by Hal Duncan
“What did we do?” says Jack. “What did we do?”
“Nothing. For fuck’s sake, Jack, what are you on? What did you take?”
Jack pushes him away and clambers to his feet. They’re parked outside an old derelict shop, the glass all shattered and boarded up, looks like it’s been empty forever. There are shadows seeping out from under a padlocked door spray-painted with a weird graffiti logo, sort of like an Eye of Horus, sort of not.
“Where are we?”
“College Street, Jack. Take a look at the fucking signpost.”
But Jack’s too busy looking everywhere, at the door, at the lighter in his hand, at the puddle of his vomit, at the passersby gaping like he’s from outer space, at—yes—the signpost that says College Street high up on a wall above the bar down at the corner, at the shadows seeping out from under the doorway and following the cracks in the sidewalk, at the low sun shimmering among striated clouds there in the west, the glow of an early evening at the end of summer, gold and yellow and red and orange like fire. He steps toward it, knocking Joey’s hand off his arm with a flick of his shoulder, walking toward the sunset without any idea of what he’s doing or why.
“Where the fuck are you going, Jack?”
He passes a TV shop, registers the screens of flames in the corner of his vision, scrolling headlines telling of destruction in Damascus. Countless dead.
“Where the fuck are you going?”
He has no idea.
“I had no idea,” says Metatron.
He sits at the bottom of the long table. It’s a custom dating back millennia, back to when they first met in some warlord’s banquet hall, the seven of them all seated round the table, three down one side, three down the other, Metatron down at the bottom, ever the humble servant, his master’s scribe and vizier, looking up at the empty seat of the megalomaniac they’d decided to overthrow. He’d found himself caught by the perfect symbolism of that empty throne, as he persuaded the others that not only could they do it but they had to do it. It was right. And since that day they carved the Covenant into their own souls, they had always kept an empty chair, in the banquet halls and tents and boardrooms where they met, through the ages. And Metatron always sat at the bottom of the table, as the lowest of the low, even though—or perhaps because—ultimately it was his plan, his scheme, his vision, his voice. None of them, least of all Metatron himself, ever considered that the table was just a rectangle like any other rectangle, with four sides, two long and two short, that the allocation of top and bottom to it was an arbitrary notion, and that, to all intents and purposes, the head of the table was not where they quite spuriously projected it into an empty symbol but, in fact, in actuality, wherever the power sat, wherever the authority that they listened to laid his elbows on the table and leaned forward to say in a quiet firm voice, this is what we’re going to do. No. That empty seat is too important, too central to the Covenant, for Metatron to question just how empty it might be, as a symbol.
And now, up at the top of the table, across from Uriel, beside Michael, there is another empty chair.
“You make a deal behind our backs,” says Gabriel. “You give some little trailer-trash desert rat total immunity after Eresh has done a number on her—”
“She wasn’t relevant,” says Metatron. “She was nothing.”
Michael snorts. Obviously, he’s with Gabriel all the way. Uriel is the military type, more of a tactician than a city-burner, but he’ll still side with the hawks. Sandalphon, the only real dove among them, will side with Metatron as always; he would have let the girl go free just out of sympathy. Azazel? Who knows?
“You waste two good agents,” Gabriel carries on, “just to get your little bitch-whore out of jail free—”
“I sent them to get Eresh—”
“Not to mention that you hack them into dogmeat first.”
“I had to make her think that…look—they were unstable to begin with.”
“They were Covenant,” says Michael. “They were our men. Our boys.”
Uriel nods grimly, but Metatron notes the weary look on Azazel’s face, the way he rolls his eyes.
“And now,” says Gabriel. “Now whatever Eresh had under lock and key is out there using your own blessed bitmites against us.”
“We don’t know that,” Sandalphon says. “It might have been Malik. We don’t know for sure—”
“It’s time we did,” says Gabriel.
He pushes his chair back as he stands up, strides around the table to lean on the back of Raphael’s empty chair.
