Vellum

by Hal Duncan

  “I don’t know,” says Finnan.

  “How long?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Destination Apocalypse

  Thomas picks up the business card lying on the table between them and starts turning it between his fingers like a magician playing with a coin. He turns it up and out to face Finnan, who slumps back into the red faux-leather of the booth, shaking his head. All it has are a name, a logo and an address—no phone, no email, no link. It’s not even smart, just printed white card, like something from the last century. But then—Thomas looks around—the whole fucking city of Asheville is an anachronism. Not that that’s a bad thing. It’s in these kinds of places that it’s easiest to step across from one time to another, following the flow of similitudes, the folds of commonalities.

  Like airports, he thinks. You go from one transfer lounge to another and you look around you and, if it wasn’t for the plane ride, you wouldn’t know you’d gone anywhere. Thomas has walked into a john in George Bush International in Texas and come out of another in Mexico City. And out on the back roads through these sticks of states, the desert roads, mountain roads, you can step across whole decades. He managed to spend last summer hiding out in 1970, moving from commune to commune, May through July; only reason he’s back now is to see Finnan and his little sister Phree one last time before he takes that last big step…sideways. You can skip up and down the railroad track as much as you want, back and forth, back and forth. Pick a year, any year. At the end of the day, there’s still a freight train coming that’ll either run right over you or pick you up and slam you all the way to the terminus. Destination Apocalypse. Better to get off the track entirely.

  “Madame Iris Tattoos,” says Finnan. “You don’t have a fucking clue what you’re dealing with, Tom.”

  Thomas lays the card down on the table. The logo is a black, stylized eye, radiating lines and curves, like the eye in the pyramid on a dollar bill, like the Eye of Horus used on all the New Age head shops around here…and quite different from either.

  It fucking screams unkin. He can hear it in the bones of his fingers where he touches it, the way it resonates inside him, simpatico with his soul. Thomas is one of them, you see, unkin. One of what they call angels, or demons, or gods. The birdmen who sing the morning world into existence with their Cant. He found it out three years back and he’s been running ever since.

  “So are you born unkin or made unkin?” he asked Finnan one night, before he was sure about himself, when he could just feel something tingling in his bones. A sense of something. They were on peyote, the two of them, out in the desert outside Slab City, and the world seemed like a dream that he was suddenly lucid in.

  “Fucked if I know, Tom,” Finnan had said. “I’m not sure it’s either. Maybe it’s a bit of both.”

  He wonders if it was chance, meeting this crazy hermit in his ramshackle cave of junk with his young face and old eyes, or if Finnan somehow found him, somehow knew before he knew himself and was just waiting for Thomas to realize what he was. Looking out for him in the meantime, while the Covenant angels and their enemies walked the earth, gathering their armies.

  “This is our way out,” he says. “Away from the whole fucking bullshit war. Into the Vellum. It’s all or nothing, he says. All eternity or nothing.”

  “bullshit war?”

  The frat boy’s voice isn’t loud enough for him to make out the whole sentence, but the tone of it and the stares in their direction carry more than enough information, more than enough threat. Thomas waits for the crow-haired hawk to calm his fuckwit fascist bull of a buddy—the queer lion just sits there of course, avoiding all the confrontations, external or internal, that might arise from any actual action. He wouldn’t want people to think…whatever. Thomas waits until the bull is soothed—leave it, man, leave it—and they’ve turned back to bludgeoning each other with their blunt opinions, then leans over to Finnan, speaking quieter now, serious.

  “We don’t belong here, Finnan. None of us do. And we all know it; we all feel it. We get that graving cut into us, burned into us, we get a little glimpse of what’s out there and, you know, from then on, we can’t get it out of our heads.”

  Thomas became unkin at the age of nineteen, wasted on peyote out in the Mojave desert, saw eternity in a grain of sand, and didn’t like what he saw, a vast and ancient power moving under the world around them, like muscles under the smooth skin of some slouching panther. Not God but something older, something colder. A glimpse of scales and feathers.

  Finnan finishes his beer and peels a twenty out of his pocket, drops it on the table to cover their tab, stands up.

