Vellum

by Hal Duncan

  But if it’s what she wants, he thought, I’ll have to tell her.

  And so they sat in the parlor, him with his hat in hand, and they were distant enough from each other, like she already sensed the guilt in him far deeper than his failed promise. Why was he suffering so? she asked him. What awful crime was he punishing himself for? And he could hear the fear in her voice that he was going to tell her and break her heart. (Just like the fear that’s in him now, that she’s got some truth like that but it can’t be as bad as his, can it? How could it be?) He thought of the endless telling of his tale to the doctors of the Medical Board.

  “Sure and it seems I never stop talking of my sufferings,” he’d said. “A man can only talk so much.”

  “Seamus, tell me what’s driven you to the edge,” she said.

  The will of dukes, he thought, the hand of a smith. He shook his head.

  She asked him, if he loved her, God, to tell her what was wrong, don’t soften it for her; she was strong and she could take it. And he said he couldn’t, Jesus Christ Almighty, how could he tell her? “It was to do with Thomas,” he’d said, looking at those green eyes. “Please,” she’d said. And he couldn’t just tell her, he said, but…if she asked…if she asked any question…any question…he would tell her anything she wanted to know.

  And so she asked, and Seamus told her how he shot her brother.

  And now he knows it’s somehow the same thing, with her trying to tell him her own shame but needing him to prompt her, draw it out of her as she did to him. And what could it be? Jesus, what could it be that she’s afraid is so bad he might not be able to forgive her?

  The Third Player

  “I’m pregnant,” says Phreedom.

  Finnan looks down at the bottle in his hand, leans down to place it gently on the floor between his feet. The quiet words resonate in the empty church in that whispering way that only empty halls have, not quite an echo that can be made sense of, just a pious ringing of the stone in answer to the human voice.

  “Is it…?”

  “Yours?” she says. “I fucking hope so. Christ, I fucking hope so.”

  He knows it’s not the only possibility. The last time they met, in this same church, she told him exactly what they’d done to her, the angels of the Covenant who were looking for her brother.

  They’d left her for dead afterward, and in a way she was, she is; they both are—Finnan with his heart ripped out, a traitor to her and Thomas, her with a seed of hatred planted in her, poisoning her slowly. She went to Hell to try and save her brother. It didn’t end well.

  “I led them to him,” she had said. “I thought I could change the story, rip us out of it, and all the time I was just tearing an opening in the Vellum for those…creatures to get at him. You betrayed him, Finnan, but I damned him. I fucking damned him. I thought I could go back and…make things right. But time in the Vellum isn’t that simple, is it?”

  He had been sodden and filthy then, just as he is now, living hand-to-mouth, going from soup kitchen to homeless shelter, stewing in his own misery and drinking in churches just to spite the bastard God of his innocent childhood. When she’d found him, he’d expected her to hate him, but by that time she was too busy hating herself. In the end, they’d found some little solace together; she’d taken him back to her room, fed him and washed him. As they lay together in the warm bed after fucking like animals, she’d told him of all the strangers she’d used in the same way, pickups in singles bars and seedy nightclubs, dirty old men and groups of frat boys. He knew she wasn’t saying it to hurt him, but to open up herself to him because he was the only one who’d understand. They were both trying to make physical the degradation of their souls, in the ruin of their flesh.

  That was three months ago and now she’s pregnant, and it could be his, it could be any of the johns’ or marks’, Tom, Dick or Harry’s. Or it could be the angel’s.

  “Whatever,” she says, “I’m going to have it.”

  He looks at her. There’s a sort of strength to her now. She seems to have found some sort of strength in the acceptance of this, as an end to her own story, maybe, and the beginning of another. It’s like she’s fought so hard against her fate since the first day she stood up to an angel of the Covenant, she’s sold her soul to Hell only to steal the secrets of its queen, she’s torn her way into the Vellum to try and save her brother, and the futility of it all that had her broken and beat-up inside like him has now become a grim and nihilistic faith of sorts, in the emptiness of it all. While he’s still on his knees, raging against the dying of the light, she’s standing up to face the darkness, ready to walk into it, and ready for the good fight.