“I’m working on it,” says Metatron. “I just need time. I have a source—”
And Gabriel spins and throws the chair against a wall. A painting falls, its glass frame shattering, scattering. He pushes the empty chair at the head of the table to one side and plants his hands on the wooden surface, staring directly at Metatron, challenging him silently. There are lines around his eyes; the last few centuries have been hard on him. He was born to burn bright, and they’ve been hiding in the shadows for too long now. Even Metatron understands how…alien this kind of angel feels in an age of science and technology, an age of information and mass media. There was a time when stars meant cherubim of awe and majesty, with swords of fire flashing from their mouths, the unkin tongue lashing reality, laying waste the enemies of the Covenant. Not painted actors on a painted screen.
“No more time,” says Gabriel.
He stands straight, then turns and leans behind to grab the chair, to pull it close behind him.
“No, Gabriel,” says Metatron. “This is against all that we…you’ll be nothing but another Sovereign.”
“Weren’t we all Sovereigns once, kings of this world? Baals.”
“So what do we call you now?” says Azazel with disdain. “Prince Gabriel? Lord Gabriel? King?”
Gabriel stares at him as he sits down. At the head of the table. The angel of fire on the throne of God.
“Not king,” he says. “And not just me, but all of us here in this room, if you’ll stand behind me. We’ll be…Dukes.”
Not dukes, thinks Metatron, but Dukes.
five
NARCISSUS HAS WOKEN
The Reality of Dreams
“You think your dreams are real, Jack?”
“That’s the nature of the conspiracy. We all think our dreams are real.”
“Most people don’t see the world the way you do, Jack—”
“You don’t see it? You don’t fucking see it? You don’t see the statue of a saint watching over a priest as he molests some fucking altar boy? You don’t see the book of lies in the hands of a zealot ordering a stoning? A horoscope read out to a president before he orders an attack? You say I’m living in a fantasy world, Dr. Starn?”
“Jack, these are terrible things, but—”
“A flag flown by a skinhead, a bulldog tattoo on an arm throwing a brick. Offerings of flowers lain down for a dead princess, People’s Princess—paparazzi human sacrifice—and every fucking newspaper with the glossy pictures of the funeral, mmm, zoom in, show me some grief, oh, such a tragedy. Who’s in charge, Dr. Starn?”
“Jack, nobody’s in charge. Not in the way you mean—”
“Who’s in charge?!”
“Calm down, Jack.”
“You’ve been living in the Empire so long you don’t even see it, working lurking, in the background, in the shadows and reflections. Do you know who your masters are? Dreams aren’t real? I say they walk among us, whispering in our ears all their sweet promises and threats, carried in our heads, mindworms, maggots eating at our dead souls. Dreams, memes, gods and monsters, creatures of the id. If they aren’t real then what the hell am I?”
“You’re a very disturbed young man, Jack. You’re ill.”
“I’m awake!”
Starn lays the folder down on the table. He knows this is a bloody risky thing to do, given the boy’s mental state; it may not be a good idea at all to show him his own face in another tim
e, offering him more fuel for the fantasies, an open door out of reality. In fact, it’s downright playing with fire, but…He tries to tell himself that he’s not here to treat the boy, just to get at the truth; but, at heart, no matter what he might say to the inspector, no matter what public opinion is, or what brand of barbarism’s championed by the tabloids these days, he can’t help but see these people that he deals with as not evil but sick. Wounded, crippled souls. Driven, riven minds. Born with broken hearts. They belong in hospitals, not prisons. Not the scaffold.
He opens up the folder, turns it round on the table to show the photograph of Mad Jack Carter.
“You said you used to have a name. Before.”
“Once upon a time,” he says. “Once upon a time there was a boy called Jack.”
RETURN TO ARCADIA
OPERATION: Enhance grandiose delusions; scan for memetic substructure.
