Midian Unmade (40 page)

To human eyes, Xxyzx might easily have been the most
sapiens
among them—tall and slender, commonly built. He could have walked for an evening in the cities or towns—unnoticed were it not for his black eyes and ruby-red fangs. But his appearance had made him feel eternally
different,
and over a decade, he withdrew further from the race into which he'd been born. He'd chosen to live in books, scavenging human pages wherever he might find them—classics and porn magazines, pamphlets and maps (from which he'd renamed himself). His hatred for a species to which he felt somehow connected made for a bitter temperament, and seldom could he hold his tongue when given the opportunity to unleash it. He ranted frequently—fancied himself a self-tortured intellect—and blasphemed often on the subject of Baphomet.

He was an open book.

So Lylesburg had cursed him—a punishment given without trial, which was uncommon among the Breed, though in this instance nobody objected, nobody cared. The curse was thus—that every negative emotion, every terrible thought, would write itself across the creature's skin, in all tongues and languages. Every ember of anger would scribble itself in razor-thin lines across his flesh—the scripting eloquent, the bloodletting slight. Lylesburg had hoped that the pain might force Xxyzx to reconsider himself, to negotiate some pleasure from his own existence, and for a while it had worked. He had calmed.

But the humans had come with their torches and guns and Lylesburg was dead, having never lifted the curse. And Xxyzx, like all the Breed, bore his anger openly. Cast out and homeless with neither direction nor hope of salvation …

He bled frequently these days.

“Again,” he insisted. “What do you mean
no shelter
?”

Allyaphasia contorted her neck and shoulders to facilitate the knitting of form and flesh. The eagle had nearly retaken its place across her back.

“In all directions,” she said. “Only wilderness. We cannot make shelter by daybreak. We can only go back.”

The crowd murmured in protest.

“Certainly, there must be—”

“Nothing,” the mother insisted. “Roads. Fields. But no place to hide.”

“We can't return,” said Neptune. “Can't go back.”

“Then what of here?” asked Jonas, picking cobwebs from between his horns. When he spoke, his lips failed to move, his mouth hung open in a dark, empty oval to allow the thing that lived in his throat—the puppeteer, the
real
Jonas—to speak in its shrill hiss.

Xxyzx scoffed loudly. “What of it?”

“We can all smell it,” he said. “The death. From the house across the way.”

Xxyzx winced as another few lines carved across his cheek. The German word for “idiot,” the Arabic for “fool.”

“Others will come,” he responded. “For them, death is just an empty space. They can't stand the silence, the stillness. It's what they do, the humans—they find the empty and fill it.”

“Well, we can't wait forever,” grumbled another. “Or drift forever, too.”

“And you'd have us do what?” demanded Xxyzx. “Dig? Rebuild?”

“Perhaps,” said a voice. Not one, but many.

“On the backs of us broken few? Here, in this place, dare to do what Baphomet did, for all his power? To create a new home?”

The room fell silent at the prospect. Allyaphasia put a hand on his bloody shoulder, feigning her smile from memory.

“I'll try again tomorrow,” she comforted. “One last time. And then we'll go.”

Xxyzx turned, his brow an architecture of lines. “To where?” he asked, his voice trembling as the word “despair” cut slowly across his chest.

“To where?”

Jonas pushed suddenly to the front of the crowd, his nose held high in the air. “Xxyzx, Allyaphasia…” he began. “I smell something.”

The old monster rolled its eyes. “Yes, yes, death. We all smell it, Jonas, we all—”

“Not death,” interrupted the creature. “Something worse, I think.
Life
.”

Even as he uttered the phrase, the woodwork creaked loudly overhead, the double-hatched doorway to the cellar pulled open and—

4

—there were monsters in the basement.

Standing atop the stairway, Jonathan tried to scream, but the terror caught dryly in his throat. He'd made his way across the field, ducking between a section of half-broken boards and quietly into the darkened barn. The smell of hay and damp cedar wafted into the night, masking another scent—musty and strange—which he'd never before encountered among the farm's earthy perfume. And beneath that odor, a noise—the chatter of whispered voices, half raised in argument.

He should have turned then—turned and run back to the house, rousing Albert toward the shotgun that his father had left behind. But he pressed forward, silently across the floorboards, between which small slivers of lamplight projected themselves like stars against the ceiling. With all the foolishness of youth, he cast open the cellar door—

And there were monsters in the basement … a group of them, looking slack-jawed and surprised, meeting his frightened glance with a fear of their own. Together, they seemed like some crudely sewn patchwork—a half-human quilt of magnificent colors and forms. Purple skin and mossy scales; wet, gelatinous masses and fully-fleshed forms. Some had horns, others tentacles. A few had neither. A few were …
worse.

Finally, Jonathan gasped, a gesture that broke the frozen moment between them. He turned, terrified, rushing back up the stairway in small ten-year-old steps. Below him, his feet went
thunk-thunk-thunk
against the dusty plywood, masking a sound that he failed to hear until it was too late. Behind every
thunk,
a
click,
a spark
—
the claws of a creature against the damp cellar walls. It entered his periphery, demanding a glance, and he turned to find it not beside him, but crawling across the surface to his left, spider-walking in spite of gravity. A second, smaller set of arms had somehow torn themselves free from the hollow structure of the first, and the monster—all six hands clutching the walls—scurried along the concrete and in front of him, slamming the door with a thundering echo.

He was trapped, surely dead. He dropped his head in anticipation of the bite, or the blow, but none came. Instead, only—

“Stop!”

It was a voice of complete command, strong yet distinctly feminine, though not without a slight, shaking vibrato.

“I forbid this!” it called. “Not another child dead before my eyes!”

“Allyaphasia,” hissed one of the creatures. Its mouth dangled open, teeth glinting, but despite the high-pitched voice, its lips didn't move.

“Neptune, bring him here,” said another, this one far more like a human than any of the rest. He turned to the others, some of whom snarled, some of whom whimpered. “It was bound to happen. Hiding in basements and barns. