Ink

by Hal Duncan

  He spots her standing there, holding the head up like a torch, and stops.

  Can ye see it? Husht now. No and I Moody well won't if ye—Why are we no mov-in? Can ye see it yet? Sure and there's all the nobs and gentry to let off first so we'll be left to last as ever. Can ye see it? And would ye get yerfeckin elbow out of me ribs? Ah haud yer whisht. Look. Look!

  The babble of voices is as crammed, as mixed up all together, as the rabble of third-class passengers all squeezed into the corridor with their cases and their bundles and their greetin weans. It's the noise of blathering gobshites with their caps off craning their necks over the mob of heads and shoulders, newlyweds wittering excitedly as they kiss a hand and turn to try and catch a glimpse of something other than that wee patch of blue sky up where the corridor opens out onto the steamer's deck. Oh, but there's hundreds of them all pressing forward, moving so slowly up toward the gangplank and their new lives in the New World. In New York.

  “It'll be magic, Jack,” she says to the babe cradled in her arms. “Oh, it'll be grand. Oh, yes it will. Oh, yes it will.”

  She nuzzles his nose with her own and he smiles, gurgles. Oh, he's a darling, so he is, all this time in steerage and the noise all day and night and hardly a peep out of him, no, but he slept as peaceful as Jesus in his manger for most of the trip.

  He's awake now, blue eyes shining up at her like that tiny wee bit of sky ahead that they're inching toward so slowly.

  “Who's my cheeky wee boy?” she says. “My cheeky wee boy.”

  The crowd moves forward, little by little, and the chatter grows louder now as those ahead of them are saying, look now, look at it, sure, and it's grand, so it is, by Jesus, look at it, just look at it.

  She can't really see it herself for all the nodding heads and hats of these immigrants in their Sunday best like they were filing into the chapel for midnight mass. She just sees glimpses of the giant robe sweeping off the shoulder, of the upraised arm, and the sunburst crown of that greenish girl like an angel or an ancient god of justice, but a true one, yes, a true angel that's come down from heaven itself to hold its torch up as a beacon for humanity. She can't really see it herself, so she can't, but she holds Jack up above her head so he can see it. Oh, look at it, Jack. Can ye see it? Isn't it everything we ever dreamed of?

  She brings him back down to cradle him, as they move another few inches forward, and as he burbles in her arms, his eyes as wide and blue as the sky itself, she can almost imagine that the glint of sunlight in those eyes is the vision caught magically. A tiny reflection of Lady Liberty photographed, imprinted on his soul.

  Phree stands there in a daze, the bitmites swarming along her arm, around the severed head, and spreading out, an iridescent haze that fills the hall with shades of lives that never were but might have been. The past is no more certain than the future out here in the Hinter. Like the sudden moments of recasting in a dream, when the whole scene shifts in an instant and your memories adjust, the Hinter slips and slides from side to side; new histories rise to the surface even as the old ones crumble.

  “So I return to you,” says Don, “with my son Pierrot slain by the maidens.” With his gaze fixed on the bitmites’ tumbling imagery of forests, mad aristocratic mothers of action roaming through the oaks (Indo and Autonomy— their names are whispers in the air), he looks so solid and so humble, and I wonder if it is this … stoic reticence of his that makes it natural for him to slip unnoticed into someone else's dreams. Jack rips through Havens like a whirlwind. I skip after him, and Guy and Joey make their own marks in bold strokes of pen or knife. But none of us can do what Don does, reaching deep down into someone's life. Now, playing Pantaloon with gravitas in place of pomp, he walks out toward Phree, speaking with gentle Cant.

  “They told me Columbine was here,” he says, “and acting wild. As Scaramouche and I entered the city walls, returning from the rites, they urged us, hurry, told us this … atrocity was done by my own child. They didn't lie,” he says. “I see her now, a sorry sight.”

