Ink

by Hal Duncan

  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—

  “Enki,” says Seamus—though he's careful not to say it in the Cant.

  five

  GUARDIAN OF ANGELS

  DANCING WITH DANGER

  swing-kick through the sidescreen of the ornithopter, jackboot heels connecting with the pilot's side so hard he's kicked straight out the opposite door. The thopter rears and gyres wildly in the air as I swing into the vacant seat, grab its controls and rein it in.

  So far, so good. Now all I have to do is get back to Fox's den in the Rookery before another flip-flop through the folds, and hope to hell there's some way he can patch this little rip in time.

  Circus swarm above, roofs of the Rookery below, stray chi-beams pierce the air around me, friendly fire and enemy attacks; I swoop the thopter through and round the blasts of color, flick back the covers for the trigger buttons on the joysticks, and aim for an enemy thopter. Both buttons, keyed to the pilot's thumb-prints, lock me out.

  Not good.

  As a chi-blast rocks the whole machine, I whip out my Curzon-Youngblood Mark I chi-gun, shoot out the windshield of the thopter and start firing at the enemy, flying my thopter one-handed, dancing with danger, spinning through the air, a whirling dervish of the skies. Enemy thopters try to follow my maneuvers, guns blasting. One just manages to shoot another out of the sky. Keen.
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  It's like the Battle of Britain fought with waltzers—man, it's kinda lucky I don't get motion sickness. I turn to fire at a thopter coming in from my side and see my friend the pilot clinging desperately to the open door with one hand, scrabbling for purchase with a foot as, with the other hand, he aims his chi-gun at my head. I duck as both of us fire simultaneously. He takes out the controls above my head; I send a chi-beam straight into his stomach, knock him out into the blue.

  The thopter screams, the sound of metal shearing, and it starts to buck insanely in the air. Looks like it's time to go, and so, with consummate skill and truly freakish luck, I send the ruined thopter careering across the sky into the enemy vehicle marked by its position as group leader, while I twist out of the seat and kick-jump backward through the shattered windshield, using a two-handed chi-gun shot to blast me free from the ensuing carnage. I spin in the air and straighten out just in time to grab a handhold on another thopter as I slam into its wing. The pilot tries a desperate flip to shake me and to get the machine back under his control. I cling on, and the unbalanced thopter spirals downward.

  As it reaches the right spot, I swing out and let loose, launched by centrifugal force in just exactly the direction that I want. I hit the bay window feet-first and come crashing through it into the rebel headquarters, Fox's den. Fast Puck stands to one side of the window, chi-lance blazing out into the sky. Coyote's lying bleeding on the Persian rug.

  “You're back,” he says. “You better not have fucked it up.”

  I kick my heels, sheepishly.

  “How exactly do you define ‘fucked up’?”

  “Look it up the dictionary,” he says, “under ‘Jack Flash.’ “

  I clock the room. Something's missing.

  “Where's Fox?” I say.

  “Who?” ask Puck and Coyote simultaneously.

  And suddenly the temporal aftershock hits us.

  A SPRAY OF BLOOD AND BRAINS

  21 st March. I look for some sign in Samuel's notes, some scrap of shorthand telling of this world, my world, that it is the right one and that it ends well; but I can find none that shows the truth I know, with us holed up here in this ancient temple under the watchful eye of a Virgin Whore. The variants are endless— worlds where MacChuill is captured, where von Strann is killed—but in all that I've found so far we have been trapped, eventually, back in von Strann's apartment, retreating from the patrols, our escape routes blocked by all the checkpoints that have sprung up overnight. I have been trying to glean the positions of these all from the variants, but the picture is not complete; and how can I even be certain these alternative scenarios are close enough to ours that I can treat them as intelligence? How can I know that the differences are not more substantial than the similarities?

  I take hope from the fact that the world I know differs so much from all these others. Here it is the Beth Ashtart in which we are pinned down, biding our time until the Turks find us. Here all it took was a word from Tamuz to persuade me, and I ceased my foolish blustering at the Baron. With my help rather than hindrance, here Tamuz was back with the Scotsman before we even knew it, the car still running as we clattered down the steps onto the road, MacChuill standing behind the wheel, urging us to make haste, in his own colorful and guttural tongue of course, more understood by tone and context than by anything else. Here I almost think we might have made it out had we been just a little quicker. We almost did. As it was, we made it to the Avenue of Palms before all hell broke loose.

  The car rattles a sharp right onto the Avenue of Palms, then shudders into an even sharper turn as MacChuill slams the brakes on, yanks the steering wheel even further round.

  “Fuckin shite!” he says. “Haud on!”

  The wheels spin, burning rubber, as the turn becomes a full 180 degrees. Along the avenue, soldiers are already running from the makeshift roadblock—a truck parked across the road—their rifles raised, calling for them to halt. Jack shoves Tamuz down to safety with a rough hand on his shoulder, trying to aim his Webley as the spinning car throws him off balance. MacChuill wrestles the Rolls to a stop. The engine roars. The wheels spin.

