by Hal Duncan
I turn a corner and it’s waiting for me, dark and ragged, in the shadows of the back alley, a man dressed in a shredded black suit, a bowler hat. The rag-and-bone man. He just stands there, face lowered so his eyes are in shadow, raising his hand slowly so it points at me first, then past me, over me and up, up, toward the roof. And I have one of those weird dream moments where you question everything, you actually think to yourself, this is a dream, but then you think, no, it’s just too real, the fear, the pounding of my heart, the sweat trickling down my back under the shirt. It must be real.
“I don’t want to die,” I say.
“Everybody dies,” the rag-and-bone man says. “Look.”
My gaze follows his gesture upward and behind me.
Jack squats on a window ledge, in a gargoyle crouch, the golden flames of Evenfall around him, face up to the dying sunlight, basking in it. He looks so primitive, so primal in his bestial bliss, he should be howling at the moon, a caveman werewolf. I want to be with him, to be up there in the light with him instead of down here in the shadows of the streets of a nameless city in a world falling apart. Because it’s the shadows, I realize, it’s when the shadows come that people disappear and roads change their directions, buildings shift location. I have this feeling that I’m on the verge of understanding some great truth about our world, about its flux of form, when Jack looks down at me and I see the flames reflected in his eyes and the tears wetting his cheeks.
He stands slowly up and steps forward off the roof.
“There there,” says Annie.
She holds me in a tight hug but with care, making sure she doesn’t put any pressure on my wounded shoulder with its padded dressing. I sob into her bosom, a sniveling five-year-old, afraid and—even surrounded by the others sitting on the back of the cart, all lined up on each side like soldiers in some military truck going off to war—alone.
“I lost my mommy,” I say.
Because that’s the way you see it when you’re five. It’s not you that’s lost but them, your parents.
“I know,” says Annie. “We all lost our mommies, but we’ve got each other now so it’s OK, you see. We’ve got each other, so everything will be all right.”
The cart trundles across the bridge, past burnt-out wrecks of long-abandoned cars. Behind us, night rises from the city like steam or smoke, a storm of gathering gray.
AUTUMN AFTERNOON
The bells of the rag-and-bone man’s cart jangle me out of a light, dreaming sleep and into full and frightened consciousness. The light through the muslin curtain is low, and the air in the musty old apartment has taken on a late-autumn-afternoon chill. I don’t know how many times I’ve tried to get Jack to put some kind of heating in, even put something up to replace the long-since-shattered windows. He seems to refuse on some strange point of principle. Sometimes I think he’s deliberately trying to hold me off, a literal cold shoulder; other times I think he really, honestly, just doesn’t understand what heat is.
I shiver anyway.
“Are you awake?” I hiss.
The bells of the rag-and-bone man’s cart jingle and jangle, louder than all the weird charms strung along the beach. He must be getting close to his barn now, arriving home from his expedition to the city, maybe just a brief foray into the suburbs, returning with the contents of someone’s jewelry box or liquor cabinet. He’ll be looking for me soon.
All I need is a word of support and I’ll be fine. I’m sure of that. But Jack sleeps on.
“Jack,” I whisper. “Jack…wake up.”
And maybe a part of me doesn’t really want him to wake up; I don’t really know why I’m not giving him a shake, why I don’t speak just a little louder. I don’t know. I just know that hearing those bells I feel even the tiny scrap of faith in myself I might have briefly found in an afternoon of simple sensuality slipping away. I can’t shake the trembling feeling left in me by the dream. Do we really only stay anchored to the shifting bedrock of this world by our memories of each other, by being anchored to each other? We’ve got each other now, so it’s OK. But all I’ve got is Jack.
“Jack,” I whisper, but there’s nothing in my voice.
