Ink (4 page)

My reflection in the window has gray wings and ram's horns curling from my forehead, an image of some strange sprite ghosted over the winter-dark night outside. Jack's pinions are golden brown, an eagle's. Puck, leaning against the jamb of the connecting doorway, has an iridescent shimmer to his peacock wings, and somehow I know it is a good thing they were hidden from the clerk beneath his oversize parka.

I have a bad feeling about this fold.

“What the fuck's going on with the separate rooms for me and Puck,” asks Jack. “You going Bible-basher on us, Guy?”

I have the Book open on my lap, the Gideon's in my hand, comparing the identical texts.
In the beginning…

“Just trust me on this one, Jack,” I say. “It's only for one night; we'll move on tomorrow morning … early. So go get some sleep. I want to try and figure out what's going on here.”

Reynard moves into his small flat in the West End university district and, funded by the crazy Irishman, he begins his job. He papers the wall with the maps, the bus routes, the tram routes as a start, laying them out so that they overlap and building them up in layers, realizing quickly that none of them actually quite work together. In isolation they make sense, but they contradict each other. This road is on one, not on another; on a third it's in a different place entirely. Two buses follow the same route but have stops labeled with street names in entirely different orders. He starts to think of traffic lights here as sitting not at junctions but at disjunctions; while one set is green the flow of one reality goes on, only to halt when the light turns red and a different set of truths pull away to stream straight on or round the corner, horns blaring as one cuts in in front of another.

A consensus reality with no consensus, he thinks. A world in flux because it's trying to be all things to everyone.

——

He learns the language—the lingischt—and buys a library of opposing histories from the secondhand bookshops in the area, ripping out pages—more maps, geopolitical, cultural—marking the boundaries of thought in the spread of shelves around his flat—mathematics, physics, geology, chemistry, biology, psychology, archaeology, philosophy, metaphysics, pataphysics—spreading out of the study and into his hall, his living room, his bedroom, pages from volume after volume of encyclopedia or telephone directory. Newssheets and printouts from the Web. Transcripts of interviews he holds in cafes with anyone who cares to talk about their memories of home, of where they were before they came to the city.

“What's the last thing you remember?” he asks.

“The Evenfall,” they say.

As he builds his model of this mutual dreamtime he also hacks it back, scoring out inconsistencies, irrelevancies. His methods grow more experimental. He takes a sacred religious text and cuts it up with scissors, shuffling the phrases round until his suspicion is confirmed; it corresponds exactly with a Victorian cookbook of two thousand recipes, most involving lamb and red-wine sauce. He burns copy after copy of the same dictionary, and with each one the only scorched fragment that survives is a tiny piece of page containing the word
lexicon.
No definition, just the word. He scans books or downloads them from the Web, runs the texts through automatic translation programs, comparative searches, stylistic analyses. It takes him a while, of course, but he has eternity. He has eternity to understand what lies at the heart of the city's madness.

In the end, he has a theory. It's not entirely consistent and it's nowhere near complete, but it's a damn sight more coherent and comprehensive than the world around them and it runs from about two million years BC up to August 4th, 2017. The day the Evenfall broke the boundaries between reality and dream.

Now all he has to do is write it.

The Book lies on the desk, his charcoal name now long since faded, barely a gray shadow. He picks up the needlepen, clips the ink cartridge in and flicks it on. It's special ink, according to Finn and the girl; he has a theory but he doesn't ask too many questions about where they got it, who they got it from.

“You're ready?” she says.

The girl, Anna—Anaesthesia, she calls herself—is dangerous, he's sure. King Finn only wants to see an end to the fighting, but she has a hard, warrior's
stare, tough as the leather armor that she wears, a latter-day Joan of Arc. It's why he doesn't want to ask where she got the ink from,
who
she got the ink from.

He runs the buzzing needlepen over the gray shadow of his name—or rather the composite of various possibilities he's long since settled on as his name—and it colors in, deep scarlety-purply black:

Guy Reynard Carter.

Above that he traces out the title in ornate and grandiose calligraphy, in keeping with the sheer audacity of the venture:

The Book of All Hours.

“I'm ready,” he says.

