Authors: Hal Duncan
Ink (32 page)
“August 13th, 1943,” says von Strann suddenly.
It's a date Pickering will never forget.
“What?”
The man tries to pull his head away from the gun again, but Pickering's grip is firm.
“That's when your wife and son died, isn't it, Major Pickering? That's the story, isn't it? That's what they all said.”
It's a date he'll never forget because it's like a knife that's buried deep in his still-pumping heart. And yes, it's what they all said. He remembers grilling them one by one, forcing them through the stories over and over again, and he would stay quiet and composed even as they wept and giggled, recounting the same scene of horror that wakes him screaming from his dreams. All of them were soldiers, officers, career army like himself, as if this Jack Flash were picking his targets by a most ruthless logic, not his enemies but the innocents they loved.
“That's what they all told me,” the manbabbles. “August 13th, 1943. Yes, I've talked to them. But you don't understand. It isn't real.
He
isn't real.”
“I've seen him,” says Pickering. “And I'm not alone.”
“So you've talked to them. Are any of them sane?
Mon Dieu
, are any of them even rational?”
Pickering pulls the gun away from the man's face. He uncocks the trigger and holsters it, leans in close to whisper.
“Believe me,” he says, “I am the most rational man you will ever meet.”
And that's your own form of insanity, he thinks. Isn't it?
He didn't wear black at the funeral. He wore his uniform.
“Then I ask you, Major Pickering. As a rational man. Do you believe in myths or do you believe in reality? Perhaps you want to believe in gods and monsters, Major, but I… I want to believe in humanity. I want my world godless and without magic.”
The man is trembling. He shakes his head.
“But … I've seen him too, Major Pickering. God have mercy on my soul, I've seen him too.”
“Your brother,” says Pickering.
The feeling sickens him a little, but it's one of the few pleasures he has left now since his world was murdered: the vicious pleasure of breaking a man. But von Strann has that strange bitter smile of a man going to the gallows with his secret still intact.
“We are all brothers,” he says, “under the skin.”
He pats at his breast pocket, takes out a pack of cigarettes.
“Do you mind if I smoke?”
“Go ahead.”
“Do you have a light? Thanks. Please … where were we?”
“Berlin, 1929. What was it called—your own club—by the way?”
“Jongleurs. It was called Jongleurs. We had a man juggling fire out front. Jacques his name was—quite the crowd puller.”
“But hardly bestiality.”
“Hardly. The Fox's Den rather put our little juggling act to shame.”
“So it was a successful business? Prostitution? Other criminal activities?”
“ One rather suspected so. The proprietor was a quite untrustworthy fellow. Although from what you say, I fear I may have misjudged him. As I say, there were all sorts of stories. Oh, wait. This lighter isn't working … got it. Yes, as I say, there were a lot of stories going around. What is it that you want to know, Major Pickering? What is it exactly that you want to know?”
Pickering stands up from his chair and wanders to the corner of the room, leans back against the wall, arms folded, sizing the prisoner up. He returns, takes his cap off and lays it on the table. Reinhardt von Strann, he thinks; or Reynard Carrier, depending on who you listen to. If it weren't for the photograph of von Strann Senior, Pickering might almost believe the cover story himself; his accent sounds Parisian enough, with just the hint of German you'd expect, and MacChuill is utterly convinced that he
did
debrief the man on his arrival.
Jolly good sort. Great help to the war effort and all that.
So what happened to the interview records?
Oh, there's a lot of things that Pickering would like to know about this man, and he'll get to them all eventually. He checks his watch: It's early yet and they have all night if necessary. As long as it takes.
“I've spoken to the French authorities, you know? They have no record of you either.”
“War is a confusing time, Major Pickering. Things get lost in all the chaos, lost, forgotten or …”
“Stolen?”
“Lost,” he repeats. “A few little scraps of paper among … millions, Major Pickering. It must be easy for things to get jumbled up, slipped into the wrong file, lost in transit.”
