Ink

By
Hal Duncan

THE BOOK OF ALL HOURS

Vellum

Ink

To
Koré

The Story, So Far

he story, so far removed in time and space and so far-fetched, seemed an v’ exotic fabrication when I first heard it from my uncle's lips, those lips with a hint of sly smile at the upturned corners, just enough to crinkle crow's-feet round his eyes. Uncle Reynard, the rake, the rogue. He'd heard of my first story sale, my desire to be a writer, and invited me to visit; he had a story for me, he said, a family legend worth a book at least.

I'd arrived at his tiny Bank Street flat to an exuberant welcome from his wag-tailed mongrel, Koré, been settled into a seat on the black leather sofa with a gin and tonic and an ashtray on the occasional table to my side.

He lit up a cigarette for himself and began his tale.

“Your grandfather, Captain Jack Carter,” he said, “returned from the Great War a changed man. He'd seen the blood and mud of the Somme firsthand, ordered men to their deaths, ordered them shot for cowardice. He carried his memories as a secret burden, my mother said, one that he could never relieve himself of. One day, he received a telegram from an old professor of his—Hobbsbaum, I think his name was—and with only the briefest of farewells to his darling Anna, who was heavy at the time with your father and myself, he left his pregnant wife and set out for the Middle East, never to be seen again.”

Uncle Reynard paused for effect, manipulative old codger that he was.

“He disappeared into the Vellum,” he said.

“Vellum?” I said.

He took a sip of his gin and tonic.

“An unwritten page has such potential, don't you think?” he said. “As a writer? Anything could be shaped in ink upon that … substrate. A million worlds waiting to be conjured by the feathery flick of a pen across paper. And even after you've graved your artifice of order onto that blank slate, don't you find that there are always still the spaces between the words, the possibilities you can still read in the gaps between the lines?”

He smiled.

“You think I'm talking in metaphors. I am, I suppose. I'm trying to put this in a way you'll understand. A story doesn't just start at the beginning and trundle onward in a straight line to the end. The same story can be—and «—told in different ways by different writers, each one taking their own path, branching the story out from one dimension to two. The same story can be—and «—retold in different ways by different generations. Revising the earlier drafts of those who came before, building our stories on the remnants of the past, those retellings give the tales a third dimension. Then as we read, following the trail of ink, we move in those three dimensions, skimming onward and skipping back, diverted to the side here and there as we consider the invisible lateralities of what might have been, digging down into the strata of residual tales, the dead truths palimpsested by this new text.

“This is a metaphor for time,” he said. “This is the nature of the Vellum. Time has three dimensions, just like space.”

The parallel worlds of quantum physics or alternate history were familiar enough ideas to me but the idea of…
previous
realities …

“I'm not sure I—”

“We live in a tiny groove on the surface of a great sphere,” he said, “in a little valley of reality, seeing only ahead of us and behind us. There are other valleys in the Vellum, plains where time stretches out into wide fields of illusion, where you can easily stray from the path, stray so far that when you look back you see a past which is no longer yours. And there are rifts, fault lines where the shifting continents have folded stone, thrown elder worlds up into mountain chains that dwarf us with their primal majesty. Take a step out of this world and you can find yourself with the scree of myths under your feet, staring at the fossilized feather of an angel's wing, embedded in the face of a cliff in front of you. Just a second. Wait there.”

He pushed himself up from his chair and left the room. Through the open door I could see him cross the square hallway of his one-bedroom flat—his bachelor pad, as he called it—and enter his study. A moment later he returned
with what looked like a humidor, the size of a shoebox, maybe a little larger, every inch of its surface carved with intricate abstractions, its lid hinged and clasped in brass.

“Your grandfather disappeared into the Vellum,” he said. “But he sent this back to us. Your father wanted to burn it, but I stopped him. I thought you should have it. Your
grandfather
thought you should have it.”

He laid it on my lap.

“He says so on the first page.”

I unclicked the clasp, the hinge of the box creaking as I opened the lid. Inside it was crammed full of papers—loose scraps and notebooks—pages yellowed and leather bindings brittle as autumn leaves. It smelled of dust and decay—a hint of sulfur, I thought—and under my touch I could feel a grit of sand or salt crusting the smooth but crumbling surfaces of cured skin and bleached parchment.

As my uncle had said, the page on top—half a page, actually, torn roughly from some cheap book and used as a note—said that this mystery was meant for me.

For my grandson, Reynard
, it read,
unborn and unwritten as of yet. May you make of this folly a future free of destiny Bind the Book into a book.

Jack Carter, Palestine, 1929.

“I don't understand,” I said. “A future free of destiny? What book?”

“The Book of All Hours,” said my uncle. “From what I can gather, what I can make sense of in there, it's … the blueprint of this Vellum, of all reality, all
unreality
, graved into eternal certainty in a grimoire that might have been written by God himself, if you believe in that sort of thing. A manual of mathematics and metaphysics, written in the language of the angels—the Cant he calls it—the language that binds reality.”

“The Book of All Hours?” I said.

“Read it and see,” he said.

“Once upon a time,” Jack had said to me, “there was a book called
Once Upon a Time;
and it was
all about
a boy called Jack. But Jack, well, he didn't really give a flying fuck for books, being more into toy guns and shit, so he just took his felt-tip pens and scribbled all over it until you couldn't read a word in all the mess of ink, and boy did he get fucking whipped for it.”

He'd looked at me, there in the garden.

“That's the story of my life,” he'd said, “just a mess of ink. And that's the Book of All Hours, Guy, the fucking Book of All fucking Hours. That's how I got my scars.”