Jack fiddles with the white haversack that runs from right shoulder to left hip over his dark blue shirt. Leather belt holding it down, white epaulette on his left shoulder. When he has the hat on he looks like a member of the bloody Hitlerjugend. He only joined the Boys’ Brigade because Joey was in it. And all this Sunday school shit is the worst.
“But it says that God threw Adam and Eve out because he didn’t want them to be like him and live forever. That’s what it says.”
He looks at the teacher as she smiles a pleasant but firm smile, closing her Bible, and he sees himself as Jesus, casting the moneylenders from the temple. Soul merchants, buying the human spirit, selling snake-oil salvation. Fuck them all.
“Well, you wouldn’t want people to be as powerful as God, would you, Jack? People can be bad, and do bad things, and—”
“It doesn’t say anything about power,” he says. “It just says they’d live forever.”
“Well, they would have lived forever, but they disobeyed God so He made them mortal so that they—”
“That’s not what it says. It says they were already mortal and they would have been immortal, but God didn’t want them to be, didn’t want them to be like him.”
The others all look bored and fed up, sitting there in their uniforms, even the ones he knows from school as troublemakers, all weirdly quiet and respectful here, happy to challenge teachers, to fire paper airplanes and spitballs, to start fires on railway embankments, to throw stones at the Catholic kids from St. Mick’s over the other side of the bridge. Jack’s normally the quiet one, well-behaved, a good boy. It makes a change for him to be the…awkward one.
Like all it takes, he’s thinking, is a bite of some forbidden fruit and a human can become something else, maybe not God, maybe not a god, but something like that. No longer just a human. That’s what it says. Lest they become like us.
And a little flicker of a smile—a flash—moves across Jack’s face.
“What was he,” says Jack, “afraid of a little competition?”
ALERT: Messianic complex; rebel archetype detected.
OPERATION (IMPERATIVE): Scan for reality breach; authenticate metaphysical incursion.
NARRATIVE DETECTED:
The road is still there, with just a few more years of tags and band names, and the concrete cylinder’s still there as well.
ET IN ARCADIA EGO.
He knows what it means now: and I am also in Arcadia. It’s from some painting, three shepherds looking at the words inscribed upon a tomb. It’s famous, but he has no idea of how he knew it at the age of fourteen. It’s possible he heard the phrase somewhere, saw a photo of the painting at some time, but that’s not what Jack thinks. It’s not what Jack Flash thinks.
Joey is zipping his leather jacket up as he pushes through the thicket, scrambling down the slope, less balanced now in adolescence than they were as children.
He’s starting to see things now. Finally, after so many years of snapping his head round at the shadows and reflections at the corners of his vision only to find the world completely normal, finally he’s starting to catch glimpses of the secret world beneath the world. He looks up into the sky sometimes and sees a silver sea, ripples running across it, waves rolling. He can hold sand in a small pile on the palm of his hand and watch the grains dance, sparkling like glass in the sunlight, moving into patterns like iron filings caught between magnetic fields. He can hear songs in the murmur of a crowd in a busy shopping precinct on a weekend. He can smell the rotting corpse of God in a church.
Jack knows that he’s insane. He’s not fucking stupid; he recognizes all the signs and symptoms of him being schizo. Voices, visions. But that doesn’t help him when he sees the creatures of liquid light walking through the crowds, stopping to whisper in this person’s ear, to pass a hand over somebody’s heart, or when one of them stops for a second and, like an animal scenting its prey, sniffs the air and turns to look at him with its blank mirrored eyes.
THE ROAD TO NOWHERE
INFORMATION UPLOAD: Subject previously identified; advise search on known felons/fugitives.
They’ve started to watch his house, these creatures. He’s not crazy enough to think they’re beaming thoughts into his head; he’s not reached the tinfoil hat stage yet. But they’re definitely watching him, following him.
“You know they’re not real,” says Joey. “You know you’ve got to talk to someone about this. You can get help.”
