brass clasp, unlatch it.

“What page?” I say. “Where will I read all these strange and wonderful prophecies?”

He grins. He has that look again, the look of fire in his eyes.

“Any page,” he says. “Just open it anywhere.”

I run my thumb down the edges of the pages, look up as the door opens and Thomas reenters. He drapes a red cloth over the table and starts to lay out upon it various instruments of their nonsense: the Eye of the Weeping Angel; a candlestick that looks not unlike a Hebrew menorah but with five branches instead of seven; a long, thin dagger. He looks at the book in my hands.

“You know,” I say, “you sound like Himmler with this occultist mumbo jumbo.”

Jonni rounds on me.

“Himmler. That swine doesn't even know what he's doing. Tonight, he's opening up the gates, and he doesn't even know it.”

The vitriol in his voice takes me aback.

“That murderous cretin doesn't even realize what he's letting loose. He has no idea of the power in the blood he'll spill tonight. I've got the book, though.
I
know what to do with all that blood.”

My eyes fixed on my brother, I open the book upon my lap.

“If this will satisfy you,” I say. “If this will make you see sense.”

And I look down into chaos.

He slams the clip into the Desert Eagle and slides it into the shoulder holster hidden by his black woolen overcoat. He flicks back his crow-black hair and gathers it into a ponytail, secured with a doubled-over elastic band. The face looking back at him in the mirror has a cold and callous smile on its lips, slight but noticeable, and, like the narcissist he is, he straightens the thin, black tie to look his best for what he is about to do. The frayed and tattered edges of the overcoat kind of ruin the sophisticated look he's cultivated all these years, but it's an integral part of the entire game. It wouldn't be the same without it.

He remembers how it all happened when he was the boy; he remembers the mysterious stranger that came to him, like Death himself, and the dark deal that he offered, dropping the coat upon the ground in front of him and handing him the gun.

“Go ahead,” he said. “Kill me and you can kill anyone.”

He remembers looking down at the man lying on the ground, the shattered bloody pulp where his head was blown away, and the shock so raw in seeing that carnage in front of him that it wiped out everything—the memory of how it looked before, the ability to imagine it any other way. The memory of how
he
was before, the ability to imagine
himself
as anything other than the killer of this thing. He was another person now, his past as dead as the corpse crumpled on the ground in front of him. Newborn in blood and bits of brain. He hadn't thrown up, or cried, or laughed. He felt no hysteria, no horror, only the hollowness of endings and beginnings.

Joey picks up the
True Crime
digest and shoves it into the inside pocket of his leather jacket along with the rest of the clippings and photographs, almost as bulky as the gun. It's almost time, he thinks, time to close the loop, to pull Joey Narcosis into existence by his own bootstraps, by handing this dumdum-loaded motherfucker of a gun to a crazy kid, giving that boy the chance, the choice, to murder his own future and, in doing so, become it.

He opens the hotel room door and cuts right through from evening into morning, walks down the corridor where a maid is coming out of another room, locking it behind her. She walks backward to the linen trolley and lays the clean towels down on it, pulls it backward down the corridor. She doesn't see him and he doesn't know how he's seeing her. This whole world, and the light that
bounces round in it, is in reverse to him, and if the laws of physics were at play here, in his backways world, his eyes should be pouring out light instead of gathering it in, focusing it into vision. But, fuck it, he's long since come to the conclusion that the laws of physics are just rules of thumb. He doesn't claim to understand the journey that's brought him here; all he's interested in is the destination, and that's not far from here, not far from now. It's almost time.

As he slips out a side door of the hotel, he slips into sync with the world around him, moving with the flow of frontal time. He heads for the high school.

Today is the first day of the rest of your life, he thinks.

The alley is only fifty to a hundred yards from the school, a dank narrow chasm of brown brick slicing between a department store and a block of crafts shops. Handmade shoes and bespoke tailors. Of course, there's not exactly a lot of new stock coming into Lincoln since it drifted off into the Hinter, so the whole town's sort of regressed; he'd forgotten how quaint it all is—was. But that'll change when the CNN choppers come flying low over the fields to land in the high-school parking lot. Lincoln will never be the same again after the tragedy.

