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Authors: Hal Duncan

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BOOK: Vellum
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They turned to look at me together, precisely in synch, like two parts of the same machine, and their hollow gazes sent a shiver down my spine, because I felt exactly the same emptiness.

I actually wonder now if nothing in this world has changed but me. It occurred to me as I wandered the empty streets of the world, walking down the middle of roads known and unknown—maybe the world was as it had always been and it was me that had been transformed, seeing for the first time the whole scope of it and myself alone within. I knew, as I wandered those streets so subtly familiar, that the whole world around me was abandoned, desolate; it didn't make sense in any rational way but somehow I knew the world I'd walked into, whatever kind of hell it was, was mine and mine alone. It was like that moment in a dream when you realize you're dreaming and wake up into the real world…and then you realize you're still dreaming.

I don't know how long I walked aimlessly around my new environment, struck by the surrealism of these buildings in all stages of abandonment, some overgrown ruins, some pristine with lights on in their rooms, children's toys left sitting on carpets, radios hissing white noise. It was as if the city's inhabitants had all simply dropped whatever they were doing and left, but over a period of centuries with none of them noticing the others' departures, even until the very last, who, it seemed, had left mere seconds before my arrival.

“You really believe in this Book?” Jack had asked me. “You really think you can find it?”

He finished off his glass of ouzo, loosened his black tie and poured himself another. We were in his room, after the funeral, and the place was scattered with empty beer cans, empty bottles and plastic bags with more for us to drink. We were going to get wasted. We were all of us going to get completely wasted that night. Fucked out of our minds.

I shook my head, laughed sadly.

“Maybe it
is
just some fucking old, old hoax. But…I just want to know. My whole life, I've wanted to know if…it's real.”

“Nothing's real,” said Joey.

“Everything's real,” said Jack. “Everything is true; nothing is permitted.”

I thought,
that's a quote.
I thought,
I recognize it,
but I couldn't place it and it didn't sound quite right.

I looked from one to the other, all of us sodden with drink and grief, and felt one of those moments of acid significance, where you're sure you've just realized something important and forgotten it instantly.

No Comfort, No Answers

So I sit in this pub now, writing, and there are pints poured sitting on the bar, packets of cigarettes left with lighters on tables—Christ, when I walked in there was one still burning in an ashtray—but no humanity. Only the remembrance of it. I've spent the last few hours turning everything over and over in my head and I'm no closer to making sense of any of this. I can find no comfort, no answers, only that same sense I feel each time I look upon the Book, a mingling of dread and wonder, horror and elation.

It sits before me on the table as a mystery.

I think maybe I'm dead, that this world exists for me alone because it is no more, no less, than my own personal gateway to…whatever lies beyond. And the Book? Maybe it's my own invention, my own creation, placed here, waiting for the moment when I could finally face my own mortality and cross the boundary into the unknown. Was my life before now imagined…or reimagined, re-created with a path to lead me to this book of maps, with a family history filled with myths and legends, a drive to know, to grasp some secret, sacred mystery? And friends found and lost. All leading me inexorably to the opening of the Book, to the discovery of my state.

I miss Jack and Joey and Thomas. Nobody ever wonders if the dead grieve for the ones they leave behind, it seems, but I miss them, even if I'm not sure that they ever existed. If my whole world up until I found the Book was just the fantasy of a dead man wishing he was still alive, maybe they were only ever little parts of me that I snipped off and carved into a human shape to keep me company in that dream of life. I think of Jack and Joey, fire and ice, light and dark. And I think of Thomas and I feel cheated, betrayed. I can't accept that Puck was just a lonely ghost's imagination. No. I think—I want to think—that they were all real, that I knew them, that that day on the grass outside the library was real, true, even if it happened differently. I think I had a life without the Book, without any of those stories, just a simple life, replayed in death with transformations as a quiet way of bringing me to this point. And when I picture Jack and Joey standing in that church, I picture Thomas standing beside them in my place. Maybe his death was just another signpost of my imagination, pointing the way. I hope that's the truth. I dearly hope so.

