Ink (37 page)

SOMETHING LIKE THE TRUTH

o,” says Reynard, “it won't work.” “Do it.”

“But Monsieur Carter, surely …”

Reynard looks over to the Irishman for support but he's out cold in the armchair now, empty wine bottles at his feet. In this last year, it has been harder on him with each passing month. Even drunk, the visions are too much to bear, and Reynard can hardly blame him for his wretched state. A million Polish workers taken away on trains at German gunpoint to join Czech civilians, to be worked to death. Copenhagen and Oslo taken by Hitler's forces. Bombs aimed for the bridges of Rotterdam falling on the city center. British troops evacuated from Norway. Germans marching into Brussels and Antwerp. The British falling back from Boulogne and Calais.

Dunkirk.

They have a week before the Nazis enter Paris now, a week to stop it all, to find
some
turning point that they can change to rewrite history; but Finnan is a wreck and both of them … they've been almost without sleep now for the last four months, both Reynard and Carter, working round the clock just to transcribe the Irishman's mad ravings, the could-bes and the might-have-beens, pinning timelines, glossaries and indexes to the walls, planned alterations scribbled in margins. There are drafts and redrafts written in normal ink on normal paper everywhere; scratched over or scored through, the paper crumpled up and thrown away in despair, a novel's worth of gravings in this madman's language litters the floor of Reynard's study.
Mon Dieu
, they've tried to map not just the
history of their world but its permutations also and, for all of this, they're still no nearer to an answer.

Reynard picks up the bottle of ink, the black and swirling fluid that the Englishman produced from God knows where. … But no, Reynard knows all too well where it came from; he's seen the cuts on Carter's chest. It's just… what kind of creature has black blood? But no, he doesn't want to know. He puts the ink back in its place to one side of the desk, as if in ordering his tools he might somehow put
everything
in order: history; reality; his life.

“We have to try,” says Carter. “We have to take the risk.”

‘And what exactly are you risking, Monsieur Carter?” says Reynard. “Do you have a wife and child? Do you have anyone you love?”

Anger flashes in the Englishman's eyes for a fraction of a second, anger, pain and guilt, and Reynard knows his words have cut him deep as any little scalpel drawn across his chest. It's not the first time that this man has bristled at his talk of family, of loved ones.

What exactly made you join the army, Captain Carter?
thinks Reynard.
Just what exactly are you fighting?

“If we can bring both Britain and America into the War in Spain,” says Carter, “Christ, an Allied victory there … or before that, if we could stop it happening, destroy fascism before it even—”

Reynard throws his arms up.

“No! It will not work. Look …”

And he traces through the sigils of dark logic
here
and
here
on this scrap of paper on this wall, from there to
this
one, see, from victory in Barcelona and Madrid to Gibraltar's fall, and on and on, the bitter truth that Carter can't accept. Yes, it has to work, it has to, but it doesn't. Murder Stalin. Kill Hitler in the trenches while he's still a private. Have the Turks change sides in 1917. There's an infinity of alterations they could make, and somehow, always, there's this page that does not change. This one infernal set of symbols that remains inviolate no matter what they do.

The Englishman rams a cigarette into an overflowing saucer, one of a dozen makeshift ashtrays round the room, Anna's best Dresden china.

Anna … He had to beg her to stay again yesterday, her suitcase already packed, Tomas holding her hand as they stood in the doorway, and the poor boy crying because of course it's all beyond his infant understanding. All he knows is that Mama is angry with Papa and his new friends, and all the shouting scares
him, wakes him in the night, the voices raised in fear and anger. Reynard can't blame her, and he's tried to tell her …
something
, something like the truth. The men are British agents. What they're doing is important, so important, and they need his help. And why him?
Why us? Why you?

“What choice do we have?” says Carter.

Reynard studies Carter as he stalks the room, as riven, driven as the notes strewn all around them. Like some lion avatar of all this chaos, Reynard thinks. The pile of angel skin sits on the desk so neat and orderly, in contrast, that it almost seems the book itself is what they're up against, some demon sentience lurking hidden in the ink. A grim, inhuman tyrant known as truth against which they are little more than animals caged for an emperor's sick delight. Carter remains untamed, still roaring, straining at the bars, but Reynard … all he thinks of now is Anna and Tomas. If there's really no way out should he be wasting time with this mad scheme?
Non.
He is an
imbécile. Un crétin.

Carter tears a sheet down from the wall and slams it on the desk, one of the trial drafts that Reynard knows will only result in the same horror that they're trying to remove. Worse, actually.

“This one,” says the Englishman. “Just do it.”

He stares in silence at the man, and—

He sees the death of reason in his eyes. God, no. And then he's grabbing desperately for the top sheet of angel skin, but Carter's thrown the chair right back and Reynard hits the floor. Balled notes scatter under his outflung arms. He flounders, rolls and scrambles to his hands and knees, only to feel ribs crack beneath the boot that sends him sprawling.

Carter's opening the bottle now, as Reynard, gasping, pulls himself upright. The study door is open and Anna standing in the frame. Not now. Reynard just yells at her and throws himself at Carter. Black ink spatters, burning on his hand, as Carter staggers to the side, throws out an arm for balance. Another grab to clamp a hand round Carter's wrist, to pry the bottle from his tilting, twisting grip. He yanks it free, but God, it's black fire as it spills across his palm and Reynard screams. He drops the bottle, tries to catch it; it goes tumbling, trails of black ink spilling out into the air. The bottle thumps down on the desk, ink everywhere.

He hears the curses of the Englishman, Anna's screams, Tomas crying, Finnan's roar, but he can't even see them at the edges of his vision. All that Reynard can look at is this splatter-pattern of black blood on angel skin, a dark blotch on the vellum of his century.