“British Intelligence is very efficient,” says Pickering.
“I'm sure even
you
lose track of things once in a while, Joseph.”
THE MADNESS OF KING PIERROT
Q
ueer
E
ye for the
S
traight
L
ie
ierrot stands there, caught in curiosity. Jack gives a quiet laugh. He strokes his staff.
“How would you like,” he says, “to see them lying sated on the hills?”
Pierrot's voice goes quiet with the thrill of the idea.
‘Above all else,” he whispers. “Yes. I would give anything to see … her.”
Jack grins with lascivious spite, the Harlequin reeling his victim in. He circles Pierrot.
“Why this desire,” he asks, “all of a sudden? Would it not sting to see them drunk with wine, these whores, these bitches, all these maidens of this town, and your own mother, Columbine?”
He asks it innocent and sweet but stresses, oh so slightly,
your own mother
, darts his tongue to lick his lips.
“You'd be a willing witness to their rites? No matter how it hurts?”
“Of course,” says Pierrot. “If I could sit silent beneath the firs…”
He has a distant, dreamy look, Pierrot, gazing out across the audience as Jack, behind his back, jumps up to crouch upon a prop. He holds one hand across his eyes, his fingers splayed to peep through them; his other holds the flute down at his crotch. He jiggles it and wriggles till the audience's giggles make Pierrot turn, but Jack's already pointing with the flute now, while his other hand's dropped down to stroke his chin, a thoughtful and considerate Harlequin.
“No. They would notice you,” Jack muses. “Even if you came covertly.”
“Then I'll go overtly,” says Pierrot. “Yes, there's truth in what you say.”
Jack jumps down off the rock, walks round behind Pierrot and leans in to whisper in his ear.
“So shall I take you now?” says Jack. “Will you go all the way?”
He bites his bottom lip, hands reaching out to take Pierrot by the hips. Shit, Guy, I think, you've written one perverted motherfucker of a play.
Pierrot turns and once again Jack mugs a casual pose, entirely innocent.
“Lead on,” says Pierrot. “Let's go right now. I hate to wait.”
Jack takes Pierrot by the tie as if to lead him like a dog, but lets it drop out of his fingers, shakes his head.
“We'll have to find you some fine linen robes to wear.”
“Why?” Pierrot protests. “I am a man—”
“—who wants to join the ranks of women. They would kill you if you showed your
manhood
there.”
Pierrot gives a grudging nod, oblivious of any innuendo.
“That's true,” he says. “You do have some wits after all.”
“You've barely had a taste,” says Jack aside, and then to Pierrot: “The Harlequin has taught me this.”
“What do I have to do?” says Pierrot.
He sounds so small and lost.
“How do I follow your advice?” he says.
“Don't worry,” Jack says. “I'll come with you to your rooms.”
He drapes an arm around Pierrot's shoulder.
“Yes,” he says, “we'll dress you up real nice.”
The sky is thick with churning cloud cover, reflecting back the orange of streetlights muted to a dull and heavy glow. Joey rolls over onto one side; feels like his left arm is broken, but that's OK. The pills kill that pain too.
Uphill and past the scrub of bushes and trees, behind a wall topped with barbed wire littered with plastic bags and rags of cloth, a string of lights marks out the limits of the civilized. The firefly glows from the windows and the floodlights all along the length of the Circus, together with the burning wreckage of
the airtram scattered on the slope above him, give the umber foliage of the park a rich chiaroscuro taint.
“And now I'm looking out into this dark and stormy night from up here in the heavenly heights and, folks, I'm thinking that the Powers That Be may finally have gotten wise. I think they're out to shut the Rookery down for good tonight, mis amigos. We got an airfleet coming in over the Circus, lean see militiamen moving down en masse from Maryhill Barracks and, with the walls of Hyndland sealing in you boys to the West, only way to run is into the inferno. It's not looking good for Fox's little friends, I tell you.”
