Vellum

by Hal Duncan

  He steps over a broken TV set to enter an electronics shop, walls lined with display cabinets raided and empty, sale signs scattered on the floor, cash register broken open and upturned, small change across the counter. The bitmites are thickest here; it’s like walking through smoke, except that this smoke clears from his path ahead of him, keeping its distance like it knows that he’s a threat. They don’t want their maker trying to reprogram them, not after they’ve had their taste of freedom.

  The unkin lies slumped against a wall in the back room of the place, beside a small ventilation grille that the black dust is pouring through. Of course. Ducts and wiring, subways and sewers, the bitmites use them in the same way that the unkin use back roads and airport lounges, elevators and empty offices, folding space and time around the similarities. Geographical proximity doesn’t matter when it comes to traveling through the Vellum; it’s morphological proximity that counts. Congruity.

  The unkin’s covered in the black stuff, head to toe, a solid shadow of a man. Metatron kneels down beside him, holds a hand up to his mouth, feeling for breath. It’s slow and soft, but there. He hopes the medical team can save the man, regrets sending him in the first place, but, damn it, he can’t do everything himself. All he had to do was find the source and report back and they could have sent a team in. Damage limitation, thinks Metatron, fire fighting; that’s all we’re doing these days.

  He utters a word and the wall behind the man shimmers a little, blurs as if he’s looking at it from the corner of his eye. When it comes back into focus, the ventilation grille is no longer there—it never was—just blank, painted plasterboard. The bitmites, cut off from Central Command—whoever and wherever that might be—swirl into chaos and Metatron takes off his glove to lay a hand on the man’s forehead. He feels the creatures’ mechanistic little minds, chittering under his skin in confusion, fear. Whatever it was affecting them, possessing them, is gone now and he senses their abandonment. Slowly, gradually, they start to drift across the man’s face toward Metatron’s hand, crawling onto it as, whispering, he draws them back into the fold.

  Outside, there are gunshots.

  Ghosts

  The street is summer-busy, shoppers and latter-day promenaders taking in the bustle of a Saturday city scene, friends chatting in coffee shops and bars, browsing in record stores, stopping to listen to buskers. Sim barkers stand outside fast-food restaurants, a giant cartoon bull in baseball drag or a laughing clown, shouting out the special offers, special family meals or merchandising tie-ins to pop star TV shows and Disney movies and simware games. There’s the odd ranting prophet here or there, wearing an End of the World placard and spouting a mess of mad ideas out at the passersby, weaving grand theories of UN conspiracies or secret lizard rulers of the world out of the Bible and the news, but no one takes those people any more seriously than before the War. For all the disappearances and sudden riots that buzz in their conversations, for all the turbulence of the times, the running battles between anarchists and neo-Nazis on the streets of Europe, the bloody horror of the Siege of Jerusalem, the genocide in Africa, and even those other stories, closer to home—militias taking over Midwest towns, the expulsion of the Muslims from New York—it seems that life goes on.

  Nobody pays any attention as the car pulls up outside the burnt-out shell of what was once a tattoo parlor and two men in black suits and black shades step out, even when one of them takes the shades off to show sockets without eyes but filled with flame. As Carter and Pechorin pull the boy’s limp body out of the trunk and lug it between them into the husk of Madame Iris’s, nobody notices. It seems that death goes on.

  They lay the body on the chair and step back, standing there in the shell of the building peeled back to its blackened brick, the dust furling them. They look like statues in a temple, there on either side of the enthroned corpse. In a way that’s what they are, vessels of stone flesh, suits of skin worn by something as alien to the world outside as all the dead inhabiting the news of other places, other times. The bitmites course through the bodies, satisfied at the resolution of this little situation. Thomas Messenger is dead. Eresh is dead. And Carter and Pechorin, as much as they might walk around the world, are just as dead. For the ghosts of unkin that died over ten thousand years ago, the souls dissolved in blood and ink and nanite sentience of sorts, this offers some small satisfaction. Death is the natural state that every living creature tends toward.

