Ink

by Hal Duncan

  That was the old man's crazy story, anyway, half Wild Turkey and half Weird Tales, crazier than any of that flying saucer stuff, than any Twilight Zone.

  “There's nowhere to go now,” he'd say. “You know, the road out of town just curves in a big circle out and round and back in again. Swear to God, they tell you this bullshit about the Russians, the Futurists, and the oil shortage, and the New Depression, but it's lies. It's the bitmites, you see, little tiny machines.”

  Eventually they took the old man into hospital. Hebephrenic, they said.

  Sometimes, when he's standing in front of a blank canvas, he thinks about that. He thinks of the road looping out into the fields in a wide circle and back in, and he paces round the barn in a wide circle that brings him back to the canvas, where he tries to figure out what it is he wants to paint. He closes his eyes, and his thoughts do the same thing, running wide through the darkness of the inside of his head, as if trying to get … out there … at something. He can feel it. He can't put it down in paint but he can feel it, sort of inside, sort of out- side. He doesn't know what it is, but it's cold and it's dark and it's coming for him. It's like death is coming for him.

  So he paints Jesus. He doesn't believe in Jesus, and it's not that he has some stupid poor-me martyr complex—screw that—but the … mystery of this icon of the human sacrifice is something that he can't get out of his head, out of his mind, out of his hunched shoulders and peering eyes and cramped hand as he leans in close with the tiny horsehair brush to paint two tiny white titanium skulls as highlights in the shades his Jesus wears—wide round black sunglasses the shape of empty eye sockets.

  So he really doesn't identify with the Jesus that he's painting. Oh yeah, sure, he's got the same black beatnik hair and he's a pale and scrawny-looking punk, and if the town had to vote on someone to be crucified he's pretty sure he'd win by a landslide. Used to go around saying that he wanted to die, that they were goddamn killing him slowly piece by piece, wishing someone would just put a bullet in his head and get it over with. Then last year this kid from over on the other side of town, a fruit, got murdered and Jack, well, Jack took a walk out into the fields and was never seen again.

  He'd found Jack's diary left in the barn as a sort of long goodbye.

  Shit, Joey had never even known. Oh no, Jack was the all-American square, blue eyes, blond hair, and Joey had never once thought to look in those eyes and ask why they seemed so vacant sometimes. Or why a gym-team hero of the hoops like Jack would pick the weird artistic kid to hang out with. The diary got a little strange toward the end—lots of crazy talk about Old Man MacChuill being right—but, well, what really mattered was there in black-and-white, white paper and black ink that smeared his fingers as he read it. He got perspective then, the sort of perspective you get when the world drops away in front of you, and you're staring into a pit that drops down all the way to nothing, to the cold black nothing that you did for a friend who must have been scared shitless of being found out as a queer. The nothing-at-all that Joey did for his best friend, too absorbed in his own pathetic miseries to pick up on Jack's. Jesus? No, if Joey was going to identify with anyone it would be Judas.

  So he knows he doesn't have it half as bad as some, and he knows that the goddamn gaping hole in his chest where his heart used to be is not just teen angst. It's not that old self-pity. It's not guilt. It's something different. He can feel it getting closer and closer every day. Something wicked this way comes. And the only way he can explain it is, he thinks … it's death.

  He just doesn't know if it's his.

  A Single, Central Flaw

  “It won't be long now,” he says.

  “What won't be long?” I say.

  We sit in the armchairs beside the fireplace, looking across at each other in the golden glow, and I wait, I pray, for some explanation. The jewel sits up on the writing bureau, glittering, and I keep finding my gaze drawn to it. Why did I steal it for him, I have to ask myself. Why do I steal at all? It's not that I am a greedy man—that's not why I steal in general—and, in all honesty, the threat of being exposed, of prison, or of the shame upon the family name, none of these things coerced me into his scheme—although I know my willful brother would not hesitate to sacrifice the von Strann reputation if he'd decided on a course of action that required it.

  No, for me it was always about the challenge—the challenge of the seduction, the challenge of the crime, the challenge of the jewel itself. I find the … mysteries of things so small and yet so valuable just irresistible. Jewels are the creations of millennia of rock acting upon rock, the slow concentration of time itself into a singular but multifaceted crystal of such clarity, such precision. How can one not help but be seduced by them? Diamonds are carbon, like us, of course, but how many human bodies would it take, I wonder, crushed by the aeons, to create a stone such as this?

