Hal Duncan, page 39
Wait a minute. Wait. We hope that you'll be freed. Are these things Covenant or what? He's sure Henderson is Covenant; you only have to look at the fucking buzz-cut hair at the back of his neck to know he's regulation issue. So what are these things doing saying that they want to see him free?
¯ The dukes are weaker then than these?
And that's a leading question if he's ever heard one.
¯ They can't escape what has been fated, he's replying.
¯ What is fated to the dukes except to rule forever? they say, and he's almost sure that they already know the answer, like they're laying out the logic of a problem, step by step, a teacher leading an idiot child.
¯ That you'll never know, he says. Don't ask.
And then they whisper in his ear.
¯ Surely it is some awful secret you withhold.
And he knows. They're right. He fucking knows and—
¯ for a second, he's back in Inchgillan by the ocean's endless straits, with Doctor Reynard like a father confessor with his hands on his shoulders, then he turns round and it's Peterhead and MacChuill there, but fookin O'Sheen, O'Sheen his name was, not MacChuill, because MacChuill was the soldier on Kelvinbridge on the day after John Maclean's funeral, so it is, and Seamus telling him it's no good, no good, don't set yer mind against the dukes, don't even offend them with yer words 'cause it's all fookin pointless sure and Reynard is pushing his glasses up his nose and Maclean taking his off, and Finnan saying I want to help and standing in George Square with fire in his veins and wire round his wrists as he sits in the chair as he stands caught on the hill and the birds are peeking at the bodies which are falling under the hammering of the guns the shells the chains in the dugout Christ and he hears the white wind howl in his head a song that changes and a chant around the bath where him and Anna lie laughing lovers naked in the bed and Anna lying on rough hessian making faces as the birds sing outside the barn and the crows caw over the corn and may this moment stay in us forever and never be dissolved away and the stalk of corn in his teeth and the grain in his hand for her a gift just like the gifts he brought to her door his hair all combed and everything for Thomas to answer the bell and introduce him to his friends in the parlour with all their foolish talk of wars and revolutions in the pub sure and we'll never stop till we've got to the lords and in the park where the singing of the birds is different so different from the harsh caw of the crow all black like soot as black as coal thrown in a Fire he's shouting, Fire!
And he drags himself back out of it, back into the present, into the abattoir with its holy offerings of slaughtered cattle, and Henderson standing at the door and the bitmites crawling through his body and mind. 'Cause fook ye all, he's thinking. I won't fookin break.
Sure and it's a binding all right. They're stripping his soul down piece by piece, the bitmites eating their way through his memory, worming their way down through the layers of personal history that constitute identity, but he doubts if they give a damn what's left afterwards. They're not trying to bind him into a new self like their footsoldiers, like even their own warped fookin selves. All they want is to open up his soul, like, really open up his soul so they can look right through it down into the Vellum. Binding? This is a fookin divination. Peel him open, splay him out and use him to summon some fookin archetype deep in the unconscious mind. He doesn't know who or what they're looking for inside of him, but he knows now that they're reading him, reading the trails of betrayals of foolish schemes, the fookin entrails of his dreams. We hope that you'll be freed?
He thinks of an army captain he once knew, offering sympathy over a grave mistake, and the opportunity to redeem himself.
Good cop, bad cop, is it? he thinks. I know that one, ye bastards.
-Let's talk of something else, he says. Right now my lips are sealed; now's not the time for it to be revealed when, by concealing this, I may one day escape these chains.
But that's just fookin unkin talk for fook right off, ye fookin fookers, cause Sergeant Seamus Padraig Finnan knows exactly what yer up to and ye can fookin sit on it and spin if ye think he's going to help one little bit. No, he's not going to break.
Finnan's awake.
The bitmites swirl up into the air again, away for a second and then back, touching his mind again, looking for another memory to expose, another layer to peel back...
