Ink (3 page)

“What about you?” I say. “Where will
you
go?”

He shrugs.

“Maybe the question should be
when,”
he says.

“You don't notice how the world keeps changing?” says Jack.

It's our fourth—maybe fifth—session and he's starting to really open up, it seems. We're really making progress, digging down into his changeling delusion
and the cause of it, why he insists he's not a faery but a graey, stolen at birth from another world, from another fold of this Vellum. They altered him to fit in, he thinks, added the wings and the horns so he didn't look like a freak here.
Or something.
Sometimes it seems so clear, he says, but he keeps forgetting. Like his memory is being fucked with. I've just finished telling him that this kind of denial is as natural as the desire that makes him different from all the other good ole boys—the White Angelo-Satyr Protestants who inhabit most of Midwestern Amorica. It's genetic, I've been telling him; he was born a faery, and all the bornagains and bookthumpers can't change him, shouldn't even try. There's nothing wrong with his renegade lust, no matter what they say. He doesn't need to be cured.

“Jack, all you have to do is look in a mirror. Look at the glimmer of your eyes, the golden glamour of your skin. You're a faery.”

He shakes his head. Condensation on the window of my office, flurrying snow beyond it, the world outside is whitewashed, a blank page.

“Christ, Doc,” he says. “I wish I knew the word that would wake you, make you realize that you're living in a fucking dreamtime. I'd sing it from the fucking rooftops.”

I pull the car over to the side of the road, where the signpost proudly proclaims that we are now entering North Manitu. A picture of a cowboy in denims and checked shirt welcomes us, the archetypal Marlboro man with a lasso looping over his head, eagle wings outstretched behind him. Beyond the sign the landscape is low rolling hills, barren trees and snow.

I lean over the back of the seat.

“Where are we? What does the Book say?”

Puck lounges across the backseat, head in Jack's lap, the Book of All Hours open in his own, a joint dangling from his lips.

“Fucked if I know,” he says. “This thing's gone weird.”

Puck turns the Book toward me and I see that it's changed; the pages that once held maps to guide us through this endless Vellum have long since been made illegible by my annotations, but this is new. The annotations squirm and wriggle on the page as if alive. Maybe we should turn back, I think. Try another route. But the clouds rolling in behind us are the gray of wet slate, and there are rumbles in the distance. If we just push on, then with a little luck we might reach a motel before the night comes in, before the Hinter sweeps over us.

“When did it change?” I say. “How far back?”

Puck shakes his head. He looks worried.

“I can't remember. Shit, Guy, I can't remember.”

I sit at my kitchen table in my boxer shorts, smoking a cigarette and drinking a glass of water, flicking through the dead channels on the television. The cable's on the blink, it seems, probably a power-out in a transmitter somewhere—I don't know, some technical fault that probably won't get fixed until the weather's cleared; it never does. Anyway, I can't get CNN, ABC or any of the nationals, only the local public access and North Manitu State TV with its ads for farming goods emporiums that sell everything you could need…

“My tractor goes with my hat!” a madman celebrates.

I've just woken from another of the dreams and I could use some mind-numbing TV to fill my thoughts with white noise. I dreamed that Thomas Messenger and I were traveling across these folds Jack talks about. We'd been traveling forever using the Book of All Hours as a guide. It wasn't the Book I know, no Titania and Oberon in Eden, no Adonis dying on the cross for our sins; instead, it was all maps and arcane squiggles I'd learned to decipher over the aeons of our travel. Only the Book had changed and now we were lost, ended up stopping in a motel for the night.

I switch off the TV and put the remote down on the counter, knocking over a saltcellar as I do so. I take a pinch of the spilled salt and flick it over my left shoulder out of habitual superstition, to guard against what spirits lurking in the night I don't know.

“Follow me,” says Jack. “Come on.”

He takes off down the hospital corridor, striding forward, turning to walk backward now and then as he urges me to keep up. He lopes down the steps of the stairwell with the rhythm of a cantering horse, heading down to the basement level. I protest, try to tell him that he's not supposed to be down here. This area's for staff only.

“Jack,” I say. “Where do you think you're going?”

