Ink (65 page)
Authors: Hal Duncan
Some, the most foolhardy and the most craven of these men, had attempted to desert their posts and their compatriots, to escape from that dread place. Captured and executed by their own comrades, their naked bodies hung now from gibbets raised along the battlements of the city walls, stripped of all armor, stripped of all honor, as a warning to others. And of those few that had escaped this dismal fate, that had breached the city walls and thought to flee across the fiery sands of the surrounding desert? What of them? Their heads now capped the poles of the banners of the Sons of Sidim, banners made from the flayed skins of fallen foes, banners which fluttered in the dry desert wind, in the dust and sand whipped up around them, all around the city. They flapped languidly and seemed to move in time to the abominable elegy of the Sons of Sidim, as did the billowing clouds of dust and sand, as if the very elements, the very desert itself, were bemoaning the devastation and promising a dark and grisly revenge.
As Kartur watched and listened from the barricaded tower, quite unaware of his impatient hand stroking the leather-bound handle of his gleaming sword, he knew that it was only a matter of time until doom came to the city of Sidim and dealt its awesome blow upon the vile minions of the Turuq king, feeble lackey of the New Ruzzo-Purzan Empire.
21 st March. It is dawn. Through the window, I look out on a sun that rises over the occupied city of Tell el-Kharnain like the rising of the eye of God himself. It
feels like the dawning of the Day of Judgment, when every secret will be sung out like the muezzin's song, when truth itself shakes off so many centuries of sleep, and stands.
But the muezzin is silent this morning, dead on some bloody street no doubt, and the only song being sung here is the quiet murmur that von Strann mouths over the dead youth.
He sings in the strange tongue of the Enakites, I am sure. It is not Arabic or Hebrew, Armenian or Azeri. It is not any tongue I recognize. But I know this is the Enakite tongue, I know this is the Cant, because I understand exactly what it means. It is a song of mourning, a lament, but in the pain, the sadness, there is also anger, even threat. I am reminded of the tone, the quiet, grim restraint with which he promised a “reckoning”; and it disturbs me. I keep imagining that I can hear the song being sung by other voices far off, almost too faint to be heard. I say it is my own imagination because the voices match von Strann's too well and with the tension and the weariness, one's imagination can play funny tricks on one.
But I am not so sure those voices are not real.
You have to understand, Jack, I am so tired. The Baron sits on the edge of the bed beside the body of Tamuz, while I sit at his kitchen table, where I've spent most of this long dark night deciphering what I could of Samuel's notes, poring over the ragged pages, so much of it illegible, torn and burnt and bloodstained. There is too much to make sense of, too many inconsistencies, and I fear I'm only adding to them with this entry, but maybe it will be of some use to you. Have you read the other journal entries, I wonder. Are you reading this too late? Has it all already happened? Did you, like me, spend too long with all the irrelevant nonsense of Samuel's first meeting with von Strann, his introduction to the tribe, their strange customs, and with all that bloody hypocritical horror at the “abhorrent and unmanly” rituals which gave Sodom its reputation? I leaf back through the pages of this journal to three days ago, and the words are those of a stranger so obsessed with what it is to be a man that he spent his life trying to kill his own desires.
You know this, Jack. You can deny it to yourself, but you cannot deny it
from
yourself.
I look at Tamuz, dead because of my self-hate and arrogance, and, Jack, if Samuel only found these words within the Book, if you can only find them in his notes, I pray to God that you can choose another path.
——
Jack puts the page down, looks around the room, von Strann sitting on the bed, but with the girl on it instead of Tamuz. Tamui on the cot, wounded but still alive. MacChuill curled up beside the cot, asleep, instead of captured by the Turks. A present different from the journal of this other, broken self, but not so different, not so very different. Not different enough.
Von Strann mutters his strange song over the dead child. And in the distance other voices sing the same hollow lament.
21 st March,
he writes.
How much did Samuel glean from his studies that might be of use to us if we can only separate what's true and what is false? The movements of troops that are only now being planned, of alliances and betrayals that have not yet happened, Allied war plans for the coming
decades
, and even the subtlest strategies of the Futurists. I have read so much of what he wrote about the past, the present and the future, of things he should not,
could
«oi know unless the Book is real; of the internment camps of the Futurists, of what is really happening there, and why.
