Ink (52 page)
Authors: Hal Duncan
It takes Carter a full second of replay and translation before he says
yes
, not really sure which question he's answering.
“Wee beggar does it just tae wind us up, but. Bloody ‘English’! Fuckin … Sorry, nae offense, sir. Bloody wee
qadishtu
—”
Tamuz ducks a swipe from the driver and makes a retort that Carter doesn't catch, jumps over the door of the open-top Rolls and into the front passenger seat. The boy leans forward, using the sleek mahogany of the glove compartment as a mirror, flicking fingers through his fringe, pushing hair back from his face. Carter can't help but crane his neck a little to check out the dark leather upholstery.
“She's a pure stoater, eh, sir?”
The driver and the car make a strange combination, the one as messy as the other is pristine. Don MacChuill—as he introduces himself in his guttural garrulous Scots tongue—is a man made of dust and sand; it's quite impossible to tell what color his hair or crumpled uniform are, and the only patch of skin that doesn't blend with the road beneath their feet is round his eyes. Or
eye
, to be precise; MacChuill wears a patch over his right eye—yet another casualty of the Great War, Carter supposes. Goggles up over the peak of his chauffeur's cap, a cigarette dances in his mouth as he rattles through the horsepower and the craftsmanship.
——
The car is immaculate, a rag in the Scotsman's hand showing he takes as much pride in it as his talk suggests, in inverse proportion to the pride he takes in his own appearance, it would seem. MacChuill flicks ash from his cigarette, bats at a few flakes that fall on his jacket, and goes on talking, oblivious of the little dust cloud raised as he opens the back door for Carter. Half of what he says is entirely unintelligible.
“Aye, but the Baron kens his cars, he does, but.”
MacChuill jumps over his own door into the driver's seat, leans back over his shoulder to pass Carter a set of goggles dug out of his pocket.
“Ye'll be wanting these, sir.”
He pulls his own down over his left eye and the leather patch, squares his cap.
“Right then,” he says. “We fer the aff? Next stap Tell el-Kharnain.”
The car rattles over the rough roads, jouncing Carter back and forth and side to side as they wind up into the hills northeast of the Holy City, terraced hills of olive groves and orange trees, dark green leaves patching the stony, sandy, sandstony terrain. Occasional mosques and synagogues and churches dot the road, barely more complex in their architecture than the squat secular buildings of the villages they pass through, rough-hewn blocks with holes for doors and windows, only the towers, the odd symbol—Star of David, Cross or Crescent—marking out their greater purpose.
It seems strange to Carter that so harsh a region should be such a holy land,
the
Holy Land. And in times as inhospitable to faith as these arid climes. But what else is there? he thinks. The abyss the Futurists would have, the nihilistic hell of men whose only faith is in their own will? There are things he's witnessed which have tested many of his beliefs—in God, in humanity, in the existence of wisdom, justice or mercy anywhere on this earth—but still, he thinks, we
must
believe. We must have faith. He watches the back of the boy's head as it bobs this way, that way, juddering with the rhythm of the road. If these Enakites are devil worshippers of a sort, like the Yezidi, even
they
still have a faith. But the Futurists… the Futurists do not pray; they only offer their burnt offerings to the furnaces of progress.
“Huv ye got a fag there, sir, by any chance, cause Ah've smoked ma last an I'm bloody gaspin fer it, ye know, but, see Ah—”
“Of course,” says Carter. “No problem.”
He leans forward with the case open in his hand and MacChuill turns in his seat, hands off the wheel, to take one.
“Carter Bey?”
Tamuz has a wide-eyed look—
can I?
“Go on,” says Carter.
