Ink (31 page)
Authors: Hal Duncan
Guy, as the messenger, goes running from the stage.
“I swear,” snarls Pierrot, “it would be rich if we allowed ourselves to be defied by these hysterical bitches.”
“Still stubborn, Pierrot?” says Jack. “Despite my warning?”
He climbs slowly to his feet. Pierrot's knife turns, pointing at him, at arm's reach.
“Is it impossible to shut this stranger up?” he says to me. “In chains or out of them, he speaks too free.”
‘And you should thank me for it. Even after the mistreatment I've endured from your hands,” Jack says, “still, I warn you: Bearing arms against this spirit is a sin. I tell you, stop this now; the Harlequin will not allow you to disrupt his revelers.”
“Disrupt? I'll drive them from the mountains. I
will
drive them out.”
“There'll be a rout, all right. You'll all be put to flight—and put to shame when with their little sticks they crush your armored warriors, your shining knights. You kick against the pricks in rage when you should sacrifice to him. You're dust, Pierrot, and the Harlequin is king.”
Pierrot slashes at him with the knife. Jack staggers back, a slice across his chest. Under the leather a thin trickle of red blood begins to flow
“I'll give him sacrifice!” says Pierrot. ? wholesale slaughter of his women
on the hills. I'll give them what they're due. No, I'll not listen to you tell me what to do. So you've escaped your chains; now keep your peace or you can feel my steel again.”
“Fuck you,” says Jack. “Come on, then. Fucking try it.”
He's right up in Joey's face, and it takes all that Joey's got not to just deck the stupid fucker, but he reins his anger in. He holds it back for at least a second before his hands are up and slamming into Jack's chest, palm-first, shoving him back and away. Jack bounces off the wall and comes right back with one step, then another; his own hands slam into Joey, and again, and again. Then they've got each other by the T-shirts, by Joey's torn and sleeveless white tee, Jack's black-and-red-striped top, and they're pulling each other around like it's the mosh pit, but this time the snarling spitting venom is more than mock fury, more than raging glory in teenage kicks, headlocks and roars of animal joy. This time, as Jack shoves Joey away from him, there's no crowd to catch him, throw him back, just a chair to go tumbling behind him and a desk to rattle, papers scattering onto the floor at his side. Fox's plans for revolution.
Joey grabs a fistful of paper, holds it crumpled up in front of him.
“Fuck this,” he says. “This is—”
“Bollocks,” says Jack. “They'll never catch us.”
He leans against the brick wall, darts a glance over his shoulder, round the corner, then looks back at Joey, grinning. Joey grabs a handful of shoulder and leans round Jack to see for himself. There are ten, maybe twelve of the razor kids hanging outside the Grosvenor, empty bottles of Buckfast, Thunderbird and Mad Dog 20/20 clinking at their feet. The leader perches on a crossbar of scaffolding, one arm on an upright to steady himself, the other dangling down between his legs. Head monkey, Joey thinks. King Ned. His chief lieutenants lean against the square pillars of the burnt-out cinema building's entrance, smoking fags and arguing over the pills in high-pitched nasal whines—
aye, right
—
aye, too fuckin right, ya fuckin prick
—
these are pure shite, man, by the way.
The others mill and jostle each other, one of them playing with his chib, flicking the cutthroat open and closed, open and closed.
These urnae fuckin anyhin. Ahm gonae kill that cunt Narco.
Joey swings back round the corner.
“Up and over,” he says.
He points at the second-level gantries, the scaffolding and prefabs that all but swallow up the cobbled lane. They could get by without even being seen.
“You take the high road,” says Jack. “I'm going straight through.”
And Joey has no time to argue because Jack's already gone, legging it down the cobbles, weaving past the swing of a chib and ducking a bottle that smashes on a wall, grabbing scaffolding and swinging up, too fast and agile surely for any of these little shits to catch while they're strung out on the dog tranquilizers Joey sold them. Surely …
“Fuck,” says Joey.
He starts running after Jack.
“Come on,” says Joey.
He grabs Jack by the collar of his piper jacket, drags him up enough so he can latch an arm and haul him to his feet. Jack stands there dazed, looking down at the militiaman, at the truncheon with the blood and hair being washed from it into the puddle in the gutter, at the crowbar with the blood and hair and bone.
“You killed him. You fucking killed him, Joey.”
