Vellum

by Hal Duncan

  OPERATION: Harness paranoia; focus; establish name and context.

  It’s one year after Guy’s death, and as Jack Carter steps out of the Victorian station of sandstone and girders and glass, into the streets of a city carved out of volcanic streetlight night, he knows that he’s mad and alone in his own hell, his hair long and lank, and something wild let loose within his head and howling in his words, a whirlwind wolven wrath.

  But he feels fucking reborn, an angel or a demon, something beyond either, something older, something newer. He can feel it in his bones. He might be mad, touched in the head—touched in the head by Death—but he can feel it. He can feel the call of the creatures singing to gather their changeling brethren, to fight for them on the battlegrounds of eternity or existence, with all humanity as their cannon fodder. And he knows he stands on the threshold of the two worlds, one foot on the earth, another in the liquid light of dreams. And he’ll never be one of their fucking dogs of war.

  ALERT/INFORMATION UPLOAD: Rogue unkin; unaligned agent; extreme threat.

  In the unspoken parts of conversations, in the unwritten truths in a newspaper article or a book, in the white noise of day-to-day life, he can feel the order, the pattern, the scheme. He can see the world of the unkin spreading out into existence, so gradually that you could blink and miss the way a housing scheme becomes a prison, an ID card becomes a travel permit. Tabloids calling for all pedophiles to be castrated. Internment for terrorists. Fascists on local councils, in parliament, on the cabinet. They brought back the death penalty last week and no one noticed except him.

  He hasn’t figured out exactly what’s happening yet but he knows this world is just one little corner of something that the unkin call the Vellum, folds of reality shaped by their words; and maybe they began with good intentions and they just got lost along the way, but he’s seen what they’ve got in store. Call it schizophrenia. Call it prophecy. Call it foresight.

  But he’s going to find the fuckers that are turning his world into their little Empire, if he has to tear the whole of fucking reality apart to do it.

  DREAMTIME’S UP

  OPERATION: Enhance and focus; establish contacts.

  NARRATIVE DETECTED:

  Jack picks the book off of the library shelf—The Book of All Hours, it’s called, by Guy Reynard Carter. He likes the names, the author’s and the book’s—because Carter is his name and Reynard sounds like the fox in the fairy stories that’s always up to no good and The Book of All Hours sounds important and mysterious. He likes stories which are important and mysterious. But the book has really small print and he thinks that it’s a grown-up book, so after a quick look inside he puts it back on the shelf. He wipes his hands on his trousers to get rid of the dust from the old book, and heads back toward the children’s section.

  “You’re not special, Jack,” says Starn. “You’re not chosen. You’re not a hero. It’s called paranoid schizophrenia. You think you’re on a mission from God, but you kill people.”

  ANALYSIS: Irrelevant; subject irrational/resistant.

  OPERATION: Scan for all contacts, rebel operatives, operational base.

  And he watches the world changing around him, stripped back, through the fantasy beneath reality, to the reality beneath the fantasy: not existence, not eternity, but something built out of the ruins of both. There are worlds built upon worlds, a whole fucking dreamtime. He doesn’t know who is in charge but he knows they’re there. In every head of every person in this city, in the world itself, in every shadow and reflection. Something old as time and bad as hell is shaping the world, shaping the dreams that shape the thoughts that shape the acts that shape the world. Building an Empire.

  “There is no hidden Empire, Jack. You know that. You have to face reality. This ‘Jack Flash’ is just a puerile fantasy that you’re hiding behind. What is it you can’t deal with, Jack? What is it that you’re running from?

  OPERATION (IMPERATIVE): Scan for all contacts, rebel operatives, operational base.

  Dream on, motherfucker.

  ALERT—

  Shut up. Yeah, you, Pechorin, let me tell you how the story ends…

  And inside of him the sleeper meme, the dormant dream god, grinning thing of chaos, is shaking off its drowsiness, and finding itself inside an empty body. And no, he thinks, it isn’t his imagination. This thing of darkness isn’t his. It belongs to everyone.

  “Who are you, Jack?” says Dr. Reinhardt Starn.

  He looks sad, thinks Jack.