Sacrifice, he called it, the sacrifice of the chosen.
—
Room
innan stands up, and waves wash over him—of revulsion, reverence— not felt as his so much but as an outer force as physical as sunlight on your back, as a caress or a cut. He's past the sex-and-death, carrot-and-stick part of the trip now, shucking those shallow neuroses, headed deeper down into the psychodrama that the drug's performing with his dreams, a play cast from his past. He snatches glimpses of Phree as an angel anima, winged guardian, Tom as the self, lost soul of summers gone. Black-suited unkin torturers play id and shadow. In the corner of his eye he sees himself in chains, an ego bound in pride and pain. The fall of shadow
here
becomes an aging soldier with one eye, a raven on his shoulder; there he sees a face he doesn't recognize, a rakish chap with pencil tache. A fox dashes across his vision.
And along with the hallucinations, elemental and ephemeral certainties assault him now, peyote plucking out chords on his heartstrings till convictions blossom in him like unfolding lotus flowers. He's a fucking god, is Seamus Shamash Sammael Sodding Finnan. Sure and this is what it is to be a god. But with his years of mescaline and mojo and the magic of the Cant, Finnan knows fine well the folly of believing such delusions. So he throws his head back with a belly laugh, throws off the flattery of heart and head, and throws himself into the dream, pushes for a sense more visceral, more honest. To get something worthwhile out of a trip you have to listen to your guts, forget the truths you want to hear, have the
cojones
to cut through the crap. You have to kick away the crutches offered by your psyche; the unconscious can be just another carney, like these Cold Men trying to scam the rube into a false faith in its charms.
Illumination is the ultimate confidence trick, Finnan knows.
——
The crowd and the marketplace fall away behind him as he lays his hand against the peeling paint of the woodwork and pushes a heavy door open, with a smooth and sanguine movement, to enter a fallen falling ruin of a room. Tumbled sandstone walls that once defined the boundaries of a stable now slide and skew into a new perspective. The room has become as vast as a whole landscape, the dirt floor wide desert, and every stone a towering mesa. Immense and open, this isn't
a
room, it's
Room
, and the wooden beams that hold up and hatch out what is left of the roof are the architecture of the sky itself. That's the illusion, anyway.
The aged cracked black leather of horses’ harnesses and saddles hang, and turn and twist, as he looks at them, into weathered coats and cloaks. These are the abandoned attributes of elder gods; this is the cloakroom of the Old Ones, and in every stall there's a shadow that Finnan's flickering mind can give a name to, arbitrary and invented but as meaningful as any name: Ixzoche, God of the Dead Soul Deeps; Kavajokee, God of Firewater and Iceblood; Nixo, Little God of the Mantelpiece. He makes them up as he walks down between the stalls, looking from one side to the other, nodding to each one in turn. Even spurious gods deserve at least a casual respect.
He steps into the open ruin of the room, and every shadow in it comes alive. That's the illusion, anyway.
Crows’ wings and serpents’ coils crack around him as he sits cross-legged in his simworld of a sweat lodge, surrounded by his leathered weathered shadow-elders, by the harnesses and saddles that are skins and irons now, flayed hides of slaughtered angels, shackles for defeated demons, veils of Vellum to be torn and chains of Cant to be broken. He's in that stage of satori where every object is a symbol, every symbol has a mythic meaning, sense turned into nonsense to make new sense, make a new sense of himself as he was always good at, making a nuisance of himself, sure—but Finnan has done peyote too many times to buy into the wonder. Time to strip the trip down to the truth. These aren't gods, just god-hide saddles and soul-steel bits for the human horses ridden by the loas, the orishas, spirits of vodoun and Santeria. Skinsuits and gravings worn by hunter-gatherers to mimic and to mask the face of the divine in mystery. The fabric and framework of the Vellum stripped of flesh, the surface and structure of a reality shorn of substance.
Come on then, he thinks. Show me what you're really made of.