I slip out of the bed and stand shivering on the bare wooden floor, dress silently. I have a theory, you know. I mean, everyone has a theory about what happened to the world. Some people say that the Evenfall is actually these little nanite things, tiny creatures small enough to dance, a million of them, on the head of a pin, or to float in the air like motes of dust, that they were made to heal us when we were sick, or to watch over us with microscopic eyes, medical or military technology gone rogue. Maybe they tried to heal our scarred psychology by wiping out the memories of pain that make us who we are. Maybe they tried to give us what they thought we wanted, in our dreams of lost childhood or dark fantasies of bloody revenge. Maybe they tried to change our world to something we all wanted, not realizing that we would never all be wanting the same things. A consensus reality can’t work without consensus.
But I have another theory and it scares me. I think we’re dead, you see. I think we’re dead and there’s no God, no heaven or hell, only the patchwork of our memories of life and the denial of our true state. We can’t acknowledge our own deaths ’cause if we do we know we might just slip from limbo into oblivion. I think Evenfall is the part of us that wants that final peace. But I don’t think about that a lot.
When I’m ready, I kiss Jack on the cheek and slide quietly out of the hollow house.
THE RECKONING
It’s raining, and the dirt road out of town turns into mud under my feet. A glare of floodlights through the slatted wood of the rag-and-bone man’s barn means he has to be home, so, as gusts of wind whip through the coarse grasses, and the white windmills spin furiously, I spit the rain out of my mouth and trudge on to my reckoning.
The doors are wide open, chain and padlock hanging loose, and for the first time in my life I walk alone into the vast barn. The size of a small aircraft hangar, I think, it holds one of the plastic prefabs inside it—pastel pink, nestling surreally among the shelters and shelving units built onto the barn walls. Of all the gear the rag-and-bone man has stashed away in his hoard here, only one or two of the items are recognizable—an oak wardrobe, a stone angel, both dripping with rain. Everything else is cocooned in heavy-duty translucent polythene like dead flies in a spider’s web. With the wind and rain howling in through a hundred gaps in the roof and walls of the barn, I suppose, his worthless, priceless junk needs at least some protection from the elements.
And the rag-and-bone man himself, he’s standing in what, I suppose, is the front yard of his prefab—a morass of mud rugged with tarpaulins, filthy and puddling—arms wide and staring up at the sky through the largest hole in the roof, mouth open and drinking the rain. After a long five seconds he shakes water from his lank white hair, puts a battered black bowler back on his head and turns toward me.
“Hail and well met,” he says, and the black symbols carved deep into the scarred, stretched mask of his face all twist and distort as he grins his death’s-head smile of welcome.
“Don’t you just love this weather, m’lad?”
He speaks in a harsh and croaking voice with a strangled accent—old Bostonian or something. With its tortured vowels, I’m not sure at first if what he said was m’lad or m’lord.
In a couple of long strides he’s right in front of me, hunching his shoulders to look into my eyes. A face that would only look at home in hell, pale skin stretched taut round fleshless bone, hollow cheeks, sunken eye sockets—he looks like something is eating him from the inside. He’s not just gaunt; he looks emaciated. But the scars are the worst.
All over his face—and over his body, they say—a latticework of white-on-white scars runs riot. His is a stitched-together patchwork hide of tiny diamond-shaped sections of skin, a square inch or so in size on average. And inside every section is a mark, not really tattooed but hacked into the skin and stained black, each ma
rk different and each one indecipherable as far as I’m concerned. Like an untranslated Mayan codex, the sigils that disfigure him seem to signify some story I could never read, a blood ritual meaningless to an outsider but terribly horrifyingly true if you only had the key to understanding it.
I’m shaking.
He throws his arms wide, his tattered gray suit jacket flapping in the wind.
“Speak, m’lad,” he says.
His brown trousers are sodden, ripped and muddy, his jacket belonging in some antique decade with its wide lapels; I’m trying to find his clothes real interesting because I don’t want to look into that face. He puts a knuckle under my chin and tilts it upward.
“Speak,” he says.
“You wanted to see me.”
A very small voice.
“Yes, indeed. You’re a good boy, Tom, good boy. I call you and you come running. Am I so very…scary?”