  He’s just waiting for his Judgment Day.

  “So you’ve picked a side then,” he says.

  “No sides,” she says. “Just me.”

  She lays a hand on her stomach.

  “Us.”

  He thinks of Anna, the lost sweetheart of his past and the way it all seems to tie together, echoes and reflections bouncing back and forth across a century. They’re creatures of the Vellum, and time in the Vellum has a funny way of weaving and looping; they tear it and they stitch it back together as they travel through it. Jesus, but Tommy made a right mess, so he did, then, now and fucking forever. One unkin’s all it takes to shatter time into a million shards that no amount of Covenant craft could put back into order. Now that the war is kicking off it’s only going to get worse.

  “You know how bad it’s going to get?” he says. “The Sovereigns and the Covenant—”

  “The Sovereigns are straw dogs. And the Covenant don’t know what they’re dealing with.”

  She pulls off her jacket to show him the pink scarred tattoo. The black ink of Eresh’s needlework crawls over her arm in such a chaos of ever-changing signs and sigils that it makes him dizzy, gives him vertigo; it’s only when she puts her arm back in the jacket sleeve that he stops feeling like he’s being sucked into a void.

  “Jesus, fookin Mary and Joseph. What the fuck?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “What do you get if you cross the queen of the dead’s blood with the ink of God’s scribe? I think they’re breeding, Finnan. And I don’t think I’m the only carrier.”

  “Metatron’s pet hawks,” he says slowly, quietly. Carter. Pechorin.

  She’s told him what came walking out of the exploding moment of Eresh’s death, in the bodies of Metatron’s two bloody-handed angel thugs, what followed her into the Vellum to drag Thomas off to an eternal grave. As much as she can make sense of.

  “I don’t think they work for Metatron any longer,” she says. “I think they’re like me.”

  She flexes her fingers in front of her; on the back of her hand, down just at the wrist, at the edge of her sleeve, he can see the clashing symbols on her skin. He reaches over to take her hand, hold it.

  “You always said you thought there was a third player,” she says, “sitting on the sidelines, staying out of the game. Jesus, I’m not even sure it understands the concept of sides.”

  Her other hand goes to her stomach.

  “But I think it just entered the game,” she says.

  Errata

  Heroes and Villains

  “Don’t try to speak,” says Malik.

  He walks around to the side of the surgical slab and lays a hand on the shoulder of the man strapped down on it. He feels the muscle twitch, ribbed tricep quivering like horseflesh, bicep in a knot, straining against the leather bonds. Fresh blood seeps from the cuts and scratches reopened on his skin by pointless struggles. The poor creature looks quite exposed, naked and vulnerable. How the mighty are fallen.

  Malik lifts his hand to straighten a gold and black obsidian cuff link. The stone glistens even in the fluorescent light of the operating theater, as shining and dark as the fixed pupils of the angel staring up at him with hate. Malik feels his lip curl up in an involuntary sneer. One shouldn’t gloat, but it’s hard not to.

  He reaches into
the pocket of his white dress uniform—his own design, replete with meaningless medals in the classic military dictator style so de rigueur in the last century; he’s nothing if not a traditionalist—and pulls out the set of dog tags.

  “Rafael Hernandez Rodriguez, Corporal, United States Marine Corps. Did you choose the body for the rank or for the name? No. Don’t try to speak, Corporal Rodriguez. It’s not worth the effort.”

  He dribbles the dog-tag chain through his hand, lets it drop, chinkling, onto the man’s chest. It only covers a fraction of the unkin lettering that’s carved all across his torso.

  “Not without a tongue,” he says.

  The archangel Rafael moans wordlessly.

  “I apologize for the crudeness of the binding, by the way”—he taps a finger on one of the sigils—“but I’m afraid we don’t have all the wonders of modern technology at our disposal. None of your bitmites here, I’m afraid.”

