Vellum (56 page)

I put my hands out to steady myself against the archway I am standing in—huge ivory ribs, cathedral scale, ornate with carvings, complex as clockwork. The steps of stone sweep down beneath my feet into a city of biers of bone and leather, bleached wood, paper-thin skins both dark and light; fine etched lines trace everywhere across the engraved grave city, and the stinking vapors curl in vortices and whorls as intricate as the inscriptions on all the huts of hide and banners of stitched skin. With the light of the lamp gripped in my hand I can see perhaps a couple of hundred yards into the Kur, and I can see it stretch beyond that, back, back…back.

Corpses lay thrown across the cavern floor like filthy clothes, broken and bent things, torn and twisted. I step down toward them, step again, walk one step at a time, down into Hell. The uniforms stripped from their naked bodies are scattered in the dry dust all around them; the Second World War Soviet grays I recognize, the rest unfamiliar, but I can guess that these are the White-Nationalist mercenaries hired by Hobbsbaum in 1921. The scattered remains of two expeditions, twenty years apart, a world away from my time. I try not to see them dying, being peeled, rent.

The dead flesh is immaculate, undecayed; it is a scene of carnage pristine as the day it happened, but for the drained, dried blood soaked into the dust all around. Some have been speared on pikes of ivory, some simply opened from the throat to the balls, rib cages torn apart, postmortem cadavers, birthday-present wrappings. Many have been scalped. One has been draped by the arms over a wooden crossbeam as silver as the moon, head dangling to one side, a sordid christ. I kneel down to another, on the ground before me.

His peeled-off face is lain across his chest, held in his clasped hands like a prayer book—dried blood under his nails. In his savage, rictus grin, between his teeth, he clenches a mouthful of skin, a dozen scraps or so, holds them with that grin, like victory, like a shit-eating dog. I notice that the inside of his upper arm has a patch of torn-off skin the same size as the scraps. I glance around; many of the others have the same wounds on their shoulders. Prying his jaws open, I pull out the skin scraps and look through them, see division names and serial numbers. Ironically, there were two groups of people tattooed by the Nazis—the victims of the “Final Solution” and the SS men who carried it out.

Beyond these dead, a solid wall of bones weaves round the city but through the gates ahead a road leads in, straight as an ivory lance, into the heart of Kur. Paved with skulls. I feel drawn toward the center, toward the core of Kur, wondering what might be there, if this is what drove some two dozen men to literally tear each other apart, if somewhere in there is the Hell my grandfather had seen twice and somehow lived through, somehow left behind him those two times and walked out, harrowed by the sights he'd seen. Alone, I start down the road.

Childe Roland to the dark tower came.

The Book of Names of the Dead

It is an avenue of skinsuit banners; twisting sails stretched in the turning liqueous air, billowing. There shouldn't be a breeze down here, I think, but there is, and it's a quiet howling—distant, like the echo of time itself. Empty faces stare down at me, empty eyes and empty mouths, their “names,” if you could call them that, tattooed across their foreheads. I remember reading within my grandfather's journals, or perhaps in Hobbsbaum's notes, the line:
The word for “face” must be the word for “name.” They do not make a distinction. Such a concept of identity.

And I remember reading that this archaic writing, strange and subtle, was the sum of all its wearer's wisdom and understanding. The designs were added to, made more complex, involved, as the individual's experience and ideas grew and complexified. The first tattoo youths received was their own name, woven into an intricate design across the face that signified not only who they were, but what they were, where they had come from, their role, their status. As the name fit into the designs upon the face so the youths should fit into their society, their world. And true enough, the few blank skins that hang amongst the rest are smaller, younger, those of children who had never come of age. They seem more gruesome in their nakedness.

I walk down the road of bones, toward the center of Kur. Between the billowing skins, other roads branch off into the city. Structures of stretched skin on bone form tents, huts, bizarre faceted buildings on these streets. Inside them, through tied-back doorways and sliced-out windows, I catch glimpses of racks of hanging, tattooed skins, piles of them, neat stacks of folded human hide. Every one of them containing the coded information of fifteen thousand years ago. A library of the dead.

