Vellum (8 page)

“You're not doing a very good job of it,” she says, and he laughs, the air wavering around him, dust swirling in barely perceptible vortices and currents. He raises a hand like he's playing with the breeze. And way off in the distance: a high hollow note like the coda of a song played on a flute carved out of bone.

“Don't try to teach a birdman how to fly, hatchling.”

“Birdman?”

“What does Finnan call us? Angels…gods?”

“Unkin,” she says. And he looks at her like she's eaten his grandmother, pushes past and starts straight for Finnan's slab…as if he's known the way all along. She hurries after him.

A Plain of Bones

“I thought you said your friend didn't talk much.”

His voice is clipped.

“He never told me what it means.”

“Ignorance is bliss.”

“Bullshit,” she says.

The angel glances back at her, and the dog they've just passed starts to howl.

“Did he think we wouldn't gather you as well?” asks the angel.

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

“Then your friend Finnan didn't tell you everything. Ask him sometime what it's like to walk the road of all dust. Ask him about the dry wind that blows across the fields of lost days. Ask him.”

And he mutters something under his breath and suddenly she's dizzy, her mind filled with this image of a long, dry, dusty road, and the angel walking down it, dust devils spiraling in the air around him, whipping up the sand and grit, the dusky-gray and ochre-red and bleached-white dirt of centuries, of millennia of…she sees his black leather boot coming down on a bird's skull, in her mind's eye, and she sees a whole plain of bones, a whole desert that isn't the Mojave at all but somewhere else, somewhere far, far away. And there's a word that's running through her head, something she can't quite make out…villain? volume? valium?…vellum?

She shakes her head to clear it, shake off the image and the ringing sound, but she still feels…sick.

“All I know,” she says, “is what he taught me about mojo, about voudon and Santeria, which is nothing you can't learn in books. And all I know about you unkin is that some people let the mojo take them over, carve it into their own souls till they think they're some sort of fucking superior race, some kind of ‘living manifestation of divinity,' and sure, they've got power, but they're so fucking full of themselves, so fucking self-righteous, so fucking…”

She loses the word she's looking for; all she can do is spit on the ground in disgust.

In some ways it's true. The little that Finnan's told her is really just kitchen magic, charms, little gravings on the world. Even the word
unkin
only slipped out when he was drunk that time and got all weird so that she couldn't tell if he was sad or angry, at her or someone else. But if this bastard's going to play fisherman with her then fuck him; two can play at that game.

“There are righteous unkin and there are fallen unkin,” says the black man, “and there are fools like Finnan who think they can stay neutral, who think they can hide from their duty in the middle of nowhere and pray it never finds them.”

“And that's your job, right?” she says. “Finding them?”

“It's time for your friend to decide where he stands. On the side of the angels or with those who would…”

He tails off into a silent scrutiny of her.

“You have no idea, little one, just what our enemies are capable of. You have no idea what the demons of this world would do to you if we didn't…draw the line.”

“So you're a recruitment officer for the War in Heaven?” She laughs. “Hunting down draft-dodgers and deserters? You going to press-gang him or shoot him at dawn?”

“I've come to gather him,” says the angel. “I've come to gather your good friend Finnan.”

And Finnan's slab comes into view ahead.

An Old Sepia Photograph

The place has the look of an old sepia photograph, with its sand-scoured chrome and rusted steel and everything all dusty faded brown. The old Airstream trailer stands high up on redbrick piles and girder stilts, forming the center of a large structure of retrofitted salvage. Canvas, corrugated iron and even old car hoods form the walls and roofs of annexes built around and under the main living area, accessed by an old rusting ladder.

Round the back of this industrial gothic folly, rubber tires are piled up to form three walls of an open garage-workshop area, roofed with obsolete twelve-foot solar panels and linked to the Airstream by wires and cables. In front of the main construction, the sandblasted shells of two dead automobiles stand like two stone lions at the steps of some grand city hall. All around, the place is littered with electrical and mechanical equipment, old and new, broken and fixed, with computers, TVs and satellite dishes, with stripped-down washing machines and motorbikes built up from spare parts.

It was Finnan who'd built the bike her brother Thomas left on, just picked up and left one day, without a note or a word of goodbye. She knew the two of them well enough to know that if anybody had an answer for her it would be Finnan. Finnan had an answer for everything. So she had stormed up to Finnan's slab and started throwing stone after stone against the aluminum of his trailer, stood there, hands on hips, cursing him and shouting at him to come out, demanding to know where Tom had gone. That's two years past now and she still isn't convinced that Finnan doesn't know exactly where Tom is, but she's learned to trust him in so many other ways…she's learned to trust him that Tom had a reason for just disappearing.

Part of it is, she's seen what Finnan can do. His slab is a junkyard in its own right and Finnan…Finnan is the junkmaster, the man who can take a broken food processor, a Frigidaire, an electric boiler and a bus engine, and rebuild them into a single unit that turns raw sewage into fresh water, fertilizer and sterile nontoxic dust. But he can do other things as well. She still remembers when Mac had his “episode” and they found him lying on the ground, and before she knows it Finnan is down beside him, one hand on his chest, and he gives just a little flick—it wasn't a laying on of hands or nothing, she wouldn't say that exactly, but no way was it a cardiac massage. She was trying to take Mac's pulse and it just wasn't there, she remembers, she couldn't find it there at all until Finnan gave that tiny flick of the wrist…and then it was.