  It was three days after he left for the family estate that I finally succumbed to the pressure of guilt, realizing that I couldn't abandon my brother to whatever insanity had taken root in him. Horst being more than capable of running the Fox's Den in my absence, I pushed my way through the crowds of Berlin Central Station, bought my ticket and, with only the clothes on my back, took the first train to Strann. Now I wait for my brother's explanation, and he just smiles.

  “It will happen tonight,” he says, and again my thoughts turn to his mental state. He has dismissed all the servants. When I phoned ahead, before I left Berlin, it took an eternity for the ringing to end with his hello. I told him I was coming, not to do anything foolish till I arrived, to wait for me, please, and he simply muttered, yes, yes, good. I had to phone again from the station in Strann for him to send a car, and when it arrived the driver was a stranger to me, a young lad, quiet and sensitive-looking, no more than a boy really.

  “It's not meant to happen for years yet,” he says. “But some of this isn't meant to be happening at all.”

  ——

  “What are you talking about, Jonni?”

  “Jack,” he says. “I told you to call me Jack now, Fox.”

  Our voices echo in the silence of the old house, empty now it seems but for the three of us—assuming the boy stayed around after leading me to the study where my brother sat waiting in the dark, after closing the doors softly behind me. There is a hush that lies over the two of us as if it were another aspect of the gloom, palpable and permeating everything around us. It feels like the house itself, the house that I once played in, has become a stranger to me, weighed down with some terrible darkness that is now inextricably a part of it. And it feels as if that weight is focused on my brother's shoulders.

  “What isn't meant to be happening, Jack?” I ask.

  He looks up at me, the light of the fire catching his eyes, and I think of rock weighing down upon rock, and of the energies such pressure generates, volcanic, tectonic. Whatever burden he carries, it is changing him, crushing him, but even with his uniform in disarray, his thoughts quite patently on other matters, he does not seem wearied by the weight. Rather it is as if a slow fracturing of his rough exterior is revealing cold, clear facets I have never seen before. A glassy reflectiveness in his character that is as focused and focusing in some ways as it is scattered and scattering. And with a single, central flaw right at its heart.

  “The Futurists,” he says. “Don't laugh. No, don't say anything; just listen.”

  He stands, walks slowly to the desk to lay his hand upon the Eye of the Weeping Angel.

  “Do you know that the Party is full—was full—of men with strange ideas, mystical ideas? No? Himmler, for instance … Hitler, too … many of those who betrayed us for the lies of Futurism—let me finish. Even in the grassroots there were those who were interested in such things. The Holy Grail, the Spear of Destiny. Have you heard of the Book of All Hours? No, neither had I. But when I heard it described, you know, it sounded so familiar, like something one remembers from childhood, but only just…”

  He opens the writing bureau
and brings out the leather-bound tome he'd had on his lap the day he summoned me here with the telegram.

  “Father's copy,” he says. “It's sort of a history book. You could say it's the history book. Interesting reading. Did you know that time has three dimensions? Oh, yes, it's much more complicated than you or I could ever have imagined.”

  He lays the book in my lap. Now that I see it up close I recognize instantly on its front cover the design of an eye with lines running off from below, like tear tracks, the pattern hidden in the flaw of the jewel.

  “So anyway,” he says, “I read it and it turns out that tonight is a very special night. It's going to make a big splash. As I say it's not meant to happen for a few years yet, but it seems that some … changes have been made that brought the schedule forward a little. The point is, tonight there's going to be a little sacrifice, not a very large one—not in comparison to what comes after—but it's a … step along the way. Do you want to read about it?”

  He moves to open the book and, before I know it, my hand is on top of the thing, holding it shut.

  “No?” he says. “They came up with a wonderful name for it, you know. Very poetic, very romantic. They're going to call it the Night of the Long Knives.”

  WILDFLOWERS IN HIS HAND

  He looks at the photographs of the boy, the file he's put together of Darkwater's seventeen years of life, laid out on the hotel bed in front of him. The adoption papers, the school reports and exercise books. And then there's today's newspaper full of horror at the brutal murders, full of shock that such a quiet boy, such a nice boy, harmless boy, could actually be capable of such an act. The vast and hollow magnitude of their ignorance almost makes him laugh. When the old world died, it took its history lessons with it. To the people of Lincoln, he understands now, the simplicity of their surroundings is some sort of gifted grace, a Happy Christmas, war is over, thousand years of peace and goodwill with Jimmy Stewart running the local newspaper, and the Mom-and-Pop stores back now that the Wal-Mart and the malls are a million miles away across the Hinter of farmed and unfarmed wildernesses.

