Ink

by Hal Duncan

  And the stranger in the mirror is that shimmering youth's killer and lover, his friend and brother across the countless folds of a Vellum that this Jack can barely even imagine, a fire dancing for this butterfly soul, only seeking to impress with its own flitting brilliance, and not knowing its own nature is to burn.

  The sensation starts to fade, sanity clamping down around his racing heart, locking him back down in denial, in the world where he's just Jack, Jack Carter, yes, the Mad Jack Carter of the Somme, the Sword of Yerevan, and there's only this world, only this Jack; and, as he closes the door on that hall of mirrors in his head, the smoke trails drift around the room—

  —we drift around the room, dispersing now our tableau's done—a little of our little tale told in a single word. We drift down into the cracks between the floorboards and back up, to the satchel with Carter's journal and Samuel's notes, spiraling up the leg of the table to the saddlebags and more notes. Somewhere in there are the words von Strann is just about to speak. We touch the dead parchment tenderly, dead parchment and dead ink, this ink not even true black but sad blue, insipid indigo, pallid purple. We are rich with the tales crushed velvety in us by centuries upon centuries of stony sedimental sleep.

  Hush. He begins, words just a little more alive in his mouth than in Hobbs-baum's hand.

  “That's the Cant,” says von Strann. “You understand now—”

  “No,” says Jack.

  But,yes, hisspers the stranger in the mirror.

  INTO THE CHAOSPHERE

  Out on the far perimeter of the Rookery, a rooftop dwelling made of corrugated iron explodes in flame as a thopter's chi-beam cuts right through it. They know where we are, of course; it's just a demonstration, and I'm not impressed. They may have ether supremacy but the rebels rule the streets and I have balls of adamantium, a glint of silver in my smile. Tonight, we rock.

  “Try not to cause a stir,” says Puck.

  He flips down his white nightshades. I stretch over and tousle his green scruff of hair.

  “Would I do that?” I say, tapping a finger on one of his pointy little horns. Lust of my life, he is, the little punk.

  “This is a deep-cover operation,” says Fox. “So—”

  “No civilian casualties,” says Joey. “Tell it to the Crimson Pyro here.”

  “Slick and twisty,” I say. “I know.”

  I zip my yeti-hide bomber jacket up and sling on the bandoliers, clasp clips and buckle straps, fasten hasps and snap grips into place. I tighten the lacing on my leather trousers and pull on my white kidskin gloves. I'm tempted to go for rinky-dink, pink-n-kinky chiffon, but I settle on white silk for the scarf, for old times’ sake. I scope myself in the mirror on the wall; it's neat having a flesh-and-blood physique again, and my eyes are even matching shades of electric blue, but a week of tantra has me glowing from the goddamn teeth. I gleam a growl of unbridled appetite at Puck; I'm looking forward to this Middle East malarkey, I tell you.

  “How do I look?” I ask.

  My voice thunders like a river in my ears.

  “Stop pissing about,” says Joey. “Let's go.”

  He slams a power clip into his chi-blade, a fiend in black leather duster and whiteface greasepaint, black tears on his cheeks, a demon Pierrot, a monster mime. I flip down my mayashades. Under the Goth garb and greasepaint is a soul of articulated adamantium, shiny as quicksilver and smoother than Puck's peachy butt. Under the gloves, my own metaphysique looks much the same. Puck is still as blue as Hindu porn. I snatch a last snog from him, trying to imagine him in copper.

  “Come on. How do I look?”

  “Peachy keen,” says Puck.

  Guy Fox strokes his tache, looks at Joey and me, looks a little dubious.

  “Stay in the shadows,” he says.

  Outside the ornithopters sweep their beams across the walls and windows of a derelict school. They're getting closer.

  “This is your first trip in a while,” says Puck. “Take it easy.”

  “I'll be fine,” I say.

  I slip the jackknife down into my boot; they won't let me take the gun, despite my pouting petulance.

