Ink (6 page)

The sylph shakes the skanda strands from its head with a growl, but the scent of dead souls drifting fills its nostrils still, the smell of cigarette smoke snatched as someone passes you in the street, the smells of public transport, smells of old and young, male and female, stale fart and aftershave, curry and spearmint, shower gel and sweat. Mingled memories of parents in people carriers lifting children out to hand to ragged refugees who grab the food parcels out of the soldiers’ hands and rip the wrappers off the bars of chocolate, crumple them and drop the can and kick it and turn and dribble past the fat boy to shoot at the fire door where the man in the clean suit nails the notice…

The echoes might have belonged to anyone. They might even have belonged to the sylph, if it was human once. It might have come here, refugee or villager, in some broken bit of city—houses, streets and schemes of them, all turning, tilting in the storm of Evenfall like furniture detritus tumbling in floodwaters—when the bitmites broke loose. It might have come here seeking shelter in the drifting terror of the Evenfall, but failing to find it. It's hard to tell anymore. The sylph has been out in the Hinter for so long that it
is
the Hinter, bitmites for its blood and body.

“Halz! Qua entre resirken?”

The guard wears the nightshades and the sky-blue helmet of a peacekeeper, but his uniform is a mix of gear from many armies, over it a bulky duffel coat with
its collar turned up against the cold, fluorescent plastic patches on the shoulders as a poor man's epaulets. A cut scars down his face, the stitches still in, but where the scab should be the skin is clean and bloodless, more like a fabric that's been hastily mended than a living wound still healing. He smokes the roach of a skinny joint, his disrupter pointed straight at the sylph's head. Behind him, the Way Station looks as dead as the rest of the dreamtime scheme, but more stable in its squat single story, fenced off and guarded.

The sylph is unconcerned. Steel and concrete, guards and guns, might have kept the Haven safe once from the riots of the dislocated when the world was still as firm as flesh and survivors huddled behind barricades, shooting shambling things that came at them out of the cracks in reality. But it's different now; now the shadows and reflections released by the bitmites, creatures like the sylph given strange fluid substance by the angel dust, come as inscrutable supplicants that simply cannot be refused. They slide in through the niches in the back of someone's mind, in the highlights in a person's eye, and even scattered by disrupters they fall, flow and re-form. The only real defense the enclaves of reality and order have against such things is to invite them in.

The sentry studies the sylph for a second and it feels itself solidify under his gaze.

“Lingischt?”
says the sentry.
“Italiano?Français?Deutschen?”

The sylph's perspective snaps, a cut to close-up.

“Angelish,” we say.

We growl, shake our head, force the word out right.

“English,” we say.

He seems to relax a little at this. One of his own, he thinks; we smell corned beef on him, chip shops and lager, kebabs and curry. A spiderweb tattoo is just visible on his neck. Football chants curl in the smoke that rises from his spliff, and the steam of his breath. He misses the lads more than the missus or his ma and da, and he's not cut out for this malarkey, so he's not, you know; all lost in the Evenfall they are, as he was when the militiamen found him, lost in the diasporas and disappearances of where did all the people and the places that he used to know go into that's a no-go area of rubble and smoke and—

“Got any papers?” he says.

“No,” we say. “No identity, no papers.”

“I mean cigarette papers. Skins. You got any cigarette papers?”

We hold our hands out, palms up.

“Worth a try,” he shrugs. “On you go, mate.”

“Don't you want to know our name?”

He laughs.

“If you had a name, you wouldn't be here.”

We sniff at him as we pull open the unlocked gate. His disrupter is switched off— no telltale odor of ozone and cum, just blackcurrant, petrol and apathy. The filth of four weeks living in a corner shop without a toilet, raiding its shelves for tinned food, as the Evenfall raged outside. The fish-oil smell of fear when he came out into the still black night, and the city was gone and he was in the Hinter, ash falling like snow across the dereliction of a hundred suburbias. He was lucky that the search party found him or he'd never have known that this slumscape of houses torn from their original moorings is accreted into a barricade around an entry point, a Way Station.

