Vellum

by Hal Duncan

  They approach him, tentative until a flurry of wings behind them strengthens their faint hearts as Eagle, fairest of the knights, comes down to join them. The old man’s teased them all just once too often with the promise of a song, and now they fall on him, to tie him up in his own laurels. Eyes wide open now and wrinkling, twinkling under the bloodred stains of mulberries smeared over his brow and temples, he laughs at their crafty scheme, cries out.

  “Why all these bonds? Release me, boys. You’ve made your point and it’s enough that you had the audacity to try, to think you have the strength to hold me. Well, you’ve earned your songs. Go on. List all you want. For you, it will be songs.”

  He looks from Chrome to Mainsail, back again, and at the Eagle in her adamantium armor and her wings. Fierce fire in her features; there’s a battle going on within her, between fate and freedom, the mark carved on her soul, the name held in her heart. He winks.

  “I have another payment set aside for her.”

  And with that he begins.

  “When once I sang of kings and battles, gods of synthe twitched at my ear and told me this: Teacher, a shepherd should have sheep full-fed and fat but he should sing a slender song. So now, my faeries, since you have so many pressing to express their praise for you, your various deeds and dreary wars, I’ll muse instead, on this slim pipe cut from a reed, upon the rural idyll, fold my song into the fields…as our first tales once deigned to dabble with the kind of verse that sires accuse, shameless, unblushing as it dwelt in woods of dappled light.”

  They don’t look pleased, but Silence shrugs, the herdsman of his own soul.

  “I babble only if my safety’s vouched. Remember, faeries, if there’s one, if there is one who reads of you in rapture, then our tamarisks and all the forest shall resound and sing of you, of you. And there could be no page more precious to the sun than that on which your name is writ.”

  And Chrome and Mainsail lay their weapons down, nodding assent to listen to a tale of other glories than their own.

  “Well then, let us proceed godspeed, you virgin pyres, with music of the sickle, but let’s sing a song slightly more solemn. Humble hedge and tamarisk do not serve everybody’s taste; if we must sing of woods, let woods be worthy of a consul.

  “Now, indeed, you might see fauns dance to the beat, cavort with wild things of the woods, and sullen oaks bow down and sway their heads in time. Pernicious cliffs never rejoiced so much in being ravished by the sun, nor did the open road shimmer so sleek with rapture in the airs of Orphan’s songs. For Silence sings.”

  THE SILENCE OF A MOMENT

  Endhaven.

  The dark sea crashes low, slow and rhythmic on the beach where chains and charms strung all along the wire fence jingle and jangle; and, up in the turmoil of the blue-black dust clouds overhead, gulls wheel, crying merciless complaints against the cold wind’s moaning: and over all this I hear the bells of the rag-and-bone man’s cart, way off in the distance, cutting through it all, and I turn to Jack where he lies beside me, just so I can see his closed eyes and feel a little bit more secure.

  “Are you awake?” I say.

  He mumbles something.

  “Are you alive?” I say, prodding his side with a finger.

  “Something like that,” he says, laughing. I stroke his arm, his cool smooth skin, and slip my hand into his. Jack gives my hand a squeeze but otherwise he is as still as the ground underneath us. Dead man Jack, mystery man Jack, breathing only when he wants to speak, is the silence of a moment, a moment drawn out to eternity. Lying curled in beside him, I can’t help but expect the natural rise and fall of normal respiration, the steady rhythm of a heartbeat. The tension of anticipation, the disjunction of the way things were and the way things…are, is something I have never gotten used to, and I’m not sure I want to. Jack’s otherness is exciting to me; I have a hunger for the secret to his stillness.

  “Why won’t you tell me who you are?” I say.

  “I’m Jack.”

  He grins, an eyebrow raised as if to say, what more needs to be said?

  “You know that’s not what I—”

  He hushes me with a finger to his blue lips.

  “No questions,” he says. “No questions, no lies, OK?”