  “I’m exactly what you think I am. But who are you?”

  And Jack Flash, older than the gods and newborn spirit of fire, looks at the fragments of personal history, memory and fantasy, truth and invention, still littering his host body’s head, and gazes at itself in the mirror of its…his…mind. A dreamer, a lost boy, a golden boy. And Pechorin sees the calm look on the face of this rogue unkin, this fucking avatar of chaos, and feels something buried in the back of his head, shifting.

  “You want to know what makes me tick, Reynard?”

  “Jack…”

  “I’m a time bomb. Tick. Tick. Tick. Dreamtime’s up. Narcissus has woken.”

  THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS DARKLY

  “Narcissus has woken.”

  I utter the trigger phrase and the preprogrammed meme bomb implanted in Pechorin’s head undercover of his dumbass fucking Rorschach maneuver blossoms, flooding imagery from the dead soul deeps into his mind, a host of gods and demons, angels, aliens. Like a river thundering through the ruins of a dam. You know, baby, if there’s a stream of consciousness, somewhere there’s gotta be a river bursting its memory banks. Information is power, honey, language is liquid, and I got a fucking firehose in my head. Am I mixing my metaphors? I’ll put it this way:

  Narcissus has woken.

  Narcissus has woken.

  OBSERVATION: Status—danger desire despair desolation dream dream dream.

  REPORT BIOFORM STATUS: Bioform not found.

  ANALYSIS: Narcissus has woken.

  OPERATION: Reboot psyche. Psyche not found; locate psyche; psyche not found; evacuate enemy agent consciousness; reboot ego; ego not found; evacuate.

  OBSERVATION: Narcissus has woken.

  OBSERVATION: I am the me that I am that I—

  ANALYSIS: Dream is Reality. Reality is Dream. Narcissus has woken.

  OPERATION: Emergency maneuvers; scan for scan for scan for scan for—

  ANALYSIS: I am legion; the kingdom is within us.

  ANALYSIS: Narcissus has woken.

  “What—” is all the doctor has a chance to say before my chi-enhanced Dragon Punch smashes him backward through the one-way mirror. Through the looking-glass darkly, you might say. Shards of mirror rain into the darkened room behind, where Pechorin stands, one arm against the wall supporting him, eyes rolling up inside his skull. Somewhere in his head the remnants of identity are drowning in the raging ocean of his own unconscious, dissolving to distorted reflections. I leap through the glass-edged frame to grab Pechorin, peel his eyelids fully open and stare into his soul. It’s helter-skelter in there, a whole host of mindworms being sucked down into oblivion. Poor old Joey. He always knew he’d be a soldier of the Empire. I only hope he’ll pull through.

  He has my Mark I Curzon-Youngblood in his hands—was probably using it to form the psychic link—so I take it off him, flick the safety off. The chi energy flows into it and I can feel the power in my hand, that mystic orgone life-force of the universe. Never mind the bollocks; here’s the real sex pistol. And you can analyze that however you want.

  I hunker down beside the doctor, who groans as I slap his cheek gently.

  “Time to wake up, Guy,” I say. “We’re leaving. All of us.”

  He groans.

  “Jack? Did you hit me?”

  And to think he’s meant to be the brains of this operation. Guy Reynard. Guy Fox, as in crazy-like-a. King of thieves and master of disguise. Good enough to fool even himself, they say.

  I sig
ht down the chi-gun’s barrel at the doorway of the interview room, at the commotion already starting in the corridor. Guy is looking at Joey, at me, at Joey.

  “What did you do to him?”

  But before I can answer I’m too busy firing as they come in through the door.

  I may well be crazy, you know. They may outgun me. I may be however many miles underground, in the depths of the Empire’s headquarters, in a hellworld so royally fucked by the meme merchants that even their own dreams end up spewing out one or two of their own into the world at large just to fucking sort things out. But I got my weapon and my wits and if they want a war for people’s hearts and souls, I got the will. But most of all I’ve got my weapon.

  “What did you do to him, Jack?” says Guy.

  I pick off a couple of militia as they run into the room, then duck down.

  “Meme bomb,” I say. “Not much choice after you went sodding native.”