  To me she's barely visible among the rising blizzard of the bitmites. There're too many different and conflicting sights—a marketplace of stalls, some sort of hall of refugees dressed in Depression drab, dark woods full of wild women, darker docks, a steamer with a gangplank coming down from it, and Guy and Joey dressed up as policemen or as palace guards. I can't follow the confusion that the bitmites are projecting out of her into the room. But Don is calm. It's like he's simply gazing through the sham, ignoring this mere … scenery, the costumes and the props.

  The rest of us stand back, our parts played out, with just a few lines left for me and Jack. It's down to Don to find my sister in there now, among the Annas and the Anaesthesias, pull her from the ruins of her past.

  She laughs.

  “Old man, be proud and sing out loud,” she says. “You're blessed by our courageous feats. Your daughters are the best of any mortal race, and I'm the purest of our breed. We left our weaving at the loom to free our hands for noble deeds, you understand, to chase the savage beast whose head I've brought for you to nail up on the palace wall. You see? Take it, old man, and call your friends to feast in honor of the kill.”

  The palace of the Basilisk rises behind her, the Duke's Haven fading into gray. The mask of Guy's rewritten play peeled back and stripped away, the ancient myth emerges. Jack is Harlequin is Dionsyus. But the vision shimmers as Don speaks to her. The air itself vibrates with his gruff Cant.

  “The murder in your hands,” he says, “this invitation to the feast, is too horrific for a mortal eye. The prey you offer the divine was precious, Columbine. I weep for your regrets … and mine.”

  She looks confused as he comes closer to her, bitmites swirling into shapes of glassy towers and marble halls all round them, into streets of skyscrapers. Ghost men and women clutching carpetbags and suitcases now stand among the courtiers all shivering along the wall, merchants and slaves in chains from more archaic pasts, the host of souls long buried in the dust under the Haven's stone, a single huddled mass.

  Don steps down off the stage, but it's a steamship moored behind him now and I can smell the oil and fish and human sweat, the rotting fruit in the warehouses around us. Snow is falling from a winter sky and someone's singing of how Irish eyes are smiling, and, Oh, but it seems so far away now, someone's saying—and I realize that it's me, carried along on the flow of dreams. I recognize the skyline now as Anaesthesia's Hinter fades into this other scene.

  “The Harlequin is harsh,” says Don, “for one who claims to be our kin. Does anyone deserve the shame he sends?”

  But I can hear the echo underneath his words—some bloody faither God is, Jesus, sending us this kind of bloody weather—as the cursing Scotsman takes her case out of her hand so she can hold her child in both arms, wrap the shawl around him tight, to keep him warm against the New York winter night.

  “Come on, lass,” he says, “we've got tae get ye in ootae this cold.”

  She looks so scared and lost now, shaking like a leaf, but the wry tone to his voice is warm and comforting and so she follows him toward the immigration building, through the crowd, and having this stranger at her side—his name is Don, he says, MacChuill—well, you can see it in her eyes, the sheer relief.

  So it's Don that walks beside my sister, down into this dream of New York winter, streets of gold and Lady Liberty, to find herself in Hinter's cold, to help her face her false eternity of grief.

  To make her Phree.

  A Slower, Grayer World

  Berlin. 1936.

  I listen to the Fuhrer give his speech to the Reichstag, played on the hissing radio behind the sliding glass window of the guard's cubicle room. I hear the cheers in response to Hitler's ranting rhetoric and I hear the screams of butchers become victims, dragged out of their beds to slaughter—not on the radio, those last, but in my head. I've been waiting to hear it for the last seven years, this echo of another night of long knives in another time, another place. Things
happen slower in this world, not quite so condensed. But they still happen. There is no Futurism in this world, but it is not that different underneath.

  The opening of the gates, my brother called it, and he was right. I think somehow we crossed over a threshold that night, both of us. Perhaps the whole of Germany crossed over a threshold on that night, and reached out from the other side to drag the rest of the world down with us into the depths. The opening of the gates.

  But he was wrong as well, and in so many ways. This is not the world he thought it would be, I think. It is grayer, I keep thinking, dimmer than the glory he expected, if I understand the way my brother's mind works. And I have thought about this a lot in my time in the Institute, in this slower, grayer world.

