Vellum (45 page)

four

THE SCYTHES OF CRONOS

PETERHEAD, 1920

Y
our request has been heard and noted,
says the letter,
and an answer will be given presently…once the full facts of the matter have been ascertained
…
considered to our satisfaction,
and more shite like that, but Seamus is too weak to read it now, lying up on the blanketless bed, naked and cold, as sure and he won't wear their fookin convict arrows, and he's exhausted, so he is, not from the laboring in the quarry, 'cause he won't fookin do that neither, but from the endless fookin fighting. His throat sore from the feeding tube forced down it, the rest of his body is still black and blue from all the previous struggles; and the bruises from today are yet to form, of course. He lets the letter from the office of the Home Secretary drop from between his fingers. Fookers. Three months of penal servitude, they call it, in their fancy language. Call it what it is, hard fookin labor, done looking up the barrel of a Civil Guard's Lee Enfield rifle. And he's already two months in. It's the 25th of October.

So he lies there gazing up and back through bars at the pure sky, the paths of birds, wondering if he'll be dead or free before they ever accept that he's no fookin common convict but a political prisoner. Outside there's the sounds of footsteps. A crow circles.

“Well, now, ah have to say it makes me right sad to see ye in this state, but.”

He looks down at the foot of the bed. It's just one of the boys, Lance Corporal Donald O'Sheen MacChuill (Irish Catholic mother, Scots Protestant father, Seamus remembers—the Dubs always were a mixed bunch, and MacChuill was about the most mixed of the lot of them—spoke Gaelic and knew
The Sash
by heart and refused to see the contradiction). MacChuill stands there, in his full kit, backpack and helmet, rifle slung over his back, with a stupid big eedjit grin, sure, and the big hole in his face where his right eye used to be, the gaping black-red hole with the hard white shards and soft gray stuff all messed up in the midst of it. It doesn't scare Seamus anymore though, sure, 'cause he knows it's just a waking dream and if all the electroshock at Inchgillan didn't do a single thing, well, he did learn something from the doctor, with his talk of that fellow's work over at Craiglockhart and facing your demons, and all that shite. He wasn't a bad sort, after all, that Doctor Reynard.
Such a wound,
he'd said,
such a horrific wound
…
this MacChuill must have died instantly. He couldn't have suffered. I want you to try and keep that in your mind. That he wouldn't have suffered.
It was after that that Seamus stopped screaming when MacChuill came visiting.

“Ah shite,” he says.

Seamus pushes himself upright, shaking his head. So weak he is from the hunger strike and all is what it is, sure, 'cause he hasn't had one of his turns for quite a while now, but what else could it be but one of those fookin waking dreams that used to haunt him so? Jesus, but Seamus hopes that he's not going to start with all the gibberish again, with all the crazy talk that got him his discharge—what was it Reynard called it? Glossolalia? Glossodoolallia, more like.

“Ah, Christ,” he says. “What now?”

“Aw come on, but. Is that any way to talk to yer ole pal, sir?” says MacChuill. “Ah mean, pardon ma bluntness, but here and I've come a long way just to see ye, riding this swift-winged bird, here, guiding it by ma will alone an a'.”

He points at the crow now strutting on the window ledge, watching him, its dark eye glinting with gold sunlight like there's fire in it. Seamus shivers but it's not from the cold, even if he is stark bollock naked. He wishes he had a cigarette, but there's none of that here, not even out of solitary. He wonders if ghost cigarettes still give ye that wee buzz, 'cause sure and he could ask MacChuill. MacChuill always had a spare one, so he did. Smoked like a fookin chimney.
Like a reeky lum,
he'd say. Didn't they all?

“And I suppose yer come to be spectator of me sufferings?” Seamus says. “Have ye just dropped in to see how I'm doing then, and to offer yer commiserations? That's a fair journey, so it is, lad, coming all the way across the river that carried yer soul away, all the way from the fookin hole in the ground all covered in rocks and dirt, out of the fookin iron mother earth itself, lad. I mean, I hate to tell ye this, son, but yer fookin dead and buried.”

He feels a wave of dizziness wash over him, wishes he could just fookin live his life out in the peace of seeing only what is here and now.

“Sympathy sent me here, Sarge, so it did. But even if we wurnie brothers, there's naebody I respect more than yersel—Haud on now. Don't be coming out with any of that bollocks. Ye know fine well that what I say is true. Flattery's never been ma strong point.”

He walks round to sit on the edge of the mattress beside Seamus, who's almost laughing at the absurdity, so he is, and almost crying.

“Aright. It seems to me that ye could be usin a bit of help here,” says the ghost. “Never let it be said that there's a firmer friend to ye than ole MacChuill.”

VISITATIONS, VISIONS, VOICES

Ah Jesus, look at the sight of me, thinks Seamus, all twisted up with sickness.

“Some fookin friend I was to you, lad,” he says. “Friend to the dukes, more like, helping them build their bloody Empire on the broken bodies of…”

Seamus looks round at the face in profile, the left side of it, the good side, and he thinks of the lad from some quarrying town on Scotland's west coast. Moved over to Ireland when he was twelve, right into the heart of Dublin, because his mother was homesick and his father, black sheep of the family, didn't give a damn for the Masons and the Orange Lodge that all his brothers wanted him to join with them. MacChuill seemed to have inherited some of that stubborn streak from his old man, kept the gruff accent all his life just to be perverse. When Seamus first met him, sure and he couldn't understand a word the boy said. And Christ, when he got a few Guinness in him, Jesus, it was like half the fookin letters of the alphabet just didn't exist anymore.

“Ah know,” MacChuill says. “Ah know. Yer a wiser man than me by far, Sarge, but…ah just thought ye could use a wee bit of advice, like.”

