Hal Duncan, page 52
I don't talk, just kiss his neck, his chin, his lips.
¯ What's ... happened?
I kiss his lips, his chin, his neck, his chest. His right hand works my belt.
¯ Tell me after then, he says softly.
¯ Are you awake? says Jack, and kisses the inside of my thigh. Tom?
¯ Not yet, I mumble, groan and stretch. God, I could use a shower right now.
We lie in what was once the master bedroom of this expensive beachfront property, in a king-size bed that has no mattress, just a pile of thick blankets, rugs and quilts and pillows that I have to force him to keep clean. His room is even emptier than mine, the rest of the house the same, long since gutted of its glass and mahogany coffee tables and chromed breakfast stools and framed abstracts or whatever. I picture an architect living here before the world went crazy, designing and building his own beachhouse all in clean lines and classic modernism. Minimal, severe, like Jack sometimes.
He sniffs me, snuffles at me like a dog.
¯ You smell fine to me ... sweat and sex ... rich stink of life.
¯ Charming, I say, give a quick kiss to his hip and twist round on the bed so that we're face to face. You're a real romantic, Jack.
He laughs.
¯ Fuck that shit.
He rubs noses with me and I brush hair back from his forehead.
¯ So, are you ready to talk? he says and I breathe deep and close my eyes.
¯ The rag-and-bone-man's called me for a reckoning. He's going to judge me.
Jack's arms slide around me.
¯ You've got nothing to be guilty about, he says.
¯ This is nothing? Jesus, Jack, this is ...
¯ This is none of his fucking business.
¯ Everything's his business.
I pull away, swing my legs over the edge of the bed and sit up.
¯ What can he do? he says.
He's never seen a reckoning, I realize, not a real honest-to-god reckoning. Oh, he's seen the rag-and-bone-man toting up a person's credit, their value to the community, health and morality indexed against financial status. Maybe he's seen him refuse credit to a woman caught spreading false rumours about her neighbours, or to a man for swearing once too often in the presence of children, or maybe he's seen a teenage boy caught drinking wheeled around town on display in the back of the rag-and-bone-man's cart, bells ringing out the righteous spectacle. I've seen more.
We owe everything to the rag-and-bone-man: we needed him to bring us here and we still need him to survive; without the grab-bag assortment of trade brought back from his trips to the cities ¯perfumed soaps and Belgian chocolates, painkillers and vintage wine, china cups, coffee pots, antique clocks and antiseptics ¯ I don't think that any of us would have lasted beyond the first year.
On an individual level, Endhaven is made up of liberals, each with their own loose idea of right and wrong, but each in their acceptance of the rag-and-bone-man's contract, agreeing to let their fives be ruled by his and only his idea of morality. He weighs up our worth for us and deals out goods as each of us deserve. He reckons us and, like a priest or a judge, the people of Endhaven view him with equal measures of fear and respect and, sometimes, hate him for it as a kicked dog hates its master. In the times after Blake disappeared and before Jack arrived there'd been real troubles and I'd seen the rag-and-bone-man lay some major reckonings on any of those who'd bite the hand that fed them. What can he do?
¯ What can't he do? I say. He's judge, jury and ... and he's decided that I'm on trial.
Learn to Forget
¯ Everyone's afraid of him but you, I say. You're not afraid of him, or the Evenfall. Help me.
Jack rolls onto his back and stares up at the ceiling.
-You've got to help me, I say. You're not like us. You've got something. I've seen it. I've seen you up on the ridge at night. I know it doesn't touch you. I know what the Evenfall does to the rest of us; I've seen it. But it doesn't touch you. How can you walk through that? How? Why? Why doesn't the Evenfall—
¯ Because you can't wipe away what doesn't fucking exist, he snarls.
The violence of his voice is like a slap across my face; it's gone as suddenly as it appeared but I'm left with this terrible feeling that I don't know him at all, that I never will, never could.
He climbs out of the bed and wanders over to the torn muslin curtains billowing out onto the balcony, pushes one aside.