The door of the morgue swings shut as he whirls inside, and I push through after him, sighing. The complaint stops on my lips as I find myself in a room that stretches out in front of me and to both sides, forever. Cadavers lie on slabs in rows and columns that cannot be counted there's so many of them. Wisps of steam rise from open mouths where, here and there, a sheet is folded down. I've
never actually been down here in all my years working at the hospital, I realize; I've never needed to. Given that it's as cold as it is creepy, I'm quite glad of that.

“What is it, Jack?” I say. “What's so important?”

“You don't think there's something strange here?” he says. “All these bodies?

There's millions of them, Guy, millions.”

I look around, unfazed.

“We're in the morgue,” I say. “What do you expect?”

“Look at their faces,” he says.

Every one of them, I realize, is Puck's.

I wake up crying.

You understand, I was there when they brought Thomas Messenger into the hospital, having a fly smoke in the ambulance bay outside the ER as the van pulled up, siren blaring, and the place erupted into a chaos of paramedics and doctors, clattering trolley, swinging doors. I caught a glimpse of his face, bloodied and broken, but with streaks of clear skin visible under his eyes where the tears had washed away the gore.

I didn't recognize him.

I walked past the room where he was on the ventilator, lying in a coma for a full week; I looked in and saw him there, his swollen face under the mask, and still I didn't recognize him. I watched the news report as they gradually revealed the horror of this hate crime, and they showed him in a family photo, smiling, with his green hair and his kid horns. I still didn't recognize him.

I'd never met Thomas Messenger. I'd never met Puck in this fold.

Reynard sits in the cafe, sipping at the thick sweet tar somewhere between Italian espresso and Turkish coffee. Hints of rosewater and licorice, bitter sediment at the bottom. On the tabletop, the book is open in front of him, at the first page, where his charcoal name is smeared. He's just about to turn the page to see— just to see—if it has anything to say, when a hand comes down on top of his own and the man with dirty-blond hair scrapes a chair up beside him, sits in it and says:

“Sure and ye'd be better not to do that right now, not here where everyone and anyone could see it, like. Because you and me both know what that book is, sure—Christ and I could smell the angel skin a mile off—and, well, let's just say
there's some as would cut your right arm off just to get their greasy fookin fingers on it. Not
their
right arm, mind. Yours.”

The man peels Reynard's hand from the book, picks it up and closes it, slides it back across the table toward him.

“So ye'd be best to keep that tucked away for now. Christ, don't ye know that there's a fookin war on? The Covenant's fallen. Every fookin angel bastard wants to be fookin top dog now and you're flashing the fookin Book about like it's yer journal of wanky teenage poetry, by Christ.”

Reynard puts the book in his pocket, numb with questions.

“King Finn,” says the man. “So you'll be Guy Fox then, or is it Reynard yer calling yerself just now? Sure and I don't suppose it matters, does it? It's all the fookin same.”

He waves at a waiter.

“Kave, grazzis.”

Reynard finds himself shaking hands.

The Irishman settles back in his chair.

“No doubt yer a little confused and all, having only just arrived right in the middle of things, but sure and isn't that life for ye? It'd be nice to think that the little folk like yerself and yours truly would be in on the grand schemes of the Powers That Be right from the off, but sadly that's not the way it works. No, we're just the ones wake up one day and realize that the world's gone fookin mental and it's us that has to deal with the big bag of shite the Powers That Be have only gone and got us all up to our eyeballs in.”

He takes out a pack of unfiltered Camels, taps them on the table and pulls a cigarette out with his lips.

“Right so. All ye have to know just now is that Thomas is dead. Sure and ye remember Thomas, right? Nice lad, bit light on his feet and short on the common sense but a heart of fookin gold, ye know?”

Reynard remembers.

“North Manitu,” he says. “Laramie.”

“Fookin everywhere,” says King Finn. “They killed him fookin everywhere.”

“Who?” says Reynard.

Finn points the cigarette at him.

“Jesus, but isn't that the million-dollar question? Who and why and when and where and what the fook has his dying done to the whole fookin Vellum. One
little thread and the whole fookin thing falls apart, Christ. Sure and who'd have thought a short-arse fairy with his head in the fookin clouds would've left such a bloody big hole in reality?”

He takes a book of matches out of his packet, tears off a match and folds the flap over to wedge the match tight against the sandpaper as he flicks it into a hiss of flame. Tobacco crackles as he lights the cigarette.