A Fury of Flies
A lass, alas, a hungry, wretched one afflicted with a fury of flies, she's frenzied, forced along the sanddune shores, hunted and harried by a hundred watching eyes of images of argil, herdsmen made from clay that haunt her, all the statues of the saints and Christ upon his cross and in the paintings in the chapel, looking down on her with blame. Six feet of soil don't hide the prying, pious eyes of all the glorious dead that scrutinise her from the heavens. Jesus and the blessed saints, they see her shame. Somewhere, a reed of wax, it seems, blows low, sounding a soporific song, the wind through coarse, tall grass. A lass, alas, O gods!
Ah, god, the pain! Some wretched fly stings her again, the midges of the rock pools all buzzing around her head like the saints themselves come down to punish her for her sins.
And Anna stumbles in the sand, and sinks down sobbing, in her skirts.
Where, Lord, where will she go? In what sin is it she's been found, what sin, sons of the Crown, that she's now damned to this unending misery? O, but she knows only too well. Burn me with fire, she thinks, or bury me in earth, or feed me to the creatures of the sea, but grant me mercy, God. I'll stray no more, I swear. Wild ways have troubled me enough; I've learned my lesson. Only let me know now when this suffering will be over.
She feels the hand touching her hair, the tender hand of her sweet Irish rover, Seamus, tentative now, as if he doesn't know if it's his place. He wipes a tear off of her face.
¯ Ah, hush now, Anna, Seamus says. It'll be OK. It can't be that bad, can it? What could be so bad as to deserve all this palaver?
How can she tell him in the state he's in? How can she tell him of the state she's in? Him stuck in this ungodly loony bin and her stuck here between the devil and the deep blue sea, between a rock and a hard place, sure, between her love for Seamus and the terrible thing she did in hatred of him when he told her of her brother's death in France, between her heart given to one man and her body to another. Father, forgive me, she thinks. Seamus, forgive me. I was angry. O, but the anger and the grief were just too much to bear and you were the one said you'd look after Tom and keep him safe, but Tom was gone and you were lost in your own head and ... and he was there. O, Seamus, I wanted to hurt you. I wanted to hold you. It was your blue eyes I saw in his, and your hair that I ran my fingers through as I pushed it from those eyes.
She wrings her hands and feels the ring hidden under the glove. How can she tell him that she's marrying a man she doesn't love and not the man who had his mind all broken for the promise that he made to her?
¯ What kind of place is this, she says, what kind of people in it?
She trembles, shaking like the poor unfortunates sat at the tables in that awful room, the men with missing arms or legs, blinded or worse. She saw his own hand shake when he reached out to touch her fingertips across the table, every bit as gentle as back home when they were all so young and wild and he'd come calling all spruced up and in his Sunday best. His hands are rough but they can touch so soft you barely feel it through a calfskin glove except you feel it pounding in your heart.
She looks at him sat on the rock she's slumped beneath, his legs spread wide, his dirty blond hair blowing in the wind. Behind him, beyond outcrops of rock and over moor, the cold grey edifice of Inchgillan stands looking as desolate as himself. What has he done to earn this punishment from her? What miserable outpost of society is this they've found themselves in?
And stumbling, sobbing, she begins.
¯ Please listen to me, Seamus.
Seamus, forgive me, for I have sinned.
A Terrible Dark Thing
He tries to listen to her, watching her flick a calfskinned hand around her flyfurled head, as she tells of a duke's heart warm with love for this young daughter of Enoch Messenger, but he can't take it in. Here and her father always hated her seeing Seamus, he interrupts her, laughing, and the lengths they had to go through, all the hoops they had to jump through just to get some time together. Do you remember, eh? Yer old man and his talk of decency.
¯ Why do you have to talk about my father? she says. Tell me, O Jesus, Seamus, poor suffering Seamus, because you've always talked the truth to me, are we just born to suffer? Who of the wretched, who ¯ O God ¯ suffers like us?