Joey Pechorin. He looks like the fifth Ramone these days, with his long, dark hair hanging over his face. Jack’s going for the Johnny Rotten look himself. It’s 1979 and the bitch who took away their school milk just got elected as prime minister. The Asian grocer’s got firebombed last week, sprayed with the logos, Pakis Out and BNP—British National Party. The whole fucking country’s going to Hell, says Guy but Jack, he knows different. They’re already in Hell. They just have to find the way out.
Jack edges the tip of the crowbar, pries it under the lip of the manhole cover on the concrete cylinder on the road that comes from nowhere and goes nowhere.
“They’re real,” he says. “They just don’t exist. Creatures from the id. From the fucking mass unconscious. Living information.”
Joey grabs him, pulls him away from the cover, tries to shake some sense into him.
“It’s you, Jack. It’s you. In here”—he taps the side of his head—“inside of your fucking head is where they’re from.”
“I know,” says Jack, “…but they’re from your head too.”
And he leans down at the concrete cylinder, and leans down on the crowbar and he cracks reality wide open.
It’s 1979, and as the archetype stretches within his body, he feels it like the grace and glory of an angel or a demon flowing in his veins. He stands there over the hole in the world, looking down into the abyss, into the flood of liquid dust, black blood of dead gods, the past and the future and the end of both. Joey is screaming at him, pulling him back from the edge, but all Jack can hear is the beautiful song of the bitmites as we weave our spell around him, telling tales within tales of ancient powers and future apocalypse, of infinite deaths, of infinite births, a song of murderers and heroes, and of fire burning cold inside his head, sing of a city at the end of everything and a book in which all things are written, and we sing of covenants and rebels, crows and kings, we sing of love and sorrow, flesh and words, we sing, for this is what we are, we bitmite things of blood and ink, of night and dreams, we fabricators of desire and fear drifting beneath your thoughts and what’s within them, shifting soft beneath your skin. We call you Jack.
It’s 1999 and Jack Flash smiles at the doctor across the table. These people don’t know the meaning of the word self-possessed.
ANALYSIS: Subject resistant.
OPERATION (IMPERATIVE): Scan for reality breach; authenticate metaphysical incursion.
Hair the color of flame, not blond but yellow, orange, red. He looks at his reflection in the mirror, ever the narcissist, looks into his own eyes, where his own reflection is in turn reflected, a dark image of himself, a self within the self,
a psyche within the psyche. There’s something inside his head.
Hi Joey, he thinks. Long time, no see.
ALERT: Scan detected!
EMERGENCY MANEUVERS.
OPERATION: Code name Squid-Ink.
THE INKBLOT
I let my psychic guard slip for a second, catch the shadow in my conscious ken and let him glimpse himself in the enfolding mirrors of my mind. It’s only for an instant, but, fuck, an instant might as well be eternity when you’re dealing with the mindworms, with the bloody bitmites. I yank my mind back, twisting like a fucking gymnast, hoping that he didn’t catch too much and—
The inkblot, raven black dissolving into midnight blue, is smeared symmetrically over the white card in billowing clouds of curling, whirling mist, and the way it’s lying before me on the table, I can’t help but be intrigued with its shapelessness, the way it demands to be given form, and before I know it I’m distracted, forgetting, and—what was I thinking—it’s just so peachy keen, so gnarly, with all its liquid symbolism—like, I’m trying to decipher it, and at the same time it’s there to decipher me, reflecting back the involutions, all the currents and eddies of my own mind. And looking at the Rorschach test, looking into it, I see—
“Nothing.”
“It doesn’t remind you of anything?”
“No. Just an inkblot.”
Starn studies him across the table. Again he feels that strange discomfort with the one-way mirror at his back, the constant bloody surveillance.
“Nothing at all?”
“Nuh-uh.”
“When you look at the inkblot you can’t see any shapes in it at all? I find that hard to believe, Jack. You don’t strike me as an unimaginative person.”
“Have you ever taken acid?”
“No. I don’t quite see the—”
“OK. I have imagination. I could look into the inkblot and see a butterfly—”