And he smiles as we spirits stream out of the walls, across his vision, our
voices like a river rushing, roaring of our archaic and arcane authority, we dead souls of this dereliction deep in the desert, we who have been deified and damned by time.
He takes a drag of his cigarette and blows out curls of dragon's breath.
So what's the story here? he thinks.
In the ruins of the stable then, we show him how the cities sank into the Evenfall, the people wandering lost among the rubble, watching TV news of the End Days, the unraveling of all they thought they could rely on in a slow but steady corrosion of consistency. We speak in the crackling hiss of radio announcements, tell of the disassembly and the dislocation of the world, our voices empty of emotion reading out the toll of disappearances, disturbances; a tale of driftworlds in the Vellum, Havens dug down to survive the cold of Hinter. How we tried, we
tried
, to shape a world for all their dreams, and found the one consensus in them their belief in enemies.
Two scorpions crawl across the floor toward each other, edging sideways, first one way and then the other, stretch their stinging tails up as each studies its opponent. The noises of the crowd outside, in his altered state, in our Cant, are the sound of drums and song, of Caribbean carnival.
“Rum, rum, lovely rum! When I calls ya, ya has to come.” The scorpions dance, and we dance round them, a million dust angels on the point of a sting. This is the gathering, we show him, the sifting of souls into good and evil, right and wrong, chaos and order… us and them. “Rum, rum, lovely rum! When I calls ya, ya has to come.” The scorpions dance, and we dance round them. This is the gathering, we show him, the drift of it all to an apocalypse that will wipe out both sides in one last almighty cataclysm.
“Gonna send for my scorpion to fight your centipede. Rum, rum, lovely rum!”
And Finnan stretches to his feet, looking toward the door, out to the Mission, as the voices call to their carnival saint, to this Sante Manite; but we let him hear the true source of the name now, in the song they sing, in a celebration not quite sane:
“Sante Manite,” they sing.
And
sans humanite
is what he hears.
The Last Bastion of Religion
The air in the church is darkness filled with dust and sliced by diagonals of light and, with the candles giving off their golden glow, it all seems just too staged to be
what it pretends, the sacred fallen to the profane. No, thinks Finnan, there's something here beyond the grandiose American Gothic of a church in dereliction, of statues of saints and madonnas with their paint peeling, of black candles on the altar, scents of sex and urine in the air. Even with the toppled crucifix and the rosaries trampled on the ground, there's a… piety here. The place reeks of religion even in its denial, its deliberate travesty. He closes the doors behind him quietly, running his fingers softly across the rough grain of the wood, so solid and so solemn.
It's a long time since he's been in a church, but sure and it's just like the last time…
just
like the last time.
Or perhaps not quite.
“So you lost your soul to them after all,” he calls.
She comes out of the darkness behind the altar, looking half peasant widow and half Whore of Babylon in her purple dress and scarlet headscarf.
“I
am
them,” she says. “The big Them. I'm the bitch queen of Hell, don't you know? Leader of the rebel armies. Princess—”
“Phree,” he says. “You used to be plain old Phree. You remember how I taught you to play poker?”
She smiles.
“House rules,” she says. “No kings. No queens. Jacks are high and aces wild.”
“It's the best way to play the game.”
“Things change,” she says.
Finnan lights a cigarette and takes a long drag before speaking. With the charge of the Cant inside him he's always felt like he's … hard-wired to a nova at the back of his head, as if words could just fly out his mouth and fry some poor innocent bastard if he doesn't rein it in. And now more than ever, here in the Mojave heat, with the peyote running up and down his spine and an old flame who's let herself go all to hell, he needs the nicotine to pace himself, to give a slow cool rhythm to his thoughts. To chill. He looks her up and down.
Christ, Phree, why couldn't you just walk away and keep on walking?
He can feel the mojo coming off her in feverish waves, like deep inside something is burning in the furnace of her soul. No fucking wonder the Cold Men were drawn here, drawn to something truer than their trinkets. For them, he's willing to bet, this is the Real Thing, the magic behind all their charms. Sure enough, Harker stands behind her, a pale form in the shadows.
“The Blessed Virgin of the Mission of Sante Manite,” he says.