So where do I go from here? It's a lonely world, this limbo, and I only hope that it's a borderland. The Book itself is evidence of something out there, surely, something greater than the scope of one man's memory, of a world beyond the world beyond; and if its opening was my awakening then the content of its pages must be the story of my life—my death—from here on in. I've found myself alone within a world that's only a minute portion of a larger whole. Somewhere out there, surely, other corners of this vast realm hold their own souls, born in death into their own imaginings. And will they know that they are dead, or does it fall to me to wake them? Are there already roads between the worlds, traveled by others? How many will have left their empty worlds in search of company, and what cities have been built where souls met in the great landscape of the afterworld? My God, this book might hold the Maps of Hell, but maybe it also holds the Keys of Heaven in the sigils that inscribe it. I don't even know if every dead man has such a book to guide him through his death or if I have the only copy. I won't know until some way into my journey, I imagine. I imagine there are many things that I am yet to know.

The Road of All Dust

I plan to set out tomorrow. I have the Book after all, calling me to this great adventure, and guiding my every step. As it sits on the table of the pub in front of me, I can see now what I did not understand at first. The cover of the Book no longer shows the vault I found it in. I didn't notice it changing, but it happened; now the embossing of the leather cover maps out the tables and the chairs around me, and the first page shows the architecture of this abandoned pub. The Book changes as its reader moves. The map stays centered on its observer. And the glyph, the strange eye on its exterior that is repeated on the maps inside? A symbol of the reader—the keeper, the maker—himself, an oval of a body seen from above, a circle within it to mark out the head, and four semicircles to symbolize the limbs. And the rectangle that intersects it is, of course, the Book, the Macromimicon, the Great Copy, which I carry, perhaps as a part of me. Wherever I go, those first few maps, I'm sure, will show the world around me in all the detail I will ever need, even as I venture into regions as yet shown only at the widest scale.

Tomorrow my journey really begins. I'll set out down this road I knew in my world as the Great Western Road, to where it joins another familiar but altered street. That it joins with Crow Road in an unfamiliar junction, fusing to become a new and unknown way, seems sort of significant—the road of the carrion bird, the bird of death, and the road toward the land beyond the sunset, the Western Lands. Perhaps I'm reading all this wrong, but it seems to make a sort of sense, as much sense as anything does now. What I'll do when I get to the coast I really don't know, but I suspect whatever lies in the far West is still only the beginning of my journey. I remember stories of New Mexico, that dusty, desert Land of Dreams, and of a road known as the Jornada del Muerto, the Journey of the Dead Man, and I wonder…but I can't even imagine the road I'm setting out to travel, how I can hope to cross those oceans and continents that are mere puddles and islands in the greater scheme of things. I must be a fool to face distances that dwarf everything I've ever known.

So I sit here in the empty pub, as a final act of hesitation, uncertainty.

I know my destination though. I think of that final page in the Book of All Hours and the road leading north out of the minuscule oasis in the center of the map, out of this world the size of a universe, and out of the scope of even this Book. I wonder if it is a road we all must travel eventually, even if it takes us eternity to get to its beginnings, and an eternity of eternities to walk its way. It may be the road to Hell or out of it, to Heaven or to something more profound; after all, if this whole empty world is my Limbo, Heaven and Hell may be no more than rural backwaters in the metaphysics mapped out by the Book, and maybe I'll pass them on my way like some pilgrim passing a village, his heart set on his destination, his gaze set on a distance farther even than the far horizon, the dust under his feet the dust we all become, the life we cast off in the skin we shed.

I finish off the beer that I've poured for myself from the taps in this deserted but plentifully stocked pub and, I think, it's time that I was looking for a place to sleep. I wish that my own home was still here in this remade world; I'd like to sleep one last night in my own bed. But perhaps there is a reason for that comfort being denied me. Perhaps I'd wake tomorrow back in a world busy with people, in an illusion of reality reconstructed from my memories as a buffer against the cold truth. I know a part of me would like that. But I have the Book, and in the pages of the Book, I have the map and, on that map, I have the way that I must travel marked out. There is another part of me that wants to wake tomorrow with that truth.