  Don Coyote in his armored longcoat, armed to the teeth and ready for a rumble, growls.

  “OK,” he says. This is the last stand of the counterculture. Remember New-bury and the Irish Solution; we all know there won't be any quarter given. Let's—

  A searchlight beam floods through the window, a kaleidoscope of color, burning out my senses for a second. I can feel the psychic charge of it, the astral feelers prying, scrying through the room, the pilot in the ornithopter searching for me, reaching closer. In a single fluid move, Puck swings the chi-lance to his shoulder as he drops to one knee, aims along the silvery-steel shaft and blasts the ornithopter out of the sky. I feel the pilot's mind exploding like a blossom of light inside my head.

  “Time to go,” says Fox. “See you in 1929… I hope.”

  I look to Puck.

  “You'll be OK?” I say.

  “Get out of here.”

  I start to stretch my mind out of reality, into the chaosphere, the lawless world under the skin of space and time, the Vellum. Fox and Coyote fade into the confusion, the free fusion of flowing forms, but I can hear the ornithopters open fire, see fire falling. A flash of light. The grain of the fields is shimmering. The acid's peaking. Or maybe that's just the acid speaking.

  Joey's at my side, ice to my fire, dark to my light, villain to my hero, his dreams of the Circus closing in around us, of its cells and corridors and doors leading out into streets deep underground, running up and down and all around.

  “Just remember the fucking mission,” he says. “Remember you're an agent. Remember who you are, and what you're here to do.”

  “Operation Orpheus,” I say. “Easy in. Easy out. Piece of piss.”

  ‘And remember what we're dealing with.”

  But we're already leaving this reality, shifting—

  Errata

  —

  Crickets, Bells and Clarions

  innan holds his hand over the middle card.

  The crowd is gathering behind Harker now, imbecile faces warped by the peyote into grotesque pink sculptures that might freak the hell out of Finnan if he wasn't totally aware that it's his own imagination reconfiguring them; they're just magic mirrors of all the … me he might be. He has his own crowd at the back of him anyway, hallucinations growing out of the shadows and the lights at the corners of his vision. Gold and green ferns wave in the empty bar now. Ancient Aztec deities sit at tables, lean against the walls. Velvet moss grows over pool tables, carpets the floor, and a buzzing, ringing music—crickets, bells and clarions—fills the sense-warped saloon. Smooth, sinuous in motion, he reaches out to tap the card and turn it over. A Queen.

  “You win again,” says Harker. “You're too good at this.”

  His white face is glowing, radiant, shimmering in the desert light. Finnan leans back in the chair and cricks his neck. Good peyote always does this to him, calms the electric energy of the Cant, evens it out into a bluesman's laid-back mojo. Slow shudders of a goddamn gorgeous serpent spine. Feels like being home.

  “Just lucky,” says Finnan.

  So it's lucky, it is? Seamus takes a slug of the beer. Sure and he never could quite give up the booze though, could he? You can never quite get away from yer past, even hiding out in the desert.

  Fuck it, thinks Finnan. He puts the bottle down. It's time to push.

  “Try again,” he says. “You nearly had me, there.”

  Harker grins a snarl and shakes his head. The ribbons on his hat curl in the air.

  “Lost too much as it is,” he says.

  “One more game,” says Finnan. “For one more question.”

  “I've told you everything I know.”

  He'd told Finnan that he used to be John Harker, sales exec for a small movie merchandiser, until one day his wife and children disappeared in the Evenfall. The Evenfall was hard in this fold, he'd tol
d Finnan. People didn't just disappear without leaving a forwarding address; they disappeared without leaving a memory. But for Harker it was different; he remembered the family he loved perfectly. His in-laws, no matter what this crazy man on their doorstep said, they didn't even remember their own daughter, but he remembered goddamn everything, the wild child in high school, how she'd crashed the family car, how they'd got married in Reno. He'd started reading up on alien abductions, government conspiracies, the Rapture, started writing letters to the newspapers and the chat shows; but no one really listened, even as the world around went crazy, suburbs emptying house by house, the Left Behind wandering around like Alzheimer's patients, memories stripped so bare they were like children. One day he stepped up onto his best friend's porch to find a child sitting on the swing. He'd grown up with David John-stone and so Harker still recognized him, the same gap-toothed smile on this face without a beard, without the scar from the boating accident where David's little sister Julie-Ann drowned.