MacChuill sings as he drives, some Scots folk song that should have a fiddle to accompany it. Carter wonders how he does it, with the dust kicked up around them as a lung-choking dervish; after the first half hour of the drive, his own coughing and spluttering had driven him to dig his scarf out of his kit—a tasseled affair not unlike the checkered Palestinian kaffiyeh—to wrap his nose and mouth. MacChuill and Tamuz both seem quite unperturbed. He'd almost think the Scotsman's beard was acting as a filter, but bushy as it is, it can't be that wild. Curiously, the airstream must be carrying the dust around Tamuz entirely; the boy's shirt looks as snow-white as it did before the journey's start. It strikes Carter that the dust should be thrown up behind them anyway; simple common sense says that it shouldn't be furling, whirling up into his bloody face as if it's blowing up from the road in the car's path ahead of them, rising to meet them.
As it bobs, Tamuz's head turns and Carter notes the boy's lips moving. But if he has decided to join in the song at least he's not as loud as the Scotsman, not loud enough to be heard over a voice loud and rough enough to make the engine's roar seem smooth and soft.
The road turns south for a brief second, rounds a steep slope running up to overhanging rock, and they look down upon Jerusalem off in the distance, glowing golden-white as a mirage, before they turn in to a pass, a scar gouged through the rock. It's no more than a glimpse, and it's perhaps because it is no more that it strikes Carter with a sudden nameless pang; it's not quite yearning, nothing quite so clear and simple, maybe curiosity as much as anything, but it's the feeling you get when you pass someone in the street just as they brush the hair back from their face and drop their hand. You glimpse that face too briefly really to register the beauty, but you turn unconsciously, caught by it, wondering after it, only to find it gone already.
And the road swings east, and the car with it, rattling on, away from the Holy City, away from Carter's lost faith.
“Have a little faith in me,” I say. “How hard can it be?”
A freefall through a million dead worlds, arms spread wide to catch the currents of time, aiming your body at a hole halfway down, a hole the size of a ventilation duct.
“Well,” says Fox, “this is the proverbial jump into the abyss …”
“Do we get parachutes?” says Joey.
“Or jet packs,” I say. “A jet pack would be cool.”
Fox looks up from the sim and gives a sigh.
“OK,” I say. “No jet pack for Jack”—I grin him a glint—”relax. Nice and easy does it. Falling is what I'm best at.”
“It's getting you to the chi-shaft in the first place that's the hard part.”
I look at the sweep of Georgian terrace at the top of the sim.
‘? few walls and watch towers,” I say. “Piece of piss.”
“The surface structure's just a sideshow,” says Fox. “The real Circus is what's underneath. Note the paradox shielding.”
I squint at these scraps of map dredged up by Don from Joey's screaming dreams, assembled into a semblance of sense by Guy and simmed by Anaesthesia; it doesn't look like all the parts quite fit. I cock my head like a quizzical mutt, try to straighten out the involution of environs and events. It still looks nutty as a squirrel's dreams.
“The Circus is a timefuck,” says Joey. “Trust me; I used to live there. Walk down the wrong corridor without clearance and you don't just find yourself back where you started; you find yourself back
when
you started. With no memory of getting there.”
I shrug. Who needs a memory when you've got joie de vivre and an orgone pistol?
“This route should take you down to the lower levels, though.”
Fox traces a path around the outer edges of the plans, where corridors form Mobius-Hilbert wheels, his finger moving inward and downward to our helter-skelter highway into history, that shaft drilled down into the chaosphere. I flip my mayashades down and zoom in on his fingertrail, cock my head a few more degrees. And realize what I'm looking at. Roads. Buildings.
Once upon a time, you see, my peachy Kentigern had a sister city called Dunedin, Albion's main base in Caledonia, built on black volcanic hills with a big old castle at its heart, perched up on a sheer-walled plug of basalt, balustrades as grim as February, cannons on its battlements, and barracks dug into its dungeon depths. If Kentigern's an outlaw city of shipbuilders and steelworkers, Trade and Industry, well, Dunedin was an outpost city of pipe bands and politicians, Might and Majesty. Fucking tartan-clad tourist trap for the Volk-loving fascists. Until the Evenfall came and Kentigern ate Dunedin whole. But didn't digest it, apparently.