But, yes, it's time for me to sleep—even if it is only an imagined sleep within the sleep of death—so I can wake to face tomorrow fresh. The irony of it all does strike me as I sit here, but it seems that even in eternal rest I need…rest.

I have a long road ahead of me, a long and winding road of dust…perhaps the road of all dust.

one

A DOOR OUT OF REALITY

FROM THE GREAT BEYOND

F
rom the Great Beyond she heard it, coming from the Deep Within. From the Great Beyond the goddess heard it, coming from the Deep Within. From the Great Beyond Inanna heard it, coming from the Deep Within.

She gave up heaven and earth, to journey down into the underworld, Inanna did, gave up her role as queen of heavens, holy priestess of the earth, to journey down into the underworld. In Uruk and in Badtibira, in Zabalam and Nippur, in Kish and in Akkad, she abandoned all her temples to descend into the Kur.

She gathered up the seven
me
into her hands, and with them in her hands, in her possession, she began her preparations.

Her lashes painted black with kohl, she laid the
sugurra,
crown of the steppe, upon her head, and fingered locks of fine, dark hair that fell across her forehead, touched them into place. She fastened tiny lapis beads around her neck and let a double strand of beads fall to her breast. Around her chest, she bound a golden breastplate that called quietly to men and youths,
come to me, come,
with warm, metallic grace. She slipped a golden bracelet over her soft hand, onto her slender wrist, and took a lapis rod and line in hand.

And finally, she furled her royal robe around her body.

Inanna set out for the Kur, her faithful servant, Lady Shubur, with her.

“Lady Shubur,” said Inanna, “my
sukkal
who gives wise consul, my steadfast support, the warrior who guards my flank, I am descending to the Kur, the underworld. If I do not return then sound a lamentation for me in the ruins. Pound the drum for me in the assemblies where the unkin gather and around the houses of the gods. Tear at your eyes, your mouth, your thighs. Wearing the beggar's single robe of soiled sackcloth, then, go to the temple of the Lord Ilil in Nippur. Enter his sacred shrine and cry to him. Say these words:

“O father Lord Ilil, do not leave your daughter to death and damnation. Will you let your shining silver lie buried forever in the dust? Will you see your precious lapis shattered into shards of stone for the stoneworker, your aromatic cedar cut up into wood for the woodworker? Do not let the queen of heaven, holy priestess of the earth, be slaughtered in the Kur.

“If Lord Ilil will not assist you,” she said, “go to Ur, to the temple of Sin, and weep before my father. If he will not assist you, go to Eridu, to Enki's temple, weep before the god of wisdom. Enki knows the food of life; he knows the water of life; he knows the secrets. I am sure he will not let me die.”

Thick with Trees and Thunderstorms

North Carolina, where the old 70 that runs from Hickory to Asheville cuts across the 225 running up from the south, from Spartanburg and beyond, up through the Blue Ridge Mountains and a land that's thick with trees and thunderstorms. It's on the map, but it's a small town, or at least it looks it, hidden from the freeway, until you cut down past the sign that says
Welcome to Marion, a Progressive Town,
and gun your bike slow through the streets of the town center with its thrift stores and pharmacy, fire department, town hall, the odd music store or specialist shop that's yet to lose its market to the Wal-Mart just a short drive down the road.

She rides past the calm, brick-fronted architecture that's still somewhere in the 1950s, sleeping, waiting for a future that's never going to happen, dreaming of a past that never really went away, out of the small town center and on to a commercial strip of fast-food restaurants and diners, a steak house and a Japanese, a derelict cinema sitting lonely in the middle of its own car park—all of these buildings just strung along the road like cheap plastic beads on a ragged necklace. She pulls off the road into a Hardee's, switches off the engine and kicks down the bike-stand.