  Who now remembers Columbine? he wonders.

  Better not to, he thinks. Better not to acknowledge the cold and desolate truth under the surface of the stories, all the murdered murderers, the ones whose silence is the quiet of the dead, of death, walking among them in the body of a man, but with no soul, no life, no heart, only the ragged hollow where their spirit's been ripped out of them.

  In the newspaper, there's a quote from one of the survivors, words whispered to him while he was curled up in a ball, pissing his pants, spared to deliver a brutally simple explanation.

  I was better than them, the boy had said to him. They killed me slowly. I killed them quick.

  ——

  Joey wedges the crowbar into the crack of the minibar door and levers it with a sharp shove, once, twice. The door gives with a splintering crack of wood and he pushes the crowbar in farther, shoves again. The door shears open and almost off its hinges, sitting out at a funny angle, a wrong angle. It looks blurred, ripped out of causality as well as out of place. Too bad. He opens the door of the fridge inside and takes out a bottle of Miller, pops the top and takes a slug. Lucky that the brewery stayed moored to the town while it drifted in the dislocations of the Evenfall. He doubts all the good old boys would have been able to carry on without it.

  Carry on, he thinks. That's what people do when their world gets turned upside down, whether it's by some crazy kid with a gun in his hand or some crazy president with a Bible in his. They just carry on and wait for it to happen again. A little foresight and they might change their fate, but they can't even see the simplest straight-line path from past to future, from the violence of their words to the vengeance they call down upon their own heads. It's really no wonder that they reacted to the apocalypse the way they did, choosing to carry on with their lives like their town had just been cut off from the outside world by some river flooding its banks and bringing down the bridge, some path through the mountains blocked by snow that would be clear when spring came with its thaw.

  Maybe it's a little harsh of him but there's only so much blinkered naivete a man can take before he wants to pistol-whip the ignorant fucks who just won't understand. Fuck, it's no wonder they can't see the other aspects of their involuted time. They can't even see their own death till it spits a metal insult in their face.

  One of the photographs shows a child sitting on a rock, wildflowers in his hand and smiling for the camera, maybe eight or nine years old—a picture of innocence, as they say. Then there's the school photograph that's on the cover of the paper and scattered throughout the inside pages. And the true-crime digest from the big-city eighties that he came from. It's one of the ironies, of course, that the murders put the town back on the map, literally.

  He lays the beer down on the top of the minibar and stands up, stretches, cricks his shoulders and angles himself through time to face forward. Outside the window a bird flutters up to circle away into the blue—flying in the right direction now. The clock on the bedside cabinet reads 20:43. Good. He always wanted to see this.

  He switches on the TV and it comes on at the public-access channel, the only channel—KWTV. Back in his city apartment Joey has a whole room of anomalies he's gathered in his travels, DVDs and datasticks, R-Drives and Qubes, the facts and fantasies of a future he'll never see but can just about imagine— 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq, Syria and the Sudan, Jerusalem and New York and … 2017. The grainy black-and-white pictures in places like Lincoln always seem so primitive in comparison, but in the towns with bigger stations and later technologies it's even worse. Some of them have years’ worth of old movies and shows on tape, so they fill the otherwise dead air with shit. Endless reruns.

  Right now KWTV is full of the chaos of the previous day. A white-haired reporter who looks like she should be organizing jamborees is interviewing a doctor at the town's medical center.

  “We're just not equipped. We're just not set up for anything like this.”

  20:44.

  The shot goes back to the studio where the anchorman—a geriatric amateur in black tie and gray cardigan, clearly out of his depth—is launching into another regurgitation of facts and fatuousness when, pow, the screen goes white noise. This is it.

  It hisses gray-blue for a second and then the other picture starts to come through; it's an aerial shot from a chopper flying low over billowing fields where clay men swing their scythes in time to the chuffa-chuffa-chuffa-chuffa rotor-blade noise in the background.

  “—approaching now, Harry. Yes, just like so many of these isolated towns—”

  The voice breaks up, but the picture is clear enough now to see the logo in the corner of the screen, a logo that most of the people in this town will say they've never heard of, till the memories start to shift to accommodate new truths, an arcane combination of letters: CNN.

  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 camerama
n, 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.