¯ I'm sorry, he says.
*
I sit up on the edge of the bed, blankets wrapped around my shoulders, hugging myself, watching. He just stands there. For a long time.
¯ Can't you get some heating in here or something? I say, to fill the silence.
¯ I don't feel the cold.
After a while, he shakes his head.
-You know, I could kill him for you easier than you could possibly imagine ¯ you can kill his kind with a word ¯ but whose hands would his blood be on, yours or mine. What would I become for you?
¯ Nothing would change, I say.
He looks over his shoulder at me, an open honest gaze.
¯ Everything would change. Don't fool yourself. You think I'd be the saviour of the town? the one who killed the wicked ogre? Jack the giant-killer?
¯ I don't know ... everybody hates him.
¯ And, boy, would they fucking hate me for taking him away from them.
¯ You're talking like we want him, like we have a choice.
¯ You always have a choice, Tom. That's all you have. That's all I can give.
He turns to face me and the curtain falls back into place.
¯ Stay with me, forget Endhaven, forget the ugly sisters, forget the rag-and-bone-man, how you got here, where you're going, and stay with me, stand here with me, on your own two feet, and all their reckonings and judgements can't touch you. Or go back to face him alone, like a whipped dog. Either way, it's your choice. It's your choice.
¯ Jack, I'm not like you. I don't have the ¯ I don't know ¯ I don't have what you've got. He could kill me. I owe my life to him. We all of us owe our lives to him. And now he's calling in the debt.
I can see his fists clench, muscles in his arm twitch.
¯ Why do you always have to hold yourself back from me? I say, throat tight.
¯ Maybe I'm not as strong as you think, he says.
*
¯ I'm scared, Jack; I'm just scared.
He walks over and crouches in front of me, puts his hands on my knees
¯ You don't have to be afraid.
Slides them up to my hips.
¯ Take it all one second at a time; that's the secret. Stay here for an hour, then another hour, and another. Pretend you're going back to them soon, real sooni, any day now, next week maybe, or the week after, or next month, you'll get around to it, whenever, never. Learn to live without a reckoning hanging over your head. Learn to forget.
He pulls the blanket off my left shoulder with his right hand, smoothes his fingers over the small diamond-shaped scar where, long-ago, I remember the needle inking me in black, and the scalpel that made a five-year-old child scream blue murder. He shakes his head, his blond hair brushing my thighs as he moves in closer, hands at my waist.
¯ I'll try, I say.
The tip of his tongue just tastes, touches, my foreskin.
¯ Yes.
What Dreams May Come
I'm running. I'm in the city and I'm running, my feet slapping the tarmac and the cobblestones and flagstones,, echoing amongst the empty buildings, brick and concrete, sandstone and limestone. Reflected in windows, I can see whatever it is that's chasing me leaping from roof to roof above my head, but all I can catch are glimpses of this flashing thing, a blue-white shape flickering through the gold and red of early evening sunlight ¯ flakes of flame, autumn leaves. The Evenfall.
I turn a corner and it's waiting for me, dark and ragged, in the shadows of the back-alley, a man dressed in a shredded black suit, a bowler hat. The rag-and-bone-man. He just stands there, face lowered so his eyes are in shadow, raising his hand slowly so it points at me first, then past me, over me and up, up, towards the roof. And I have one of those weird dream moments where you question everything, you actually think to yourself, this is a dream, but then you think, no, it's just too real, the fear, the pounding of my heart, the sweat trickling down my back under the shirt. It must be real.
¯ I don't want to die, I say.
¯ Everybody dies, the rag-and-bone-man says. Look.
My gaze follows his gesture upwards and behind me.
Jack squats on a windowledge, in a gargoyle crouch, the golden flames of Evenfall around him, face up to the dying sunlight, basking in it. He looks so primitive, so primal in his bestial bliss, he should be howling at the moon, a caveman werewolf. I want to be with him, to be up there in the light with him instead of down here in the shadows of the streets of a nameless city in a world falling apart. Because it's the shadows, I realize, it's when the shadows come that people disappear and roads change their directions, buildings shift location. I have this feeling that I'm on the verge of understanding some great truth about our world, about its flux of form, when Jack looks down at me and I see the flames reflected in his eyes and the tears wetting his cheeks.