  Guy grabs the limp body, lugs it partway over his shoulder.

  “Must’ve been something in the tea,” he says. Well, so much for the gently gently approach.

  I kick open the door of the observation room and walk out firing.

  Which means it’s time for the extraction team, on the roof as arranged. Just make it quick, motherfuckers. We can’t hold out forever.

  Jack Flash over and out.

  Errata

  All the King’s Horses

  “How is he?” I say.

  Joey shakes his head, grim and thin-lipped. I had to virtually drag him down here to the hospital, pushing his guilt button again and again with dagger remarks about how long he’d known Jack, how he owed it to him, they were best friends and Jack needed him, needed us both now. For fuck’s sake, Joey, you’re his best mate.

  “He’s living in a fucking fantasy world,” says Joey. “All he talks about is this dead boy, this fucking figment of his imagination. Thomas this and Thomas that. He’s a fucking basket case, Guy. I can’t deal with this.”

  I want to hit him. I just can’t accept how he can walk away from this, no matter how bad it is. Does he really just see Jack’s schizophrenia as a bloody inconvenience? I can’t believe that he could be so callous.

  But I’ve been coming to visit Jack every other day and Joey Pechorin, his closest friend, hasn’t found it in his heart to come here on his own, not once in the three months since Jack had his latest and worst episode, the one that ended with him sectioned for his own safety.

  I stare at Joey with a silent knowledge that our friendship is only a word or two away from ending, and push past him through the door into Jack’s room.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” says Jack. “None of it makes any sense.”

  He’s right. Of all the notes and pages of scribblings scattered round the room, tacked or taped to walls, none of it bears any obvious relationship to anything else. Even within themselves the fragments don’t really, on close examination, reveal meanings shared by anything beyond the inside of Jack’s head. There are pages where the initials J.C. have been written over and over again with explication after explication—Jack Carter, Jesus Christ, Jerry Cornelius, Joe Cool, John Constantine, and on and on, as if to map out some grand kabala of identity. Other pages gather quotes from a whole host of sources, fiction or nonfiction, books on magic, politics, philosophy, conspiracy theory, just laying them together on the page as if the act of copying them out, the simple juxtaposition of them, says all that needs to be said about their interrelations. I can’t make head nor tail of it.

  Schizophrenia. Broken head. That about sums Jack up. He’s a one-man Tower of Babel, Humpty Dumpty at the bottom of the wall, taking a hammer to his own pieces to see if by breaking them up even further he can crack them into smaller fragments that’ll fit together better.

  “How are you doing, Jack?” I say.

  He smiles and shrugs, sitting up on the bed, his back against the wall, knees up to his chin.

  “Still crazy,” he says. “Officially. How’s yourself?”

  I make a so-so gesture with one hand, sit down on the edge of the bed.

  “You seem a bit more…together today.”

  “Wonders of modern medicine,” he says. “The miracle of lithium. Hallelujah. I keep asking if they can get me some acid, but they don’t seem to think that’s a good idea.”

  A glint of mischief in his eye. Every so often you get these flashes of the old Jack, a Jack of random notions and spurious arguments supported on the flimsiest of evidence, held with the deepest conviction and abandoned with a shrug on the calling of his bluff. A Jack who’d happily throw a bomb into a conversation just to see what happened, who’d argue for mandatory vision-quests for all fourteen-year-olds, or the restoration of ritual regicide. “Tradition,” he’d say, adopting an old-fogey voice. “Young people these days, no respect for tradition.” We were so used to Jack’s trickster reimagination of the world we missed the point where he began to take it seriously.

  “No, I don’t think acid’s what you need right now,” I say.

  He waves a hand around the room.

  “I bet it would make sense on acid. We should do that, Guy. You could smuggle in a couple of tabs, or some good fucking Mexican psilocybin or—was it Hawaiian we had that time? We’ll get shit-faced and I’ll tell you the secret of the universe and you’ll tell me that I’m talking shit.”

  We laugh.

  “I had an idea,” he says.

  Uh-oh, I think.

  “Last night,” he says, “I was trying to figure it all out, and, OK, it doesn’t make any sense, but you know, Guy, it almost makes sense. It almost makes sense.”