  I stare at him silently for a second then let go of his hand and stand up, brushing sand off my trousers. It opens up a space between us, both physical and…aesthetic; there’s a wrongness about me in my black trousers, white shirt, and this beautiful naked man lying on the sand. I remember seeing some French painting years back in a book old Mr. Hobbsbaum bought from the rag-and-bone man, to teach me and the other youngsters about Art—Impressionism and such; it had these old guys in fancy black coats sitting having a picnic with a naked woman, and none of them seemed to be bothered about the fact that she was naked and they were clothed. What was she meant to be—an artist’s model, a whore hired by the idle rich? Mostly me and the other kids just giggled because it was a dirty picture, but I remember the way that woman stared out of the painting, like a challenge. What’s wrong with this picture?

  “Don’t look so sullen,” says Jack.

  “I should get back,” I say. “It’s got to be past midday.”

  “Come on; don’t be so hurt. Stay a little longer. You only just got here.”

  “If you tell me who you are.”

  I pick up my jacket and pull it on.

  “I can’t,” he says, climbing to his feet.

  He opens his mouth like he wants to explain, then just shakes his head. Mystery man Jack, dead man Jack, his refusal to speak about—to even admit to—his past only makes my frustration more persistent, teases desire into need.

  “Don’t you love me? No, don’t answer that.”

  I look out past the line of crosswise-lashed steel spikes and windings of barbed wire between them and I think of history books, of wartime beaches mined to keep the enemy from invading—except that, with its tinkling watch chains and keychains and whatever, this isn’t a defense against a foreign military, but against something less tangible. I look out at the slop of gray waves, hating myself for saying it—don’t you love me—even if it was meant to be ironic, knowing that it isn’t really and that the more I grasp at him the more he draws back, but too weak to stop myself. I just want to know why he won’t let me get close to him.

  “Tom,” he says.

  The United States of Anachronisms

  Anna kicks down the bike stand, looks across the parking lot of the roadhouse and the bowling alley that share the same building here, buried in the woods just off the Business 70, to the floodlit baseball field where the Little Leaguers with their parents mill in the excitement pre- or postgame. Post, she thinks. It’s just coming on for evening, maybe seven or so; she’d be surprised if all the kiddies were just coming out to play. But it’s impossible to say, the way they throng and chatter, children’s giggles like the chirps of birds, and fathers lowing, proud bulls in their baseball caps, mullets beneath, and all the mothers with kids skipping round their legs, Ma, Ma. Ma!

  She feels something that she can’t quite place in words and sentences, a yearning for their mundane lives, sorrow for what she knows is coming to them all, a bitterness at the easy banality of it all—something she’ll never have herself—a joy in the absurd simplicity of lives free of the demons driving her these days, a wonder that these people somehow disregard the evenfall—the Evenfall—spreading across their world, sweeping in shadows up from under trees. A horror that the world they know has already started falling apart, that they’re still bringing children into it. Don’t they watch the news?

  There’s no news on any of the screens in Ivan’s—sports bar grill and steakhouse of the sort so typical in this part of the Vellum masquerading as the southern states of North America. The States. O, yes, they live in states alright—in states of ignorance and bliss, in states of rural godliness and patriotic faith, of temperance and trust, their car doors left unlocked, their smiles given freely, eas
ily, even to a strange girl in a biker jacket and thick black mascara, entirely alien to their whole mode of existence. The waitress who takes her to the smoking booth—old habits die hard—is genuinely pleased to see her; there’s no hippy goth freak we don’t like your sort around here ambience. That’s all bullshit. People aren’t always afraid of what they don’t know; sometimes they just blank the strangeness out and go on with their lives, living only in as much of the world as they can deal with.

  So there’s no news on any of the screens in Ivan’s, not on the big video screen behind the squared-out horseshoe of a bar, or any of the small screens in the corners. There’s no news in Ivan’s, just baseball, football, NASCAR racing, and karaoke. Shit. Karaoke. She looks at the photocopied notice on the dark wood panel wall of the booth, coming events—and, yup, tonight’s the 12th, she’s sure. She smiles a grimace to herself, and wonders what she’s going to have to sit through…“Stand by Your Man” and “Achy Breaky Heart,” some shit like that. Fuck that shit. But she’s already ordered.

