Vellum

by Hal Duncan

  I glance over at them, sitting side by side on the low branch of a tree, legs dangling and kicking, passing the joint between them. Jack reaches over occasionally to pick through Puck’s green thicket of hair, grooming for fleas or ticks, a little disappointed, it seems, at not finding any; every so often, he taps a curious fingertip on one or the other of Puck’s pointy horns and gurgles a wordless question. Puck blows smoke rings and Jack flaps his hand through them. It’s sort of sweet, in a decadent way; beneath them on the ground, the drained can that I watched them sipping from earlier, passing between them as they now pass the joint, lies discarded and forgotten as they poke each other and point at this or that, at leaves or grass, the cart, myself, the other tribesfolk sitting in a huddle off in the far distance, lost now that their shaman has abandoned them; and Jack and Puck peer at the world around them, tilting their heads and giggling, in their Chimp’s Mushroom Tea Party.

  I wonder that Jack, so terrified of the landscape that we’re traveling through, is not insane with spectral horrors crawling from the recesses of his unconscious out into his hallucinating mind, but then again I have seen him in various states of intoxication and I am yet to see him have a bad trip. Truth to tell, the two of them are the very picture of bliss.

  I pick out three of the skulls and lay them before me in a row, glad that for the moment I have peace to try and think. I have known for a while that whatever kind of afterworld the Vellum is, death walks in it as much as in the reality I left behind me. Actually, it always struck me as rather senseless that the imagined afterlives of religion after religion should be fleshed out with forms so imitative of the physical as to have eyes to see, mouths to speak, hands to play harps or wings to fly among the clouds, but shy away from the anatomical actualities of bodies—lacking a physique but with what might be called a metaphysique— hemming and hawing uncomfortably about matters of sex and death. Et In Arcadia Ego, as Poussin’s Shepherds found written on the tomb in their idyllic hills, and here in the foothills of Oblivion’s Mount, we seem to have found a similarly symbolic tomb, this signifier of death in the middle of eternity that terrifies poor, simple Jack so much.

  What is death in the afterworld of souls? I wonder. What is death in the Vellum?

  I have the Book open before me and I stare at it, at the contours of Oblivion’s Mount, listening to the keen of the wind catching the lip of the pit and curling down around the skulls like a macabre woodwind instrument. And suddenly I have an answer.

  six

  ECHOES OF IAPETUS

  KUR

  Now well behind Russian lines and in continual peril, writes Pechorin. The next instant could find us snatched up, crushed like insects by the Soviet fist. I pray for it sometimes. I might tell them I was a prisoner of these fascists, my wife and family hostage, forced against my will to guide them through my native lands; but as a White Russian, I know I have no hope. They would see me only as a traitor, a collaborator. I know that part of me leads them willingly toward their goal, but there is another aspect of my soul that cries out against it. Why do I lead them on? Perhaps because I feel I must return and face the past.

  Carter strikes the attitude of a victim. But I can see the contempt with which he looks at all of us, and I know the power that he brought back with him, the power we all brought back, those of us who returned. Perhaps it is knowledge that I seek, an understanding of that power. Carter seeks only to forget the past, to bury it…and us with it? He still watches what he says to Strang, but I suspect he is considering his options carefully. As we approach the entrance to the cave, I wonder if he is already making moves I have not seen.

  29 March 1921. The professor revealed today his secret, his lie, and the true object of our quest. The “Great City of the North” is not Aratta. We are, as I have been nagging constantly these last few days, two hundred miles north of the only possible location of Aratta. What do you know of the geography of the Georgian Caucasus, he asked me; the river that runs southeast from Tiblis down to the Caspian Sea, what is it called? The Kur, I said, and began to realize what he was thinking. What is the name of the great river of the north in Sumerian texts, the name of the great northern mountain, also, and the name of the city where the souls of the dead reside? It’s the same word for all of them, isn’t it, Carter, old chap? Kur.

  What I felt in that moment of realization I can hardly put into words. I wanted to laugh at the absurdity of his suggestion. I could have cursed him for lying to me or pitied him for lying to himself. He gabbled on about the river Kur, the name being there in black and white upon the very map with which we plotted our course, the river that we all must cross to enter the great netherworld, the house of dust and ashes, and I felt a sudden terror that I was traveling with a madman, that his mind had snapped. And yet something in me recognized a certain glory to the idea. What if he is right? What if we can find it? “The City of the North.” Of course it is a myth. Of course it is a legend.

  So was Troy.

  THE BONE AGE

  “They left no trace behind them because they were trackers themselves. They believed that if a single artifact was left to show where they had been, the Old Hunter, Death, could find them and feed on their souls. So everything they used they used again, and again, and when there was no more use that could be made of something, when the broken spear-throwers were whittled down to needles, when their ragged clothes were more stitching than material, they burned what was left and scattered the ashes on the winds. The perfect hunter-gatherer society. They scavenged and salvaged everything, even used their own dead as material resources. They wore their brothers’ skins as clothes, drank from their skulls, fed on their flesh.”