  He gestures around at the sparse theater, the antiquated equipment that belongs in the last century, all hulking and obsolescent, hard screens and dials, tubes, lights, mirrors.

  “No bitmites,” he says. “No microscanners. No VR modeling and mini-waldos here. No synthskin. No autosuturers. We still cut people open with stainless-steel scalpels and sew them back together with needle and thread. If we think they’ll make it through the operation.”

  Malik strokes his thick mustache, an unconscious gesture of a brooding mind.

  “Ten years of war and sanctions and military coups and more war and more sanctions and so on and on and on and on. Do you know how hard it is to get antibiotics in Damascus? Do you know the child mortality rate here?”

  Rafael just glowers at him.

  “And I’m the baby-killer,” he says. “The great and terrible Moloch.”

  “You used to be a healer, Rapiu,” he says. “Do you remember? Do you remember anything from before your blessed Covenant? Do you remember bathing the sick on the shores of the Dead Sea, handing out your medicines to the poor and needy? Do you remember watching the cities blossom in that land of salt and sand, because people could come there and be healed, because of the legacy you left behind? Or was that all burned out of you by the glory?”

  Malik leans over so he can stare back into the angel’s eyes. He wants the bastard to see him for what he is, even knowing that that’s impossible.

  “How many children died in the furnaces of Sodom and Gomorrah? How many lives did you destroy because a few intransigent unkin wouldn’t bend their knees? Your own lord couldn’t stomach it. The most glorious of all angels chose the long walk into the Vellum rather than serve what your Covenant had become.”

  The angel turns his face away, but Malik grips him by the chin, pulls it back round to meet his hatred and contempt. He thinks of a thousand years of luxury, of cities rich with the scent of cedar incense and spiced food in markets, and beautiful whores dressed in linen dyed scarlet and purple by Canaanite craftsmen, and poets of the flesh and all the wonderful, wicked deviants and decadents that he would walk amongst, a king dressed as a beggar. There was injustice. There were terrible crimes. And there were people with souls that shone as brightly as their jewels. And he thinks of three thousand years in which his name—Malik, Malak, Meleck, Moloch—has been synonymous with burning babies.

  “Understand me, Rafael. Understand me. I am not the villain here. You are.”

  “No,” says the voice behind him.

  He stands in the doorway, a shape of black, a silhouette even though the well-lit room should pour its light upon his face. Some of the black rises in wisps off of him, like steam from a beast of war slick with its own sweat. The volutes carve out symbols in the air, thin trails of thought. Malik tilts his head, more curious than concerned, even though the breach of his security is clearly severe. The city has been sealed off for the last week, ever since he choppered in with the angel Rafael drugged up in a body bag, a squad of guards scouring the landscape all around them with their nightshades glowing white in the darkness, lances snapping this way and that to train on any smallest motion, and the pair of black monks in the back of the Sikorsky, legs curled into lotus position, chanting the mantras that rendered them as invisible to the watcher angels scattered all around the area as to the Allied radars and surveillance satellites. No one should even know he’s here and even if they did, they shouldn’t have been able to get past his circles within circles of protection. Part of him feels he should be outraged at the inadequacies of his minions; but, as Malik would dearly like the angel Rafael to understand, Malik doesn’t have minions, just men and women willing to die to drive the occupying forces from his land, their land. His Philistine Liberation Organization, he calls it, sometimes, in his moments of blackest humor.

  “No?” he says calmly to the shadow-thing.

  It’s got to be some emissary from another rebel group, of course. Maybe Marduk, he thinks. Or Nergal. Nergal does have a tendency for melodrama, playing the underworld god, the dispossessed turned demon. Playing right into the Covenant’s hands, like so many of them.

  “No,” the creature says. “No more villains. No more heroes. No more victims.”

  The tongueless moaning of the angel on the table grows louder, higher-pitched, more wail than moan now.

  “A commendable concept,” says Malik bitterly. “And who might you be?”