  “God help you, Tommy boy. You don’t know what you’re doing. God help you.”

  “Which one?” says Thomas.

  But as they say their goodbyes and Finnan walks away and pushes his way out through the door and into sunlight, as Thomas sits back down to finish off his beer and eye up the blond frat boy over at the other table, he thinks to himself that he knows—he does know—that he’s playing with fire.

  But there’s a whole Vellum out there to hide in.

  He checks the clock behind the bar—he doesn’t wear a watch himself these days, not much point the way he lives. It’s 5:45 or so. Where to, he thinks, where to?

  Pick a year, any year.

  The Voice of God

  The Voice of God has a name—Metatron—but it’s a made-up name, a chosen name; it’s not the name he was born with and it’s not even the first name that he’s taken since abandoning the one his mother and father gave to him, back when he was still human. Needless to say, it’s not the name on the passport that he hands over to the painted china doll of a woman at the check-in of the KLM flight from Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam, to Newark, or at customs and immigration, or the transfer desk in New York; on the passport, he’s Enoch Hunter, a solid, straightforward name that’s not going to raise any eyebrows. Traveling to the States as Enki Nudimmud, in this day and age, would be just plain foolish. Slipping through the cracks in reality requires subtlety; and given the…situation in the Middle East, the last thing he wants is to draw attention to his origins. It would be ironic if the very architect of the new crusade was detained under the Homeland Defense Act for “motivational profiling,” as they call it. He could beat the lie detectors and the truth drugs, but it would waste his time, and he would be tempted just to tell them everything.

  “You want to know the truth?” he might say. “You really want to know the truth about your war on terror?”

  And then he’d whisper one word and they’d see it all, the Dead Soul Deeps and the demon Sovereigns walking in the shape of men, angels begging for their lives on Al Jazheera. And Malik in Damascus, at the heart of it all, graving Shariah law and hatred of the West into his followers. The real Cant under all the rhetoric.

  Charlotte, July 13th, 2017, 11:45 a.m. Six hours before the Messenger boy and the Irishman will meet.

  He takes the passport back from the guard, nods and smiles at him as he leans forward, putting his eye to the retina-scanner and his thumb to the sampler. The guard runs his gloved fingers over a nonexistent keyboard, and stares through him for a second as data scrolls across his lenses; Metatron watches it like a reflection in the man’s pupils, little arcane flickerings of light drawn out of a distant database—birth and citizenship certificates, criminal record query, tax records. It all pans out as tidy and safe, as it should. Enoch Hunter is an African-American, unmarried, a professor at the University of North Carolina, based at the Asheville campus, specializing in anthropology and archeosociology, a taxpayer and an honest citizen. Metatron puts the passport in the inside pocket of his long black leather duster, flicks back his dreads and gives the man a You too in reply to his Have a nice day.

  It’s not that the passport is forged. It’s not that Enoch Hunter doesn’t actually exist. The identity is a construct but it’s an airtight, solid-as-mahogany one. Here and now, at this exact point of time and space, i
n this little corner of the Vellum, Enoch Hunter is as real as the guard, with the same memories of childhood and adulthood, in his head or in other people’s, the same tracks and traces left in the world around him, among his friends and family, as any human leaves in his path. Metatron remembers his lecture at the conference in Paris. He remembers laughing in the seafood restaurant as he dined with colleagues. It’s just that all this is temporary. Even as he walks out through the silent slide of automatic doors that open out into the North Carolina sunshine, Enoch Hunter dissolves back into the field of possibility that he came from, forgotten as quickly as he was created. As Metatron takes the small black leatherbound palmtop out of his pocket and flips it open, Enoch Hunter ceases to have ever existed and reality slides back to where it was and should be. There was no conference in Paris now. The KLM flight from Schiphol to Newark, the Northwestern flight from Newark to Charlotte—neither have any record of an Enoch Hunter traveling in business class.

  Carter and Pechorin are waiting in the airport car park, his spear carriers. Carter looks like what you’d get if a farmboy of the Midwest married an Elven princess—all corn-colored hair and jut of jaw but greyhound slim, more a gymnast than a quarterback. Pechorin has a Slavic face of angular curves, all cheekbones and quiet, catlike intensity. In their mafioso black suits, they’re clean-cut all-American angels, the paragon of efficiency. They should be; Metatron graved them himself.