Because decency, she tells him. Decency. He's put a name to the very heaven-sent source of it all that sent her to him. He asks her why, what is it, why and she tells him how she came rushing headlong, how she hasn't been able to eat since ¯ and the rough ride of the ferry over from Dublin, and how they all end up suffering from the plots that people make in anger, maddened by spiteful thoughts like insect bites.
He doesn't understand her tumbling story, as she tries to get it out but keeps going off the rails before reaching the point. Or there's a part of him that understands but that won't let the truth through to the rest of him. All that he knows, all that hell let himself hear in her mixed-up rambling confession is that she has some terrible truth that she can't bear, but she can't bear to tell him.
¯ Do we go to Heaven or Hell after we're dead? she asks him. How much more can await us after what we suffer in this world? Surely Jesus must forgive us.
Tell her, thinks Seamus, tell the poor girl that God is in his Heaven and forgives us all our sins, even shooting the brother of the girl ye love for cowardice, not the cowardice of a young lad cowering in a dugout, but the cowardice of his friend, his Sergeant, who followed the fookin order. Tell her there's forgiveness for that.
He can't.
It's been a terrible dark thing between them ever since he got back from the front to give her the news himself of Thomas's death, to say that the shame was on him, on Seamus, on himself. He sees it in her eyes, that she can't really forgive him even though she wants to. And he can't really forgive himself because when he looks into her eyes, he sees the same dark green and brown as Thomas's looking out at him.
But what has she got that needs forgiveness, sure?
He remembers arriving at the door of the Messenger family home in the well-to-do Dublin suburb of Rathgar just like so many times before but now so different. On leave and waiting for the results of the Medical Board, sure, and shaking like a leaf, he hadn't a clue what he was going to say to her and whether she would cry or curse him to his face or both. Should he tell her the untarnished truth, whatever she might want to know in simple words, leaving out the euphemisms and not weaving some grand mystery of tragic death out of it? Surely she had the right to hear it from the horse's mouth. Should he tell her she was looking on the face of the man who gave the lads the order to take aim and fire?
And when she came to the door she had a look so lost, so wandering, that he knew she needed something to latch onto as a sign that the grief might someday end, and would it be better for her not to know or ¯ Jesus Christ ¯ for her to learn? Could he hide it from her, have her find out later, suffer even more? He couldn't grudge her this one thing, this tiny thing, this awful tiny truth so why the fook did he delay? It's not that he doesn't want to, is what he told himself. But he couldn't help but hesitate on account of what it would surely do to her.
But if it's what she wants, he thought, I'll have to tell her.
And so they sat in the parlour, him with his hat in hand, and they were distant enough from each other, like she already sensed the guilt in him far deeper than his failed promise. Why was he suffering so? she asked him. What awful crime was he punishing himself for? And he could hear the fear in her voice that he was going to tell her and break her heart. (Just like the fear that's in him now, that she's got some truth like that but it can't be as bad as his, can it? How could it be?) He thought of the endless telling of his tale to the doctors of the Medical Board.
¯ Sure and it seems I never stop talking of my sufferings, he'd said. A man can only talk so much.
¯ Seamus, tell me what's driven you to the edge, she said.
The will of dukes, he thought, the hand of a smith. He shook his head.
She asked him, if he loved her, God, to tell her what was wrong, don't soften it for her; she was strong and she could take it. And he said he couldn't, Jesus Christ Almighty, how could he tell her? It was to do with Thomas, he'd said, looking at those green eyes. Please, she'd said. And he couldn't just tell her, he said, but ... if she asked ... if she asked any question ... any question ... he would tell her anything she wanted to know.
And so she asked, and Seamus told her how he shot her brother.
And now he knows it's somehow the same thing, with her trying to tell him her own shame but needing him to prompt her, draw it out of her as she did to him. And what could it be? Jesus, what could it be that she's afraid is so bad he might not be able to forgive her?
The Third Player
¯ I'm pregnant, says Phreedom.