A Way Station. The low-bulked building doesn't look like it could hold a city within its walls, but that's how the Havens are. Hidden among a twenty-years-wide novagrad, buried decades, sometimes centuries, down beneath the ruin, just a door or window showing here or there, through which they can be entered. Time is wide in the Hinter, wide and deep.

We walk across the yard of hopscotch chalk marks, up the steps, into the bunker that will take us home.

“So here I am, back in grand Themes,” says our Iacchus Bacchus. “Jack is back, the son of Sooth and Simile, born in a flash of lightning, out of the east. I've shed the spiritskin, and taken human shape to show myself at Hinter springs and Sumer's falls.”

The painted backdrop of the wagon's fold-down stage portrays a grandiose ruin of gray stone obscured and overgrown by green. Don, Guy and Joey melt back into it as Harlequin commands the stage. Jack's in the spotlight. Out in the hall, the audience are shades.

‘And here I stand,” says Jack as Harlequin, “before my mother's monument, here where the bolt blasted her house, the ruins of it smoking still. And I can feel the fire from the spirit blaze beneath, the fury visited upon my mother. I have to praise old Pantaloon; he keeps this spot so … sanctified, so sacred in his daughter's name, it seems no hands have touched it barring mine. See how it's wild with the thick foliage, the choking vines.”

——

The Duke upon his throne across the hall, where all the lords and courtiers like children sit cross-legged on the ground, leans to one side to whisper in his consul's ear, looking from Jack to Joey and to Guy … and back to Jack, who leaps from top of prop to top of prop, to crouch as if to pounce; there's just that little bite of something else there, added to the bounce and flounce.

“This seems,” the Duke says, “rather serious for a Harlequin play. Dead mothers and suchlike. I do believe I stressed the word
diversion.”

The Princess seated on his other side just rolls her eyes, quite clearly tired of her gray-bearded, scar-faced guardian and his stern insistence on frivolity. She looks like a child beside him, haughty and imperious, yet with a flash of trash in the way she sits itching and twitching in green riding dress, her dark-red hair pinned up and back. The anachronisms of this place are not entirely consistent; the heraldry hints more of Ruritanian pageantry than the authentic pomp of days of yore. The Duke wears gray, of course, his garb, the hall itself, all an extension of his stone demeanor; even the torches on the wall can't light his gloom. This is his world, I think, and she's not at home here.

On the stage, the Harlequin sits down upon his mother's tomb.

“M'sire, the Troupe d'reynard do come highly recommended,” says the consul, smiling like a nervous dog. ‘Avant-garde perhaps,” he says, “but if m'sire doesn't like it, we can always have them executed afterward.”

Backstage, I skulk into the shadows of the folds of curtains and billowing backgrounds. The threat of death's an occupational hazard of a mummer's life, here in this wasted land of mad gods and ghost megalomaniacs, the many kingdoms of the Hinter; life is cheap to those convinced of their authority over reality itself.

“Shh,” whispers the Princess as she shakes her head. “He's talking again.”

“So my dear mother's ugly sisters, of all people, call me bastard,” Jack says, “born from some secret lover's shame, born to a slut, a slag. They might as well have called my dear old mum a toothless, bearded hag. And they deny all claims that the divine might have a hand in it. I can't think why. Is it not obvious that I'm descended from on high, from mighty Sooth?”

With his dark mask on you can't see the arching eyebrow, but I know that tone of mischief in his voice, the
Who? Me? Would I lie to you?

“But no! They say that Pantaloon, shifting the blame, invented the whole thing … that no one knows my roving father's name.”

Jack flashes from naive mock indignation, instantly, to something darker.

“Hah! With one whisper of that word upon the wind, I've seen them driven into a frenzy, driven from their homes into the hills, out of their minds, raving and answering another's will. I've got them dressed for orgies, each and every one of these smug daughters of old Pantaloon, up on the open rocks beneath the towering green pines, lying with all the sons of Columbine.”

Jack walks the boards. A slow turn of the head to speak directly to the Duke.

“This town,” he says, “however ignorant it is of mystery and loath to learn, will see. I'll happily take up my mother's case, and wear a crown to show these mortal fools her child, the son of Sooth, born in the death of a lost divinity, to give them truth.”