The burger tastes good—real meat in a thick, rough-shapen hunk, not some thin bland patty of processed gristle and fat—and she washes it down with deep sucking slurps of Mountain Dew, and twirls the straw in the cardboard bucket of a cup to rattle the ice as she looks out the window at the road, hot in the summer sun, humid and heavy. The sky is a brilliant blue, the blue of a Madonna's robes, stretching up into forever, stretching—

—and she stands in front of the mirror in the washroom, leaning on the sink a second, dizzy with a sudden buzz, a hum, a song that ripples through her body like the air over a hot road shimmers in the sun. The Cant. Shit, she thinks. She must be getting close. She looks at the watch sitting up on top of the hand-dryer. The second hand flicks back and forth, random, sporadic, like one of those airplane instruments in a movie where the plane is going down in an electrical storm.

It's August 4th, 2017. Sort of.

Steady again, she studies her eyes, black with mascara and with lack of sleep, and pushes her dark red hair back from her forehead. Even splashing more water on her face she still feels like a fucking zombie.
Fucking zombie retro biker chick,
she thinks. Beads in her hair, a beaded choker round her neck, a chicken-bone charm necklace over a gold circuit-patterned T-shirt. Shit, she looks like her fucking techno-hippy mother.

She picks up her watch and slips it over her wrist, reels out the earphones from the stick clipped to her belt and puts them in, clipping them into the booster sockets in her earrings so her lenses can pick up the video signals. The Sony VR5 logo flickers briefly across her vision as she shoulders her way out through the door, tapping at the datastick to switch it onto audio-only. She doesn't need a heads-up weather forecast with ghost images of clouds or sunbursts, or a Route-finder sprite floating at every turnoff to point her this way or that. Not today.

She grabs her helmet from the handlebar of the bike and puts it on as she swings her leg up over the seat, flicks up the stand, zips up her leather biker jacket, kicks the engine into life.

The antique creature of steel and chrome growls between her legs, and another antique creature—one of leather and vinyl—screams in her ears.

“Looooooooooooooord!” howls Iggy Pop, and the murderous guitar of the Stooges'
TV Eye
kicks in, as Phreedom Messenger opens up the throttle on the bike and roars out of her pit stop on the way to hell.

WHORE OF BABYLON, QUEEN OF HEAVEN

And Inanna continued on her way toward the underworld. She journeyed from ancient Sumer up the land between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, through the whole of Babylon and into Hittite Haran. She traveled into Canaan with the Habiru who called her Ishtar. She went with them into Egypt and they called her Ashtaroth when she returned, leaving behind only a memory, the myth of Isis. She saw god-kings and city-states rise and fall, patriarchs murdered by sons who took their places and their names, armies and wars of territory and dominion. She traveled with the armies, with the whores and the musicians and the eunuch priests, offering solace in their tents, in tabernacles of sex and salvation. She had bastard sons by kings. She washed the feet of gods amongst men.

She saw villages burned and statues toppled. She saw kingdoms become federations, federations become empires. She saw whole dynasties of deities overthrown, their names and faces obliterated from the monuments they'd built, so, unlike them, she took new names, new faces. Times changed and she changed with them. She never accepted the new order that was tearing down the old around her, but she knew better than to fight it, watching the others stripped of honor, stripped of reverence, stripped of godhood, still calling themselves Sovereigns even as the Covenant shattered every idol in their temples. So she traveled as supplicant, as refugee, with mystery as her protector rather than force, cults rather than armies. She saw the seeds she dropped behind her take root in the earth and grow only to be crushed by military boots. She traveled with slaves and criminals.

She went from Israel, to Byzantium and Rome, this Queen of Heaven, Blessed Mother, full of grace, her new name and old titles echoing amongst the vaults of stone cathedrals, spaces as vast and hollow as the temples left long empty in Uruk and Badtibira, Zabalam and Nippur, Kish and Akkad.

She traveled in statues and pietàs, painted in indigo and gold in old Renaissance frescoes, Russian icons; traveled to the New World with conquistadors and missionaries, to plantations where the slaves danced round the fires at night, possessed by gods, by saints, by loas and orishas; journeyed across time to a New Age of carnival mythologies and stars worshipped in glossy parchments sold at newsstands, of rosaries and Tarot cards and television earth mothers fussing over the broken hearts and wounded prides of soft, spoiled inner children.