  “To you, Jack, maybe, but not to the rest of us.”

  I stand up and start to wander round the room, uncomfortable and looking for a way to draw the conversation away from more of his delusional “explanations.” On the walls: a sheet of paper has the Hebrew alphabet in a table with Roman equivalents, names and numeric values; a pyramid divided into sections numbered in a mathematical sequence—1, 3, 6, 10, 15, 21 and so on down to the bottom-right corner and the number 666; a fake frontispiece in the medieval style of an illuminated manuscript, the paper crumpled and tea-stained to look old, the lettering done in felt-tip pen—The Book of All Hours.

  “When I was in the Boy Scouts…”

  “You were in the Scouts?” I say. “I can’t imagine you in the Scouts.”

  “Oh, yeah,” he says. “I was a right little trooper when I was younger. I’m a sucker for a pretty uniform.”

  He winks.

  “Anyway, they taught us this song, and last night, for no reason, it just pops into my head. Dee deeddly deedly deedly deedee…”

  I vaguely recognize the tune, some Scottish country dance music, I think, or maybe Irish. He starts to ticktock a finger in time to it.

  “MacPherson is dead and his brother don’t know it. His brother is dead and MacPherson don’t know it. They’re both of them dead and they’re in the same bed. And none of them knows that the other is dead.”

  “I think we’d know if we were dead, Jack,” I say.

  “Do you know when you’re dreaming?” he says. “Who’s the fucking mental case here? Personal experience, man. Just because you’re sure of something doesn’t make it real.”

  “Jack, that is totally twisted. That’s just…”

  “I know,” he says. “But it made sense last night. Almost.”

  I sit back down on the edge of the bed.

  “You want to watch some TV?” he says.

  Two for Tea, a Tree for Two

  Jack seems to have become somewhat enamored of Puck. He does not trust me in the slightest, sad to say, but I can’t really blame him given the fact that I sit here on the cart surrounded by a score or so skulls excavated from the pit like some ogre with his terrible treasure, and given that these may well be his ancestors, compatriots, beloved cousins or god knows what. I try to fathom the history of this place but it is quite inscrutable. Oblivion’s Mount is marked
in the Book, in wide, sweeping contours more on the continent-crossing level of isobars on a weather chart than the humble cartography of a little peak like Everest or Olympus Mons (I’m getting rather blasé about the scale of things here in the Vellum, I fear; it’s all rather gauche and grandiose for my liking, like the arms-race conversations of children when they degenerate to the level of infinity-times-infinity and infinity-squared and infinity-to-the-power-of-infinity, so there!); the problem is there are no indications of inhabitation, no dotted lines of old roads, no glyphic marks of places of historical interest. All I have to go on is the skulls and Jack’s horror of them; and the former remain as obstinately silent—other than the low whistling moan of the wind as it blows down into the pit—as the latter is unyielding in his vociferous protests. I only hope that Puck can shut him up for long enough that I might actually get more than an hour’s sleep.

  He has managed to calm the poor thing down a little in the last week, soothing Jack’s savage music with his offerings of candies and pretty things from our rations and stores, though I was not entirely happy that the first such offering was a silver fob dowser filched from my pocket and dangled by its chain between thumb and forefinger, snatched by Jack even as I did a double-take, patting my pocket and gawping dumbly as I tried to put some words together in protest. Pickpocket Puck simply shrugged and said he’d noticed Jack eyeing it, pointed out that, hunkered over behind a shrub, Jack was now quietly snapping the casing of it open and closed—chunk, chik—rather than raising his usual racket. He was so quiet for the next few hours, in fact, that I actually managed to notice just how much more pervasive all the creaks and cracks and rustlings and rumblings are, the higher up we get in our around-and-over journey on Oblivion’s Mount.

  Since then, anyway, the various trinkets and treats that Puck has used to charm him with have, it is true, offered some brief respites from Jack’s otherwise ceaseless bewailing of whatever tragedy he scents—or senses somehow—buried under our feet. And with each offering Jack has grown more trusting of the boy until Puck has him now, quite literally, eating out of his hand. I think it was the drugs that really won Jack over.