Finnan looks down at the bottle in his hand, leans down to place it gently on the floor between his feet. The quiet words resonate in the empty church in that whispering way that only empty halls have, not quite an echo that can be made sense of, just a pious ringing of the stone in answer to the human voice.
¯ Is it...?
¯ Yours? she says. I fucking hope so. Christ, I fucking hope so.
He knows it's not the only possibility. The last time they met, in this same church, she told him exactly what they'd done to her, the angels of the Covenant who were looking for her brother.
They'd left her for dead afterwards, and in a way she was, she is; they both are ¯ Finnan with his heart ripped out, a traitor to her and Thomas, her with a seed of hatred planted in her, poisoning her slowly. She went to Hell to try and save her brother. It didn't end well.
¯ I led them to him, she had said. I thought I could change the story, rip us out of it, and all the time J was just tearing an opening in the Vellum for those ... creatures to get at him. You betrayed him, Finnan, but I damned him. I fucking damned him. I thought I could go back and ... make things right. But time in the Vellum isn't that simple, is it?
He had been sodden and filthy then, just as he is now, living hand-to-mouth, going from soup kitchen to homeless shelter, stewing in his own misery and drinking in churches just to spite the bastard God of his innocent childhood. When she'd found him, he'd expected her to hate him, but by that time she was too busy hating herself. In the end, they'd found some little solace together; she'd taken him back to her room, fed him and washed him. As they lay together in the warm bed after fucking like animals, she'd told him of all the strangers she'd used in the same way, pick-ups in singles bars and seedy night-clubs, dirty old men and groups of frat-boys. He knew she wasn't saying it to hurt him, but to open up herself to him because he was the only one who'd understand. They were both trying to make physical the degradation of their souls, in the ruin of their flesh.
That was three months ago and now she's pregnant, and it could be his, it could be any of the johns' or marks', Tom, Dick or Harry's. Or it could be the angel's.
¯ Whatever... she says, I'm going to have it.
He looks at her. There's a sort of strength to her now. She seems to have found some sort of strength in the acceptance of this, as an end to her own story, maybe, and the beginning of another. It's like she's fought so hard against her fate since the first day she stood up to an angel of the Covenant, she's sold her soul to Hell only to steal the secrets of its queen, she's torn her way into the Vellum to try and save her brother, and the futility of it all that had her broken and beat-up inside like him, has now become a grim and nihilistic faith of sorts, in the emptiness of it all. While he's still on his knees, raging against the dying of the light, she's standing up to face the darkness, ready to walk into it, and ready for the good fight.
He's just waiting for his Judgement Day.
¯ So you've picked a side then, he says.
¯ No sides, she says. Just me.
She lays a hand on her stomach.
¯ Us.
He thinks of Anna, the lost sweetheart of his past and the way it all seems to tie together, echoes and reflections bouncing back and forth across a century. They're creatures of the Vellum and time in the Vellum has a funny way of weaving and looping; they tear it and they stitch it back together as they travel through it. Jesus, but Tommy made a right mess, so he did, then, now and fucking forever. One unkin's all it takes to shatter time into a million shards that no amount of Covenant craft could put back into order. Now that the war is kicking off it's only going to get worse.
¯ You know how bad it's going to get? he says. The Sovereigns and the Covenant—
¯ The Sovereigns are straw dogs. And the Covenant don't know what they're dealing with.
She pulls off her jacket to show him the pink scarred tattoo. The black ink of Eresh's needlework crawls over her arm in such a chaos of ever-changing signs and sigils that it makes him dizzy, gives him vertigo; it's only when she puts her arm back in the jacket sleeve that he stops feeling like he's being sucked into a void.
¯ Jesus, fookin Mary and Joseph. What the fuck?
¯ I don't know, she says. What do you get if you cross the queen of the dead's blood with the ink of God's scribe? I think they're breeding, Finnan. And I don't think I'm the only carrier.
¯ Metatron's pet hawks, he says slowly, quietly. Carter. Pechorin.