And right now, Finnan is standing in his dead-car gateway, waiting for them patiently with his staff in his hand and a cigarette in his mouth.

Finnan

Finnan looks about twenty and has for as long as she's known him. He claims to be in his late thirties, but there's nobody who knows for sure. The clothes he wears seem always the same, the same white button-neck T-shirts, the same sandstone-colored chinos and the same scuffed desert hiking boots, everything always smudged with the same black engine oil and grease that slicks back his dirty blond hair. Short and skinny, but with muscles that look like they're made of steel cable, every fiber of them showing under the taut skin of his arms, shifting as he moves them as he works on whatever his latest project is.

“That's the demon inside me,” he's joked with her a few times, but she's never been sure just how much of a joke it really is. “Got a little bit of something in me,” he says, “seems to just eat up all my body fat.”

She's sure there's something underneath the joke. Finnan has an air about him, a sense that he's constantly on edge, constantly restrained, like he's burning all his energy just holding back, holding himself back from doing God knows what. As she's come to know him, from the late nights when the three of them would get wasted, back when Tom was still around, or chasing him around in the months after her brother left, trying to get some answers out of him, she's come to realize that, in a way, it isn't a joke at all.

We've all got a little bit of demon in us, she thinks, and a little bit of angel. Finnan talks about it in terms of the graving, about the way everyone has an…ability to find the Cant inside themselves, to open up a locked door in their heads and let it loose. She thought he was talking in metaphors until the day he held his hand out in front of her, closed in a fist, then opened it up to show her the palm of his hand, closing it again quickly. It might have been some magic trick, but the scar looked real for that instant, the weird shape that looked like it'd been carved in with the point of a knife; she didn't get that good a look at it but she caught a glimpse of something that looked vaguely like an eye in outline—an ellipse with a circle inside but with four little bumps coming off the outside of it.

Then he opened up his hand again and it was gone, just the rough skin of his workingman's hand. He closed his hand into a fist again, flexed his bicep, looking at his arm like it didn't belong to him.

At the moment, she can see the tension in those arms of his, the knotted muscles and wire veins, as one takes the cigarette from his mouth and flicks it away, while the other grips the iron railing that functions as the shaft of his staff. A TV aerial is fixed at the top of the railing, pointing downward, its crossbars hung with chains and charms, wound round with barbed wire and crowned by a plastic doll's head. Finnan holds the thing with white knuckles like it's his only connection to sanity. He calls it his
disruptor.
Magic for the TV generation, he says, for an electronic world of nanotech and simware. There's mojo in skin and bone and graveyard dirt, of course, but you have to keep up with the times. The Cant is powerful enough just whispered in an ear; and in these days of
bitmites,
nanite surveillance systems blowing in the wind they breathe, riding on the dust they taste on it, well, the Cant is even stronger as a whisper in the head.

She doesn't know what powers it, but Finnan's disruptor gives a low buzz if you listen close to it, as he grips it in his hand. Like now.

“Well,” he says. “Good morning, reality. Let's go inside and talk.”

The Book of Names

“There's nothing to talk about,” says the angel.

He and Finnan are sitting at the Formica top of the little dinner table in Finnan's Airstream, one drinking bottled water, the other bottled beer. She noses round the fridge, looking for a Coke, but watching them all the time out of the corner of her eye, and listening intently to everything they say.

“Your name is in the book,” says the angel.

The angel's leatherbound “book”
—
actually a tenth-generation palmtop with slick packaging—is sitting up on the table in front of him, open and switched on. Scrolling over the screen, row upon row, is a sequence composed of four different glyphs arranged in seemingly random order, and she can't help thinking of an image she saw on a documentary once, a computer-generated graphic of As and Ts and Gs and Cs, scrolling behind a slowly spinning model of a double helix. The letters represented a gene sequence, she remembers, four basic building blocks that combine along the helix of a DNA molecule to write out the pattern of a living creature.

As she watches, the scrolling gradually accelerates until the screen becomes just a gray blur.

“The book is wrong,” says Finnan. “You've got the wrong man. Maybe you should check the original. Oh, that's right, I hear you lost it.”

He smirks.

“Pity,” he says. “You really can't expect a cut-rate copy like that to be worth a damn. Those scribes in Aratta hacking the old Cant into gravings that—”

“Seamus Finnan. Born in Ireland, in—”

“That's not my name,” he says. “You don't even have my fucking name. Fucking angels. You want to get yer fookin facts straight before ye come barging into someone's fookin life.”

It's not the first time she's noticed the hint of an Irish accent in Finnan's voice, but she's still surprised. It's as if the name has just this moment sparked something off inside him, and despite his denials she's suddenly sure that Seamus is the name he was born with. But she's also sure that isn't what Finnan means when he talks about his name. He's talking about something deeper.

The angel leans forward, peering at the book as if the blur actually means something to him.

“The book isn't wrong,” says the angel. “The record is complete.”

“The little black book of your master's conquests, eh?”

“A book of unkin,” the angel says. “Covenant and Sovereigns and those who're not yet signed. All of them. Times and places of callings and gatherings. Crossings of paths. Reckonings.”

He moves a finger across the trackpad and the screen flicks sideways, up, down, scrolling, panning, faster than he can possibly see, surely. He taps it and it stops.

“Slab City, April 12th, 2014,” says the angel. He turns it round to show Finnan, like the gibberish of sigils proves his point.