Vellum

by Hal Duncan

  “Well,” he says. “Good morning, reality. Let’s go inside and talk.”

  The Book of Names

  “There’s nothing to talk about,” says the angel.

  He and Finnan are sitting at the Formica top of the little dinner table in Finnan’s Airstream, one drinking bottled water, the other bottled beer. She noses round the fridge, looking for a Coke, but watching them all the time out of the corner of her eye, and listening intently to everything they say.

  “Your name is in the book,” says the angel.

  The angel’s leatherbound “book”—actually a tenth-generation palmtop with slick packaging—is sitting up on the table in front of him, open and switched on. Scrolling over the screen, row upon row, is a sequence composed of four different glyphs arranged in seemingly random order, and she can’t help thinking of an image she saw on a documentary once, a computer-generated graphic of As and Ts and Gs and Cs, scrolling behind a slowly spinning model of a double helix. The letters represented a gene sequence, she remembers, four basic building blocks that combine along the helix of a DNA molecule to write out the pattern of a living creature.

  As she watches, the scrolling gradually accelerates until the screen becomes just a gray blur.

  “The book is wrong,” says Finnan. “You’ve got the wrong man. Maybe you should check the original. Oh, that’s right, I hear you lost it.”

  He smirks.

  “Pity,” he says. “You really can’t expect a cut-rate copy like that to be worth a damn. Those scribes in Aratta hacking the old Cant into gravings that—”

  “Seamus Finnan. Born in Ireland, in—”

  “That’s not my name,” he says. “You don’t even have my fucking name. Fucking angels. You want to get yer fookin facts straight before ye come barging into someone’s fookin life.”

  It’s not the first time she’s noticed the hint of an Irish accent in Finnan’s voice, but she’s still surprised. It’s as if the name has just this moment sparked something off inside him, and despite his denials she’s suddenly sure that Seamus is the name he was born with. But she’s also sure that isn’t what Finnan means when he talks about his name. He’s talking about something deeper.

  The angel leans forward, peering at the book as if the blur actually means something to him.

  “The book isn’t wrong,” says the angel. “The record is complete.”

  “The little black book of your master’s conquests, eh?”

  “A book of unkin,” the angel says. “Covenant and Sovereigns and those who’re not yet signed. All of them. Times and places of callings and gatherings. Crossings of paths. Reckonings.”

  He moves a finger across the trackpad and the screen flicks sideways, up, down, scrolling, panning, faster than he can possibly see, surely. He taps it and it stops.

  “Slab City, April 12th, 2014,” says the angel. He turns it round to show Finnan, like the gibberish of sigils proves his point.

  Finnan lights another cigarette and takes a draw. She wonders how long he’s been here, that his accent’s so…sporadic.

  “I don’t see my name in there,” he says.

  “Slab City, April 12th, 2014,” says the angel. “And there’s only you and me here.”

  “You can’t take me without my true name. You’ve got no hold over me, and you sit here at my table by my invitation.”

  “You will be gathered,” says the angel.

  “Not by you.”

  “Then by the others, by the Sovereigns.”

  “You think a nut-job megalomaniac like Malik wants me for his private jihad? Not fucking likely.”

  She picks up Finnan’s lighter from the table and starts playing with it.

  “When they come for you they’ll be less…diplomatic than I am,” says the angel.

  “And I’ll be less hospitable,” says Finnan.

  “They’ll rape your little apprentice here,” the angel says, “and drag you down into hell by your greasy matted hair.”

  She blinks and flicks the lighter open, sparks it.

  “Don’t underestimate the girl,” says Finnan. “She can look after herself.”

  “A chicken-bone cross around her neck is going to save her from hellhounds?”

  She fingers the charm necklace that Finnan made for her. Finnan blows smoke in the angel’s face.