“But if I could make sense of it to ye here and now, I would, believe me, but, ye see, that's your job—if ye'll take it, like. And seeing as how yer carrying the Book about with ye, I hate to say it, but I think ye'll find it's what yer meant to do. To make sense of it all, like.”

The Irishman takes his coffee from the waiter, smiles and nods his thanks.

“ ‘Cause sure and it doesn't make any fookin sense to the rest of us,” he says. “The Evenfall was bad enough, but this is fookin chaos. Fookin Hinter. Jesus, but I hate the fookin Hinter.”

“You know it's always Hinter,” says Jack. “You realize that, right?”

“It might seem that way,” I say, “but it's only a quarter of the year, Jack.”

“Yeah?” he says. “So what did you do last summer? You didn't take a vacation, did you?”

“Well, no, I didn't get a chance,” I say. “Couldn't get away.”

“So you just worked through it, right? And the summer before that?”

“Well, the hospital was busy. I ended up—”

“Really? Christ, when was the last time you had a vacation, Guy? When was the last time you were out of state? How long have you been working in this hospital?”

“Five years, I think. Give or take. Why?”

“Have you been out of state at all in any of those years? Have you even been out of town? When was the last time you sat in a park and watched a butterfly?”

I smile. It's true, I realize, that I haven't had a summer vacation in all the time I've been working here, but I have had trips outside of town. Why, I have crystal-clear memories of returning from a conference over in…what's-it-called? Anyway, I remember stopping off on the way home, at the Safe Haven Motel out on the interstate.

I hand the clerk behind the counter my griftcard and wait as she swipes it through the machine, watches the till monitor for the all-clear. My fingers are crossed in
my jacket pocket; the card belongs in another fold entirely, but it should, I hope, be able to adapt to this old system, stalling for time while it hacks the network, finds a suitable host and sets up an account with all the credit we'll need. Looks just like a normal Visa too. I used to feel a little guilty about this scam, but it's rare for two folds to have exactly the same currency, and even in eternity we need to eat and sleep.

And I
am
tired. We must have driven for forty hours straight with the night roaring in at our back and only the Hinter wilderness around us, fields with split-rail fences half buried in snow, advertising hoardings for beer and cigarettes. Churches with flags. Crosses aglow with Christmas lights that are just a little too much like dots of flame for my liking. Finally we found the Safe Haven Motel here on the interstate. GOD BLESS AMORICA lettered on the VACANCIES sign.

As the receipt prints with a rattling chatter from the antiquated machine, I accept the card back with a smile and a thank-you, take the keycards for our rooms and hand two of them over my shoulder to Jack, who passes one on to Puck.

“Of course I've been out of town,” I say. “For a conference. I was over in…”

I trail off, drawing a blank on the name of the city just thirty miles north of Laramie.

“You should try taking a trip,” says Jack. “See how far you get before the fog makes you turn back.”

“The road's closed today,” I say. “They don't think they'll get it open for a week or so. But maybe next week I'll take a run up to…”

I
still
can't remember the name of that city just down the road. But I
do
remember going there for the conference. At least, I remember the Hinter conditions getting so bad on the way back home it seemed insane to risk the final stretch, better to stop somewhere and wait it out till morning. I remember seeing the Safe Haven Motel on the edge of town, lit up in the night. God Bless Amorica, indeed.

“Why did you come here, Guy?” says Jack.
“When
did you come here?”

“You know, it's nice to see young men who're not ashamed to show their faith,” says the clerk. “Too many
cynics
in the world, if you ask me.”

There's a confused moment before she points at the Book under Puck's arm; and I'm still a little confused, to be honest, as I mutter some vague but amiable affirmations. Upstairs in my room, that confusion is partly answered, partly deepened, by the Gideon's Book of All Hours I find in the bedside cabinet. The Book
has always been this singular and secret thing we carry, Puck and Jack and I, through folds where no one even knows its name. Now here it suddenly shows up as a commonplace, a giveaway Gospel in a motel room. I don't know what worries me more—the printed pretender on the bedside cabinet, or the fact that the real Book has changed as if to camouflage itself among the fakes. Or that the three of us have also changed to fit into this fold, it seems, in a way that's never happened until now.