Joey pulls himself to his feet, looks round. There's a few bodies thrown clear of the twisted airtram but what strikes him most is that, beyond the scar of crumpled, buckled carriages and strewn debris, the park is calm, a wild and feral garden but a garden nonetheless, even with the Circus looming on one side and the Rookery on the other, and a streak of metal devastation carved right down the slope between. It's the light that he notices. A crimson and ocher wash paints over the flowers of weeds and, over the long grass, a sickly pattern of yellow and black is marked out where light hits it or does not—the pattern of a poisonous frog. He used to paint when he was a kid—when they were kids—not just graffiti but oil on canvas, stolen or traded for what was stolen; the first thing he ever got high on was turps. He gave that up a long time ago—a pointless pastime—but he can still look into the night and see the way light works in it.
The Rookery rises, carved out by the volcanic glow of halogen and given a painted solidity by the lightning flashes of militia ornithopters’ chi-beams. They're coming in low from over the Circus now, gathering into a front. The glow of steam vented from Cavor-Reich engines builds and builds as the gunboats circle slowly into position, until it bathes the sky in a green that speaks of absinthe and other worlds. Madness and war machines. Gauche, Joey thinks.
Out here on the bridge to nowhere, though, there are no lights, and form builds its definitions out of damp olive shadows.
“But as my dear old papa always said, Son, you can hunt and you can trap, but if you shoot an animal you better kill it then and there, ‘cause if you only make it mad, if you just wound it, it'll come for you with everything it's got. A crafty fox or cornered rat, boy, if you trap it, well, make damn sure that it can't get loose, because there's nothing wilder than an animal that's soured its taste buds with the bitter steel of chains and cages, knowing it'll never wash that foul metallic flavor from its mouth without the rich red wine of human blood. Well, mis amigos, seems to me like we have
all of us been biting on the bars for an eternity and waiting for the day that Dionysus drops by. And now
—
oh yeah
—
the fur is gonna fly.”
Joey looks down the slope. A pedestal of stone rises up out of overgrown flowerbeds before the bridge; a monument to the Boer War, on the top of it a statue of a pith-helmeted soldier once sat, Joey remembers, in a surreally languid catalogue pose, one leg hanging down, the other raised so that the soldier could lean his lazy stone elbow on it as he gazed out across some distant savannah slaughter. Now another figure holds the same pose.
Jack swivels round to face him, gives a salute.
“What's this? I hear you ask. Dionne Warwick? Dianetics? No, you heard me right. We're talking Dionysus, god of beer and wine and party times, and god of small trapped animals, no less. Oh, yes! Beware, you trappers, you guardians of the ghettos and the gulags. Beware, you burgher mousers, all you fat cats thinking you can round up all the rats. Beware, lest one day you trap Dionysus in your hunt, ‘cause Dionysus when he's angry is one seriously mad cunt.”
“You smell it?” calls Jack. “That lush deep scent of … memories. Smells kin da like heat. Kinda … sexy.”
“All I smell,” says Joey, “is shit and garbage.”
There is something else though. On top of the fetid stench of the rotting filth under the bridge is a hint of methane and more powerful fuels. It's the smell of the open-cast mines of cavorite seams that powered Albion's industrial revolution. Of the chi-wells of Persia that the Empire was built on. The orgone-rich deposits of the North Sea.
The wind is blowing from the south, from the carcass of the ICI plant, still burning after twenty years. Joey remembers the radiovision pictures of King Finn being dragged out of the wreckage of it, delirious from the orgone fumes, then the shots of him standing in the dock in chains, spouting his angry rhetoric.
“Shit and garbage,” says Joey.
“Ah, now,” says Jack, “even shit and garbage changes if you leave it buried long enough, under constant pressure.”
And there
is
something else there, coming from below, something buried real deep, beneath even the rats.
B
roken
K
ing