“Come on.”
Jack pulls his arm away and wipes a rivulet of red from his left eye, blood dribbling from his flame hair, running thin in the torrential rain, streaking his face. He's in a bad way. If Joey hadn't got to him in time …
He snorts blood, wipes it from his nose and cut lip with a flicking hand. Spits it in the militiaman's broken face.
“Come on,” says Joey.
An ornithopter searchlight sweeps the alleyway, a heavenly ray illuminating them as Jack limps back, then turns to take a running kick at the dead man, screaming abuse. Joey looks up into the raindrops sparkling as they fall through the bright flood of light.
“Come on!”
“Come on,” says Joey. “Skybikes against militia ornithopters?”
He throws the crumpled sheet at Jack.
‘And guns all along the east wall of the Rookery,” says Jack. ‘And with the reinforcements Anaesthesia's bringing back—”
“We don't even know if she's coming back herself. She's gone. She's lost.”
“It doesn't matter. We only have to hold the line till King Finn reaches the ICI plant. Once we take that we have the whole city's fucking power.”
That's the plan. A push out of the Rookery, a wall of fire laid down along
the river so King Finn and his men can make it down to Finnieston, down to the docklands, the airshipyards and the orgone manufactory. Jack in the skies. Guy and Puck in the Rookery coordinating its defense, all of them just trying to hold that line long enough for Finn to … take the power back.
“And they're with us, Joey. The workers there are with us—Jesus, Joey, this is it. If you can't fucking see that, if you can't fucking hack it, then fuck you.”
Joey grabs the corner of the desk and pulls himself to his feet.
“It'll be a fucking massacre,” he says. “You think they won't take out the plant? I'm telling you, you'll be lucky if they don't level Kentigern and sow the fucking ground with salt. Can't stop the children of the revolution, eh Jack? You have no fucking idea how far they'll go. You want a city of martyrs, Jack? Is that what you want?”
“I want freedom,” says Jack. “What the fuck do
you
want?”
“World peace,” says Joey. “Fuck you.”
he
S
avage
S
pirits
The Duke is rapt, gripped by this picture of a royal mind unraveling, of a tyrant calling down his fate. There are a million Dukes of Hell across the Vellum since the Hinter tore the Covenant apart, and each self-styled Asmodeus or Beelzebub is just a rival, just another enemy, just one more threat to this one's precious city-state.
Pierrot's just one of them, to him, one of the fools he hates. We'd all been worried that he'd watch the play so long and then catch on but, no, I guess we underestimated just how dim this gray lord is. As Hitler loved his Wagner, loved to watch the gods destroy themselves, Valhalla burning to the ground, our Duke's won over easily by the promise of a violent end, of seeing Pierrot brought down.
What's new? I think. A lot of bluster and a little blood. Some folks are always easily amused.
“Friend, there is still one way to heal this hate,” says Jack.
‘And how is that?” says Pierrot. ‘Am I supposed to bow to my own slaves?”
He snorts. The Duke snorts with him. Angels, I think: Even with the Covenant broken, Gabriel and his goons still see themselves as lords, still see humanity as beasts, as monsters, slaves to be subdued. Even despite the fact that Metatron's Republic fell, these tinpot tyrants think they have the
right
to quell the savage spirits of upstart humanity. And so they build their Havens as these dreams of order, rule them as new Dukes of Hell.
My sister, Phreedom, should be out there in the Hinter now, out gathering the rebel souls, the wild things, nature's children, all those who'd choose flesh and the chaos that goes with it over this … scotch mist. That was the story, anyway, as King Finn told it, as Guy wrote it down … but sometimes stories take unusual twists.
“I'll bring the women here for you unarmed,” says Jack.
“This is some crafty scheme of yours,” says Pierrot. “I won't be charmed.”
“What kind of scheme is it, to keep both you and them from harm?”
The Princess is giving her attention now to something other than the play; she's watching Guy intently as he drops down from the wagon, at the far side of the stage from where the Harlequin and Pierrot act out this age-old fight between chaos and order, the nemesis of human nature and the hubris of the state. He slips along the far wall of the hall, sneaking under the torches so he doesn't cast a shadow in their light, around behind the crowd, behind the throne, to where she sits below the Duke and at his side.
“You're in with them,” Pierrot's saying. “It's a plot so that your wine will flow forever.”