  “Thank you. Where were we?”

  Pickering snaps the lighter shut and pockets it. He leans back in his chair, looks at Reynard. Really, this is all so bloody pointless. MI5 is jumping at their own shadows these days, every continental a potential Futurist, every Irishman a Fenian, every queer a spy. And let's not forget the Russian Jews; why, you never know what subversives might be lurking in among those exiled intellectuals. Mosley's rhetoric of the enemy within is all very well. The new patriotism of Empire Albion is all very well. But Pickering's never really trusted all that talk of fighting fire with fire, Britain—sorry, Albion—standing strong and pure against the Slav.

  It leaves a bad taste in his mouth, that blend of opportunism and idealism.

  “Actually, I think that's about covered it,” he says. “Sorry to keep you so long. I'll let you get back now. How is the boy, anyway?”

  “Tomas? Wonderful,” says Reynard. “Looking so much like his mother— God, I'm sorry, Joseph; that's hardly what you want to hear. I—”

  Pickering forces a smile.

  “No, don't be silly. That's … exactly what I want to hear. It's good to know you're happy.”

  I look into the mirror in the bathroom, at my close-cropped hair, and I think that even if I were to find the Book again, and the jewel, even if I were to carry out some arcane ritual full of blood and horror like my brother's, I do not think it would transport me back into the world I came from. I think if the Book even exists here, then this world will have found a place for it within its own more rigid system of possibilities, as it has found a place for me—as an anonymous inmate in a mental hospital. I imagine the jewel as no more than a pretty bauble in the royal treasure of some ermine-decked buffoon. I imagine the Book as some eighteenth-century hoax, relished by mystery hunters as a curio, its authenticity long since discredited. I imagine my brother as the hero that he dreamed of being, this blond, blue-eyed adventurer in flying jacket, pistol blazing, captured in gauche ink in the flat paneled frames of an American comic book. There are these … stories of Jack Flash in this world. Visions. Myths. But he exists now only in these fictions and delusions, I believe.

  There are no Futurists in this world either, of course, but we don't need them; the Nazis are more than enough.

  I shuffle across the linoleum in my slippers and pajamas, sit down on the side of old Kurt's bed. His breathing is as distant and dry as the radio when the guard listens to it late at night, the slow wheeze of an accordion, in and out, in and out. The nurses are letting him die, one less half-wit to take care of. I can hear the weak voice of his thoughts among the river in my head. That much is acceptable in the logic of this world, you see, something that only might be magic, that might just as easily be madness. I pat his wrinkled, liver-spotted hand and mutter some words of comfort.

  After a while, the breathing stops and only the voice remains, the whisper of his life among those others in my head.

  Reynard lays a hand on his shoulder.

  “How are the nightmares, these days?”

  Pickering shakes his head.

  “Not so bad. Not so frequent.”

  He still finds it hard to talk about his never-ending dream, where he's home that night instead of out carousing in some pub with Carter. But he understands it now, at least, the truth of Carter running after him through the shattering streets, following him into the burning shell of the house to drag him from the buried crib—how that becomes this other scene. He understands why the events of that night are transformed in his sleeping imagination into something more grotesque, more crude in its horror, with Carter as the flame-haired fiend, the very slaughterer of his wife and child. Survivor's guilt, Reynard once called it. He's just the part of you that you blame.

  “But it's strange,” says Pickering. “I've had the dream so many times now, sometimes I remember it better than the actual…”

  “I know,” says Reynard. “We all have dreams like that. I sometimes think the world would be better if we never dreamed at all. God save us from our dreams, Joseph.”

  “Thus speaks a dreamer, Reynard.”

  “I know. I know.”

  THE HOUSE OF ACHING

  Phreedom wakes to find Don leaning over her, a damp cloth in his hand mopping her forehead. She's still weak with the fever, but she pulls herself upright, tries to pull herself together. The room is barren, dirty wooden floorboards and an empty window frame with polythene nailed across it to keep the Hinter out.

  “Why so solemn, old man,” she says. “Why so grim?”

  “Ye know ye've been out of it fer nine days,” he says.