I look at the buildings and bridges in Anaesthesia's sim, the crumpled subterranean city with its streets all twisted topsy-turvy, and the castle hanging upside down over a bottomless pit. Nazi Gothic to the max.
“Tell me we have to get into the castle,” I say.
“You have to get into the castle,” says Guy.
“Keen.”
“So we can't just blow the doors,” I say … “a few sex bombs through the windows, and stroll in through the carnal carnage?”
“That wouldn't be a good idea,” says Fox.
“What if I'm in disguise? I could have a lab coat. And a clipboard.”
“Jack, you could wear a rubber mask and fake mustache; with your meta-physique the castle psi scans would still trigger before you got to the door.”
“This'll get you into the Circus at least,” says Don. “Here.”
He hands me my astral travel papers—an expired passport with the corner snipped off, a used airplane ticket to Turkey and a bright pink note of Monopoly money tucked inside. I flick it open. A crude pencil drawing of a smiley face taped over the photograph, details Tipp-Exed out and overwritten in crayon, it's the work of an expert forger. Even smells of minion. I lay it down on the table and take the syringe full of ink that Anaesthesia hands me.
“And this'll get you inside the castle,” she says.
The syringe is sweet with my soul-scent, but then it should be; it's loaded with blissbath water homeopathically encoded with complete schematics for my archetypal character. It's living liquid information, viral ectoplasm, logos jism, meme spunk, soul-juice. Ink from my graving.
“Once you're inside,” she says, “you find your cover, spike his soul and ditch your skinsuit then … disperse. We reckon on twelve hours before the Jack Flash meme overwrites the host soul, so you spike him at midnight. Coverboy gets a good night's sleep, apart from some wacky dreams, walks in through the castle gates feeling fine and dandy, then just as he's about to chow down on his packed lunch…”
“Jack go boom,” I say. “In his head.”
“Quite,” says Fox.
“So who's the mark?”
“Circus architect,” says Fox. “Escherspace expert, Beta-level clearance.”
I flick open the dossier Fox hands me for a look at the SS stooge whose deep-and-dirty I'm gonna be riding into Dodge on. A job's a job, I suppose, and Daedalus didn't make the monster; he just built the labyrinth to house it. Still, at
that level of complicity I'm expecting a weaselly coward with a weak chin and beady eyes. In the photograph, the dapper chap doesn't look the sort to suck Satan's cock, though, with his little beatnik flop of hair, goatee and tache. Looks all-too-fucking-familiarly bohemian, in fact.
“Jacques Reynard Cartier,” says Fox. “Least that's what his papers say.”
“I know that face,” I say.
“Distant relative,” mumbles Fox.
“I'm not sure how he got here,” Fox explains, “but I rather suspect it's something to do with a little attempt to rewrite history that backfired quite … flamboyantly.”
“Strann?” I say.
“Strann,” he says, “or Paris, or here. God knows how many folds that little fiasco took place in. Anyway it rather looks as if our man switched streams in the storm and, well, decided to settle down, play by the rules, get a nice job—”
‘As an evil minion of the Empire,” I say. “That's not like you, Foxy.”
Fox keeps his gaze locked on the sim but his fingers drum a staccato beat on the tabletop. It's not easy seeing yourself as a sellout, I guess.
“Maybe he thought that he could work within the system,” he says. “Infiltrate … infect it with humanity. Salvage a few souls, throw a spanner in the works here or there. No Book. No big ideas. No grand plans.”
He shakes his head.
“Just… try not to blow your cover,” he says. “More to the point, try not to blow your cover
away.
There might be … temporal fallout.”
“I like temporal fallout,” I say.
I grin. Backflashes and splinterworlds, rewrites rippling through reality. Gives life a little depth to have as many pasts as futures. Linearity's for squares.
“Just try to remember, Jack, that some of us don't have quite the same … resilience,” he says.