He stands slowly up and steps forward off the roof.
¯ There there, says Annie.
She holds me in a tight hug but with care, making sure she doesn't put any pressure on my wounded shoulder with its padded dressing. I sob into her bosom, a snivelling five-year-old, afraid and ¯ even surrounded by the others sitting on the back of the cart, all lined up on each side like soldiers in some military truck going off to war ¯ alone.
¯ I lost my mommy, I say.
Because that's the way you see it when you're five. It's not you that's lost but them, your parents.
¯ I know, says Annie. We all lost our mommies, but we've got each other now so it's OK, you see. We've got each other, so everything will be all right.
The cart trundles across the bridge, past burnt-out wrecks of long-abandoned cars. Behind us, night rises from the city like steam or smoke, a storm of gathering grey.
Autumn Afternoon
The bells of the rag-and-bone-man's cart jangle me out of a light, dreaming sleep and into full and frightened consciousness. The light through the muslin curtain is low, and the air in the musty old apartment has taken on a late autumn afternoon chill. I don't know how many times I've tried to get Jack to put some kind of heating in, even put something up to replace the long-since shattered windows. He seems to refuse on some strange point of principle. Sometimes I think he's deliberately trying to hold me off, a literal cold shoulder; other times I think he really, honestly, just doesn't understand what heat is.
I shiver anyway.
¯ Are you awake? I hiss.
The bells of the rag-and-bone-man's cart jingle and jangle, louder than all the weird charms strung along the beach. He must be getting close to his barn now, arriving home from his expedition to the city, maybe just a brief foray into the suburbs, returning with the contents of someone's jewellery box or liquor cabinet. He'll be looking for me soon.
All I need is a word of support and I'll be fine. I'm. sure of that. But Jack sleeps on.
— Jack, I whisper. Jack ... wake up.
And maybe a part of me doesn't really want him to wake up; I don't really know why I'm not giving him a shake, why I don't speak just a little louder. I don't know. I just know that hearing those bells I feel even the tiny scrap of faith in myself I might have briefly found in an afternoon of simple sensuality slipping away. I can't shake the trembling feeling left in me by the dream. Do we really only stay anchored to the shifting bedrock of this world by our memories of each other, by being anchored to each other? We've got each other now, so it's OK. But all I've got is Jack.
¯ Jack, I whisper, but there's nothing in my voice.
*
I slip out of the bed and stand shivering on the bare wooden floor, dress silently. I have a theory, you know. I mean, everyone has a theory about what happened to the world. Some people say that the Evenfall is actually these little nanite things, tiny creatures small enough to dance, a million of them, on the head of a pin, or to float in the air like motes of dust, that they were made to heal us when we were sick, or to watch over us with microscopic eyes, medical or military technology gone rogue. Maybe they tried to heal our scarred psychology by wiping out the memories of pain that make us who we are. Maybe they tried to give us what they thought we wanted, in our dreams of lost childhood or dark fantasies of bloody revenge. Maybe they tried to change our world to something we all wanted, not realizing that we would never all be wanting the same things. A consensus reality can't work without consensus.
But I have another theory and it scares me. I think we're dead, you see. I think we're dead and there's no God, no heaven or hell, only the patchwork of our memories of life and the denial of our true state. We can't acknowledge our own deaths 'cause if we do we know we might just slip from limbo into oblivion. I think Evenfall is the part of us that wants that final peace. But I don't think about that a lot.
When I'm ready, I kiss Jack on the cheek and slide quietly out of the hollow house.
The Reckoning
It's raining, and the dirt road out of town turns into mud under my feet. A glare of floodlights through the slatted wood of the rag-and-bone-man's barn means he has to be home, so, as gusts of wind whip through the coarse grasses and the white windmills spin furiously, I spit the rain out of my mouth and trudge on to my reckoning.