“No,” says Jack. “You can be sure, however, that
that
pact's already made with the divine.”
“Bring me my weapons,” calls Pierrot. ‘And not one more word from
you”
The Princess lets Guy take the goblet from her hand. He whispers something in her ear that makes her shake her head, brows furrowed; it's a long time since she heard that name, I bet—eternity, perhaps. It's hard to read the words upon her lips from here, but I can guess.
Phreedom
… she says.
“Pierrot, wait,” says Jack.
A pause. It is the moment of Pierrot's doom.
“I'll give you what you
really
want.”
The Princess Anaesthesia, our forgotten Phreedom, looks at Jack across the cold, stone room. And whispers,
Yes.
—
T
he
S
hape of
T
hings to
C
ome
Y
our brother knew what Himmler was planning, didn't he?” says Pickering. “He found out about Operation Hummingbird. He knew that Himmler was going to purge the SA, slaughter the last remnants of the old order and raise a new army from the ashes of the old. Fascism would be dead, Futurism victorious. He was willing to do anything to stop that, wasn't he?”
“How many times do I have to tell you, Major Pickering, I am not Reinhardt von Strann. I know nothing about the man other than what I have already told you. I know he had a brother in the SA but—”
“
You
had a brother in the SA.
You
, Reinhardt von Strann.”
“I am not that man. My name is Reynard. I am a French citizen.”
“You are the brother of Johann von Strann, of this so-called Jack Flash. You know what he is.”
“No.”
“You know what he made himself.”
“No.”
“You know how he did it.”
“No, I tell you—”
“The Eye of the Weeping Angel—”
“I don't—”
“A ritual in your family home in Strann.”
“My name is—”
“Tell me what he did!”
——
I feel a sickening lurch, like the ground itself moving beneath my feet as I stagger from the chair and he turns the open book toward me—it moves, oh God, the text itself is moving—and all the whirling, churning vortex of text resolves into a swastika inked in red and black upon the aged, yellowed manuscript.
“Hypnosis,” I'm saying, “mesmerism. It isn't real. It isn't.”
No, I tell myself desperately, it's just some fake, some forgery, some nineteenth-century Romantic fancy full of inscrutable hieroglyphs, grotesque illustrations, bound in black leather and written on skin warm to the touch, like it's alive and crawling with insect language, crawling right into your mind. Oh, God.
I back away from him.
“Drugs,” I say, “it's drugs. You've drugged me. Drugs and hypnosis.”
“The Book of All Hours,” he says. “A book of everything that ever was or
wasn't
written, not just our history, not just our future, but
every
history,
every
future. Written in the language of the angels. A living language, Fox. The Logos. The Word of God. The Cant. Look at it, Fox. This is what the first shaman saw when he looked into the fire he stole from Heaven. This is the shape of
everything.”
And I can see it in the book, the whole of history twisting in that maelstrom of a forgotten symbol, truth warping around the myth and spewing out, in spiral arms, a million brave newworlds, spinning as a galaxy of constellations of chance and change. The book barely binds it, can hardly contain it. It's pushing at the edges, trying to break through into our world, into reality, existence.
“Close it,” I say. “Close the book.”
“Look at it,” he says. “The Book of All Hours. You know what Himmler thinks it is? I'm not sure how much the Russian knows—I don't understand his part in this—but Himmler thinks it's just some
spellbook
, some pathetic little gri-moire for conjuring demons.”
My back hits a bookcase and a glass door rattles. I have nowhere left to go, my brother and the book between myself and the door.
“Demons!” he spits. “This is a book for conjuring worlds!”
“You want me to make something up for your story? Some ancient grimoire, maybe? A medieval tome of arcane knowledge, of secrets and truths too terrible to tell? Will you be satisfied if I invent some spurious detail for your preposterous tale?”
Pickering says nothing, simply stares at the prisoner with the same cold gaze
he used against the Futurist spy in the room before this one—three hours ago it was now. He wonders if that hangman is still waiting outside, has a sudden absurd image of the man sipping a cup of tea and chatting with some pretty Wren as he leans against the wall of the corridor.
“Yeah, we hanged three of the buggers already today. That Pickering knows what he's after. “
That was how he first met Sarah. He was standing waiting outside a room in the Circus—that's what they call this place, just like the original, Thames House, the HQ of MI5, the Circus—when she came walking past with files in her hand, and saw him there, and smiled at him. He wasn't a major then, of course. He didn't really start to rise through the ranks until… until he learned how to not care about the pleas, the begging.