She's told him what came walking out of the exploding moment of Eresh's death, in the bodies of Metatron's two bloody-handed angel thugs, what followed her into the Vellum to drag Thomas off to an eternal grave. As much as she can make sense of.
¯ The dukes are weaker then than these?
And that's a leading question if he's ever heard one.
¯ They can't escape what has been fated, he's replying.
¯ What is fated to the dukes except to rule forever? they say, and he's almost sure that they already know the answer, like they're laying out the logic of a problem, step by step, a teacher leading an idiot child.
¯ That you'll never know, he says. Don't ask.
And then they whisper in his ear.
¯ Surely it is some awful secret you withhold.
And he knows. They're right. He fucking knows and—
¯ for a second, he's back in Inchgillan by the ocean's endless straits, with Doctor Reynard like a father confessor with his hands on his shoulders, then he turns round and it's Peterhead and MacChuill there, but fookin O'Sheen, O'Sheen his name was, not MacChuill, because MacChuill was the soldier on Kelvinbridge on the day after John Maclean's funeral, so it is, and Seamus telling him it's no good, no good, don't set yer mind against the dukes, don't even offend them with yer words 'cause it's all fookin pointless sure and Reynard is pushing his glasses up his nose and Maclean taking his off, and Finnan saying I want to help and standing in George Square with fire in his veins and wire round his wrists as he sits in the chair as he stands caught on the hill and the birds are peeking at the bodies which are falling under the hammering of the guns the shells the chains in the dugout Christ and he hears the white wind howl in his head a song that changes and a chant around the bath where him and Anna lie laughing lovers naked in the bed and Anna lying on rough hessian making faces as the birds sing outside the barn and the crows caw over the corn and may this moment stay in us forever and never be dissolved away and the stalk of corn in his teeth and the grain in his hand for her a gift just like the gifts he brought to her door his hair all combed and everything for Thomas to answer the bell and introduce him to his friends in the parlour with all their foolish talk of wars and revolutions in the pub sure and we'll never stop till we've got to the lords and in the park where the singing of the birds is different so different from the harsh caw of the crow all black like soot as black as coal thrown in a Fire he's shouting, Fire!
And he drags himself back out of it, back into the present, into the abattoir with its holy offerings of slaughtered cattle, and Henderson standing at the door and the bitmites crawling through his body and mind. 'Cause fook ye all, he's thinking. I won't fookin break.
Sure and it's a binding all right. They're stripping his soul down piece by piece, the bitmites eating their way through his memory, worming their way down through the layers of personal history that constitute identity, but he doubts if they give a damn what's left afterwards. They're not trying to bind him into a new self like their footsoldiers, like even their own warped fookin selves. All they want is to open up his soul, like, really open up his soul so they can look right through it down into the Vellum. Binding? This is a fookin divination. Peel him open, splay him out and use him to summon some fookin archetype deep in the unconscious mind. He doesn't know who or what they're looking for inside of him, but he knows now that they're reading him, reading the trails of betrayals of foolish schemes, the fookin entrails of his dreams. We hope that you'll be freed?
He thinks of an army captain he once knew, offering sympathy over a grave mistake, and the opportunity to redeem himself.
Good cop, bad cop, is it? he thinks. I know that one, ye bastards.
-Let's talk of something else, he says. Right now my lips are sealed; now's not the time for it to be revealed when, by concealing this, I may one day escape these chains.
But that's just fookin unkin talk for fook right off, ye fookin fookers, cause Sergeant Seamus Padraig Finnan knows exactly what yer up to and ye can fookin sit on it and spin if ye think he's going to help one little bit. No, he's not going to break.
Finnan's awake.
The bitmites swirl up into the air again, away for a second and then back, touching his mind again, looking for another memory to expose, another layer to peel back...