  And we tell him exactly what we are.

  The Heart of Damascus

  White light, white noise, he feels the loss rip through him like a blow to the back of the head, like a syringe of morphine rammed into his spine at the base of his neck, squirted and then broken off with a savage downward snap. A searing, blinding dagger of sensation followed by utter numbness and confusion. Gasping. Staggering. Metatron hits the floor on his knees like a boxer with a glass jaw, and doesn’t even see or hear the palmtop crack against the wooden desk, tumble and skitter on the marble floor. His dreadlocks hang down over his face, his arms shaking as he tries to hold himself up like a drunk over a toilet bowl, retching, grasping for breath.

  Rafael’s dead.

  “—some kind of explosion, in the heart of Damascus, just a few seconds ago—”

  Phreedom crawls across the motel floor, sobbing and clutching at her stomach. It’s too early. It’s too fucking early, but the cramps are unbearable.

  “—reports coming in from all over the city, a sort of blinding flash of—”

  She reaches for the phone up on the bedside table, knocks it down onto the carpet beside her, then another cramp hits her and her fist curls even tighter round the corner of the quilt. Liquid dribbles down between her thighs.

  “—horrific devastation, absolutely unimaginable—”

  She reaches for the phone, pushing her hand through a moment of time as solid as a wall. Goddamn it. Fucking. Not now.

  Time flickers.

  “—Israel or America. Nobody knows but this is sure to—”

  The TV flickers too, switching channels every couple of seconds—CNN, NBC, Fox, BBC, ABC, VNV, ANN, channel after channel and some of them she knows never existed until this moment, until some fucking bastard unkin bit the farm and ripped a chunk right out of reality as they went down. The channels are changing. Literally. She grabs the phone and punches at a key. It’s too fucking early. Oh, Christ, it’s too fucking early but she’s not going to let them take this from her.

  “I need an ambulance,” she sobs into the phone, not even hearing the voice on the other end. “I need an ambulance. Room…I don’t know. I need an ambulance.”

  And then the gurney is slamming through swinging doors, lights flashing above her head and doctors leaning over her, hands examining, and she hears phrases like breech birth and C-section and have you taken anything?

  “No,” she says.

  No, no, no, no, no.

  And Carter reaches into Seamus Finnan’s body, into his heart to read what’s written on it like a blind man reading Braille, his fingers feeling for the filigree of unkin language on a h
eart of damasked steel, while Pechorin holds him there.

  “Where is the Messenger boy?” he says, and then he finds the answer and he looks at Finnan with an honest shock on his face.

  The shell blast knocks him off-balance for a second and he has to steady himself against the dugout’s wall. A tin mug rattles on the floor where it’s fallen.

  “I don’t care what you say, Sergeant. It’s decided. Dismissed.”

  Sergeant Finnan snaps to attention, salutes him with a look of utter hatred and stalks from the room. Pickering stands up from the bunk, a cruel smile on his face.

  “Tims, eh?”

  “Shut up,” says Carter. “Are you bloody well enjoying this?”

  “Come on, Jack. The boy’s a coward and a deserter, and an urning at that.”

  “What did you say?”

  He spits the words with fury.

  “I said he was a fucking faggot,” says Joey. “Come on, man. You saw the way he was looking at you. So we had some fun with him. He’ll be OK.”

  “Stop the car,” says Carter, leaning forward.

  “What the fuck’s the matter with you?”

  He pulls the car over to the curb and Carter fumbles the handle open, falls out onto the sidewalk to vomit at the feet of a disgusted passerby. Carter looks up and it’s a boy’s face looking back at him, a face he recognizes without knowing. He scrambles back and away.

  “Jesus, Jack, did you take something?”

  Joey leans over him, pushing an eyelid back with a thumb to study the pupil. Jack grabs at his jacket collar and, as he opens his hand to grasp the leather, a silver Zippo falls down to the ground. He has no idea where it came from but he grabs it like the most precious thing he’s ever owned.