  The other five sebitti will be following them in some unmarked van presumably, backup in case any demons have picked up on his movement, caught sight of the wake, the ripples in the Vellum as he slides through it from one time and place to another. It’s unlikely, but there’s always the chance.

  “Glad to finally meet you, sir,” says Carter as he reaches out a hand to shake, sliding down off the car’s hood where he’s sat. Neither Carter nor Pechorin have any memory of their graving, of course, or of much else at the moment. Sebitti don’t function very well under those hindrances of humanity.

  Metatron shakes his hand absently, busy studying the scrolling sigils on his palmtop. He lets Carter open the door for him and slides into the backseat, still looking at the screen.

  “I understand you’ve had some problems tracking the boy,” he says.

  “Slippery little fucker,” says Carter.

  “He always was,” says Metatron. “Or could be.”

  Thomas Messenger, he thinks, looking at the sigils in his electronic book of life. Metatron wonders if the boy even really knows what he is, what they all are. Or could be.

  “We’ll get him though, sir,” says Carter. “We will get him.”

  “I know you will. He’s history.”

  GOLDEN APPLES AND GREEN LEAVES

  In Uruk, under a tree of golden apples and green leaves, Tammuz, the lover of Inanna, sat, sheened in his me-garments, lounging, still, upon his throne. Inanna fastened on Tammuz the gaze of death, spoke out against him words quiet in wrath, uttered against him cries of shame, of blame:

  “Take him! Take Tammuz away!”

  The ugallu grabbed him by his thighs, spilled milk out of his seven churns, smashed the reed pipe the shepherd played. The ugallu, who know no food or drink, who eat no offerings and drink no libations, who accept no gifts or invitations, grabbed Tammuz. They dragged him to his feet; they threw him down. They punched the husband of Inanna, slashed him with their axes.

  Tammuz wailed. He raised his hands to heaven, to the god of justice, Shamash, begging: “O Shamash, my brother-in-law, I am your sister’s husband. I brought cream—I brought milk—to your mother’s house, to Ningal’s house. It was me who brought food to the sacred shrine, me who brought the wedding gifts to Uruk. It was me who danced upon the holy lap, Inanna’s lap. Shamash, you are a god of justice and of mercy. Change my hands into a snake’s hands. Change my feet into a snake’s feet. Help me flee my demons; do not let them catch me.”

  Shamash in his mercy heard the tears of Tammuz, changed the hands of Tammuz into snake’s hands, changed the feet of Tammuz into snake’s feet. Tammuz fled his demons and they could not catch him. He slipped away, slid from their grasp and off and out and down, down into the eternal tales of transformation, metamorphic, mythic, Tammuz, Dumuzi, escaping out of Arcadia into the Fields of Elusion. Even now the shepherd boy, the king, Dumuzi, runs across cornfields in his mother’s white dress, Tammuz, veiled like a bride, a priestess or a whore, his skin, beneath the silk, the smooth and golden gleam of a gazelle under the sun. He stops to drink from a stream, hunted, alive. Sees a reflection and looks up. A dark man, a shadow, some kind of friend or brother, perhaps—or something entirely other—stands on the opposite bank, across the water.

  “Who are you?”

  Carrion Comfort

  Lightning. The rivers rise in rain, deep ochre down among the greenery and rising, brown bubbling up out of the drains, red ruin flowing over where the road should be. The day is dull with thick clouds of a summer storm but somehow still too bright, fierce with an unearthly light, blue-green, blue-blue, the tarmac mirroring the sky, sky mirroring the tarmac. Out on the road, out on the run, the boy flicks up the collar of his sodden afghan coat against the downpour, wondering if somewhere there’s a new ark for this broken covenant. This hail of liquid light—a flash of white—electric flame over the earth’s primordial blood, this second flood…is this to kill more sons of angels? He draggles long hair from his face with fingers of one hand and, with the other, reaches out a thumb, hoping—in vain, it seems—to hitch a ride.