A Fury of Flies
A lass, alas, a hungry, wretched one afflicted with a fury of flies, she's frenzied, forced along the sanddune shores, hunted and harried by a hundred watching eyes of images of argil, herdsmen made from clay that haunt her, all the statues of the saints and Christ upon his cross and in the paintings in the chapel, looking down on her with blame. Six feet of soil don't hide the prying, pious eyes of all the glorious dead that scrutinise her from the heavens. Jesus and the blessed saints, they see her shame. Somewhere, a reed of wax, it seems, blows low, sounding a soporific song, the wind through coarse, tall grass. A lass, alas, O gods!
Ah, god, the pain! Some wretched fly stings her again, the midges of the rock pools all buzzing around her head like the saints themselves come down to punish her for her sins.
And Anna stumbles in the sand, and sinks down sobbing, in her skirts.
Where, Lord, where will she go? In what sin is it she's been found, what sin, sons of the Crown, that she's now damned to this unending misery? O, but she knows only too well. Burn me with fire, she thinks, or bury me in earth, or feed me to the creatures of the sea, but grant me mercy, God. I'll stray no more, I swear. Wild ways have troubled me enough; I've learned my lesson. Only let me know now when this suffering will be over.
She feels the hand touching her hair, the tender hand of her sweet Irish rover, Seamus, tentative now, as if he doesn't know if it's his place. He wipes a tear off of her face.
¯ Ah, hush now, Anna, Seamus says. It'll be OK. It can't be that bad, can it? What could be so bad as to deserve all this palaver?
How can she tell him in the state he's in? How can she tell him of the state she's in? Him stuck in this ungodly loony bin and her stuck here between the devil and the deep blue sea, between a rock and a hard place, sure, between her love for Seamus and the terrible thing she did in hatred of him when he told her of her brother's death in France, between her heart given to one man and her body to another. Father, forgive me, she thinks. Seamus, forgive me. I was angry. O, but the anger and the grief were just too much to bear and you were the one said you'd look after Tom and keep him safe, but Tom was gone and you were lost in your own head and ... and he was there. O, Seamus, I wanted to hurt you. I wanted to hold you. It was your blue eyes I saw in his, and your hair that I ran my fingers through as I pushed it from those eyes.
She wrings her hands and feels the ring hidden under the glove. How can she tell him that she's marrying a man she doesn't love and not the man who had his mind all broken for the promise that he made to her?
¯ What kind of place is this, she says, what kind of people in it?
She trembles, shaking like the poor unfortunates sat at the tables in that awful room, the men with missing arms or legs, blinded or worse. She saw his own hand shake when he reached out to touch her fingertips across the table, every bit as gentle as back home when they were all so young and wild and he'd come calling all spruced up and in his Sunday best. His hands are rough but they can touch so soft you barely feel it through a calfskin glove except you feel it pounding in your heart.
She looks at him sat on the rock she's slumped beneath, his legs spread wide, his dirty blond hair blowing in the wind. Behind him, beyond outcrops of rock and over moor, the cold grey edifice of Inchgillan stands looking as desolate as himself. What has he done to earn this punishment from her? What miserable outpost of society is this they've found themselves in?
And stumbling, sobbing, she begins.
¯ Please listen to me, Seamus.
Seamus, forgive me, for I have sinned.
A Terrible Dark Thing
He tries to listen to her, watching her flick a calfskinned hand around her flyfurled head, as she tells of a duke's heart warm with love for this young daughter of Enoch Messenger, but he can't take it in. Here and her father always hated her seeing Seamus, he interrupts her, laughing, and the lengths they had to go through, all the hoops they had to jump through just to get some time together. Do you remember, eh? Yer old man and his talk of decency.
¯ Why do you have to talk about my father? she says. Tell me, O Jesus, Seamus, poor suffering Seamus, because you've always talked the truth to me, are we just born to suffer? Who of the wretched, who ¯ O God ¯ suffers like us?
Because decency, she tells him. Decency. He's put a name to the very heaven-sent source of it all that sent her to him. He asks her why, what is it, why and she tells him how she came rushing headlong, how she hasn't been able to eat since ¯ and the rough ride of the ferry over from Dublin, and how they all end up suffering from the plots that people make in anger, maddened by spiteful thoughts like insect bites.