  “You know…birdman,” he says, “your organization will never beat the opposition, and they’ll never beat you, because underneath the bullshit you’re exactly the same thing. Oh, it may be unkin with a little ‘u’ and not a grand and self-important capital letter. But it’s Covenant with a capital ‘C’ for cunt, isn’t it? The Covenant and the Sovereigns. I bet they have a book just like that one. How’s the score looking, anyway? All even in the final minutes? Waiting for that golden goal.”

  “You never did understand us, Finnan. The point of the struggle is not to ‘beat the opposition,’ as you put it, but to separate the…chaff from the grain…the good seed from the bad seed, and if it means burning the world to dust and fire, well, the most fertile fields have come from ashes.”

  “I always thought you fuckers were inhuman. You’ve forgotten where you came from.”

  “We’re more than human, boy. We’ve seen what’s out there, you and I. We know what we could build on the ashes of this world. We don’t need this…squalor. We can burn the filth away and build humanity a new world, one of order…out there…in the Vellum. You know this world is nothing. This whole universe is…a mote of dust, a smear of ink, on the surface of the Vellum.”

  The Last Big Rumble in the Sky

  He turns to smile at her, condescending.

  “At most, little girl, your history, your reality is…a groove, cutting its way through what might be, curving so slowly that you see it only as a straight line stretching ever-onward, just deep enough that someone like you can’t even conceive of the worlds that run in parallel on the other side of your reality’s walls. And it’s still nothing more than one tiny whorling line of a fingerprint on the Vellum.”

  She looks at the angel with his coat covered in the desert’s dust, and at Finnan, face smeared with engine oil. He’s never mentioned any of this to her.

  “I took the King’s Shilling once,” says Finnan. “Once was enough. I was a fookin eedjit then and I won’t do it again. Not again.”

  “You know, Finnan,” says the angel, “it doesn’t really matter to us whether I leave with your heart or with your head; all that matters to us is that you make the choice.”

  “The Last Big Rumble in the Sky,” says Finnan. “Is that what you’re fookin wanting? Wake up, birdman, the gangs are dead; the Anunnaki, the Athenatoi, the Aesir—they’re all long gone—”

  “What do you know about that?” the angel snarls. “Were you there when those gangs were throwing children into furnaces in case—just in case—they might grow up to be rivals? Did you see Irra march across Akkad, laying waste to everything in his path? What have you seen, Seamus Finnan? What petty little human wars have you seen?”

  Finnan flicks ash on the linoleum floor. Phreedom fidgets with the alphabet magnets on the fridge door.

  “You think I want the old days back?” the angel carries on. “You think this is nostalgia for that? This is an age of reason, and it’s the Covenant that built it. This is a war against all that. Against the god-kings and emperors.”

  He turns to her.

  “Against those great romantic lies you humans seem to hold so dear. I would have thought that you’d appreciate that, Seamus Finnan. But you weren’t there, were you, when we signed the Covenant to bring an end to all the bloodshed?”

  Seamus Finnan. She’s wondered about his past before, and now she wonders again. The King’s Shilling. So he was in the army, in a war? Syria wasn’t that long ago, but then again she’s sure—the way Mac’s talked about him—he was here before that. Iraq? Before that? She suddenly realizes that she doesn’t know shit about history. And in all the times he’s talked about the unki
n, up to his arms in wires or engine parts, she’s never really imagined him anywhere but now.

  “No,” says Finnan, “I wasn’t there. But I knew a man who was. A long time ago—maybe not for the likes of you, mind, but for someone like me who still remembers his mother’s face and the like—a long time ago for me. I knew someone who was there through it all, who was there when yer fookin Covenant was signed. And he told me it was a big pile of horseshit.”

  Finnan flashes a grin at him.

  “And that he fucked yer mother.”

  She’s waiting for the angel to come flying across the table at him, but he just sits there, staring at Finnan with absolute fury.

  The angel sits silently for a moment, while Finnan takes another draw on his cigarette and a swig of his beer, then he punches a few buttons on his palmtop. It starts to scroll again. He looks across at Phreedom, then at Finnan, then out the window at his side.