So, “OK, OK,” I agree, “this evil minion of the Empire who's going to carry me inside the castle in his dreams is not to be drugged, drooged with a baseball bat, or dropped from a tall building with an
oopsy
, I am not to kill him. I am not to stitch myself into his flayed skin. I am not to arrive at the front door of the castle with a manic grin on my face and hair bleached to the color of fire, insisting that I am
not
Jack Flash, honest guv. I'm the bloke that works in
thingumy
, you know, with the
stuff.
See, I have a mustache. And a clipboard.
“I'll be good,” I say. “I promise.”
“It was nice knowing you, Guy,” says Joey.
—
The Mission
e's walked down roads that led to places that should never have existed, not in any sane world. He's walked down side streets into alleys that came out, a hundred yards or so along, in cities halfway round the world. He's talked to people who dream others’ memories, more vivid than their own waking life, or who murmur to themselves in languages they've never learned, or who remember children there are no records of and that no one else recalls. He's passed through towns where these so-called Cold Men have just, always the day before, packed up their shops and moved out, leaving behind them only the odd cheap and nasty scrap of mojo kitsch, some chicken-claw earring or some crystal skull. And even here—where in a way it all began, in the Mojave— even here he can't find any fucking angels.
The scent of Phree's sweat is heavy as the heat, though, in the air, so Finnan knows he's on the right track.
His scuffed tan desert boots kick up the dust as he trudges. He'd give his right arm for a drink of water, sure, his lips as cracked as dried-out paper, and the sun just too damn hot for this time in the morning, but he knows this beeline as-the-crow-flies route is safer than the road that should have taken him up to the old adobe mission they tell him lies just up a ways along the gulch; way things work now the official road could just as easily have led him into Disneyland or Dodge. As it is, he comes around a ragged outcrop of the crumbling sandstone foothills and it looks as if he's entered something like that kind of hell, anyway. Uncle Walt meets Sergio Leone.
A sea of rusted SUVs, a parking lot that stretches out to the horizon, crack-weed and dry brush sprouting up between the dead metal shells. The town, the mission, sit at the heart of it.
——
The mission rises among the few broken buildings and he sees it for a second as it once was, a ghost image of the blank walls and bell tower superimposed over the reality of this fold. Like the way a word in English or Italian, Inuit or Etruscan, still carries an echo of the Cant it's a corruption of, the mission shimmers with— part shadow, part reflection—an image of its prior self, whitewashed, serene, with a grand, cracked beauty like some peon widow in black sitting on her wooden chair in the shade—the old lady everybody comes to for advice, for gossip, and because they'll get an earful of abuse if they don't treat her with the right respect.
That image lasts only a blink before the truth burns through it.
The mission has been painted red, as red as Satan's fiery full-cocked loins and every bit as vulgar. So have the ruins of the little village that surrounds it, although they at least are mercifully small and almost buried among the rabble and babble of stalls and awnings, tents and wigwams, flags, banners, canopies … and Cold Men and customers wandering everywhere.
He hadn't thought that there might be so many normal folk out here, had imagined it as the last retreat of the Cold Men, packing up their businesses and leaving towns that they were never really welcome in, to come here to live with their own kind. He'd imagined this as some walled hideaway for the Jim Jones wannabes, some unkin version of the Moonies.
Turns out it it's more like Mardi Gras on acid.
Finnan pulls a softpack of Camels out of the back pocket of his chinos, taps one out and fires it up. The first draw of unfiltered nicotine is a lazy rush, coming on like an old dog rousing itself to greet its master,
hey there, hack again?
He's always liked nicotine; it gives him the patience of a saint and the voice box of a sinner. And the satisfying
clunk-snick
of a Zippo, quiets/jsss of tobacco lighting,
chuk
of the Zippo shutting—some things remain the same, even at the end of the world. Or after it.
“Hey there,” says a Cold Man coming toward him out of the freak fiesta up ahead. “Back again?”
Finnan cocks his head at him. Skin and hair the color of fresh ivory, but dressed up in a stars-and-stripes top hat and tails, beaded, ribboned, and feathered like a vodoun Uncle Sam. Finnan nails him for a barker and a con man right away. No real mojo here, just some pretty colors and a slick tongue to pull the marks into the carnival.