T
he
H
owl of
I
ts
R
age

The room roars with the sound of thunder, waterfall or hurricane, a whirling wall of noise that's wild with lashing whips of air, tendrils of sound, of
something
, whipping at my sleeves, my hair, my very breath, as if the noise itself is trying to gain purchase, trying to drag me in, make me a part of this monstrous creation. Back flat against the bookcase, fingers clutching to an edge of wooden shelf, I know that what I'm trying to hold on to is life and sanity, my soul itself. The room roars as if it is alive. My God, it carves the very air into a form, invisible but touching, trailing liquid, cold, across my skin, drowning my pitiful shouts. The candlesticks roll round the pentacle upon the floor and, here and there, flames lick the floor and walls, the books in the bookcases. On the desk, the pages of the book flick back and forth as if some spirit seeks some reference in it on a page long since forgotten—only the certainty of an answer left, and fury at its inability to find it. With its voice made from a hundred rivers or the river of a hundred voices, the room roars like a thwarted beast. Is this what gods are made of, I wonder, surfaces of sounds of souls? Is this the god my brother's called down on us, sucking in the souls of Rohm's slaughtered inner circle to give it substance?

Is this the howl of its rage?

“For God's sake, no!”

He stands there in the center of it, screaming invocations unintelligible amid the havoc all around, the dagger raised in his right hand. He stands in scattered light that blossoms from the jewel in his left hand, the light of all those little fires refracting and reflecting all around him like the air itself were crystal, each flame with its own partner in a shadow skittering across the walls, the shelves, the darkwood panels and the forest green of Father's favorite wallpaper. A pagan bonfire in the depth of pines at night. A blizzard whirling snow around some Loki as he calls the spirits of Walpurgisnacht itself to him, to him. Or of the Night of the Long Knives.

It is a centrifuge, I think, as much as a vortex: souls being stripped apart, the light sucked in toward the center, while the dark smears out around the room. But as ghost fingers clutch at me, as voices gibber in my mind, I start to hear the fear that's in the flitting shadows, terror underneath that rage. It is the sound of men being dragged out of their beds and out into the garden, naked, cowering, as the bullets punch into the backs of their heads. It is the sound of children crying in their beds in the night because something is wrong with them that they can never fix and so they must be braver, better, stronger, fiercer. It is the sound
of these men, these thugs and murderers, being stripped of all that glory, all that blinding fire. And that darkness scattered round the room, I realize, is not the evil in them. No, it is the weakness, the self-pity and the shame, the dark and hidden shame of their humanity.

While the glory of their atrocities gathers around my brother.

“Johann, for the love of God.”

Before him, on all fours, the young lad Thomas crouches like a dog before its master, like an acolyte before the statue of his god; and something gold and black and iridescent blue-green, every hue under the sun—a beautiful wraith, a glorious, hideous angel; something human-shaped but alien, utterly inhuman—hangs above them in the air, as still as death.

I scream his name.

He glances over his shoulder, smiling and saying something, the casual grinning comment of a child saying,
Look at this, look here, isn't this great? Look what I've done.
But his words are as lost as my own, drowned in the torrent of noise. Blasted back against the books by this dervish, at the same time I can feel it try to suck me in toward the center, and I stand there torn, transfixed, with terror urging me to flee, but with a mad drive to leap right into the abyss almost as overpowering.

I have to stop this. For the sake of all that's good I have to stop this, break the circle, break the ritual, break the sickening chain of moments that can only lead one place. Do it, God in Heaven, man, just do it. Stop him. Drag him back from this terrible splendor that he's loosed. He raises the knife to shoulder height and from the fire in my brother's eyes I know, I know what he's about to do. But crucified by my own fear and awe, all I can do is watch in horror as my brother drops into a crouch. The dagger falls and slices, under and around, and up again, blood spraying in its wake. And as the boy's slit throat gouts blood into the whirlwind, to be blown into a mist of red, I watch his body slump, dragging that strange etheric creature down. I watch my brother stepping forward, dagger circling his head, slicing the air and gathering it around him.

Blood sprays across my face, burning and blinding, and the struggle in my body suddenly dissolves as something breaks within me. My will or my fear? I don't know. Am I trying to halt this horror or to be a part of it? God, I don't know. I have no idea what deep compulsion I am answering. I only know I'm stepping forward into the storm, to where my brother stands … and where the creature stands, in the same space, limb around limb as a ghost image superimposed over another. A hundred images, a thousand. It wears his SA uniform one second, the
black trenchcoat of a Futurist the next, the flying goggles of an airman, khaki denims torn and bloody, a scarf around his neck—all checks and tassels now, and then white silk—black woolen balaclava, British army cap, the jacket of some drummer boy. It wears a hundred different uniforms with glittering insignia, the Iron Cross and other medals I don't recognize, a hundred different uniforms with bullet holes and rips and tears.

I step into the pentacle of chaos and strike out, my open palm across his face as ineffectual as my wordless cry. He smiles at me, beatific and bemused, even as I grab his bloodied hand to wrest the dagger from him, hurl it down and to one side. It's too late now. It's done.

The bloodstained patchwork demon god of war, dressed in the armor of all those it's claimed, wraps itself around us, through us, in between us and within us. I can feel it trying to push me from him, claim him for its own, but I hold on to him. I clamp my hand onto his shoulder, leaning in and cursing, screaming in his face. It tries to drown his answer in this river of voices that our souls are being swept into now, carried away and lost among the maelstrom of new memories and ancient knowledge, but I can hear it as a whisper in my head.