“You know I'm not much of a virgin, Finnan, and I wouldn't exactly call myself blessed.”
She doesn't have to say,
and whose fault would that he?
Finnan remembers all too well his own role in her damnation.
“So,” he says. “What's the score with this last bastion of religion? Christ, Phree, rabbit's feet and chicken claws, fucking chickenshit for the soul? And they just eat it up.”
“Don't be so hard on them,” she says. “They just want a little peace.”
“So you sell them a little piece of shit?”
She sits down on the altar, perches there with a casual grace, one foot up, the other on the ground. She fingers the chickenbone necklace that still hangs around her neck.
“It's what they want,” she says. “What else have they got? Maybe you've forgotten what it's like.”
But of course he's never forgotten the little rituals—the kisses on letters from sweethearts, making the sign of the cross on yerself before going over the top, sure, and the bullet with your own name scratched on it tucked into a pocket of your tunic. It was a long long time ago, but sure and he hasn't ever forgotten. How none of it really works; and what, he discovered once upon a time, actually
does.
“But you know there's nothing on those stalls that'll do anyone any good. You're selling lies.”
“Selling the truth would draw too much attention. And the hokum's a good smokescreen for the real mojo, to keep it hidden.”
“From the Covenant?” he says.
She laughs.
“The Covenant's broken. You were right all along, Finnan. The Covenant ripped itself apart fighting its own shadow… with a little help from our bitmite friends. The Covenant's dust.”
“But you're still fighting, Phree.”
“I'm the guerrilla goddess now,” she says. “It's what I do.”
He tries to picture her before all this began, a tomboy kid in her brother's biker jacket, and him just the crazy loner out in that dust-blown trailer park, keeping his cards close to his chest when it came to personal history, but full of stories about magic and mystery. He hadn't meant to charm them, Tom and Phree, but by the time he realized the Cant in his voice was stirring up their souls without him even knowing, by then it was too late.
“Try doing something else,” he says.
“I don't have a choice,” she says. “It's war.”
“I've been in a war,” he says, “a few of them. No choice? Fuck that; there's always a choice.”
“Run away? Hide out in the desert somewhere, in the Vellum? You tried that. I tried that. The war just keeps on spreading until it finds you.”
Last time they'd met was in a church, with Thomas dead and Phree changed forever trying to save him. The Covenant had its agents wandering the world, sniffing out their brethren, gathering them. So she'd headed out into the wilds of the Vellum, off into the sunset, while Seamus Finnan tried to drink himself into oblivion. The war had found him all right.
“So you took the King's Shilling,” he says.
“It's the King we're fighting. All the kings of heaven and dukes of hell and two-bit tinpot tyrants of fucking eternity.”
“And princesses?”
She gives him a wry grin, crinkling her nose—a touch of the old Phree.
“Sometimes you've got to play the role for the troops, you know?”
She slides down off the altar, beckons for him to follow her as she moves toward the vestry door.
“This is a different war,” she says over her shoulder. “And it's one we can win, one we
will
win. We've got the advantage.”
Harker opens the door for them and steps aside to let him see into the room. A small table and chair. On the table sits a ring binder of glossy photostats, tattooing and surgical equipment, a shaving mirror. Sitting on the chair is a man whose face is not the one Finnan knows but whose graving he recognizes instantly. It's so fucking strong you can see it in the air around him, never mind that he's stripped to the waist so Finnan can see the black lines covering every inch of his torso with maybe the most intricate pattern any unkin's ever had. The needle of the tattoo gun buzzes as the man carves the story of his ancient life into his arm, the story in the image in front of him, the story of a man who wrote a book once, of the man who came up with the whole fucking idea of writing, of taking the Cant and turning song into symbol. The graving is so complex Seamus can't take it all in, sure and the way it loops in on itself and around again in rivers of red and black running over his flesh, but he can sum it all up in a word, can Seamus, because sure and the man's name's at the heart of his tale, over his heart for all the world to see, this scribe of it all, of the Book of All Hours, not Metatron, no, not Metatron of the Covenant, but who he was, what he was before the Covenant, before the Sebitti tried to change the world and only changed themselves, not Metatron, no but—