The doors are wide open, chain and padlock hanging loose, and for the first time in my life I walk alone into the vast barn. The size of a small aircraft hangar, I think, it holds one of the plastic prefabs inside it ¯ pastel-pink, nestling surreally among the shelters and shelving units built onto the barn walls. Of all the gear the rag-and-bone-man has stashed away in his hoard here, only one or two of the items are recognizable ¯ an oak wardrobe, a stone angel, both dripping with rain. Everything else is cocooned in heavy duty translucent polythene like dead flies in a spider's web. With the wind and rain howling in through a hundred gaps in the roof and walls of the barn, I suppose, his worthless, priceless junk needs at least some protection from the elements.
And the rag-and-bone-man himself, he's standing in what, I suppose, is the front yard of his prefab ¯ a morass of mud rugged with tarpaulins, filthy and puddling ¯ arms wide and staring up at the sky through the largest hole in the roof, mouth open and drinking the rain. After a long five seconds he shakes water from his lank white hair, puts a battered black bowler back on his head and turns towards me.
¯ Hail and well met, he says, and the black symbols carved deep into the scarred, stretched mask of his face all twist and distort as he grins his death's-head smile of welcome.
¯ Don't you just love this weather, m'lad?
He speaks in a harsh and croaking voice with a strangled accent ¯ old Bostonian or something. With its tortured vowels, I'm not sure at first if what he said was m'lad or m'lord.
In a couple of long strides he's right in front of me, hunching his shoulders to look into my eyes. A face that would only look at home in hell, pale skin stretched taut round fleshless bone, hollow cheeks, sunken eye-sockets ¯ he looks like something is eating him from the inside. He's not just gaunt; he looks emaciated. But the scars are the worst.
All over his face ¯ and over his body, they say — a latticework of white-on-white scars runs riot. His is a stitched-together patchwork hide of tiny diamond-shaped sections of skin, a square inch or so in size on average. And inside every section is a mark, not really tattooed but hacked into the skin and stained black, each mark different and each one indecipherable as far as I'm concerned. Like an untranslated Mayan codex, the sigils that disfigure him seem to signify some story I could never read, a blood ritual meaningless to an outsider but terribly horrifyingly true if you only had the key to understanding it.
I'm shaking.
He throws his arms wide, his tattered grey suit jacket flapping in the wind.
¯ Speak, m'lad, he says.
His brown trousers are sodden, ripped and muddy, his jacket belonging in some antique decade with its wide lapels; I'm trying to find his clothes real interesting because I don't want to look into that face. He puts a knuckle under my chin and tilts it upward.
¯ Speak, he says.
¯ You wanted to see me.
A very small voice.
¯ Yes, indeed. You're a good boy, Tom, good boy. I call you and you come running. Am I so very ... scary?
I bite my bottom lip and nod.
¯ You're a good boy, a bright boy, m'lad. I reckon you could go far. You reckon that?
Dumbly, numbly, I nod again.
Where Are You Now?
His gloved fist cracks across my cheek with a sudden, casual brutality and, as I fall, a kick in the stomach sends me sliding, splashing into mud. I retch, sob, cough and try to pull myself away, too shocked, dazed, winded to think of anything else. I feel the edge of a tarpaulin under my palm, my fingers digging into muck. He grabs me by the collar and drags me to my feet. I blink, tears streaming down my stung face, salt in my mouth along with the darker taste of rainwater mud. I don't think I've ever been punched before.
¯ Go where, m'lad? You have a destination in mind, you have a sense of direction? If you do I'd like to know. Well?
He lets me go and I fall back to the ground.
¯ I didn't think so. I reckon you're just like all the rest ... I've got your number.
His voice is twisted with contempt but when I look at his face, at his eyes at least, I'd swear that what I see is disappointment.
¯ Why don't you stand up, m'lad? Come on. Show some backbone.
I slide in the mud, steady myself against some polythene covered piece of furniture, and try to pull myself upright.