I bite my bottom lip and nod.
“You’re a good boy, a bright boy, m’lad. I reckon you could go far. You reckon that?”
Dumbly, numbly, I nod again.
WHERE ARE YOU NOW?
His gloved fist cracks across my cheek with a sudden, casual brutality and, as I fall, a kick in the stomach sends me sliding, splashing into mud. I retch, sob, cough and try to pull myself away, too shocked, dazed, winded to think of anything else. I feel the edge of a tarpaulin under my palm, my fingers digging into muck. He grabs me by the collar and drags me to my feet. I blink, tears streaming down my stung face, salt in my mouth along with the darker taste of rainwater mud. I don’t think I’ve ever been punched before.
“Go where, m’lad? You have a destination in mind, you have a sense of direction? If you do I’d like to know. Well?”
He lets me go and I fall back to the ground.
“I didn’t think so. I reckon you’re just like all the rest…I’ve got your number.”
His voice is twisted with contempt but when I look at his face, at his eyes at least, I’d swear that what I see is disappointment.
“Why don’t you stand up, m’lad? Come on. Show some backbone.”
I slide in the mud, steady myself against some polythene-covered piece of furniture, and try to pull myself upright.
“Tell me, m’lad, where are you now; do you know even that?”
I manage to get up onto my knees, still shaking, blinking.
“What do you mean? Endhaven…?”
“Wrong, m’lad. Where you are now is humiliation and anger, frustration and fear, and it’s me that brought you here.”
He stalks away from me, strides to his cart and slaps his hands down on the edge—like a drunk would hold himself steady against a low wall as he throws up, or like a boxer would hold the ropes at his corner as he waits for the bell to ring.
“Where you are now is on your knees,” he says, “and I’m the one you owe it to. You could stand up, but maybe you’d rather be down there on your knees. Tell me. Is it worth it? Is your tawdry little life worth all this?”
He comes striding toward me through the dark rain.
“It’s…something,” I say, and he kicks me in the face.
“What’ve you got that’s worth my keeping you alive?” he says.
I can’t answer, too busy whimpering, curling into a fetal ball, but I can hear him hissing in my ear, crouched down beside me.
“Should I reckon your debts, m’lad, give you a sermon on the sins of the flesh? On respectability? On decency? I reckon your debts run deeper than that.”
I moan. I feel his gloved hands grabbing the shoulders of my jacket, dragging me like a sack of potatoes.
“You owe me your life, m’lad,” he says. “You owe me your soul.”
He’s lifting me, swinging me round, dropping me onto puddles and bubble-wrap polythene and a solid shape of seat and back and arms beneath—a chair.
“Or fair exchange,” he says.
I wipe the muck out of my eyes—tears, rain, blood? All I can see is the vague shape of him pacing around me.
“You know, m’lad, I reckon there’s not one of you in Endhaven who will ever have enough to…repay your debt, clear your account, to pay back what you’ve taken from me.”
I’ve never heard him like this. I’ve heard him calling down God’s wrath, cursing the sinners and the cities of iniquity, but this is pure unbridled venom.
His gloved hand clamps my jaw, pulls my face up for him to snarl into.
“You people. You give up your dreams to me, sell out your hopes for a trinket or two and, you know what? Really. Honestly. Your souls are worth nothing. Nothing!”
Has anyone ever heard him like this? I think. Has anyone ever heard this rage? Christ, it’s like some kind of confession. Why me? Why is he doing this to me?
“I’d kill you all now,” he says, “but it’s not within the contract.”
And his voice sounds almost sorry.
“How do I reckon you, Tom?” he says. “I reckon you’re nothing.”
A SHORT WALK DOWN TO THE EVENFALL
My face is burning, half with the heat of pain, half with the heat of shame.
“What do you want from me?” I say.
“I want nothing at all from you. You’re worth nothing at all to me. Nothing.”
“Then leave me alone.”