  David's little sister Julie-Ann was sitting up on the swing beside him.

  “Well, I guess I went a little mad then,” Harker had said.

  He'd worn a placard for a while after he lost his job, slept on the streets, eaten out of trash cans, screamed at strangers about patterns of secret meaning in the litter, started muttering to himself pretty much all the time, crooning little singsongs that made him feel better. And sometimes it seemed the litter danced to them.

  The Cant, Finnan had thought. The bitmites. And a fold where the bitmites focused on the painful past, removing the sorrows and the cause of sorrows … even if one man's or woman's errant daughter is another man's wife.

  “How much did you love your wife?” Finnan had asked him, after turning over another Queen. He'd known it was a cruel question.

  “Not enough,” Harker had said. “Maybe that's why I went a little crazy, old friend.”

  And then one day, Harker had told him, he just woke up on a bus pulling into Gar-sonville, Illinois, in the dead of night, with a suitcase full of charms and trinkets, wearing a patchwork coat of all different colors, in its inside pocket the deed to a small shop on Main Street. In the window streamed with rain he could see his own reflection, white and thin, a stranger to himself. He'd just woken up as a Cold Man.

  “Old friend, I felt the call of magic then, and I wasn't afraid anymore. I knew I was going to be OK now, and I wanted to share that faith with others.”

  Finnan had almost believed him. He was meant to almost believe him, Finnan was sure.

  He looks at Harker now, half risen from his seat but hesitating, and sees the same elements of a performance as in the man's telling of his tale, the same sleights as in the movements of his hands, the shifts, the switches. And the crowd behind him. Drawn by the skill and the story in Harker's hands and voice, they're being played like the cards, like he's already tried to play Finnan. Pretend you're not a pro. Look like a loser. Suck them in and wait for the right moment for the sting. He has them all behind him with his hard-luck tale.

  Eventually, he'd told Finnan, the Cold Men came to Sante Manite because they felt it calling them. It was as if they all knew they'd done everything they could in bringing that little bit of faith to those small-town folks, and now, the way salmon have to swim upstream to mate, or birds know it's time to head due south, the Cold Men had known it was time to leave.

  “So we came here, old friend, though I don't rightly know what that might tell you.”

  The wall of marks and suckers sweeps behind Harker like a cloak of color. According to the Cold Man—and spoken with a casual sincerity—the mojo peddlers of the market have no idea what brings the customers in, but to Finnan it's pretty clear; he can see the desires and fears in their faces, simplified and stylized into the crudest of images—living, sweating caricatures. Skull-faces ripple with folds of fat, beaks twitch and owl-eyes blink. They whisper to each other, pet and scratch and pick at each other, or point stubby fingers—see how he does it, all in the wrist, ah-hah—and kiss each other's ears as they whisper, lick and bite. Sex and death.

  Finnan looks past this fucked-up Freudian masquerade toward the red bulk of the Mission at the far end of the market. By now, the mescaline in his system is in full flow of vision and voice. Fractal skies above peel over one another, electric blue, cerulean, azure, and in it all a winged sun, fiery, floats over the scarlet Mission. The whole scene is engulfed by an illuminated atmosphere, and in that numinous wash the only things that seem truly real are the sand and the sky, the ruins of the buildings, and most of all the Mission. The marketplace is an absurdity crayoned in over the actual world of golden dust, over the ground swirling in grooved and pitted patterns, over the scattered solidity of broken-up sandstone. It's a sideshow, sure, as superficial as the barker's pretense of being beat and, standing up from his seat, ready to call it quits.