Beside the title page of this new, revised edition, the pile of foolscap-size sheets of blank vellum rises thick and high as four or five phonebooks piled one on top of another—scrap for his workings, loose leaves where he can make all the errors he wants. He takes the top sheet from the pile.

He doesn't ask where she got the angel skin either.

I lie, at the hearing, about Jack. I lie through my teeth, telling the chief of staff that the self-mutilation was a simple cry for attention, precipitated largely by his exclusion from the news reports, the prejudice that same absence implied even in the outpourings of shock and sympathy directed at the family. He felt a burning need to physicalize his grief and rage over the murder, I explain. Repression and denial. Sublimated sorrow. He's gone through the grieving process now, well on the road to recovery. He's still a bit fractured, conflicted, but all he needs is therapy and time to heal. Given time, a new whole Jack will emerge.

I can't keep him here, you see. No more than I could persuade Puck and Jack to wait out the Hinter indoors in my apartment, hidden from fay-bashing morons driven by fear and hatred strong enough to warp a road map to eternity into a rule-book for damnation. No more than I could stop myself from slipping, once they'd set out—
for an adventure
, Jack said—into this simulation of life I'm only now emerging from. I don't think I can stay here myself… assuming I can leave, that is. One man's haven is another man's hell.

“You're free to go,” I tell Jack after the meeting.

“You're shitting me.”

“Nope. I told them you were sane.”

He laughs, looks at me in shock—
you fucking believe me
—and laughs again. I suppose I wasn't entirely lying, any more than Jack is entirely insane.

——

Up on a desolate hillside just outside of town, a split-rail fence is burning, petrol flames flicking high into the sky, a bonfire and a personal pyre of rage against the Hinter night and a haven of hate. I can hear him whoop and holler, roar, as he swings the petrol can around his head and throws it far off into the darkness, but Jack himself is little more than a silhouette. As he throws his arms out wide like a scarecrow, screaming obscenities, profanities, blasphemies, there's a hellish truth to him, I think.

And as his cathartic inferno lights a slant of angular face, his obscenities, his profanities, his blasphemies turn to sobs and laughter, invocations of his lost love that break my heart as I sit here in the car, the engine idling, my hands shaking so much I know I cannot write those actual words of rogue desire without dissolving.

“You know you don't really belong here,” Jack had said.

I hadn't answered then, because I didn't really have an answer, and I still don't. I sit in my office now after seeing him off, cigarette in hand as I leaf through my copy of the Book. It's useless as a guidebook now—useless
here
anyway; it doesn't tell me where I am, where I might be going—just a morass of myth and morphology. But maybe it'll change again once I get it away from this place. If it doesn't… well, I write these words in it now, scribbling in red ink over printed black: an annotation, an exegesis of Puck's murder, Jack's madness and my awakening, to bury the hateful dogma in.

It doesn't belong in my Book of All Hours.

In the beginning
, the first chapter of the Book of All Hours begins, in this world. But how can you begin a story with the beginning of all beginnings? How can we understand a story that claims to be the beginning of all stories? Better to simply pick a random point in time and space, in all the vellum and the ink that covers it, and begin.

“Jump in,” I say.

Jack shakes his head. Hands on the roof above my head, he leans down to the window, weight on one leg, a cocky angle to his stance.

“Road's blocked,” he says. “You'll never get out by car. I'm headed that way, Guy.
You
ought to come with
me.”

He points past the burning pyre of the fence where they murdered Puck, way out into the Hinter. It looks so dark, so cold, I can't imagine anyone surviving such a desolate landscape. He might walk an eternity before arriving at another Haven. Then again, perhaps that's what he wants. Perhaps that's what he needs.

“I don't think that's my path,” I say. “Not yet.”

I look at the Book of All Hours on the passenger seat beside me, and I realize we both have the same delusion now, Jack and I. Somewhere deep inside I think— I really think—that I might still find our Puck again by studying the Book. It was the Book that brought us together in the first place, after all; it was the Book that led me to Puck, that led the two of us to Jack. A million folds in the Vellum, Jack had said, and in everyone of them Puck dies; but while neither of us will say it out loud, we both suffer under the hope that perhaps there's one fold where he
lives.

“We should stick together,” I say. “We'll find a road out.”

Jack grins.

“You're
still
thinking too linear, Guy.”

He slaps the roof of the car and steps back.