She journeyed on the road of no return, to the dark mansion of the god of death, the house where those who enter never leave, where those who enter lose all light, and feed on dust, clay for their bread. They see no sun; they dwell in night, clothed in black feathers of the carrion crow. Over the door and the bolt of the dark house, dust settles, moss and mildew grow.

She stopped, this Whore of Babylon, this Queen of Heaven. Inanna stopped before the entrance to the underworld, and turned to look back at her servant, who had followed her down through the centuries, the millennia.

“Go now, Lady Shubur,” she said. “Do not forget my words.”

“My Queen,” says Lady Shubur.

“Go.”

A Sculpture of Time and Space

She shifts the engine to a lower gear, a lower growl, swings low and wide around the corners, slower as the bike climbs the steep, winding road into the mountains. White wooden churches stand with bible quotes lettered on billboards at the side of the road, and shabby prefab houses perch in their little plots with leaning porches and pots of dying flowers in hanging baskets. They nestle in amongst the deep trees of bear and deer; this is hunting territory, a place of pickup trucks and men in armored vests with high-powered rifles and coolers filled with beer. Stars and Stripes on every house. On a dirt track coming off the road at her right-hand side a rustbucket of a car sits up on bricks, the legend
#1 Dawg
scrawled in paint across the battered panels of its side.

The bike swings left and right in wide curves round the tight corners and she leans down into them, following the flow, the rhythm of the constant turns and twists. The road snakes on right up into the hills and she snakes with it, like a cobra reared up ready to strike but swaying side to side, charmed by the music in its contours, switching gears, from growl to roar and back again. Slow and wide. Fast and tight. Left. Right. Left. Right. Sunlight flickers blinding white through the canopy of trees like the end of an old celluloid film rattling through a projector.

The road cuts deep into the sharp-carved shadows of tall trees for a second, slices between dark juts of moss-slicked rock and through a concrete underpass; and she takes the circling slip road off to the right and turns and turns, and then she's up and out and on the Blue Ridge Parkway, riding the wide road that runs from mountain spine to mountain spine along the length of the whole range. And the sun is hot but the air is clear and crisp as a cool spring and she can look out to her left and to her right and see the world on either side, the hills in the beyond, the valleys in between, the vast, green, rough, soft sculpture of time and space, of earth and sky.

It's places like this that you can't tell where the world ends and the Vellum begins, she thinks. For all its asphalt artifice, for all the wooden mileage signposts scattered along its way, for all that you can look down into the valleys and still see the houses and churches, schools and factories of small towns cradled in the folds, up here reality, like the air, is thinner. The road is just a scratch on the skin of a god; if you came off it, she thinks, if you smashed straight through one of the low wooden fences and shot out into the air, you might crash right out of this world and into another, into a world empty of human life or filled with animal ghosts.

But those aren't the kind of world she's looking for, not by a long shot.

INANNA AT THE GATES OF HELL

“Gatekeeper, open up your gate for me,” Inanna called. “If you refuse, I'll smash this door, shatter the bolt, splinter the post. I'll tear these doors down and raise up the dead to feast upon the living, until there are more dead souls walking in the world than are alive.”

Inanna stood before the outer gates of Kur, and she knocked loudly.

“Open the doors, you keeper of the gate,” she cried, her voice fierce. “Open up the doors, Neti! I come alone and ask for entry.”

“And who are you?” asked Neti, surly chief gatekeeper of the Kur.

“I am Inanna, Queen of Heavens, on my way into the West.”

“If you are really Queen of Heavens,” Neti said, “and on your way into the West, Inanna, why, why has your heart made you a traveler on the road of no return?”

“My sister, Eresh of the Greater Earth,” Inanna answered, “is the reason. I have come to see the funeral rites of Gugalanna, Bull of Heaven, her dead husband. I have come to see the rites, the funeral beer of his libations poured into the cup. Now open up.”

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