  1 April 1921. It was one of our lads, one of the Brits, that found it. The younger chap—Messenger, his name is—stumbled upon it quite by chance while exploring the darker recesses of the cave with one of the South Ossetians. What they were up to down there I have no idea, but I suppose we all retain from our youths that fascination with the unknown, that desire to explore the dark, to conquer our childhood fear of it by shining a lantern into those forbidden places.

  But, my God, the racket that the boy set up, the way it echoed in the depths, and seemed to magnify as it resounded. You would have thought that he was trying to wake the dead.

  “The power they must have felt, my forefathers.”

  “You still don’t understand, do you? This was fifteen thousand years ago. This was before your damned Aryan race even existed. This is civilization in the Stone Age—the Bone Age, we should call it. This is mathematics and mythologies, maps and histories, writing, ten thousand years before Sumer.”

  “Tell me about the writing.”

  “They could leave no trace behind them, so they didn’t carve it in the rock, or in clay tablets or on wood. They carried it with them on their skins. So they wouldn’t leave a trace.”

  “But they did.”

  “They did. And we found it. The mother lode.”

  We followed the distant, disembodied cries, myself first, Hobbsbaum close behind, and Pechorin following at his heels, squeezing our way through the crevices and cracks, ducking and twisting in the worst stretches. I am glad I am not claustrophobic or I fear the pounding of my heart should have been too much for me. As it was, I found myself strangely caught between two memories, two states of mind. I found myself thinking of all the digs I’d been on with the old man, crawling through tight-walled tombs, barrows and long-buried palaces; so I had that old thrill of anticipation. But also—and this is strange—I found myself thinking of the trenches, of crawling into foxholes and the stench of death and gas. At one point—it is hard to write this, to admit it to oneself—I had to stop a second, and it was only Hobbsbaum’s hand on my shoulder, his innocent inquiry if everything was all right, that brought me back to myself, and the damnfoolishness of my behavior.

  I think it was the smell of the place, an acrid chemical smell that assaults the nostrils the deeper one goes into the caves. It seems
absurd, for it is nothing like that stench of putrefaction I can never quite eradicate from my dreams; nothing could be like that. I don’t know why it should affect me so. But I wonder if it was just the fact that I couldn’t place it. Rotting metal, petrol fumes, boiled blood, sulfur or ammonium, I swear it smelled like all of them and none of them.

  If that smell is natural, then Nature is no mother.

  A LITTLE SKIN AND BONE

  2 April 1921. Hobbsbaum has lain the skin out on a slab of rock to study it. It is a macabre scene, this antechamber of rock all carved with arcana, lit by the flickering light of all the lanterns gathered round the slab where Hobbsbaum scrutinizes the flayed human hide like some doctor of another age giving an anatomy lesson to his students. His finger moves like a scalpel, tracing the patterns; I watch him as he runs it down the skin from throat to groin, then pauses and follows another course of script across the empty chest—a travesty of a Catholic blessing.

  He is convinced the black spirals and circles, lines and dots, the whole delicate tracery of geometric convolution, is some kind of writing. I cannot believe him. I cannot believe the monstrous creatures that created the abomination in the caves beneath our feet were capable of anything other than the most barbarous atrocity. I will not believe. I shudder even as I write these words.

  The men are also in deep shock. It is quite understandable, I suppose; these men are simple souls, fighting lads, and while they are like me, I’m sure, no strangers to death, the sight of it on such a scale and in such an inhuman, alien manner can only be disturbing to them. I think of an old Arab guide outside a tomb in the Valley of the Kings, refusing to go one step farther, making signs to ward off curses. But I think also of his son, laughing at his superstition and beckoning us inside. Painted grave, he said dismissively. Dead king. Much gold. He understood something his father didn’t, that in the end it was just desiccated flesh inside, however splendidly adorned. A grave is a grave, no matter whether the corpse is in a gold sarcophagus, a linen shroud or a khaki uniform, whether it’s laid to rest with salt and natron, or formaldehyde, or simply flowers and mud. But that is no grave beneath us.

  Hobbsbaum buries his feelings in his intellectual curiosity, though I can tell that he is not entirely unmoved. Pechorin alone seems unaffected by the sight of Kur. He is a pitiless reptile of a man. He stands behind the professor, looking over the tattooed skin as if it were a map to some lost treasure, a map that only he could read. He and Hobbsbaum speak quietly in lowered voices.

  3 April 1921. The state of preservation is incredible. The conditions in the cave are strange, granted, but even those foul vapors could not suffice to cure the skin so well. These people must have had some preservation techniques far beyond even the pharaohs. I am beginning to wish that they had not, that the skin that lies before us had rotted and been forgotten, that these madmen had left not one single trace behind them…that we had never come to this hellish place. It is affecting us.

  22 September 1942, 13:05:

  “Do you feel it yet?”

  “Feel what, Mr. Carter?”

  “The eyes of your men on you. Accusing you. Hating you for bringing them to this hellish place. I remember what it felt like. I—”

  “I feel nothing. You are mistaken.”

  “You don’t feel…unnerved?”

  “By a little skin and bone? Nothing to…”

  “A dozen corpses from another expedition. Looks like it happened only yesterday.”

  “Be quiet!”

  “Of course. Words are dangerous.”