He pulls off the glove on his right hand; scarred like his face and just as cadaverous, it has one small patch of raw tissue where a little diamond of skin has been cut out, peeled off. Even the muscles and veins inside are white as the sinew and bone.
“Leave you alone?” he says. “Come on, we’ll take a short walk down to the Evenfall, m’lad, and see if you still want me to leave you alone.”
He reaches into a pocket, searching, finds what he’s looking for and produces the missing patch of skin, holds it out toward me in the palm of his hand. I know the black mark with a deeper and more instant recognition even than when you see your own face suddenly reflected in a window or a puddle.
I remember watching the others get their marks—I was maybe five, six, I don’t know—and then it was my turn and I cried and had to be held and comforted and coaxed by Annie as the tattooist leaned over me with her blurring, buzzing needle in one hand, wiping away the blood and excess ink with the antiseptic wipe in her other hand. I remember the hot biting pain in my shoulder and the feeling deeper inside like this mark was something being dragged out of my soul, not carved into my skin. I don’t really remember the later part with the scalpel—I think maybe I passed out—but I remember afterward, sitting in the back of the rag-and-bone man’s cart, crying with the pain and misery, with Aunt Stef hugging me and Annie sitting across from us, also in tears. I thought it was because her shoulder hurt too, but now I guess she knew what we were giving up.
The rag-and-bone man curls his hand into a fist around the patch of skin and I feel it, not in my shoulder but at the back of my neck.
“Who are you, Tom?” he says. “You’re nothing without this. The only thing that holds you in this world is the contract, is me. You have nothing to hold on to; we go down to the Evenfall, m’lad, and I reckon your soul will just blow away in the wind.”
“I have Jack,” I say. “We have each other.”
“Yes, but does he actually need you?” he says.
I say nothing.
“Jack…” he says almost idly. “Maybe there is something you have to offer. You ‘love’ the iceman, don’t you? You’d give your soul for him if you could. Would he give his for you, do you think? That’s ‘love,’ isn’t it? Isn’t that what you think?”
I feel sick, afraid that I know what he means, praying that I don’t.
“Come on, m’lad, you know his soul’s not going to be given to anyone. It’s sealed off more secure than a Swiss bank account. That boy, he cut his heart out long ago and locked it in a little steel box to keep it safe from damage. How can you ‘love’ him if you don’t even know him? Where’s he from, what made him what he is; what’s his secret mark, h
is hidden true name, the essence of Jack? Until you know that you’ll never really touch him, and he’ll never truly be yours. Isn’t that true? Isn’t that what you think?”
“Leave me alone. I don’t know what you—”
“Oh yes, you do,” he says. “You want to know him, don’t you? You want to really know him, m’lad. Deep down. You want to own him.”
“No, that’s not—”
“I could help you. We could make some sort of deal here.”
“No! Leave him out of this.”
“You want him? I’m the rag-and-bone man, boy. You want it, I can get it for you, at the right price. Come on, make a deal with me, m’lad, or let’s just take a walk right now. It’s time to pay the piper, m’lad. But I can call in your credit or extend it.”
THE DECLARATION OF DEPENDENCE
I won’t listen to his deal. I don’t know where he’s going, but I don’t care.
“No,” I say. “You’ll never own him. Not like the rest of us.”
“Is that what you think? I own you?”
“…yes…”
“Is that what they told you, m’lad?”
I say nothing.
The rag-and-bone man laughs, pulls his hat off his head and shakes his hair, still laughing. He puts the hat back on and thumps it down.
“I don’t own you, m’lad. You own me. Look at me, for the love of god, and ask yourself if you can’t read me like an open book.”
He tears his ragged T-shirt down from the neck to bare his tattooed chest.
“Look at me. This is your contract carved into this skin, the brands of ownership that bind me to this town, the true names of the people of Endhaven, signed and sealed, the declaration of dependence. This one”—he holds up his fist—“is yours.”
I stare at the latticework of diamond scars all over his chest, all over his face, the scars of where each scrap of soul has been stitched on, a harlequin suit of horror.