  One More Question

  “One more game,” says Finnan. “One more question.”

  The words echo in time, while Harker looks to the crowd, a show of his shame to gain sympathy, a show of sudden resilience, sudden resolution. He sits back down, square in the seat, and a come on ripples through the crowd. Harker shucks the three cards around the table, up and down, switch, shift and drop, again, then again, crossing hands, a switch, a drop and a stop.

  “What's the question?” he says.

  “What do you know about the Mission of Sante Manite? Yours?”

  “The same.”

  “Don't know what you think I'd know about this place.”

  “Just curious, old friend. You know the score. Pick a card… any card.”

  Finnan taps the middle card, a Jack. Harker is already smiling as he turns it over, to the crowd's near cheer at this underdog's change of fortune. Finnan shrugs, a wry smile, takes a slug from his beer. Harker works the crowd, basking in his victory before turning back to him.

  “So,” he says. “What do you know about the Mission of Sante Manite?”

  Seamus swivels the beer bottle around on the table in front of him, picks at the label.

  “Well, now,” he says. “There's not much I can tell you at all, John Harker, since there's not much I know for sure. But I do know that your Mission there is the only thing that matters, that this whole marketplace, yourself included, is just… misdirection. I wouldn't like to guess what's hiding out in there, but sure and I could make a stab in the dark as to why. If you're interested, that is.”

  “Go on.”

  Seamus takes a draw on his Camel, blows smoke up into the air, watches the swirling vortices of gray-blue.

  “See I used to be an altar boy when I was a lad. Did I tell ye? No? Well, anyway, being a good Catholic boy I learned all the names of the saints, and I never once heard of a Sante Manite, sure. But, well, there are a few strange names among the saints—like Dionysus or Bridget—and some of them sound so much like the names of certain pagan gods that ye'd almost think the Christian missionaries had just sorta coughed into their hands, looked down at the ground and told some would-be convert, well now, don't worry, son, cause sure and ye can keep praying to them as long as you call them saints instead of gods.

  “And the thing about it is, Manite has to be the strangest name fer a saint I've ever heard. So I was wondering where it comes from. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but I could swear the Algonquin have this word for a sort of a spirit, somewhere between a god and a human I do believe, and so perfect for making a saint of, don't you think?Manitou, the word is.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Trust me. I'm a mine of useless information.”

  “I'll take you at your word, old friend,” says Harker. “But you don't strike me as the kind of man who believes in saints … or gods.”

  “I believe in saints and sinners, sure; I'm just not convinced you can be one and not the other. Gods though… prayers and petitions …”

  Seamus tips his bottle to the market.

  “That just seems like a big bag of ole shite, to m
e. No offense.”

  “None taken.”

  Finnan puts the beer down.

  “But there's something in that Mission. And Sante Manite might well be a good name for it.”

  He leaves the isn't there? unspoken, and takes a draw on his smoke.

  “But then again,” says Seamus, “sure and maybe it's just built on an ancient Indian burial ground.”

  “Maybe,” says Harker. “Another game? Another question.”

  His face has brightened now to a glow that nearly drowns out all his features, leaving his eyes black slits, his nose a subtle bump, his mouth melded smooth into the skin. It's a sketched-in cartoon of a face, a few lines, uncolored, a store dummy melting in white heat, his clothes burning with a furious clash of reds and whites and blues, flames flickering in the breeze.

  “I think I need to stretch my legs,” says Finnan, “take another look around. Maybe later, John Harker.”

  “Maybe. But I still don't know what you're looking for. And you know, Finnan, we only want to help you find it. To make you happy.”

  A barker, a harker, a ragged harlequin, he seems little more than a prop against the painted backdrop of the marketplace. Like someone took the robot fortuneteller from an old amusement park and put it out in front dressed up in a ringmaster's costume.