Vellum

by Hal Duncan

She cuts him off, fingers across his lips, and shakes her head.

  They sit in the roadhouse—it’s about a year ago—sipping at their beers and looking across the booth at each other. Their bikes are parked outside and in a little while they’ll both go out, they’ll give each other one last hug before they kick the stands up, gun the engines and head off in different directions. She’s spent the last two years looking for him, praying that he doesn’t know what she does, that he isn’t like her, like Finnan. But she can see it in his eyes, like fear or fury. And he shows her his mark, on his chest, under his shirt, over his heart. Most people would just see smooth flesh, the beads and the mojo bag, the silver cross and dog tags. She sees his graving, his secret name written in light in the unkin script, like a luminous tattoo. He might as well have a halo, or horns.

  “Don’t tell me,” she says. “It’s too dangerous if I know.”

  And all she wants right now is for the world to be the way it was when they were kids, before the simple surface that they knew was stripped away and all the flesh and bones of its metaphysique shown underneath, the rippling sinews of paths twisted out of time and space, the tendons stretching between centuries, the white-bone structures of an eternity jointed, articulated, rebuilt by creatures that had stepped out of the mundane world long before either of them were even born. Creatures like they’d become, not even knowing it, and, in doing so, damned themselves to this insane existence. What do you do if the end of the world is coming and you’re an angel who doesn’t want to fight? Where do you go?

  “The Vellum,” he says.

  The Vellum. Like giving it a name makes it any more comprehensible, any more sane. A world under the world—or after it, or beyond it, inside, outside—those ideas don’t even fucking apply. Where’s the Vellum? Outside the mundane cosmos, as the ancients thought, farther by far than they could possibly imagine in their measures of the heavens dwarfed by actualities of galaxies and clusters? Or buried in a speck of dirt under a fingernail? Where do the gods come from? Where do people go when they die? Where do angels travel in packs for fear of being slaughtered by their own shadows, huddle in fortress heavens against a void they need a fucking God of Gods to conquer? Phreedom’s seen a glimpse of it, just once, a plain of bird skulls stretching for as far as she can see, a vision given to her as a threat the day that she herself became one of these inhuman things. It was a warning given to a little girl who knew too much already, a message: this is what you’re getting yourself into. As desolate and vast as that vision might have been, she knows it was only a tiny corner of the infinite Vellum.

  She looks at him, her brother, Thomas. His eyes are brown flecked with green, as hers are green with flecks of brown; where his hair’s brown pushing for auburn, hers is rust red, streaked with ginger. They’re both autumn—if you listen to that kind of Eurotrash fashionazi shit on the webworlds—but where he’s kicking through the first fall leaves, she’s dancing round a Halloween bonfire.

  “I’ll go into the Vellum,” Thomas says. “The Covenant won’t find me. Finnan—”

  “Fuck Finnan,” she snarls. “If it wasn’t for that fucker, we’d have never…”

  Never what? Never touched infinity? Never heard the Cant that resonates in every fiber of their fucking bodies? Never learned to hear that language, read the gravings of it in the world and in themselves, their own secret names? Never become unkin?

  But she knows it isn’t true, that there was something in her that couldn’t help but be attracted to the crazy guy who lived in his castle of junk in the trailer park out in the middle of the desert where they came every winter, year after year, with their mom and dad, a snowbird family of the seminomadic Winnebago tribe. He didn’t hunt them out. He didn’t come to them and offer them eternity in the sand under their feet. They’d gone to him, first her brother, then herself, because they just knew—in the way he touched the dry wind like a blind man feeling someone’s face, in the way he turned his head to watch vortices of cigarette smoke curl in the air—they knew he had some kind of way of reading the secrets hidden in the world around them. If it hadn’t been him who showed her—showed them both the world beneath the world—it would have been someone else, some other place, some other time.

  But still, she can’t help hating him a little for the hell that hunts them both now, both her brother and herself. Or the heaven, rather.

  Angels on Your Body

  From her breast the double strand of beads was taken at the third gate.