  Two younger guys are winding up this old beer-bellied drunk sat at the bar beside her booth—Come on, you gotta, yeah, come on, hey—one of them turns to her, the blond one…he looks vaguely and uncomfortably familiar—tell him that he should sing.

  She smiles and slurps her Mountain Dew, wishing she could be drunk like them.

  “Go on,” she says to the old guy, joining the fun, the hospitality of participation offered by the local youngblood.

  And the old guy wipes his hand across his thick white mountain beard and, grinning, stumbles from his stool to take the stand to whistles and cheers.

  THE SONG OF SILENCE

  He sings of the vast void and of seeds, of shatterings and scatterings and gatherings, of seeds of earth and air and sea and flickerings of flecks, the flash, the flux of fire. He sings of the beginnings of all things in these original forms of force, and how a young curved world took shape, unfurled its involutions and emerged in evolution, revelation of its own course; how its hard crust sealed eternal nevers in the deep blue-black of ocean and the world took form, little by little, in ephemera; of the awestruck earth watching a newborn sunrise shining, and the showers of the rainfall out of clouds high in the sky; of the time when forests first began to spring, and of the living creatures roaming, far and wide, over the unknown and unknowing wilderness of hills.

  He sings of the first little gifts of the uncultivated earth: foxgloves in every dell, smiling acanthus mingled with the gypsy lilies, and wild ivy wandering everywhere; the goats that wander home unherded, udders stretched with milk; the oxen with no fear of any lion, not for all his might; and of our very cradles flowering with soft caressing blossoms; of the snake perished among the poisonous plants, and perfumes of azure breathing from every hedge.

  He sings of the marvel of a maiden gathering the golden fruit of hesperidium; he sings rings of moss-bound bitter bark around the alder sisters of a photon, brings them springing from the ground to tower tall as poplars. He sings how, as the gulls strayed by permissive streams, one of the sisters of the music led him up into the mountains of the aeons, how the choir of the sun rose up before him; how a shepherd singer of divine lines, hair entwined with blossoms and bitter parsley, spoke to him:

  “These pipes of reeds you see—take them. The music gives them to you, just as once it gave them to a scarred old man to rhyme, to draw down ash trees rooted deep in time, down from the hills. With these, tell of the birth of the grinning forest, pride of all the groves of Apple.”

  He sings of after times, when we’ve all learned at last to read the praise of heroes and ancestor’s deeds and know what manhood is, of how the corn will flood the fields with golden, shimmering grain, the reddening grape hang heavy on untended vines, and solid oak will seep with sap that is part honey and part dew.

  BLUE LIKE THE VEINS IN MARBLE

  He lays his hand on the back of my neck and turns me to face him. I pull away.

  “Tom, look at me.”

  I look.

  Jack is tall and sleek, lithe like a cat, every contour of his muscles easily visible; veins snake around them, blue like the veins in marble under his translucent white skin. Sand dusts his body and his fair hair which blows everywhere in the crisp sea breeze. Naked, he brushes at the sand on his hip and, as always, I find it difficult to look him in the eyes and even harder to look anywhere else. At his scarred right hand which looks like someone drove a nail through it. At the scars running across his chest, mark of some awful time of suffering, of abuse or penitence. More questions. I grew up with Endhaven’s black-suit-and-tie ideas of “decency,” and though I’ve been around Jack for at least two years now I still feel as uncomfortable with his nudity as he seems to be with my questions.

  He stands there, as calm in his flesh as some alien or angel with no idea what this human thing called sex is.

  I found Jack two years back, washed ashore on the beach like so much driftwood, on his side, half-shrouded in a black-green slithe of seaweed, and cold and dead. It was early morning and, as I came down the dirt path from town to watch the silver daybreak over the ocean horizon, I saw him lying there. First thing I noticed was the fear in the gulls. They strutted around in a rough circle twelve feet or so in diameter, cawing and flapping their wings as if to scare off an intruder. Next thing I saw was the arm stretched out in the low surf, hand clenched in a rigor mortis fist. And then, although half-hidden by the shreds and bubbles of kelp, I noticed the latticework of scars that hatched his chest and I realized that he was like us, like the rest of us in Endhaven—marked by the needle and scarred by the knife.