“Never been here before,” says Finnan.
“A new customer's an old friend, far as we're concerned. Come on back in, old
friend. We'll fix you up with what you want. A little love? A little money? Maybe a little good-time honey to keep the bed warm at night? Am I right? Trust me. Trust yourself. What we can't give you, it's not worth having. We are…
resplendent
in our range.”
Finnan half admires his blarney with a wry smile. But he doesn't trust the fucker for a second; there's a lilt in his voice, a croon of Cant. Fucker may not be unkin, but he's as near as damn-it.
“Just tell me what you're looking for,” says the Cold Man.
Little girl who stole the world, thinks Finnan.
“Truth,” he says. “Maybe you've got a little knickknack made of chickenbone that smells like horseshit whenever someone's talking out their ass? That might be useful.”
The barker laughs, all jovial and phony as a tour guide. It's part of the act, thinks Finnan, something the marks expect, something they want. He's no stranger to the idea of roguish charm, the way you can win someone's trust by telling them not to trust you, with a twinkle in the eye.
“You're a man of practicalities and logic,” says the barker. “I can tell
that you
know what you're looking for, and it's no business
of mine.”
He flourishes his hand toward the market.
“Wander at your leisure. Browse. Question.”
He smiles, waves Finnan on and in.
“One thing, though, old friend. A little advice.”
“Free?” says Finnan.
“Free and gratis.”
Finnan takes a draw on his smoke and waits.
“Just ignore the man behind the curtain,” says the barker.
Cold as ice and eyes like steel, he tips his hat, wheels and stalks off.
“Be seeing you,” says Finnan to his back.
Dreamcatchers and Sand Faintinqs
The mission at the far end, with a square in front and a few ruined buildings round it, there's really only one street to the place—but somehow, trying to walk from one end to the other, that street seems to stretch out, twisting as you go, space winding round you like a bad-trip snake world. The way the world is now, Finnan wonders how much of it is the confusion of the multicolored stalls and wide-eyed searchers rooting among them, and how much of it is a bona-fide reality fuck. He's been out of it for a long time—fuck knows how long, really—but
he's up to speed on the Evenfall now and the long Hinter that followed it, the deep dark night of dreams he slept right through. As he ducks and winds his way toward the mission, past stalls selling shit from every corner of the world, anything that might remotely be considered lucky, he seems to be going one step forward, two steps back and to the side, and never getting any nearer.
He pushes his way around blankets laid out on the ground, scattered with North and South Americana, dreamcatchers and sand paintings, vodoun and Santeria saint statues and shrines, potions and charms. He skirts stalls selling Scandinavian runic necklaces, Hindu Ganeshas, Chinese Kuans, Celtic staffs, African fetishes. Yin/Yangs, alien blood samples, glow-in-the-dark Madonnas, mirrors with the images of Jesus, Elvis or Diana embossed on them, skull rings and evil-eye rings, pentacles and rosaries, prayer rugs and shawls, drums, pipes, rattles, crystals, bondage gear and vampire candles, tarot cards and I Chings, holy water, silver bullets, rabbits’ feet and lucky white fucking heather—there's no order to the way the stalls are laid out, no avenues to the tat, just a random distribution of mojo like a minefield that there's no straight path through.
After five minutes’ steady weaving, he can tell it isn't just bad planning.
Everywhere, he notices, the people are buying this shit—tourists, pilgrims, searchers for that one little something that might charm their lives back to the way it used to be. Suburbanites with cameras and kids, living far enough out of the cities not to feel the full shock of the world coming apart, but close enough to it to be worried, they just want a little security, Finnan knows. He's eavesdropped on enough low conversations now to know their stories. How it started when they'd tried to phone some friend or relative and couldn't get through. How the bus they normally took to work became a tram. How they watched the news the night it covered the Dissolution of Prague, and they weren't entirely sure where Prague was—Russia, maybe?—but they knew a scary story when they saw one. In diner after diner, as he walked the Journey of the Dead Man, Finnan had listened in on their fears, pieced together the disintegration of reality, Evenfall and Hinter.