For God's sake, man, I have a wife and children.
A few words from him would be all it takes. The world is changing since the Armistice, and men like Pickering hold a lot of power in their hands. All it takes is a few words: Futurist agent; enemy of the state.
“You know, I do have rights,” von Strann is saying. “Do your superiors know exactly why you're holding me? The grounds for your suspicions?”
Pickering says nothing. The man knows damn well that his superiors have no more love for “Guy Fox,” with his pamphlets littering London's streets, than for the real threat of traitors within their midst, traitors with all of Moscow's power behind them. A noisome little troublemaker like this is hardly within the remit of Operation Hawkwing, but they'd probably be happy to see Pickering's bete noire out of the way. As long as it doesn't interfere with the fight against Futurism, they'll turn a blind eye to it.
“The Stasi, the Gestapo, the NKVD, MI5—you're all the same. I understand the official designation for MI5 is the Security Service, Major Pickering. What does that abbreviate to again—SS, is it? I thought all that was dead and buried in the ruins of Berlin but, no, it's alive and well right here in Britain. Albion, I mean.”
Pickering doesn't rise to it. Mosley's victory's just a blip and Churchill will be back in power after the next elections; people are fools and, yes, Futurism's still a menace, but it needs a cool and reasoning head to deal with it, not panic and paranoia.
“Where is your swastika armband, Herr Pickering?” says von Strann. “Where is the swastika? You must be proud of what you're doing for king and country, for your glorious Albion, no? You ought to wear your heart upon your sleeve.”
Pickering says nothing. He
is
bloody proud of what he's doing, proud to wear the badge of MI5—the eye over the crown within the pyramid—and to
serve King Edward and the British Empire. Britain, he thinks, not Albion. All that tosh and nonsense, it'll all blow over.
“Where is your swastika? “says von Strann.
I push him back from me and push myself away, wanting to walk right out the door, right out of the house and out into the night. I could leave now, just leave him to his madness, but my legs are weak. I find myself still leaning against the glass doors of the bookcases, stumbling along the wall like a blind man, kicking the leg of the table covered with the red cloth, rattling the candlestick and dagger laid out upon it.
I cannot shake the image from my mind, the shape that the churning swastika resolved into, not the straightforward square-barred swastika of the Nazi Party, but something more ornate, more oriental. I consider myself enlightened; I've seen more than enough in Berlin not to blanch at what the prurient would call depravity, but the image in the book, in my head, still sickens me. Two men, one down on his hands and knees, forming the lower part of this shape, the second man hovering above him in the air, contorted like a Yogic master, arms forward, back arched so his legs go straight back, then bend up at the knees. A swastika like some antique Indian sculpture, crawling man and floating spirit coupled in sodomitic union. God and Man as one.
What kind of ritual is he planning, for the love of Christ?
The Eye of the Weeping Angel glints before me, its flaw staring back at me as if the gemstone is exactly as its name suggests—the eye of an angel that has seen the truth beneath reality and wept for it. I lay a hand over it—not to take it but to hide it, or to hide myself from it—and my brother's hand comes down on top, holding it there. He grips the book under his other arm, closed now mercifully.
“You understand,” he says. “Someone,
something
, changed history. This is not the way it's meant to be.”
But a century of slaughter? I think. Did he actually see the same reality in the book that I did?
“But
that,”
I say. “Christ, Jonni, if
that
is the way it's meant to be, we're better off with the Futurists.”
He peels my hand away from the jewel.
“I think that's what they thought too,” he says softly.
He lays the book down on the table and takes me by the shoulders.
“Fox,” he says, “since I looked into that book it's like there's two of me, this … this fool and someone else, someone better. Fox, I'm frightened of what I could become in this world, of what I already am.”
He steps back from me, hands raised as if to say, Look, look at what they've done to me. His face twists like that of a child trying not to cry and then he's pulling his open tunic off and throwing it across the room.
“I'm supposed to die tonight,” he says, “in
this
world. Himmler's men are on their way here to drag me out into the gardens and shoot me. That's in there as well.”
He points at the book.
“A different page. A different story. And I don't want to be a part of it, not anymore. Not as this. Not when I could be so much more.”