What if you found a language,
my grandfather wrote. What if you gathered a book together out of these skins, a book inscribed with the names of the dead, the essence of their lives, a book you'd stare into, see their faces looking back? Would you end up with a world of people insane, catatonic like the one man I know who read and understood a few pages in translation? I walk down into the Kur, determined in my choice of certainty, truth. I won't believe that any feeling is unspeakable, that any thing cannot be named.

As I walk I pass skins that have been cut off at the waist or thorax, that have had large sections hacked out of them, stolen by looters, and I wonder. They might have been here any time in the last fifteen thousand years. These were the pharaohs of their day, the great chieftains and shamans of the paleolithic era. There were no riches in the sense of gold or jewels, no artifacts more precious than the things the dead themselves had now become. But they were enough, and somewhere now, out there, I wonder if there exists some arcane and esoteric text, written in a lost language, on human skin, bound into a book, a book of the names of the dead. I walk on.

The Dead God

It stands at the center of the city, just under an hour's walk from all the carnage at the doors of hell. The tent is maybe twenty feet in height and stretched out like a spider's web, but folded over on itself in all the wrong places. The entrance is covered in the thinnest, smoothest skin I've ever felt, layers of it, veils. I flick them aside and to the back of me, push through them, in toward the center. There's a bier of sorts.

He, it, lies on the bleached bone framework—his own bones?—stretched on it by taut sinews and ivory hooks, stretched out in all his glory like some crimson shroud stained with rivulets and splashes of a deity's scarlet blood. The tattoos are red against red skin—colors of clay, terra-cotta, blood, fire—and they are as much scarification as tattoos. And he is strung. The strings of gut that weave him into the frame of bones vibrate in the breeze, resonating with some distant sound. I feel the chords resonating in my own guts, fear and fury. I'm afraid to even speak because I wonder if that language so pure, so precise that it rewrites the thoughts of those who hear it, might rewrite reality itself.

I don't have to look at the name on his face to know that this is the first murderer and the first rebel, the first among these mortal angels, the first to declare himself above all else, to turn on those around him and, with his own name, carve a terror into their souls that was beyond all reason. I'm only glad that where I've read his name transcribed by Hobbsbaum or by a poor stenographer, it had been done poorly, incompletely, lacking the pitch and stress, lacking the cold precision of its full saurian grandeur. I'm glad that when I look upon the symbols scarred into his forehead, all I know of it is the transcription /
^h
ya
^w
ve/, only the skin of the word, the bones, and not the flesh. Yahveh or Jehovah, the Jewish God? Jove or Jupiter, the name for the Deus that Aeneas brought with him in his flight from fallen Troy on Anatolia's shores, to Rome? Or Japheth, Noah's son, who lived in the time of the flood? Iapetus the Titan, father of Prometheus? All these are only approximations, corruptions of the original, echoes of the true name. Language changes over time, and maybe that's a good thing.

A small scrap of paper lies on top of this creature called /
^h
ya
^w
ve/, placed there by my grandfather perhaps, or Hobbsbaum; but it's blank, the silence of it somehow strange within this world of words that whisper themselves inside you even when you don't know quite just what they mean. I've read translations, rough transcriptions, but I've never learnt the system, the simple phonetic key that makes the words themselves come clear. And even despite this I can feel the language, like a quiet presence at the back of my head, the rattle and hiss of a coiled snake.

I find it hard to describe exactly how I feel, standing here. Before I came here, I spent some time researching, amongst all of this, the life of Samuel Hobbsbaum after his 1921 expedition to “Aratta.” As my grandfather had written in his journals, the professor never published another word, from that day on. However, the Nazi archives in East Berlin revealed that when he was seized in 1940 he had in his possession a “manuscript of over a hundred pages or more, handwritten.” I've seen perhaps twenty or so of these, sent to me by Strang upon his death. The rest of it—I don't know where it is.

So I stand there looking at the skin of a dead god, at the blank paper on top of it. I listen to the sound of the quiet breeze, and I can hear in it the whisper of the language, the resonances and echoes. If a sound can have a shape, the song-script of Kur is sound made flesh.