  “What is this?” Inanna asked, but, “Quiet, Inanna,” she was told again. “The ways of the underworld are perfect. They may not be questioned.”

  Creak.

  “Thanks.” The old guy smiles as he steps past her through the door she’s holding open and she nods “You’re welcome” and walks out into the car park.

  “Angels on your body,” he calls after her, some misplaced Californian craziness of a blessing.

  She swings her leg over the bike.

  Most people have it wrong, she knows now. They think the unkin—wandering through their myths and legends, calling themselves gods here, angels there—they think these creatures rule eternity, own it as their realm. But eternity, the Vellum, is like…the media of reality itself, the blank page on which everything is written, on which anything could be written. The Vellum isn’t the absolute certainty of some city-state of Heaven; no, it’s the vast wilderness of uncertainty, possibility, the fucking primal chaos itself, and this angel empire of their dreams is just a colony of settlers trying to tame it, make it fit with their mad puritan ideals, a town of walls and fences, of warped zeal, of hatred and fear, holding out against the storms and the strange natives, and riding out with their cavalry and swords and guns to slaughter every painted savage and naked squaw who won’t accept their righteous laws of sin and purity. Angels and demons. Or the Covenant and the Sovereign Powers, as they like to call themselves. To the angels, even eternity itself is just another hell of red-skin enemies to be purged and rebuilt, New Jerusalem…their New World. She wonders if they’ll have slave ships ferrying dead sinners to their Western Lands to toil in plantation purgatories.

  For a second, looking across at her brother, in the roadhouse, she has a sudden image of him in a Civil War uniform, all the braiding torn from it and gray with dust so you can’t tell what side he’s on, or was on before he started running. She blinks and he’s normal again. That’s the thing about eternity. It gets fucking everywhen.

  “They won’t find me,” he says.

  “You won’t find him,” she screams, and she twists, snarling and cursing, sobbing, spitting blood and tears as one of the bastard fucking unkin pins her arms, wrenching them back behind her, cracking electric pain through dislocated shoulders, while the other gathers a fistful of her hair to snap her head back with one hand and, with the other, pound his fist into her face, into her jaw, again and again and again, till all that she can do is moan. I’ll kill you. I’ll fucking kill you, she’s thinking. I’ll fucking kill you all.

  She can feel his mind touching on hers, a whisper inside her head, “Where is he?” The cigarette still burns in the ashtray on the Formica tabletop of Finnan’s long-abandoned trailer. She shouldn’t have come back here. The smoke curls upward, languid; the cigarette itself is mostly ash now.

  He turns to look at the table, then peers into her face.

  “Ash?” he says. “What are you thinking, little girl?”

  She looks at the cigarette, stares at the cigarette, the ash, that ash, not any other, not the spoken syllable of an interrupted word. She’s not giving these fuckers anything.

  “Fuck you,” she says, and he punches her again.

  “We’ll find him,” the one holding her arms is saying in her ear. “You can make it easy for us, easy for yourself, but either way we’ll still find him. Please.”

  Good cop, bad cop. Carter and Pechorin, they introduced themselves as. Golden Boy and Count Dracula, she thought with a sneer, dismissing them until t
hey took off their shades and she saw just how empty their eyes were.

  Fuck you. Fuck you, she thinks. I’ll fucking kill you. And you won’t find him.

  The punching stops. She can’t see anything anymore, for the blood and the blinding buzz saw sparks of pain, but she can feel him pawing at her now, pulling at her jeans, ripping her T-shirt. It’s six months since she last saw her brother, but the scent of memory is strong on her; it’s what led them to her in their hunt for him. They’re gearing up for the apocalypse. Most of the unkin are already signed to one side or the other, and it’s only the odd new blood, born in a backwater, living on the move, who’ve managed to evade the gatherers. For all she knows it’s only her and Finnan and her brother that are still free. And she’s not even sure about herself.

  I’ll fucking kill you all.

  She can feel his hand pushing inside her jeans; she’s falling into herself, the only escape from the brutality of angels. He starts to grunt, his fingers pushing, probing.