He turns to face Seamus, full-on, a tentative solemnity in his broken gaze. MacChuill, the eldest of all poor Seamus's ghosts, the first to visit him in the darkness of the dugout, after he woke up and they told him what he'd done, after he'd sat there shaking for hours and hours, looking at the bodies piled in the trench around him, while the captain blathered on about commendations, tragedies and medals. Seamus remembers all the nights of visitations, visions, voices, how he woke up in the dark so many times, seeing MacChuill there with his shattered socket, just like Seamus saw him lying on the battlefield below, and all the others in amongst the craters and the blasted stumps of trees, as Seamus stood there caught, wound up in all the barbs of German wire and
—No. Don't think about it.

“Ah mean…maybe ye want to think of what yer daein here, and get yerself an attitude that's new, because the big man among a' the lords, he's also new, and if ye carry on chucking a' these rude words at the dukes, ye know, as far above ye as they're sitting on their thrones, they're going to hear you—maybe no today but sometime soon—and when they dae, yer present troubles, Sarge, they're going to seem like child's play. Aye, life's no fair, and yours, well, it's just misery, but if ye want release from this despair, ye've got to lay aside this rage.”

Seamus tries to stand up, to get away from him. The accent is MacChuill, the language is MacChuill, but there's something in the flow of it, in the rhythm of it, that's not quite right, even for a thing that's not of this world but the next.

“Ah know, ah know, I'm sure I seem like a right ole man saying this, but ye know, Sarge, being deid gies ye a whole new way of looking at things.”

Seamus tries to stand up, but his legs don't work; even if he tries to push himself up with one hand on the iron-railed head of the bed, all he feels is the cold metal in his palm. His heart is fluttering, his breathing hard. Sure and he's just too weak.

“Sarge,” says MacChuill, “yer hardly what ah'd call the meek and mild type, no a man to gie in to the carrot or the stick, but listen…yer too wild, yer tongue's too quick, and this is how yer paid. Ye shouldnae kick against the pricks, unless yer looking for mair pain. Ye know it's a harsh, reckless tyrant reigns.”

He lays a hand on Seamus's shoulder, weighted with sympathy.

“Ah'm goin now. I'll try and see if I can get you free from all these sufferings. But ye cannae speak so loud, so rude. With all yer wisdom, Sarge, ye ought to know yer proud words will be punished. Sir, this isnae doing anybody any good.”

The Unknown Soldier

MacChuill steps out of Finnan's nightmare for a second, takes a wee breather from the work of playing someone else's ghost. Only a couple of minutes and already he feels disoriented. For a second he almost hears an Irish mother calling on him as he's playing in the street—
Donald O'Sheen MacChuill, you get yerself in here this minute.
But that's not him and never was; it's a composite of him—Donald MacChuill—and some O'Sheen that served in Finnan's platoon. MacChuill has never even been to Dublin…far as he recalls. Not that he recalls too much.

He blows into his hands and rubs them, trying to warm them up, but it's no just the slaughterhouse that's cold, he thinks. He looks down at the man bound in the chair by chicken wire and chains, and knows that what he's doing is wrong. This isn't what he signed up with the angels for at all and while he's lying to the poor man in a' sorts of ways, there's a part of him that's no playing a fucking role…and that's the sympathy.

MacChuill glances over his shoulder to the plastic-curtained door, where Henderson is standing, smiling cruelly at the sight of it. He looks around at the butchered carcasses of cattle, red meat, white with the fat and bone and frost.

No, this isn't what he signed up for, not at all. When they found him living wild in the Burmese jungles, lost and stripped of all his thought and memory after so many decades that he couldn't tell them anything of how he got there, who he was, nothing but his name and rank and number, when they told him he was something special, something risen from the ranks of base humanity, transformed by war into this strange and ageless thing—
unkin,
they said—and told him that they needed him—it all seemed such a great relief that he just laughed at it at first. They offered him…simplicity and structure…meaning to his life…a chance to serve the greater good. The
greatest
good, they said. And MacChuill, the unknown soldier who had long since lost his regiment in a war he couldn't even name, swallowed and almost cried with pride, knowing that he was back where he belonged, in an army once again, a soldier now not just for his own noble Empire but for…the noblest Empire of them all.

They told him there was a war in Heaven. Your eternity needs you.

But this is a new world that they've brought him back to, and a new war, a new kind of war. A war for the hearts and minds of every human on the planet, they say. A war for souls, they say, where the battlefield is something that they call the Vellum. History, they say. Myth, they say. It's no just distant lands across the water, now; this is war outside reality itself and inside people's heads. Heaven is, they tell him, like a little island separated from vast continental powers by a sea of dreams. Dark continents and ancient powers. He doesn't really understand the metaphysics, doesn't have to; he's a product of the British Empire, so he knows exactly what they mean. So it's no German militarism anymore, or Indian mutineers—it's no the Mau-Mau or the Zulus or any of those other savage and uncivilized races—but it's still a…tiny nation trying to spread enlightenment to primitive and brutal heathens. It's still a fight against the foreign devils.

That's what they say.

This Finnan bloke that Henderson and him were sent for, though, this draft-dodging renegade, hardly seems like a great threat to the Covenant. He put up little fight other than to curse and swear at the two of them, even as Henderson, black-hearted bastard that he is, laid into him with fists and feet. And now that MacChuill has walked a while in Finnan's dreams, wearing the face of some poor dead boy called O'Sheen, forging a history somewhere between what was and what just might have been, to try and
build a bond with him,
as his orders said, the problem is that he really has. MacChuill looks down at the man bound in the chair, his chest splayed open by the hook, the black dust crawling over him, inside him, and he feels exactly the affinity he has been told to fake. He wants to set the man free from his torment, wants to help him. Surely if he just speaks to his superiors—