I'd thought of the first words of the Book:
In the beginning.
From the Hobben word
bereshit
, which, translated into Versid, gave the first chapter its common name:
Genesis.

Once upon a time
, I'd thought, was probably a fair enough translation for that book of origins, of the Havens and the Aerth summoned into existence by the breath of Zeus over the void. It seems a good enough way to start this account.

Once upon a time there was a boy named Jack.

I met Jack in Poudre Valley Hospital in Laramie, North Manitu, where he had been admitted for treatment of his wounds, and where, in my capacity as consultant psychologist, I'd been called in to assess him as a suicide risk. A lattice of scars across his chest told a history of self-harm or abuse, but the more visible signs were… sickening. Three days before, Jack had taken a pair of garden shears and used them to cut off his wings, this after removing his horns with a hacksaw and a power sander, his file told me. Sitting there on the edge of the bed, facing out the window, with the dressing on his back clearly visible beneath his gown, and with the bandages around his head—a shock of fire-blond hair sticking out above like burning corn—Jack told me that he'd never actually had wings… not really.

“No horns either,” he said.

Body dysmorphia was my immediate thought.

Then he told me he was a changeling.

At that first meeting with Jack, I did not bother taking notes. In such circumstances I usually prefer a conversational approach; it helps the patient to relax and open up, puts them more at ease than they would be with a clipboarded stranger's more orthodox and official interrogation; also it allows for a more informal observation on my part. I remember noticing the lack of any cards or flowers in the room, the spartan environment of a patient without well-wishers, in keeping with his distant air. No wings to fold around himself to warm him in the Hinter's chill. “No family,” he said. “Not in this world, Doc. I'm a changeling, you see. I'm an orphan Orpheus, looking for my… Eurydike.”

Later I was to learn that Jack's parents were unknown, this son of theirs abandoned to Social Services, shuffled from foster home to foster home—his records lost in a fire, the administrator of one orphanage would tell me. Maybe, one might
almost think, he
did
slip through from some other world. Maybe he
did
belong elsewhere, elsewhen.

But at that first meeting I just looked around his room for any accoutrements of identity. The only object that spoke of comfort either desired or given was a copy of the Gideon's Book of All Hours laid open on the bedside cabinet. It didn't strike me as unusual, here in the Midwest of Amorica, heartland of a culture steeped in evangelical faith. One of the questions I was asked most often by colleagues attempting friendly conversation was what church I'd gone to back in Albion. I'd hem and haw and confess that, actually, I wasn't a believer. They'd look shocked for a second—more confused than shocked, really, not understanding why on earth one would not want the love of Our Lord Adonis in one's life—then the topic would be changed.

The Book simply showed that Jack was not entirely divorced from the world around him.

“You've been reading the Book,” I say.

I sit down on the edge of the bed and pick the Gideon's up off the cabinet to see what parable or prophecy he's in the midst of. These little things are often good indicators of a patient's state of mind, you see: depressives tend to like the Book of Hob, identifying with that most hapless, hopeless man and using his long-suffering tenacity as a stick to beat themselves with in comparison; the neurotic, on the other hand, tend to focus on the New Testament, seeking the constant support, the affirmation and reaffirmation, of an ever-loving Christ; schizoids, of course, always go for Revelations.

Jack's copy is open at the Song of Salamander, the only part of the Book I've ever really had much time for myself, I have to say, neither parable nor prophecy but simply poetry.

“Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth,”
says Jack—the first line of the Song of Salamander, the Song of Songs.

He turns to look at me and I notice the flecks of silvery fire that shimmer in his blue irises, the glints of gold.
He's a faery
, I realize. It clicks into place, this delusion of his that he's from another world, from the world of wingless graey, in fact. I imagine his past. Some Angelo-Satyr mother looks at her child for the first time and sees that shimmer to its skin, a glint in its eye just a little more sensuous than it should be. Did she herself hate it or was there some beer-swilling father, scattering
dishes from the kitchen counter with a brutal sweep of his arm, spreading his great black wings in fury and threat over her?
Get that thing out of my house.
A child growing up in the care of those who did not care, realizing he was different from his peers.

Christ, it's only a few weeks since the murder of Thomas Messenger shamed the town, the state, the whole of Amorica. How cosmopolitan is it here, even in a college town of frat boys and keggers?

So he's a changeling, he decides. He's not even a part of this world that would murder an innocent like Thomas Messenger simply for being a faery.

I try to lead him through this rationalization, this explanation, but he cuts me off the moment the murdered student's name comes out of my mouth, with a look of such pain and anger and… Zeus, I understand a whole lot more.

“I knew him as Puck,” he says with a voice so thick with swallowed sorrow I can hardly understand the words.

Jack's boyfriend, Puck, had been lost to him on a hillside that Evenfall—Octocher 16th to be precise—beaten to death by two fay-hating thugs who'd picked him up in a bar on the promise of a threesome.

“That's when I knew,” Jack had said. “Death opens up your eyes, Doc. If it doesn't close them and put pennies on the fucking lids.”

We sat on a wooden bench in the hospital garden, myself with my wings tucked tight under a fleece-lined anorak, huddled against the bitter Damnuary air, Jack in his dressing gown hung open, cord dangling loose. He seemed impervious to the cold, too fired up as he was with his anger.

He blew a plume of steam into the air and peered at me; he knew this was the day of my meeting with the chief of staff, knew that I'd be leaving here to give my recommendation for his future here or in the outside world—commitment as a hazard to himself, medication for depression or psychosis, keep him in for further observation, or cut him loose and let him sink or swim.