The Duke opens his mouth again to speak but Guy is suddenly beside him, elbow leaning on the throne. A shrug, a disingenuous smile, a
wait-let-me-explain.

“Now, Pantaloon,” says Guy, “the onetime poobah of these palaces and plazas, has long since passed his place and all its privileges to Pierrot, son of his daughter Columbine—”

‘Aye, Pierrot,” says Jack. “He wages war against my wine, pushing the daimon drink away and pouring no libations, making no mention of poor me in all his muttered prayers. It's not fair! This King of Tears … I'll show him and his people the divine; I'll show him the full glory of the vine. Then, once I've set his house in order, I can go somewhere more green, and show my spirit there.”

He holds a finger up.

“But
if the town should take up arms—lift up their fists in anger—if they think that they can drive my followers down from the heights of ecstasy, we'll face them down and, at the head of a mad mob, I'll show them rout and riot. Why else do I wear this mortal skin, this flesh and bone, and step down from my throne to take man's form, if not to cause a royal ruckus?”

The Duke looks ponderous, face seeming graved from silent stone like he's just one more sculpture in this hall built out of dreams of chivalry. I'm not impressed. His artifice is more elaborate than our own, but made of ideas that are long since stale, a pulpy paperback heroic fantasy. He probably has knights somewhere, off hunting for the Holy Grail. Well, fuck that shit, as Jack would say. Nobody ever asks the serfs if
they
are happy living in the fairy tale.

Once upon a time. Once upon a time there were three little pigs, a wolf and seven little kids, three billy goats gruff, and trolls under bridges, and giants in the sky, and thirty little children with Ladybird books and poster paints, and tubes of glitter and sticks of glue, and a boy called Jack.

Once upon a time, the Way Station was a school, and faded finger-paintings still decorate the walls—dinosaurs and ruined cities, happy families and war crimes. Pages of arithmetic textbooks, times tables and alphabet readers litter the floor, ground into pulp by countless feet. The open-plan classrooms are cluttered with overturned desks and chairs all scaled for preteen occupants.

Signs in white paint on eggshell yellow lead us to the gym, where filing cabinets and lockers have been gathered against the back wall of a small stage, and where an old man sits behind a desk half buried in paperwork. Military uniform, British Raj—period general. He looks up only when the door creaks and crashes shut behind us; a tattoo circles one eye, the graving of a monocle, just a little absurd like he's been inked by a joke telescope. The dull thunder of children's feet fills the room, together with the muted hiss of a radio playing an eightsome reel far-ago in the past. The Way Station is haunted with the ghosts of all those who didn't make it, shreds of spirit matting the entry point like hair clogging a plughole.

He nods to himself and waves his hand for us to come close. We jump up onto the stage and sit down on a chair facing his desk, sniffing the dust and musk and mildewed paper in the air. For a while we just study each other: a thousand shadows could be hidden in the wrinkles of his ridden face, the jowls and baggy eyes, a face once solid, long gone soft. He peers at me through his nightshades.

“So…” he says eventually.

His quiet voice is amplified by the emptiness of the hall.

“You want sanctuary. You want come in Kentigern, play pip pip best of Britain, old boy? You no jolly happy in Hinter?”

His accent is so thick that it's grotesque, as if the farthest reaches of the British Empire collaborated on creating the ultimate offense to the language of their colonialist masters.

“We want humanity,” we say.

He laughs and coughs, gasps for air, and laughs again. He has the emphysema wheeze of a forty-a-day smoker but it doesn't stop him from reaching into his
breast pocket to bring out a silver cigarette case. He clicks it open, takes a Russian black out, taps it on the table. Snaps the case shut. Puts the cigarette in his mouth.

“Crazy thing! You have one idea what is humanity? Eh, crazy thing?”

“We can learn.”

The unlit cigarette dangles from his bottom lip, bouncing as he speaks.

“Hah… You
learn
to ride bicycle. You
learn
to speak lingischt. You no
learn
to be human being. No, you are what you are, and you—hah—”

He takes the cigarette out and points it at us.

“You are a monster. Crazy thing. Big scary monster.
Not
a human being. Dust with legs.”