Out in the sticks around Alamosa, an old gas-pump jockey had asked him what he was looking for.
“Angels,” Finnan had said.
“Shoot, fella,” the man had said, “we all looking for the angels. You find them, you ask them where the hell they been while the world going crazy. You ask them why my Sarah got Raptured fifteen years ago and they still ain't shown up for the rest of us.”
“I'll do that,” Finnan had said.
“Fifteen years, and no Antichrist or nothing. You ask them.” Finnan had taken the last slug of his Mountain Dew, crumpled the can and chucked it in a waste bin, nodded. Looked a distance up the road.
“You ask them,” the old man had said again in a voice more desperate than angry.
Finnan can feel the Cant at the back of his neck now, like a warm hand wet with sweat. He can feel it all down his spine and across his shoulders, the feeling that any minute something's going to rip out from his shoulder blades and uncurl claws and wings, lashing tentacles—an animal energy that he can only barely just contain. Call it luck, call it mojo, call it the fucking Force, it's stronger in this place than it is in most unkin, and it's making him feel edgy as fuck. It has teeth.
He tries to source the feeling. For all the charms and trinkets that are on the countertops and blankets spread out around him, the feeling isn't coming from there, but from the broken-down adobe houses and, most of all, from the mission, the Mission of Sante Manite as it's marked on the map. He glances around at the Cold Men hawking their snake-oil quick-fix solutions for the deep soul fears, feeding off this place like vultures on a piece of carrion, tearing off little chunks of skin and flesh. He picks up a Chinese coin from the stall at his side; there's a hint of the Cant in it, an electric tingle in his fingers, but it's a resonance, a reflection. The real power's based in the mission building.
Christ, what have these bastards got here, he wonders, the fucking rotting corpse of God?
“God's not dead,” a voice says from a stall behind him.
Finnan stops and turns toward the Cold Man. He stands behind a bookstall— New Age self-help and mysticism.
Tantrafor Twats. How to Use Friends and Manipulate People. How to Play Victim and Win.
He remembers playing cards a long time ago, another life ago, during a war, playing cards with nudie women on them. Was it France or Spain now, sure? No matter; he remembers thinking how reading a person's attitude, their hate, their fear, their need, is something every poker player and every officer, every lying, cheating cunt of a control freak has made his greatest skill. Tuning in to every little tic and twitch of muscle, flex of fingers, blink of eyes, shift of scent, pause, glance and wait. There's a logic of challenges and chances runs through people's bodies, a touch of the Cant that reveals the bets, the bluffs, the truths. You don't read their minds, but you read
them.
You know their hand and you say just the right thing to make them play it the way it suits you.
The Cold Man is smiling quietly, knowingly, keeping the punch line until asked for it.
——
“Hit me,” says Finnan.
“He's only sleeping,” the Cold Man says, nodding to himself. “You're trying to get to the mission, yes?”
I'll check
, thinks Finnan. He's giving nothing away just yet.
“The market's pretty busy,” he says.
“It can surely be that way. There's a lot of demand, right now.”
Raise the stakes.
“Kind of tacky, some of this crap, isn't it?”
“All genuine magic. Works like a charm, you could say. But I guess this is the first time you've seen a place like this. Pretty cynical about it, I'll bet?”
“Sure and I love places like this,” says Finnan, laid back. “Very…
eclectic.”
“Something for everyone's taste.”
“I'll bet,” says Finnan.
Call you.
“So you looking for something in particular? Let me guess, something on Quantum Interconnectedness, Chaos Field Theory?”
Finnan picks up a book, glances at the back and lays it down, browses another couple, turns a few over and back again. Pseudo-histories, folklore and crank science.
“Sumerian mythology,” he says. “Heard of something called
The Book of All Hours’!”
The Cold Man blinks and Finnan can see his mind go click.
Cards on the table and the dealer is bust, I'm afraid.