All he ever wanted was to be the hero, a knight in shining armor or a boy from nowhere going up against a giant. Only, in this world it's silver skulls that shine on the lapels of warriors. But it's the same in
that
world, I think. It's exactly the same.
“I know,” he says. “I know what you're thinking, Fox. I know the way you think. But I have to try, don't I? You know me just as well. You know I have to try. It's who I am.”
Beneath his unbuttoned shirt, a lattice of scars is visible, a hatchwork across his chest. God, I think, what have you done to yourself, Jonni?
“This isn't my world,” he says.
A
W
orld
G
odless and
W
ithout
M
agic
“Your brother knew what Himmler was planning, didn't he?” says Pickering. “He found out about Operation Hummingbird. He knew that Himmler was going to purge the SA, slaughter the last remnants of the old order and raise a new army from the ashes of the old. Fascism would be dead, Futurism victorious. He was willing to do anything to stop that, wasn't he?”
“How many times do I have to tell you, Major Pickering, I am not Reinhardt von Strann. I know nothing about the man other than what I have already told you. I know he had a brother in the SA but—”
“
You
had a brother in the SA.
You
, Reinhardt von Strann.”
“But, as I say, I'm not this Van Strann—”
“
Von
Strann—”
“Sorry.
Von
Strann. But I wish to God I was, I'll tell you that. The Fox's Den was raking it in while my own little club was struggling to stay afloat. But then we never had bestiality on the bill. Do you mind if I smoke?”
“Go ahead.”
“Do you have a light? Thanks. Please … where were we?”
Pickering snaps the lighter closed and pockets it. Where
were
they? He stands up from his chair and wanders to the corner of the room, leans back against the wall, arms folded, sizing the prisoner up. He returns, takes his cap off and lays it on the table.
“In July 1940,” he says, “you were arrested for your activity in helping refugees escape from Germany, and sentenced to death as a traitor to the New Reich. Given the pedigree of the von Strann family, this was no small scandal. Not that your family was without scandal before this … your brother, for instance. But…”
He stops. He's gone through this already with the prisoner, of course, so the feeling of deja vu is not unnatural but it's so deep and profound that… he can't nail it down, but something feels wrong.
“You want me to make something up for your story?” says von Strann. “Some ancient grimoire, maybe? A medieval tome of arcane knowledge, of secrets and truths too terrible to tell? Will you be satisfied if I invent some spurious detail for your preposterous tale? What should I say? What do you want me to say?”
Pickering stands up from his chair and wanders to the corner of the room, leans back against the wall, arms folded, sizing the prisoner up. He returns, takes his cap off and lays it on the table. How long is the bloody fool going to maintain this charade?
A little something niggles at the back of his mind but he can't place it. He shakes it off, a distraction.
“How did he do it?” he says.
“Do what, Major Pickering?”
“Become this… thing? This Jack Flash? It was the jewel, wasn't it? Magic.”
“Major Pickering, what you are talking about is not possible: cursed jewels; magical rituals; or this von Strann, escaping from a Siberian gulag and traveling across the Futurist Bloc to the Western border in four days. It simply isn't—”
“Two
days,” Pickering interrupts.
Goddammit, the man knows fine well. They've been over this.
“Really?” says von Strann. “I was sure you said
four days.”
“I said
two.”
“Well, whatever. Major Pickering, I—”
And Pickering finds himself with the gun in his hand, pointed at the other man's head. He has to stop his finger from pulling the trigger, as if another part of him is trying to seize control, to punch a hole right through the man's lies. Von
Strann flinches, pulls his head back and away, but Pickering is round beside him now, his other hand gripping the bastard's chin, the barrel pressed to his temple.
“I know you've talked to the others,” he says. “That's how I found you. I'm not the only one whose life your brother wrecked. I'm not alone in this.”
The man flails in his grip, whimpering, a spineless coward. Yes, Pickering's talked to all of them he could find, in asylums or in prisons, under some pretext or other—
official investigation into Futurist psychological warfare
—
Yes, we believe they were using projection, mass hypnosis
—some bunkum like that. All of the poor survivors of this other Spirit of the Blitz. If they could be called survivors. And all of them mentioned the “Frenchman,” the cultured, quietly interested “Frenchman,” chasing the same story, the same legend of Jack Flash. Pickering cocks the trigger.