Vellum (53 page)

I hunker down beside the doctor, who groans as I slap his cheek gently.

“Time to wake up, Guy,” I say. “We're leaving. All of us.”

He groans.

“Jack? Did you hit me?”

And to think he's meant to be the brains of this operation. Guy Reynard. Guy Fox, as in crazy-like-a. King of thieves and master of disguise. Good enough to fool even himself, they say.

I sight down the chi-gun's barrel at the doorway of the interview room, at the commotion already starting in the corridor. Guy is looking at Joey, at me, at Joey.

“What did you do to him?”

But before I can answer I'm too busy firing as they come in through the door.

I may well be crazy, you know. They may outgun me. I may be however many miles underground, in the depths of the Empire's headquarters, in a hellworld so royally fucked by the meme merchants that even their own dreams end up spewing out one or two of their own into the world at large just to fucking sort things out. But I got my weapon and my wits and if they want a war for people's hearts and souls, I got the will. But most of all I've got my weapon.

“What did you do to him, Jack?” says Guy.

I pick off a couple of militia as they run into the room, then duck down.

“Meme bomb,” I say. “Not much choice after you went sodding native.”

Guy grabs the limp body, lugs it partway over his shoulder.

“Must've been something in the tea,” he says. Well, so much for the gently gently approach.

I kick open the door of the observation room and walk out firing.

Which means it's time for the extraction team, on the roof as arranged. Just make it quick, motherfuckers. We can't hold out forever.

Jack Flash over and out.

Errata

All the King's Horses

“H
ow is he?” I say.

Joey shakes his head, grim and thin-lipped. I had to virtually drag him down here to the hospital, pushing his guilt button again and again with dagger remarks about how long he'd known Jack, how he owed it to him, they were best friends and Jack needed him, needed us both now.
For fuck's sake, Joey, you're his best mate.

“He's living in a fucking fantasy world,” says Joey. “All he talks about is this dead boy, this fucking figment of his imagination. Thomas this and Thomas that. He's a fucking basket case, Guy. I can't deal with this.”

I want to hit him. I just can't accept how he can walk away from this, no matter how bad it is. Does he really just see Jack's schizophrenia as a bloody inconvenience? I can't believe that he could be so callous.

But I've been coming to visit Jack every other day and Joey Pechorin, his closest friend, hasn't found it in his heart to come here on his own, not once in the three months since Jack had his latest and worst episode, the one that ended with him sectioned for his own safety.

I stare at Joey with a silent knowledge that our friendship is only a word or two away from ending, and push past him through the door into Jack's room.

“It doesn't make sense,” says Jack. “None of it makes any sense.”

He's right. Of all the notes and pages of scribblings scattered round the room, tacked or taped to walls, none of it bears any obvious relationship to anything else. Even within themselves the fragments don't really, on close examination, reveal meanings shared by anything beyond the inside of Jack's head. There are pages where the initials J.C. have been written over and over again with explication after explication—Jack Carter, Jesus Christ, Jerry Cornelius, Joe Cool, John Constantine, and on and on, as if to map out some grand kabala of identity. Other pages gather quotes from a whole host of sources, fiction or nonfiction, books on magic, politics, philosophy, conspiracy theory, just laying them together on the page as if the act of copying them out, the simple juxtaposition of them, says all that needs to be said about their interrelations. I can't make head nor tail of it.

Schizophrenia. Broken head.
That about sums Jack up. He's a one-man Tower of Babel, Humpty Dumpty at the bottom of the wall, taking a hammer to his own pieces to see if by breaking them up even further he can crack them into smaller fragments that'll fit together better.

“How are you doing, Jack?” I say.

He smiles and shrugs, sitting up on the bed, his back against the wall, knees up to his chin.

“Still crazy,” he says. “Officially. How's yourself?”

I make a so-so gesture with one hand, sit down on the edge of the bed.

“You seem a bit more…together today.”

“Wonders of modern medicine,” he says. “The miracle of lithium. Hallelujah. I keep asking if they can get me some acid, but they don't seem to think that's a good idea.”

A glint of mischief in his eye. Every so often you get these flashes of the old Jack, a Jack of random notions and spurious arguments supported on the flimsiest of evidence, held with the deepest conviction and abandoned with a shrug on the calling of his bluff. A Jack who'd happily throw a bomb into a conversation just to see what happened, who'd argue for mandatory vision-quests for all fourteen-year-olds, or the restoration of ritual regicide. “
Tradition,”
he'd say, adopting an old-fogey voice. “
Young people these days, no respect for tradition.”
We were so used to Jack's trickster reimagination of the world we missed the point where he began to take it seriously.

“No, I don't think acid's what you need right now,” I say.

He waves a hand around the room.

“I bet it would make sense on acid. We should do that, Guy. You could smuggle in a couple of tabs, or some good fucking Mexican psilocybin or—was it Hawaiian we had that time? We'll get shit-faced and I'll tell you the secret of the universe and you'll tell me that I'm talking shit.”

We laugh.

“I had an idea,” he says.

Uh-oh, I think.

“Last night,” he says, “I was trying to figure it all out, and, OK, it doesn't make any sense, but you know, Guy, it
almost
makes sense. It almost makes sense.”

“To you, Jack, maybe, but not to the rest of us.”

I stand up and start to wander round the room, uncomfortable and looking for a way to draw the conversation away from more of his delusional “explanations.” On the walls: a sheet of paper has the Hebrew alphabet in a table with Roman equivalents, names and numeric values; a pyramid divided into sections numbered in a mathematical sequence—1, 3, 6, 10, 15, 21 and so on down to the bottom-right corner and the number 666; a fake frontispiece in the medieval style of an illuminated manuscript, the paper crumpled and tea-stained to look old, the lettering done in felt-tip pen—The Book of All Hours.