  “My name is in this book, you know,” says the black man. “You may not have decided where your graving goes—yet—but I’m in here.”

  The scrolling stops again and the screen starts flashing up matrix after matrix of those four glyphs repeated.

  “Would you like to know my true name, Finnan, or should I tell the girl so she can call on me when the demons—”

  “Neither of us want to know your name,” says Finnan, cutting him off. “I’m not interested. She’s not interested.”

  “What is it—Rumpelstiltskin?” she says, and immediately feels stupid.

  “It’s—”

  “I won’t join you and I won’t fight you,” snaps Finnan. “I won’t be named, numbered, called, gathered, saved or damned, and you can—”

  “Metatron,” says the angel.

  Metatron

  “Metatron,” says the angel, and it hurts. He says it real quiet, but she can feel the resonance deep in her skull and it’s like a thousand dog whistles have been blown in both of her ears and for a second—for less than that, for a fraction of a second—she feels like the sound is carrying a living information into everything in the trailer, herself included; that by speaking that single stupid-sounding word the angel has stamped his name into her and into everything around her. For that fraction of a second it seems totally natural, totally logical to think this way, and then the room is spinning but the world has stopped ringing and she leans back against the fridge, looking at Finnan to see if this new development is good or bad, even though she doesn’t really need to, because she knows already. It’s bad.

  Finnan’s anger flickers through his body, in the wire vein in his forehead, in the cables of his tensed neck muscles, in the twitching of his arms and clenched fists. His eyes, though, are as calm as ever, cool ice-blue and never blinking.

  “Nice of you to introduce yourself,” he says.

  “You invited me in. It’s only polite,” says the angel.

  “Polite, sure, but there’s no need to be so…formal.”

  “I always think courtesy is the basis of any good working relationship.”

  “We have no working relationship. We never will.”

  “Then ‘know thine enemy.’”

  “We’re not enemies. I ask you into my home. I offer you hospitality—”

  “And in gratitude,” the angel says, “in return, I give you my name; I’m in your debt.”

  “You don’t owe me a thing.”

  “But I have to repay your hospitality. If you refuse me that then you offend me, and if you offend me then you’re my enemy. Which is it?”

  “I release you of your debt. I take back my hospitality. Get out of my home.”

  Phreedom notices that some of the magnetic letters on the fridge have arranged themselves to spell out a word—M E T A T R O N. It looks like some inane comic-book superhero’s name, spelled out in all its pompousness. It looks harmless.

  “You’re expelling me?” asks the angel.

  “I’m requesting that you leave.”

  “Just say the word and I’m gone.”

  “Please,” snarls Finnan.

  “Not that word, boy. You know what I mean.”

  “I know what you mean, you arrogant fucker,” she says.

  Finnan shakes his head.

  “Don’t even think of it, Phree. I taught you how to read the marks, but the name would just be a word in your mouth…and it’s a word they’d damn you with.”

  “Let the little girl try, birdman. Let the hatchling chirp her first angel-call.”

  “Don’t patronize me, you bastard,” she says.

  “Leave her out of this,” says Finnan, half rising from his seat. “Get the fuck out of my house, now.”

  He bows his head, as if in prayer or invocation.

  “I command you in your own name, I command you twice, and I command you for the third time—”

  “Metatron,” she says.

  Golden, Burning Sound of Fire and Rust

  The empty bottle in the angel’s hand shatters, and the shards themselves shatter, and sand rains across the Formica tabletop.

  “Metatron,” she says, again for the first time, time echoing itself.

  The world is screaming in her face, a golden, burning sound of fire and rust. The angel is white and Finnan is green and her own hand is crimson as she raises it to try and stop the Cant from shaking her whole existence apart.

  Metatron.