Hobbsbaum did die in a concentration camp, as Strang had told my grandfather, my namesake, Mad Jack Carter. What he didn't say—or what my grandfather didn't write down perhaps—is that sometime after the '21 expedition, Hobbsbaum had traveled to the Far East, where he received some exquisite tattoo work from an oriental master of the art form. According to those who had seen it, they were beautiful but abstract, fine graceful curving lines, dots and circles. One person I talked to compared them to Feuillet notation, used by choreographers to “write down” a dance. But everybody that had seen them remembered them.

I can hear the word, the breath, the frictions and aspirations now. I can hear it all through the cave, and I realize now that I've been hearing it every step of my journey, the tension of it, the menace, the threat. I realize I've been hearing it all my life.

His Tattooed Skin

Hobbsbaum was interred in Auschwitz in July of 1941, receiving the prisoner number 569304 tattooed on his left forearm. His actual death is not recorded, but we can reconstruct it—the way the Nazis stripped their prisoners of everything they owned, even gold teeth, the way they took a person apart, spiritually as much as physically. There were tables covered in wallets, tables covered in watches, rooms filled with shoes. If he managed to survive the day-to-day ordeal eventually he would have been stripped naked one final time and gassed and burned. There is a strong possibility, though, that somewhere in that process, he would have received “special treatment.” His tattooed skin would have been flayed from his body to be tanned, preserved, and perhaps made into a lampshade.

I still don't know what happened to my grandfather, my namesake.

I touch the skin of the dead god only lightly and the tone of its low hum tightens, heightens. If a sound can have a shape, this is the twisted vortex of a distant tornado. If a shape can have a sound, does making that sound reshape the world? That sound, that faint echo of another Jack Carter's voice reading out the name of God—I think that if I spoke it here and now the world itself might peel apart, shedding the skin that hides the flesh and bones beneath. And if a shape, a sound, can have a meaning, an emotional meaning, then this thing, this skin, this sound it makes all through the Kur and all through my body, is dread—or rather, something far subtler and far more complicated that can only be compared to dread.

So can I put into words what I feel now looking down at this fleshless intricated skin? Horror? Yes, but not the horror of the unspeakable, the unnameable. I think my horror is of the things that must be said, the things we have to face, to name so that we're not consumed by them. Some things, my grandfather wrote, are better left unsaid. Some things though, I would say, cannot be left unwritten.

I can only say I stand in Hell now and I can hear the song of every damned and dying soul who ever breathed their last breath in unbounded terror, from the paleolithic to the present, and it frightens me, knowing that when I leave this place, like my grandfather before me, I will carry it with me. And maybe it will haunt me, drive me mad like the rest of them. But I know this much. I will not leave that sound unwritten.

Jack Carter

Kur, 1999

Errata

Over the Pit of Skulls

“L
ook,” I say eagerly, snapping my fingers in Puck's wandering gaze to draw his attention back to the matter in hand. The Book lies open over the steel grille that I've placed back over the pit of skulls, after laying the skulls in there to rest again, for want of any better idea. There doesn't seem much purpose in giving them individual burials, mouthing empty words over these strangers' remains; at best they'd have a shallow grave, alone and unmarked, so it seems somehow more fitting to lay them back in the crypt they came from, where they at least have meaning among the multitudes beneath.

“Look at the contours here, these little squiggles on every fifth one. Those are obviously height markings. You can see it better here.”

I flip forward a couple of pages to the map that shows Oblivion's Mount pretty much in its entirety. The numbers on the maps, although they transform in script in tune with the terrain, looking pseudo-Cyrillic here or almost-Arabic there, have always been fairly easy to translate. It doesn't take much work to relate the markings to the ups and downs of one's surroundings, order them into linearities, reckon out the numeric bases of the systems. It may take a while but what do we have here in the Vellum if not time?

“See how the numbers increase with each contour as you move in toward the center.”

“Amazing,” says Puck. “You mean it's a…
map
?”

I glare at him.

“Yes. But the map is wrong,” I say.