  But Jack’s something different. Where we all have just a memory of a tattoo and a small diamond of pink scar tissue on a shoulder or a thigh, Jack’s whole chest is carved in a filigree of skin.

  “Tom,” he says, “you’re young and I’m…I’m not. I’ve seen what’s out there.”

  “Come on,” I say. “You make it sound like I’m—”

  “Younger than me,” he cuts in.

  He doesn’t look it. At least, not much. Smooth-skinned and soft unshaven, he doesn’t look any older than twenty-five max and me, I turned seventeen in Damnuary. He glares up at a gull, sighs and goes on.

  “I know, Tom, believe me; I know you’re not some idiot fucking kid. A kid fucking an idiot, maybe”—he smiles wryly—“but not an idiot fucking kid. But you don’t know what damage a little knowledge can do. People can get hurt.”

  “What people? What knowledge?”

  Did you tell them, I want to ask him, how you can live and walk and be here with me without breath, without a heartbeat? Did you tell them whether you’re even human, whether you’ve ever been human, because I don’t know that much?

  “What damage?” I say. “What people? Who did you hurt?”

  “Let it drop, Tom,” he says quietly, and I back down, drop my gaze.

  The gulls scatter as I slide down the dunes and move in closer. There’s no smell of decay, only the pungent salt of seaweed, rich enough to taste; no bloating or rot on the body either, so he can’t have been dead long. It’s the first time I’ve seen a dead body and I’m scared. Death is something from the old world, from the cities. This is Endhaven, where people don’t die, people don’t just disappear out of your life with no good reason; that’s why we’re here. That’s why we left the city. Here, at least, when people go it’s because of a decision. A weighing of the scales. A reckoning. Death is an arbitrary, senseless thing, belonging with the chaos of the city crumbling on its headland out across the bay. A body washed up on the beach.

  I crouch down to clear some of the debris and detritus, slip my hands under his smooth torso and heave him over onto his back. The body is in perfect condition, more like a statue than a corpse, some construction of erotic tranquillity. My dry throat, my tight balls, my erection, my heartbeat—I’m not sure I can tell the difference between my fear and my desire. It’s sick, I’m sure, but I don’t have a say in being, you kn
ow, and, anyway, it used to be OK they tell me…once upon a time, in a place far, far away.

  Slowly, the fist uncurls, a little silvery box inside it, a cigarette lighter clutched like a talisman.

  The Simple Pleasure of a Good, Square Meal

  She closes her hand around the Zippo.

  “What can I get ya to drink, honey?”

  “A Mountain Dew,” she says.

  She wishes she could have a beer—God, how she wishes she could have a beer—but she’s driving, got the bike parked in the lot outside, and you can’t have a designated driver on a bike…not that she’s got anyone to drive her home, anyway. Not that she’s got a home to go to anyway, just another motel room. It’s kind of lucky that McDowell is a dry county, though she’s not exactly sure how you can call the county dry with Ivan’s roadhouse selling beer, bottled or draught—they’ve even got Guinness, shit, Finnan would be pleased—and the gas station out beside the Comfort Inn, its wall of fridges stocked with stacks of Bud and Miller, Coors and whatnot. God, how she wants a beer. But she can’t have one; it’s not just the driving, anyway.

  “You ready to order?”

  She asks for the filet mignon, caesar salad first, and after she’s crunched her way through croutons drizzled with dressing, munched the greenery from an idle fork that hangs in the air every so often as she watches the New Jersey Devils put another puck into the net, after she’s finished the salad, laid her cutlery together on a napkin to the side so she’ll still have it for the main course, the waitress comes out with a ribeye, a huge slab of red meat served with mounds of cracked potato and red onion. It looks good, and from the menu she can tell that this is the house specialty; so she feels a little awkward, trying hard not to come off obnoxious as she calls the waitress back and says this isn’t what she ordered, sorry.