“
When I was in the Boy Scouts…”

“You were in the Scouts?” I say. “I can't imagine you in the Scouts.”

“Oh, yeah,” he says. “I was a right little trooper when I was younger. I'm a sucker for a pretty uniform.”

He winks.

“Anyway, they taught us this song, and last night, for no reason, it just pops into my head. Dee deeddly deedly deedly deedee…”

I vaguely recognize the tune, some Scottish country dance music, I think, or maybe Irish. He starts to ticktock a finger in time to it.

“MacPherson is dead and his brother don't know it. His brother is dead and MacPherson don't know it. They're both of them dead and they're in the same bed. And none of them knows that the other is dead.”

“I think we'd know if we were dead, Jack,” I say.

“Do you know when you're dreaming?” he says. “Who's the fucking mental case here? Personal experience, man. Just because you're sure of something doesn't make it real.”

“Jack, that is totally twisted. That's just…”

“I know,” he says. “But it made sense last night. Almost.”

I sit back down on the edge of the bed.

“You want to watch some TV?” he says.

Two for Tea, a Tree for Two

Jack seems to have become somewhat enamored of Puck. He does not trust me in the slightest, sad to say, but I can't really blame him given the fact that I sit here on the cart surrounded by a score or so skulls excavated from the pit like some ogre with his terrible treasure, and given that these may well be his ancestors, compatriots, beloved cousins or god knows what. I try to fathom the history of this place but it is quite inscrutable. Oblivion's Mount is marked in the Book, in wide, sweeping contours more on the continent-crossing level of isobars on a weather chart than the humble cartography of a little peak like Everest or Olympus Mons (I'm getting rather blasé about the scale of things here in the Vellum, I fear; it's all rather gauche and grandiose for my liking, like the arms-race conversations of children when they degenerate to the level of
infinity-times-infinity
and
infinity-squared
and
infinity-to-the-power-of-infinity, so there!);
the problem is there are no indications of inhabitation, no dotted lines of old roads, no glyphic marks of places of historical interest. All I have to go on is the skulls and Jack's horror of them; and the former remain as obstinately silent—other than the low whistling moan of the wind as it blows down into the pit—as the latter is unyielding in his vociferous protests. I only hope that Puck can shut him up for long enough that I might actually get more than an hour's sleep.

He has managed to calm the poor thing down a little in the last week, soothing Jack's savage music with his offerings of candies and pretty things from our rations and stores, though I was not entirely happy that the first such offering was a silver fob dowser filched from my pocket and dangled by its chain between thumb and forefinger, snatched by Jack even as I did a double-take, patting my pocket and gawping dumbly as I tried to put some words together in protest. Pickpocket Puck simply shrugged and said he'd noticed Jack eyeing it, pointed out that, hunkered over behind a shrub, Jack was now quietly snapping the casing of it open and closed—
chunk, chik—
rather than raising his usual racket. He was so quiet for the next few hours, in fact, that I actually managed to notice just how much more pervasive all the creaks and cracks and rustlings and rumblings are, the higher up we get in our around-and-over journey on Oblivion's Mount.

Since then, anyway, the various trinkets and treats that Puck has used to charm him with have, it is true, offered some brief respites from Jack's otherwise ceaseless bewailing of whatever tragedy he scents—or senses somehow—buried under our feet. And with each offering Jack has grown more trusting of the boy until Puck has him now, quite literally, eating out of his hand. I think it was the drugs that really won Jack over.

I glance over at them, sitting side by side on the low branch of a tree, legs dangling and kicking, passing the joint between them. Jack reaches over occasionally to pick through Puck's green thicket of hair, grooming for fleas or ticks, a little disappointed, it seems, at not finding any; every so often, he taps a curious fingertip on one or the other of Puck's pointy horns and gurgles a wordless question. Puck blows smoke rings and Jack flaps his hand through them. It's sort of sweet, in a decadent way; beneath them on the ground, the drained can that I watched them sipping from earlier, passing between them as they now pass the joint, lies discarded and forgotten as they poke each other and point at this or that, at leaves or grass, the cart, myself, the other tribesfolk sitting in a huddle off in the far distance, lost now that their shaman has abandoned them; and Jack and Puck peer at the world around them, tilting their heads and giggling, in their Chimp's Mushroom Tea Party.

I wonder that Jack, so terrified of the landscape that we're traveling through, is not insane with spectral horrors crawling from the recesses of his unconscious out into his hallucinating mind, but then again I have seen him in various states of intoxication and I am yet to see him have a bad trip. Truth to tell, the two of them are the very picture of bliss.

I pick out three of the skulls and lay them before me in a row, glad that for the moment I have peace to try and think. I have known for a while that whatever kind of afterworld the Vellum is, death walks in it as much as in the reality I left behind me. Actually, it always struck me as rather senseless that the imagined afterlives of religion after religion should be fleshed out with forms so imitative of the physical as to have eyes to see, mouths to speak, hands to play harps or wings to fly among the clouds, but shy away from the anatomical actualities of bodies—lacking a physique but with what might be called a
metaphysique—
hemming and hawing uncomfortably about matters of sex and death. Et In Arcadia Ego, as Poussin's Shepherds found written on the tomb in their idyllic hills, and here in the foothills of Oblivion's Mount, we seem to have found a similarly symbolic tomb, this signifier of death in the middle of eternity that terrifies poor, simple Jack so much.

What is death in the afterworld of souls? I wonder. What is death in the Vellum?

I have the Book open before me and I stare at it, at the contours of Oblivion's Mount, listening to the keen of the wind catching the lip of the pit and curling down around the skulls like a macabre woodwind instrument. And suddenly I have an answer.