  She can tell by his expression it's been rough. There are six—no, seven— disrupters stuck like posts into the floorboards round them, buzzing with that deep, low sound. Candles in every corner of the room. A circle of salt around the mattress sordid with her sweat. It must have been bad. But she feels so happy, such… relief.

  “I was with Jack,” she realizes as she says it.

  The image of her son summons itself so sharp, so clear, filling her head with a delight that pushes everything else out of her mind. Yes, they were laughing together. And he's out there, grown up now, following in his mother's footsteps and as much a hunter as herself, as zealous as herself in waging war against the gods. Yes, it was Jack, and there were soldiers, and a town called Themes, and—fuck! There was some creature, some mad creature with its claws at his throat. She has to warn him. Her legs buckle under her as she tries to stand up, head still spinning. Shit.

  “Where is he?” she says. “I saw him. I need to find him.”

  Phreedom tries to shake the dream off, but the image of him, Jack, among a company of young warriors—it feels so right. It makes her feel so right. So what's the problem with this picture?

  “Ah lass,” says Don.

  There's a sympathy in his eyes, a look as if there's something she's forgotten in the fever—no—some grief that's waiting to destroy her—let me hold on to the lie— and she can feel it pressing through—no, I could live forever in the dream, and life would seem less cursed with sorrow—and something rises in the turmoil in her soul.

  “What do you mean?” she says.

  There's no need to feel sorrow. Jack's alive; she saw him. And her head is clear, it is. The fever's gone. Phreedom fights the ruin of her bliss.

  “Look at the sky,” says Don. “Diz it look the same? D'ye see any change?”

  He pulls the polythene down from the window and she's looking out into the devastation of New York. Snow falls white against the blue-black night and—

  —it seems brighter, clearer than it was, but she's so cold. The lad crouches down in front of her.

  “Can you unnerstaun me, missus? Can ye unnerstaun whit ah'm sayin, like?”

  Anna nods and he asks her something else. She keeps forgetting what they were talking about, so she does, though, so she invents the questions to her answers, telling him that she still has a little of the money Seamus gave her, but it's running out so fast and she's got Jack to feed and clothe as well as herself, and where else can she turn, an exile from her own country? That's why she went there, ye see. She knew they'd take her in.

  “Come oan. We've got tae get ye off the street or ye'll catch yer death of co
ld.”

  And she nods and she tells him about the house she lives in, how she found it by the sound of the songs sung by the girls round the piano carrying out into the streets all dark and filthy and spattered with snow and this church of bawdy hymns and a different sort of marriages, the House of Aching, so they called it, the bordello down by the muddy Hudson with its red light in the window and the songs so sweet, what was it they were singing, was it love is pleasing and love is teasing, yes, it was. How does it go again? Yes, love is a pleasure when first ‘tis new. And she tells him about the little Pierrot doll up on the mantelpiece all covered in dust and made of porcelain, it was, so easy for something like that to break up into little pieces, oh, so easy to break her little baby into little pieces, just a bit of wire was all it took when they took her to the doctor, and the Russian standing there behind him with the winter eyes himself who fathered the child in the hallway of his bordello when he wanted it he took it so cold he was like ice and hard and it wasn't love oh no that wasn't the ache that had the men coming to the house or maybe it was love of a sort d'ye think because love changes over time it does starting so sweet at first so sweet and she sings but as it grows older it grows the colder…

  “Whit's that yer haudin in yer arms?” he says, his voice so gruff but so soft, sounding old for one as young as him, just a boy he is really. Don he said his name was.

  And she nods and explains how she feels so cold now, so she does, with all the blood poured out of her, all the blood that made them panic and bring her out here to this alley and the doctor saying for God's sake man and the like but he still left her didn't he and she could see the fear in his eyes not like the Russian's not cold like the Russian's no but oh what is it that she's holding in her arms? But silly it's the head of her stuffed lion Leo oh she loved the toy so much even after Thomas was so mean and pulled its head right off she kept it and she didn't cry but she kicked him in the shin and he cried and it served him right.