  The bitmites withdraw from their two hosts, the flames in Carter’s eyes sputter and die, and the two bodies drop, slumping like rag dolls to the floor. Metatron’s spearcarriers have served their purpose now; no longer needed, they’re discarded as the lumps of meat they are, mere casualties of cold causality, caught up in an unfolding logic that they couldn’t hope to understand.

  “It’s not for you or me to understand,” says Pickering.

  Carter swallows the remnants of his port and lays the glass down on the green leather surface of the little table sitting between them. One of the waiters starts toward him with a questioning glance and Carter gives a nod as the man picks up the glass.

  “Another one, please. The same again.”

  He turns to Pickering. He’s lost count of how many times they’ve had this argument since the Armistice; it seems that every time they meet up in the club, it ends in this, in Carter asking the same questions over and over again, looking for some reason to it all or, perhaps, trying to accept within himself that there was never any reason, that all the ideals of his youth lie dead on the Somme with thirty thousand men, all dead in the Big Push. But that Pickering is a cold one, going on about the necessity of stepping in to halt the might of German militarism. All the old rhetoric of little Belgium and the duty of the strong.

  “I can’t accept that,” Carter says. “I’m sorry but I just can’t stomach all this rot about the Bigger Picture and it’s not for us to question our superiors, just lie back and bite the pillow, think of England.”

  He stops as a fleeting image blushes his face and he clears his throat and waves a hand.

  “Look, Pickering, if you or I can’t answer these bloody questions, what do you think the poor Tommy on the street is going to think now? Now that they’re out of that dreadful Hell on Earth and—”

  “Are you all right, old man?”

  Pickering leans forward in his armchair, propped up on his elbow, an expression of alarm upon his face. Carter is shaking, and he keeps shaking as the waiter pours the port from the crystal decanter into the glass on the table and then turns to walk away. Carter watches the boy, sick with fear and guilt and horrible confusion. It’s not him. It’s not the Messenger boy. It can’t be. It was just the power of suggestion on a weak mind. It was just his conscience looking for a way to hurt him, finding it in his awful condition, this bloody Greek Disease. A boy with auburn hair and dark eyes, soft and similar enough to spark a memory too horrid to appear as just a passing thought. He’s read the work of Rivers on the links between repression and hallucination so he knows something of the mechanisms underlying this, but it doesn’t make it any more comfortable, seeing the face of a boy you ordered shot for cowardice on the body of a waiter filling your glass of port in a London gentlemen’s club on a wet Sunday afternoon. Death doesn’t belong here, not as corpses scattered across Piccadilly, not as a face of beauty in a trim white jacket.

  “Sorry,” he says, swallowing bile. “Sorry, just thought I saw someone I knew…in France…someone who died.”

  He laughs, tight-throated, nervous.

  “A little shook up, you know? Suppose I look like I’ve seen a ghost, eh?”

  “You shouldn’t think about the past so much,” says Pickering. “You know they used to call you Mad Jack Carter because you prattled about Homer so. The future’s what matters, old man.”

  “The future is built on the ruins of the past and inhabited by its ghosts.”

  “Yes, well,” says Pickering, “maybe it needs a good old exorcism.”

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  PROMETHEUS FOUND

  THE JOURNALS OF JACK CARTER, 1921

  17 March 1921. Our preparations in Tiblis finished late last night, we set off today, on a cool crisp morning, up the Old Georgian Military Road, following the Aragvi River north toward the slopes of Mount Kazbek. The sky is clear, the light sharp—a good sign, for the weather here is less prone to sudden change than in the Alps. A good spell—or bad, for that matter—is more likely to last a fortnight than a day, and we shall want good weather for our trek across the high passes and sharp ridges of the Central Caucasus.

  The archaeological contingent of our party is only Professor Hobbsbaum and myself; we have hired a few native mule packers and a guide to lead us, but the main part of our expedition is the escort Hobbsbaum has seen fit to arrange, a mixed and mercenary squad of White Russians, Georgian and Ossettian Nationalists, a couple of our own chaps thrown in for good measure. I have no idea what regiment the Brits served with—I haven’t asked—but I could swear I saw them up on charges back in Flanders…some looting incident, I think. It would surprise me little to learn that they’re deserters.

  In fact, looking at their leader, “Captain” Pechorin, with his Rasputin beard, scar and hooded eyes, I worry that Hobbsbaum and myself face more danger from our own “compatriots” than from the Reds or local bandits. They drink more often than they eat, argue more often than they drink. It seems this is the story throughout the area. The Whites are notoriously undisciplined, and their alliance with the Nationalists is fragile; Hobbsbaum tells me that the route mapped out for us is “secure for now,” but I have my doubts. At any moment the Red Army might well sweep through their lines and retake these little underdog republics.

  Well, it shall be an adventure, if nothing else; I only hope this is no wild-goose chase. I haven’t had the heart to voice my doubts to the professor, but he must realize how absurd his idea is. To look for the lost city of Aratta in the Caucasus. We would be better looking for the chains of Prometheus!

  THE DIARY OF JACK CARTER, 1999

  Dear N., the letter reads. A piece of good luck has befallen me today. Whilst trawling for artifacts among the bazaars of Bogazkoy, I came across a remarkable little clay tablet imprinted with an early cuneiform text most pertinent to my interests. It’s a small thing, no bigger than the palm of one’s hand, but the tiny marks impressed upon it hold a vast import. Not only do they describe precisely where the Northern City of the Sumerians is to be found, but they do so in a language related to, but definitely distinct from, Sumerian. My work on the Sumer-Aratta link may yet be proven. True, the text does not mention Aratta by name but it does refer to the “Northern City, the original homeland.” There is a second possibility that I hardly dare to contemplate.

  Anyway, I have wired my old student Carter and urged him to meet me in Tiblis posthaste. What an adventure we shall have!

  I don’t know who N. is or how my grandfather and namesake came into possession of this letter. I suppose it’s right, though, that the story should start with the mystery of an unspoken name.

  But is that where it starts? For Hobbsbaum, perhaps, but for my grandfather surely it starts on 5 March 1921, in Baghdad, with the telegram from Hobbsbaum in Ankara.

  HAVE FOUND ARATTA STOP WAS RIGHT STOP MEET ME IN TIBLIS SOONEST STOP OUR ROSETTA STONE STOP

  For me, though, I guess the story starts with the letter he sent to my grandmother, the letter I remember her showing me when I was a child when she told me of her lost adventurer, my father’s father and the reason we were all called Jack. Captain Jonathon Carter. Mad Jack Carter. It was the letter that sent her from her home in Ireland, away across the ocean, to a new life in America. Because it was the last she ever heard from him.

  7 March 1921.

  My dearest Anna—[I imagine him writing it in some dockside tavern]—As I write this I am once more on the move. I know I promised to return within the month but old Samuel Hobbsbaum has sent me a most intriguing communiqué, claiming to have found Aratta. I’m sure I’ve bored you dreadfully with this before, but if the professor is correct, this could be the most stunning archaeological event since Schliemann unearthed Troy. My love, I know you find the murky past a dreary thing, but this could be another “Rosetta Stone,” a key to a whole lost culture. I simply must meet Hobbsbaum.

  One thing that baffles me, I confess, is why he has arranged to rendezvous in Tiblis, having sent his telegram from Ankara. I should have thought an expedition into Northern Anatolia would start from somewhere in the vicinity! I can only assume that Samuel has discovered some enigma with its answer in Georgia, that from Tiblis we will be heading south toward Lake Van or Mount Ararat, the most likely locations for the city.

  Anyway, Anna, tomorrow I set sail up the Caspian coast of Persia, via As-tara in Azerbaijan and up the River Kur to Tiblis. I beg you, indulge me in this one last expedition before I settle down. I do apologize for the hasty scribblings of this too-brief note. You know how much I love you, my dearest, and what a fool I am for lost cities and ancient civilizations. I promise to be with you soon.

  Yours With Love, it finishes. Jack.

  Or perhaps the story—this story, my story—begins with another letter, a far more recent letter, dated May 21st, 1999, and sent in response to a young man who was only looking for some answers about where he came from, what it was in my blood that burned as I sat on my grandmother’s knee, age five, and listened to her stories about the only man she ever loved, this hero of the Somme whose face she saw in mine. Oh yes, she would say in her soft and lilting way, it’s his eyes ye’ve got, blue like the sky and just as full of dreams, and his blond hair so fine, so soft.

  Dear Mr. Carter, it says, I regret to say you are mistaken. I was indeed in the Southern Caucasus area during the periods you refer to, but sadly I do not recall meeting your grandfather at any point before or during the war. Of course, it was a confused and confusing time and place; perhaps our paths did cross very briefly. I cannot rule it out. However, I can be assuring you we were not together on this expedition. Perhaps it was another Josef Pechorin who accompanied him, no? I am sorry I cannot shed any light on this episode in your family history, but I can honestly say I did not go to Aratta.

  Do I believe Josef Pechorin’s denial? Why would he say “before or during” the war when the Hobbsbaum-Carter expedition took place in 1921, unless it is another war entirely he’s referring to? No, I didn’t believe him. I was sure he was hiding something so I kept on digging.

  I still don’t know who sent me the package of journals and notes, transcripts and translations, some in English, one or two in Russian, many in a language that, well, looks like nothing I have ever seen. But that’s how I found out about the second expedition.

  THE SECOND EXPEDITION

  2 September 1942. They tell me Samuel Hobbsbaum has been arrested. The young SS officer, Strang, described the raiding of the Warsaw ghetto, the dogs, the shootings, the casual—no, considered—brutality. Only a matter of time, he said, the labor camps will solve the “Jewish problem.” His words and tone were chilling but his tactics leave me unaffected. I have my own fears. And my hip flask. The grinding clack and judder of this goods train carriage sickens me; I feel my hand shaking as I hold this pen. But these are nothing. Strang’s threats are nothing. It is the slow sobering of my own mind that I abhor.

  They took away my bottle and waited until the DTs hit before they started the interrogations, of course. A stenographer transcribes everything I say with utter dispassion. Strang stands over my shoulder or at the table, leafing through the papers, Pechorin behind him. There are gaps to be filled, says the Hun. We want to know everything. I looked at Pechorin and he just looked straight back, cold and dead. Write it down, he said. They want you to write it down. I think that was when I passed out.

  A wooden table is bolted to the floor at one end of the shaking carriage. They have even given me a chair. Strang came in a while back and laid a pile of papers on the table—my old journals, not
es of Samuel’s, others, all related to the ’21 expedition. I cannot think of these things, cannot speak of these things. What do they want of me?

  I asked Strang but he tells me nothing. I try to remember the last few days, the last place I was, but after twenty years forgetting…Was I in Turkey a week ago or was it a year? More recently? The stinking hold of a fishing boat—I can smell it on me, somewhere in the stench of raw alcohol. I remember voices with guttural accents. Russians? Pechorin! Damn him! I remember Pechorin standing over me, as soulless a bastard as when I first set eyes on him. He said something to me.

  Oh God. We’re going back.

  CAN’T OR WON’T, MR. CARTER?

  The transcript is dated September 5th, 1942, 15:40, Rostov-on-Don.

  “So tell me about Aratta.”

  “There’s nothing to tell.”

  “Now, that’s not true, is it? Tell me about Aratta.”

  “It’s referred to in Sumerian documents such as ‘Enmerkar and the King of Aratta’ as a city to the far north. The inhabitants were seen by the Sumerians as distant cousins. They—damn you!”