He doesn't understand her tumbling story, as she tries to get it out but keeps going off the rails before reaching the point. Or there's a part of him that understands but that won't let the truth through to the rest of him. All that he knows, all that hell let himself hear in her mixed-up rambling confession is that she has some terrible truth that she can't bear, but she can't bear to tell him.
¯ Do we go to Heaven or Hell after we're dead? she asks him. How much more can await us after what we suffer in this world? Surely Jesus must forgive us.
Tell her, thinks Seamus, tell the poor girl that God is in his Heaven and forgives us all our sins, even shooting the brother of the girl ye love for cowardice, not the cowardice of a young lad cowering in a dugout, but the cowardice of his friend, his Sergeant, who followed the fookin order. Tell her there's forgiveness for that.
He can't.
It's been a terrible dark thing between them ever since he got back from the front to give her the news himself of Thomas's death, to say that the shame was on him, on Seamus, on himself. He sees it in her eyes, that she can't really forgive him even though she wants to. And he can't really forgive himself because when he looks into her eyes, he sees the same dark green and brown as Thomas's looking out at him.
But what has she got that needs forgiveness, sure?
He remembers arriving at the door of the Messenger family home in the well-to-do Dublin suburb of Rathgar just like so many times before but now so different. On leave and waiting for the results of the Medical Board, sure, and shaking like a leaf, he hadn't a clue what he was going to say to her and whether she would cry or curse him to his face or both. Should he tell her the untarnished truth, whatever she might want to know in simple words, leaving out the euphemisms and not weaving some grand mystery of tragic death out of it? Surely she had the right to hear it from the horse's mouth. Should he tell her she was looking on the face of the man who gave the lads the order to take aim and fire?
And when she came to the door she had a look so lost, so wandering, that he knew she needed something to latch onto as a sign that the grief might someday end, and would it be better for her not to know or ¯ Jesus Christ ¯ for her to learn? Could he hide it from her, have her find out later, suffer even more? He couldn't grudge her this one thing, this tiny thing, this awful tiny truth so why the fook did he delay? It's not that he doesn't want to, is what he told himself. But he couldn't help but hesitate on account of what it would surely do to her.
But if it's what she wants, he thought, I'll have to tell her.
And so they sat in the parlour, him with his hat in hand, and they were distant enough from each other, like she already sensed the guilt in him far deeper than his failed promise. Why was he suffering so? she asked him. What awful crime was he punishing himself for? And he could hear the fear in her voice that he was going to tell her and break her heart. (Just like the fear that's in him now, that she's got some truth like that but it can't be as bad as his, can it? How could it be?) He thought of the endless telling of his tale to the doctors of the Medical Board.
¯ Sure and it seems I never stop talking of my sufferings, he'd said. A man can only talk so much.
¯ Seamus, tell me what's driven you to the edge, she said.
The will of dukes, he thought, the hand of a smith. He shook his head.
She asked him, if he loved her, God, to tell her what was wrong, don't soften it for her; she was strong and she could take it. And he said he couldn't, Jesus Christ Almighty, how could he tell her? It was to do with Thomas, he'd said, looking at those green eyes. Please, she'd said. And he couldn't just tell her, he said, but ... if she asked ... if she asked any question ... any question ... he would tell her anything she wanted to know.
And so she asked, and Seamus told her how he shot her brother.
And now he knows it's somehow the same thing, with her trying to tell him her own shame but needing him to prompt her, draw it out of her as she did to him. And what could it be? Jesus, what could it be that she's afraid is so bad he might not be able to forgive her?
The Third Player
¯ I'm pregnant, says Phreedom.
Finnan looks down at the bottle in his hand, leans down to place it gently on the floor between his feet. The quiet words resonate in the empty church in that whispering way that only empty halls have, not quite an echo that can be made sense of, just a pious ringing of the stone in answer to the human voice.
¯ Is it...?