  Poet, prodigal, pilgrim Thomas still wears a silver cross around his neck, a half-forgotten article of childhood faith buried among the beads of his new age, an age of adulthood, of newfound, foundering, floundering identity. He feels it in his fingers, behind a wooden amulet, the leather mojo bag that Finnan gave to him back in another time and place, a world away. It’s North Carolina. It’s not 2017, though. Screw that. Pick a year, any year. Let’s make it 1971. New age. New gods…or older ones. The cross is cool, crisp-edged, metallic amongst its rough, organic brethren. He shakes wild rain from his hair, snorting, a horse, and laughs up at the sky, opens his mouth to it. If he had any remnant of that superstition anyway, he shrugs, the situation calls more for Saint Christopher. And anyway, he has his own charms now.

  Thunder. He writes in his journal. Sleep is a dark comfort from the dreams of day, sleep in the arms of a stranger. Sex is play. Picked up in a bar, fucking in a motel. Awake. Aware. Await. Away. It’s always the same, he thinks, in roadhouse after roadhouse; there’s the one that calls you beatnik, and the one that calls you faggot, and the one that doesn’t call you anything, just watches, drinking his beer with dry lips, dry mouth, drinking you. Long hair—hey girly boy—and hippy badges—which way you heading, Canada or Mexico—blue boot-cut hustler hipster jeans ripped at the ass—you selling that, girly boy.

  And all you have to do is wait for him to leave with all his friends…and wait for him to come back in alone.

  “Get the fuck out of here. Just…here, take this and go.”

  He shrugs. He wasn’t going to ask for money, but if it’s offered…He slides his fingers through the scruff of rough hair running from his navel down—he shifts position, settling cock into the comfort of its natural canter, pulls on his jeans and buttons them, buckles his belt. It’s getting light again outside. And inside the motel room, attraction sated, revulsion burns in the redneck’s face now, redder still with shame. Thomas offers an indifferent shrug.

  “Good Book says it’s a sin to lay with a man as if he was a woman. Don’t say nothing about laying with him as if you were.”

  Carrion comfort for this guy, he thinks.

  “Fucking hippy draft-dodger,” the man mutters, “that’s what makes me sick looking at you.”

  “Sure. Whatever.”

  And Thomas feels, under his shirt, against his chest and buried amongst all the beads, the dog tags…cool, crisp-edged, metallic. You don’t know shit. This Thomas is a nineteen-year-old veteran. Nine
teen years and as old as war itself.

  He pulls his coat on and walks out the door into the river of rain that washes his tracks away behind him as he walks. If he walks far enough in the rain, he thinks, maybe it will wash away his scent.

  But it would have to wash his scent off the skin of the Vellum itself and he’s pretty deeply ingrained in that.

  THE LIONESS AND THE GAZELLE

  His heart, the shepherd’s heart, Tammuz’s heart was full of tears. Tammuz staggered across the steppe, stumbled and fell, and sobbed:

  “O steppe, sound a lament for me! O crabs in the river, mourn for me! O frogs in the river, cry for me! O Sirtur, mother, sob for me! And if she cannot find the five breads, if she cannot find the ten breads—if she does not know the day I’m dead—then you, tell her, O steppe, I beg you, tell my mother. On this steppe, my mother will weep for me. On this steppe, my sister will grieve for me.

  And on that steppe, the shepherd boy lay down to sleep. Tammuz lay down to sleep and, as he lay among the buds and rushes, dreamed a dream.

  Tassili-n-Ajer or Lascaux, 10,000 BCE or today.

  It is a dry, hot and sun-bleached day in the savannah, and a lion slouches slowly through the tall grass. A slender buck twitches nostrils at the scent of predator in the air, and looks at us, and blinks long lashes over deep dark eyes. Vultures wheel lazily overhead. Turning to look around us, we can see the herd of aurochs grazing on the open skies and, superimposed like ghost-forms over this vision of a veldt, lithe copper-skinned and dark-haired villagers dance, recline and hunt. A dog lies curled up beside (beyond? behind?) a strange figure wearing animal skins, a beaked mask and what might be perhaps a feathered cloak or wings. Everything is still, poised in the moment.