  “Fuckin bastard fuckin come on tae—”

  FUCK.

  Jack hears the crack of the rifle and the thud of the impact almost simultaneously—is it himself that's hit?—and the car judders forward, stalls, MacChuill flopping down across the steering wheel, sliding down to one side. A spray of blood and brains on the windshield. God Almighty. Then Jack is firing at the Turks as—move!—the three of them jump from the car, from the crack and tungoi bullets hitting metal. They're retreating down the street, cover to cover. He's firing round a corner, holding the last two Turks back while von Strann and Tamuz run ahead to the next street where—

  Von Strann spins off his feet as if a sledgehammer has slammed into his shoulder. Tamuz is skidding, turning, running back toward Carter as the soldier steps out behind him, takes aim with his gun and—

  Crack!

  Tamuz stumbles—crack!—and then just drops.

  Jack stares at the soldier. He's bringing his pistol round, but there's another shot already fired, a splatter of blood and bone from the man's face. Von Strann on the ground, rifle still pointed at where the Turk was standing.

  Jack makes it as far as Tamuz's body before he falls to his knees.

  SUBTEXTS, SYMBOLS AND THE SINS OF SODOM, BY L. WOOLEY (1988)

  And so, if we look at what survives of the original scripts and storyboards for The Sins of Sodom, we see many elements that foreshadow not only Griffiths's later oeuvre but also epics by directors such as Kubrik in Spartacus, Lean in Lawrence of Arabia, or Korda in Achilles. We cannot help but recognize, for instance, something of The Ten Commandments’ Exodus scene in the escape of Lot and his household, especially when we consider that Griffiths planned to hire two thousand extras to make up Lot's “household.” Many comparisons have been drawn between the famous “snails and oysters” speech in Spartacus and the “milk and honey” speech spoken by the young slave boy Tamuz to the Hebrew warrior, Jonathan, in The Sins of Sodom; while Spartacus reverses the roles of seducer and seduced, slave and master, it may well be that Kubrik's script was in some way influenced by a passing acquaintance with the Griffiths script (s). Similarly, the subtle homoeroticism of Achilles mourning Patroclus in Korda's 1957 classic may well have some of its roots in the scene of Jonathan weeping over Tamuz's body.

  But, as it was, the studio balked and the funding for The Sins of Sodom fell through; had Griffiths been granted the opportunity to follow through on his ideas, however—our imagination reels. The film would certainly have generated a level of controversy greater than Intolerance when it was released, or Birth of a Nation today. Even the ending of the film, in which God destroys the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, saving only the pure and good people of the household of Lot, owes more to pragmatics than to ethics, exemplifying the so-called Hypocritic Code of the time—if you play, you gotta pay—whereby the most heinous (and of course thrilling) crimes could be enacted onscreen as long as the perpetrator was punished at the end of the movie. With the ending as a start point, then, as we can see from the surviving scripts, Griffiths seems to have set out to test the tenuous boundaries between the permissible and the permissive, with scenes of hedonism and excess patently contrived to sate a prurient public's appetite for the scandalous and the sensual.

  It is, indeed, little wonder that Erich Von Strohn, the author of the pious and somewhat turgid doorstop of a biblical blockbuster on which the script was based, decried the proposed movie as “a vile perversion not only of my own humble but honest work, but of the Good Book itself.” Von Strohn threatened to file a lawsuit, claiming that the script was obscene and, in effect, a defamation of his character, since it gloried in the very outrages that he reviled. With the Church, the censors and all the powers of the Moral Right charging Griffiths with gross sensationalism and flagrant blasphemy, the pressure on the studio rose until even the potentials of such ex
plosive hype were outweighed by the threat of outright hostility. Such was the venom and invective of the campaigners that one almost wonders whether, had the film ever actually been shot and screened, great mobs of torch-brandishing peasants would have swept across the country, burning every movie theater in their path in their righteous zeal and indignation, heaping up great bonfires of the sordid and salacious reels.

  And of course, shamefully, this might as well have been the actual scenario; of the all-too-few copies of the original script and its rewrites the vast extent of it has long ago been either lost or destroyed. Over the years the abandoned project was forgotten, buried in a drift of Hollywood dream-dust, until so much is lost now that even the hope of reconstructing any one version of the script in its entirety must be, like the film itself, abandoned to the sands of time. Bibliographies of Griffiths make no mention of The Sins of Sodom. Why should they? After all, he never made the film. And to all too many serious students of the cinema, why, it is little more than a brief hiccup in the great man's career, one which to all intents and purposes might never have happened. And yet, like some archaeologist of the silver screen, we can uncover some of the forgotten fragments, perhaps dust them off and see how they fit into the history of cinema.