  And it feels like she’s going to be saying that one word for the rest of her life, forever in that one moment, living, reliving the reverberations. The air is liquid in front of her, its intricate flow tracing sigils and symbols, all instantly understood, all woven into a single living word, that name. She reaches into the deepest part of the mark carved into the world inside Finnan’s Airstream, and, with thumb and forefinger, she twists it at its heart. She makes her first graving.

  The angel throws back his head and laughs, and weeps.

  Finnan stubs out his cigarette on the tabletop.

  The world becomes normal…almost.

  “I’ll be leaving now,” says the angel, picking up his palmtop, switching it off and closing it as he rises from his seat. His voice is tight and one small bead of sweat runs down his forehead, but he has the faintest hint of a smile around his mouth.

  “It looks like I was wrong,” he says. “It seems I wasn’t here to gather your soul after all. Young Phreedom’s bought you a little more time.”

  “Maybe I’ll do the same for her someday.”

  “I don’t think you’ll have to. She’s a fighter, that one; she’s made her choice already and she’s not even named yet.”

  “My folks called me Phreedom,” she says. “That’s all the name I need.”

  “My father named me Enoch,” says the angel, “but when you walk with God you soon find those human names too small a fit. Phreedom is what they call you, yes, but is it really who you are…what you are?”

  “As long as I’m alive,” says Finnan, “it will be.”

  “You’ll protect her, birdman? You damned her to hell the day you taught her that the gods were real. And when the desolate ones have gathered her into their arms—because that is the choice she’s made—she’ll probably thank you for it as she rips out your heart.”

  “Get out of here,” she says. “Get the fuck out of here.”

  He pushes past her to the door and opens it, but stops at the threshold as he turns to go down the ladder. Finnan walks over to the fridge to pull out a bottle of beer; he twists the top off, holds the bottle up…cheers.

  The angel flicks his hand in a sort of John Wayne salute.

  “Be seeing you,” he says.

  The Fields of Lost Days

  “How long has Finnan been here?” she asks Mac as she puts the last tin of eggshell-yellow emulsion down on the ground at the foot of the Jesus Hill. Mac grins and shrugs.

  “Longer than me,” he says. “And I been here near forty years.”

  “So how old is he?”

  Mac shrugs, and laughs this time. He pu
lls the baseball cap off his head and scratches at his scalp.

  “Looks like he’s about twenty. But I reckon he must be over a hundred.”

  As Mac replaces his cap, he grins at her with a carefully cultivated innocence.

  “But, hell, my memory isn’t what it used to be. Who knows, maybe Finnan only got here yesterday.”

  And she’s thinking to herself about just who this Seamus Finnan is, the war he fought in and the war he’s running from, the history he never talks about, the future he rejects, and she’s wondering if, with that one word, she’s stepped into a role that he won’t play. The angel’s name still echoes in her head and there’s a part of her—something that’s always been there, but she just never noticed it, she thinks—a part of her that wants to burn it out, to burn it all out.

  “You know what Finnan is, don’t you?”

  “No. No, I’m just another old drug-fucked hippy hermit; I don’t push my trip on Finnan, and he doesn’t push his trip on me. If someday he comes up to me and tells me, hey, I know where the fountain of youth is, I can take you back to the garden, man, well, maybe I’ll follow him and maybe I’ll just stay here and paint my hill. I figure you got to make your own way through; you can’t walk another person’s journey.”

  “So you never asked him where he came from or anything?”

  The road of all dust, she thinks. The fields of lost days.

  “I didn’t ever think he wanted to be asked,” says Mac.

  Nearly everybody has some kind of graving, Finnan told her. With some folks it’s cut so deep in them that they forget there’s any them except that little mark. Cut so deep it’s carved into reality itself and you can see it in the air around them, smell it on the wind. There’s a hole inside their heart that goes right down to hell, right up to heaven, and what’s on the other side’s so bright, so dark, so fucking pure they let it take them over, walk the world in their bodies. Angels and demons.