  You won’t find him.

  But I will.

  Hunter Seeker

  When she entered the fourth gate, the breastplate was stripped from her chest.

  “What is this?” asked Inanna.

  “Quiet, Inanna,” she was told, “the customs of the city of the dead are perfect. They may not be questioned.”

  Doom. She catches a glimpse of past or future, an echo across reality, across the present…across the road: a car door thudding shut as two men in black suits stand, arms folded, bug-eyed in black shades, beckoning to the person standing where she is now, to her brother Thomas. It’s superimposed over her view just like a sim world in her lenses would be, but she knows this is no electronic apparition. She knows those fuckers; her personal demons, they are, those angels of death, hired gods. Fucking unkin. She can spot them a mile off. She can spot them a month off.

  The vision only lasts a second, but it’s enough to follow.

  Asheville, she thinks, as she rides past another old Volkswagen Beetle slapped with peacenik bumper stickers. Haight-Asheville, more like.

  It’s weird. It’s not at all what she expected after days of small towns with flags flying and motels with We Support Our Troops on their roadside signs instead of Vacancies or No Vacancies, after twiddling the dial on the alarm clock-radio in her room and finding only country and western, evangelists and classic rock. Or maybe she should have expected it, realized from the Jim and the Janis and the Jimi that if the small towns were stuck in the 1950s, the big city here would be sitting stoned and tripping in a haze of 1969. So the war is in the Middle East this time, instead of Southeast Asia, so the rednecks are talking about sand-niggers and towel-heads instead of gooks; still seems like nothing ever changes.

  It’s a college town, she supposes, and this four-block area at the center of it is a little bohemian ghetto for the intellectuals, all music shops and cafes, bars and bistros. A British double-decker bus sits in a beer garden, windows and seats taken out, replaced with tables and chairs, all retro European quirkiness. She walks past what looks like an old garage, painted in sky-blue and multicolored flowers and rainbows—a fucking commune or cooperative of some sort. There’s a kid in a Che Guevara T-shirt, graffiti that says Fuck The Alamo, Remember Guantanamo. No fucking wonder that Tom ended up here, she thinks, the latter-day hippy that he is, or was.

  She turns onto College Street, and parks the bike outside a bank, circles the area on foot, working by this sort of sixth sense, like she’s playing a childhood game again, her brother’s voice laughing at her. You’re getting colder. Warmer now.

  They used to play Hunter Seeker among the trailers of Slab City, one of them hiding in some burnt-out automobile or oilcan, patched into the view in the other’s goggles—that was before the first lenses came out—and directing them with clues and taunts whispered across the airwaves into their earphones. Like they were heat-seeking guided missiles with cameras on the front, straight out of the CNN coverage of the war in Syria.

  “Ah, now you’re really getting warm,” he’d say. “Hotter. Now you’re burning. Red hot.” White hot.

  The Resonance of Another Moment

  Doom. This time the car is real, parked up on College Street, the owner—some guy in khaki shorts—slamming the door shut and pinging the central lock down with the little black electronic key he points at it. She feels dizzy as the world buzzes around her. You could call it déjà vu, but it’s not that she feels like she’s been here before in this exact moment, more like she knows that someone else has, that her brother has. Just like before, she has this deep uneasy feeling that she’s standing in the same spot that her brother stood in. And just like before, she has that same peripheral vision of two men in black suits and black shades, one of them beckoning to her brother with a slow hook of his finger. Come here.

  She has to fight the urge to turn and run, even knowing that these hunter seeker unkin, with their cold and knowing clichéd mafioso poise, aren’t here, right now, but in another time, that it’s her brother that they’re after, not her. She can feel Thomas’s terror, burning in her chest, red hot…white hot.

  The car is real, the moment has no meaning, but she feels the resonance of another moment in it, the moment her brother stepped out of a car, stood where she’s standing now and turned just as she’s turning—

  When she entered the fifth gate, the gold bracelet was taken from her wrist.