And I start to point to the discrepancies. There aren't that many of them, to be sure, but they're there—a ridge that juts out where it shouldn't, a valley with sides a little steeper than they should be. They're so minor that I had written them all off as simply products of the layer of garbage beneath us being deeper here or there, masking the true shape of the land. It is the numbers that are wrong.

“You see, as you move in toward the center the numbers go up in leaps and bounds, bigger and bigger. I thought it was just a matter of them using a strange scale, but I'm not so sure now. Who knows why? I've come across some strange numbering systems in these pages. This one's rather similar to Sumerian hexadecimal at first sight, multiple bases, six and sixty, three hundred sixty and—”

He whirls a finger in the air—
get on with it.

“They're damn well exponential,” I say. “The numbers go up exponentially, and this little symbol here, right on the summit of Oblivion's Mount, is not some bloody triangulation point, as I bloody well thought; it's the bloody symbol for infinity.”

Puck looks up toward the summit of the mountain. As hulking and monstrous as it is, Oblivion's Mount is not that tall.

“And this little symbol here,” I say “the one on top of all the numbers—that's a negative sign.”

And Puck and I both look at each other and then slowly look down, thinking about the very big hole under our feet.

Dusk on Oblivion's Mount

“It might be full,” I say.

“It's a fucking bottomless pit,” says Puck. “How can it be full?”

We ride full tilt along the ridge, cart rattling our bones and bouncing us side to side and up and down as I skitter my gloved fingers like a madman at a piano, driving the waldo-wing-things forward as fast as they can go. I can't help thinking with the grotesque and gothic quality of our clattering cart, it's like some Transylvanian carriage ride away from Dracula's castle.

“Well, there are different levels of infinity,” I say. “So the pit is infinitely deep. You'd need an infinite amount of crap to fill it, and putting that in piece by piece would take an infinite amount of time, so the pit should, theoretically, never be full.”

“So it can't be full? You said it might be full.”

Jack howls as he runs behind us, leaping from hump to hummock, hurdling bushes and dodging trees, skittering straight down slopes we have to navigate; I don't know how he manages to keep up with us, but he does.

“But suppose you have an infinite amount of worlds and all of them are producing infinite amounts of crap, and all of them are putting it in piece by piece; well, that means there's an infinite amount of garbage going in at the same time. So then it doesn't take any time at all to fill the pit up.”

“
So it is full?” says Puck.

The cart skids on scree as I take a hairpin bend at speed. The mountain is directly east of us now and we head pretty much due west. It will take us days out of our way but it will take us days to get the pit out from under us even at this speed. It would be nice to think that the pit was full.

I'm thinking of the otherworlds of the Vellum—the Veldt of Evenings, Oblivion's Mount, the Rift, the Bay of Afternoon. All the tiny villages and vast cities, the archipelagos of continents that I've been traveling in so long that I have no idea, I suddenly realize, how old I am anymore. Christ, how long has Puck been with me? I've often considered the possibility that the Vellum is not so much eternity as the sum of all possible eternities, like all the heavens we might want are here as well as all the hells that we might fear, it's just that no one's actually in charge of making sure we end up in the right place. So maybe all these eternities have all dumped their garbage in the bottomless pit under Oblivion's Mount, and we're panicking needlessly.

“So it is full?” says Puck.

“Well…”

“No. Not
well.
No
well.
I don't want to hear
well.”

“It might be full,” l say, “but there should still be room for more.”

I try to explain that,
well,
see, if the hole is full then that means that there's garbage, say, one foot down, and two feet down, and three feet down, all the way down. But if that garbage were to all drop down to double its depth, suddenly, like—if the garbage one foot down drops to two feet down, and the garbage at two feet down goes to four feet down, and so on, well then you have room for another whole infinity of garbage, and because the pit is infinitely deep, well there's nothing to say that it couldn't do that.

Ahead of us, the sun is setting, burning on the horizon of the Veldt like a bushfire, while behind us dusk gathers in twilight-gray mist and purpling sky and black clouds, around and behind Oblivion's Mount, like an army called to its colossus of a general, preparing to advance.