  [A long silence]

  “Tell me what happened to your party.”

  “We cracked the code.”

  THE ILLUSTRATED MEN

  4 April 1921. We ruled out alphabet and syllabic systems immediately and the writing is quite certainly neither hieroglyphic nor pictographic. These curves and dots are so abstract, so fluidly geometric, that, after such a time, fifty years of study would hardly render them less inscrutable. But Hobbsbaum refuses to leave until he’s found the key to it. Admittedly, I am myself strangely transfixed by the illuminated skins. There is something ungraspably recognizable about them, something that niggles at the back of the mind as when you see the face of someone that you might have known in your schooldays or back in France, but no matter how you try you cannot place it. You know that you should know them but you cannot for the life of you think why.

  I have been thinking…

  One of the skins brought out by Pechorin’s men from deep within the Kur, I am convinced, is a map of the constellations in the sky, as they would have been in those times. But rather than linking the stars together to make animals or artifacts, as classical astrologers did, these seem as abstract as the writings on all the other skins. A few of them are carved on the outer cave where we have set up camp, with Proto-Arattan annotations that may well be translations, attempts by later visitors to represent either the meaning or the name of these constellations. Again in these transcriptions we find abstraction, ambiguity, as if each “constellation” symbolized some concept, some idea. The more I think about it, the more I see these maps as codebooks, dictionaries for the language.

  6 April 1921. Each symbol is a line of force. I’m sure of it. They represent not things, not objects but events, shifts, forms of power in motion—not a cave-lion, say, but the arc of its pounce, the scything swing of its claws. Not a bird, but the flourish of its wings as it takes off. I am convinced that the tattoo script is not composed of words, or syllables, or even letters, but of phonetic elements, the changes of the airflow, the shape of the tongue.

  When I talked to Hobbsbaum he seemed stunned, but nodded, smiled an idiot grin. Pechorin could have killed me with his look. But he nodded. I know I’m right. There’s a power in these symbols, almost hypnotic. Even as the three of us talked, the idea came together. The symbols signify the places and the manners of articulation—plosive, fricative, approximant, and so on—and shifts between them, voicing qualities, pitch, rhythm.

  Now it is only a matter of understanding the system. We may not know the actual meanings but if the system is as simple as it looks, then we can reconstruct the words of the language well nigh exactly as they would have been pronounced.

  But the longer we spend here in this place, the more unnerving it becomes. What with the skins scattered all around us like some ghastly version of a Bedouin tent floored with fine-patterned rugs, it is as if we’ve brought the atmosphere out of the inner chamber, broken the boundary between the world of the ancients and our own. The cave is womb and tomb combined, the dark earth we were born from and to which we must return, in death, in dreams. It is the chambers of our mind, lit by the fire of our Promethean schemes.

  Is this why we have become disorganized, I wonder, no longer cataloging each skin one by one, but acting more like absentminded scholars rifling through their own library? Hobbsbaum strides between the things, from one to another, cross-referencing this symbol with that, with the markings on the cave walls, excitedly mumbling to himself, yes, yes, of course. And I find Pechorin more suspicious by the day; I even overheard him muttering to one of his men, This is the history of our people. It belongs in Russia. The Ossetian only blinked and gave him a blank stare. He wants to leave. Now. I can see him polishing his bayonet and thinking about how to get away from here. With Hobbsbaum buried in his work, he notices nothing of this. I must be vigilant.

  THE COMMAND OF FEAR AND FURY

  22 September 1942. I caught Carter and Pechorin scheming together in some obscure Caucasian singsong dialect that both speak with fluency. For a second something prevented me from simply ordering them to cease. Was it the beauty of the words alone that caused me to stop, to listen as they spoke? When I questioned them, they insisted their conversation was of little consequence and for a moment I believed them, as if each word was crystal truth, perfect in itself, a line of force. I forgot all my doubts and suspicions.

  Damn them. They are hypnotizing me as they have hypnoti
zed the men, turned them against me. Eicher actually approached me today to “express the fears of the men.” I cursed him for a coward and a traitor. He bowed his head, but he muttered under his breath as if I couldn’t hear him. Carter turned to me, like there was no one else around and said, “They don’t have the guts to whisper among themselves yet, but they will.” I could have killed them all when he said that.

  23 September 1942, 02:00:

  “You said before that words are dangerous. Why do you fear them? Why do you wake up screaming in the night?”

  “You know. You’ve seen the bodies that I dream about.”

  “They wanted to leave. They mutinied, tried to take the skins, to sell to the highest bidder. They had to die. What is there in that?”

  “Pechorin’s story, his story, not mine. I say they killed each other.”

  “Why would they do that? Why?”

  [indistinguishable]

  “What did you say?”

  [Carter laughs]

  “What did you say?”

  “You know, I’m not entirely sure I can translate it, but I’ll tell you this: I said it in a language old as stone and harder still, one that sounds inside you like a chord of music, reverberates, snakes itself through your head and heart, the blood and guts of you, and carries a meaning right into your soul.”

  “What did you say? I couldn’t make out what you said. What was that word?”

  “You really want to know? I’ll whisper it in your ear, Herr Strang.”