  “What is this?” asked Inanna.

  “Quiet, Inanna,” she was told, “the customs of the city of the dead are perfect. They may not be questioned.”

  And she’s close. She can feel reality stretch thin around her, like the world itself is only a skin, translucent, tenuous, the Vellum rippling underneath what’s real, underneath, beyond, behind. She’s followed the path her brother’s ripped through time, pitched back and forward in his wake, cresting the waves and working her way inward to the source, the impact zone, where he broke through, like a comet smashing into the ocean. And she’s…here.

  She turns to find it staring at her.

  The tattoo parlor is adorned with psychedelic patterns everywhere, painted over the royal blue of the woodwork and on photos and display boards in the window. The glass panel of the door has a logo of an eye painted in black, intricate and old-fashioned like an engraving. Iris Tattoos. This is the place she’s been looking for. If she wants to find her brother, wherever or whenever the hell he is, this is…the door she has to go through.

  She lays her hand on the brass handle, curls her fingers round it, tender, tense. She pauses.

  Ting. The bell over the doorway of the shop rings, brass like the handle that she turns again to push the old glass-paneled door shut, juddering in its misfit with the too-tight frame.

  When she entered the sixth gate, the lapis rod and line were taken from her hand.

  “What is this?” asked Inanna.

  “Quiet, Inanna,” she was told, “the customs of the city of the dead are perfect. They may not be questioned.”

  And the beaded curtain rattles as she pushes through it into the dark room where the woman in the veil looks up and pauses in her work, a buzzing tattooist’s needle in her hand. And there’s another hand, grabbing at her arm, the assistant’s.

  And when she entered the seventh gate, from her body the royal robe was removed.

  “What is this?” Inanna asked.

  “Quiet, Inanna,” she was told, “the customs of the city of the dead are perfect. They may not be questioned.”

  “What’s that?” asks Phreedom.

  “I said, you can’t go in. Madame Iris is with a customer.”

  “She’ll see me,” Phreedom says.

  NAKED AND BOWED LOW

  Naked and bowed low, Inanna entered the throne room of Eresh of the Greater Earth, who arose. She started from her throne. The Anunnaki, judges of the underworld, came from the darkness to surround Inanna, passing judgment on her. Eresh of the Greater Earth fastened the eye of death on her. She spoke
the word of wrath against Inanna, uttered the cry of guilt against her, struck her down. And as the judgment and the gaze, the wrath, the guilt fell on her, as the darkness fell on her, Inanna fell, and when she rose again out of the darkness it was as a corpse, raised up in the hands of the judges of the underworld, raised up to hang, a piece of rotting meat, a carcass hanging from a cold hook on the wall.

  Phreedom looks at the woman in the veil with quiet, grim detachment, ignoring the assistant, who still holds her arm. Madame Iris looks more like Gypsy Rose Lee as far as she’s concerned, looks more like some two-bit fortune-teller than a guardian of the threshold. Some fucking Sovereign. Better to rule in a fucking tattoo parlor in the middle of nowhere than to serve in Heaven.

  The woman in the veil waves the assistant away, sends her customer out through the beaded curtain with just a whisper in his ear, and:

  “You’ve got your mark, little goddess,” she says. “I can see it on you…in you. What do you need me for?”

  She has an accent—vaguely European, Phreedom thinks, but she can’t quite place it. There’s an inconsistent mix of guttural Germanic, lilting Latin in it and she wonders if it’s actually just an affectation, like the veil, a mask designed to give an air of phony mystery. Madame Iris. Yeah, right. She’s unkin for sure—she’s radiating power that Phreedom feels prickling her skin like something between heat and static electricity. But, really. Ditch the hokum, sister, Phreedom thinks.

  “I’m looking for someone,” she says.

  She reaches into her jacket pocket to pull her wallet out, to fetch a photo from it, but her hand is barely halfway out before the woman nods.

  “Thomas,” she says. “Your lover?”

  “Brother.”

  The woman gives a hmmm.

  “You know he’s gone. Gathered, gone into the…”