He dumps the clippings and the photographs, his wallet, all the junk that might identify his body, into a small pile of newspapers and other garbage, lights it up and lets it burn while he waits. The
True Crime
mag blackens and sparks, peeling away page by page into ash, till there's only the spine left.

Murder!Massacre! Mayhem!
Issue 23. Macromimicon Publications.

He kicks at the ashes of the story of his life, scattering them to a gray smear on the tarmac that'll wash away in his own blood. A glimpse out of the corner of his eye.

“Hey Joe,” he says. “Joseph Darkwater.”

The boy stands at the entrance to the alley as if not sure whether to answer the call or run like fuck. Joey tosses the overcoat down on the ground in front of him, toward the boy. He holds up the gun like it's a bone for a dog, a tempting treat. Come and get it.

“Joseph Darkwater,” he says again.

And then they're standing there, looking at each other, his hand extended with the gun hanging by the trigger guard from one finger. He looks into the boy's eyes, but all the kid can look at is the gun. It must look like power itself, with the silencer screwed on it now. Somewhere, a bell is ringing, but neither of
them can move, caught in this moment that their lives, their
life
, revolves around, this moment of death. The boy looks up at him, his pupils dark, his gaze empty, and Joey feels just a hint of sorrow, just a hint of hatred, at this ghost of his past, this hollow child. The weight of the gun in his hand feels so natural, so true, and, even as he reaches it out in offering to the boy, a part of him doesn't want to let it go.

He can picture his own body lying on the ground now, its head blown clean off. It's the weirdest feeling. The newspaper photographs of the alley cordoned off, white tape on the ground. The speculations about this mysterious first victim, this outsider forgotten and remembered here and there in the confusion of the manhunt, the arrival of the city news teams, first contact with the outside world. It's the enigma that nobody was ever able to answer: Why that first victim? Why that stranger in the alley?

The boy reaches out a trembling hand toward the gun.

“Go ahead,” he says.

For the first time in so very long, he feels something. He wonders if this is what has drawn him here, if he came back here ready to die because he knew, somewhere inside, there was a chance he might remember what it meant to feel… fear.

Kill me and you can kill anyone, he thinks.

“Kill me and…”

The boy's eyes are wide, dark … wet. He's crying. He'd forgotten that. He'd forgotten he was crying.

He flicks the gun around his index finger, catches the butt in his hand, points it at the boy's head and chambers a round.

“Fuck this,” he says, and pulls the trigger.

The bullet—like the fist of God—punches most of his soft, little skull clean off his shoulders, leaving only the lower jaw near falling off, and other fragments of white bone that jut out from the red pulp where his head once was. The body drops, twitching with the mindless spasticity of a decapitated chicken.

A shiver runs through it, then a final jerk, and then it's still. Such a close-range shot with .99 ammunition—Joey has blood and brains all over his hand and sleeve, little spots of splatter on the front of his shirt. He can even taste a little something warm and salty on his bottom lip when he licks it.

He flicks the gun's safety catch back on, unscrews the silencer and slips it in his pocket, holsters the weapon. There's a part of him a little disappointed that
the world hasn't just torn itself apart around him, that the shock wave of the bullet—of the paradox—hasn't punched right through reality and turned it into so much grisly mush, like the dead thing lying on the ground in front of him. He would have liked that, he thinks.

He heads out of the alley and turns away from the high school. Been there, done that; time to move on. He strides forward, a smile on his face as he rips through the day ahead of him, a flash of light and dark as the sun flicks through the sky, away and back again, like the turning of a page. It's afternoon, and pedestrians fill the street; behind him there's the noise of local police investigating the crime scene.

Loops and paradoxes are for the mundanes, he thinks. Time is full-on and flashback, forward and reverse, splayed out in sidewinding slipstreams of chance and causality, and layered universe upon universe, like geological strata each built upon the dust of the world crushed beneath.