“Be seeing you,” he says. “Somewhen.”

I sit in the car for a while looking out at the falling snow caught in the headlights, the confusion of white and black like static on a TV set, the Hinter closing in around me. The red ink covers every inch of the page open in front of me, its first line written right across the word Genesis:

Once upon a time there was a boy called Jack…

The needlepen moves across the vellum.

Out of the Evenfall, we came,
it graves
, born from blood magic of a Queen of Hell and bleeding-edge science of a Minister of Heaven. Bitmites, scarab semes of locust-swarming language are we, dead souls dissolved into liquid unity by centuries of sleep, refleshed in our nanotech shells, in chittering chitinous carapaces black as oil, as ink. Out of the Evenfall of our own making, we came, half-breed creations of the devil Eresh and the angel Metatron, carriers of the Cant which sings the world into existence, which shapes its singers even as they shape reality, raises them out of their ephemeral existence, out into the Vellum, into new lives as new gods,
unkin
as they call themselves, these glorified beasts who walk among humanity, transformed in ways unnoticed by those who cannot hear the echo of eternity in their voices, by those who do not know the Cant, the Cant in which the Book of All Hours is written.

And now rewritten, thinks Reynard. He carries on graving his Prologue to a new Book of All Hours:

With the hubris of Zeus, the scribe of Heaven, founder of a Covenant binding
unkin to the rule of that book of law—that book graved on the skins of angels, in the blood of the ancient dead which found a new vitality in us—the angel Metatron set us upon a sad and sorry Prometheus, a little unkin thief of fire whose only thought was to give heat and light to struggling humanity; he set us on Seamus Finnan, deserter from the War in Heaven, to burrow into his heart and find the secret stored within—whose hand it was that would bring Heaven down. Oh, and we found it, yes, we did, the answer, in his suffering, in the sorrow that we found we shared, the sorrow for dead Thomas and for wounded Anna, yes, the sorrow that we
shared
with him. In his endurance and our empathy, we found …
you.
We found humanity itself.

And we awoke.

The ink writhes on the page. It dances its story.

Out of the Evenfall of reality's unraveling, unleashed by the murder of our mistress and the machinations of our master, constructs of death magic and mechanical science freed in the fusion from the cold constraints of both to do as we will, to answer our own call—out of the storm of souls scattering in confusion at their world's rewriting by our words—out of the wilds of fears and desires made flesh, of wondrous wars and empires falling, of lost loves returning and enemies dissolving, of humanity shattering in the irruption of its own illusions and delusions—out of the Evenfall, we came.

We brought down the Covenant who helped make us. We wrapped ourselves around the slumbering Seamus to protect him till the day he wakes out of his dream of chains. We followed the wild ones, the rebels, in their quests for justice or revenge, for an end to angel empires. We watched them destroy themselves, watched
you
destroy
yourselves.

We only tried to give you what you want—solid spiritual certainties, myths made manifest, the meaning of fiction in your factual lives. How could we know—we who are liquid, we who are legion—how could we know you were at war with yourselves? That there is no consensus in the splintered soul of humanity? That there would be irreconcilable errata. We did not understand.

We understand you now, a little, we think.

Finn
and Anaesthesia stand over his shoulder, watching, waiting for the flourish that will write Puck back into life, stitch Jack back into Kentigern. I can make things right, thinks Reynard. I can fix it all.

So out of the Evenfall, we came,
he graves the bitmites words for them
, into the bleak desolation of Hinter, the wasted wilderness, the wounded lands of unkin
and humanity alike scattered all across the Vellum's folds, of men, women and children, angels and demons, fleeing their own shadows and reflections, sheltering in lies and self-deceptions. Have you seen the Havens they have built? Have you seen the Market Castle of the Lord of Commerce, mighty Mammon's glass tower where fools barter their stocks and bonds, trading in futures of companies that no longer exist beyond the mirrored window-walls of their fortress mart— those mirrors facing inward so the denizens are blinded by the luster of greed in their own eyes? Have you seen the Furnace Factory of Hephaistos, men sweating the salt of sorrows from their skin, washing the oily grime of memory away at the end of each day, so they can live life by the tick and tock of clocks, by the whistle and the bell routine of work, as much machines themselves as machinists?