¯ Yours? she says. I fucking hope so. Christ, I fucking hope so.
He knows it's not the only possibility. The last time they met, in this same church, she told him exactly what they'd done to her, the angels of the Covenant who were looking for her brother.
They'd left her for dead afterwards, and in a way she was, she is; they both are ¯ Finnan with his heart ripped out, a traitor to her and Thomas, her with a seed of hatred planted in her, poisoning her slowly. She went to Hell to try and save her brother. It didn't end well.
¯ I led them to him, she had said. I thought I could change the story, rip us out of it, and all the time J was just tearing an opening in the Vellum for those ... creatures to get at him. You betrayed him, Finnan, but I damned him. I fucking damned him. I thought I could go back and ... make things right. But time in the Vellum isn't that simple, is it?
He had been sodden and filthy then, just as he is now, living hand-to-mouth, going from soup kitchen to homeless shelter, stewing in his own misery and drinking in churches just to spite the bastard God of his innocent childhood. When she'd found him, he'd expected her to hate him, but by that time she was too busy hating herself. In the end, they'd found some little solace together; she'd taken him back to her room, fed him and washed him. As they lay together in the warm bed after fucking like animals, she'd told him of all the strangers she'd used in the same way, pick-ups in singles bars and seedy night-clubs, dirty old men and groups of frat-boys. He knew she wasn't saying it to hurt him, but to open up herself to him because he was the only one who'd understand. They were both trying to make physical the degradation of their souls, in the ruin of their flesh.
That was three months ago and now she's pregnant, and it could be his, it could be any of the johns' or marks', Tom, Dick or Harry's. Or it could be the angel's.
¯ Whatever... she says, I'm going to have it.
He looks at her. There's a sort of strength to her now. She seems to have found some sort of strength in the acceptance of this, as an end to her own story, maybe, and the beginning of another. It's like she's fought so hard against her fate since the first day she stood up to an angel of the Covenant, she's sold her soul to Hell only to steal the secrets of its queen, she's torn her way into the Vellum to try and save her brother, and the futility of it all that had her broken and beat-up inside like him, has now become a grim and nihilistic faith of sorts, in the emptiness of it all. While he's still on his knees, raging against the dying of the light, she's standing up to face the darkness, ready to walk into it, and ready for the good fight.
He's just waiting for his Judgement Day.
¯ So you've picked a side then, he says.
¯ No sides, she says. Just me.
She lays a hand on her stomach.
¯ Us.
He thinks of Anna, the lost sweetheart of his past and the way it all seems to tie together, echoes and reflections bouncing back and forth across a century. They're creatures of the Vellum and time in the Vellum has a funny way of weaving and looping; they tear it and they stitch it back together as they travel through it. Jesus, but Tommy made a right mess, so he did, then, now and fucking forever. One unkin's all it takes to shatter time into a million shards that no amount of Covenant craft could put back into order. Now that the war is kicking off it's only going to get worse.
¯ You know how bad it's going to get? he says. The Sovereigns and the Covenant—
¯ The Sovereigns are straw dogs. And the Covenant don't know what they're dealing with.
She pulls off her jacket to show him the pink scarred tattoo. The black ink of Eresh's needlework crawls over her arm in such a chaos of ever-changing signs and sigils that it makes him dizzy, gives him vertigo; it's only when she puts her arm back in the jacket sleeve that he stops feeling like he's being sucked into a void.
¯ Jesus, fookin Mary and Joseph. What the fuck?
¯ I don't know, she says. What do you get if you cross the queen of the dead's blood with the ink of God's scribe? I think they're breeding, Finnan. And I don't think I'm the only carrier.
¯ Metatron's pet hawks, he says slowly, quietly. Carter. Pechorin.
She's told him what came walking out of the exploding moment of Eresh's death, in the bodies of Metatron's two bloody-handed angel thugs, what followed her into the Vellum to drag Thomas off to an eternal grave. As much as she can make sense of.
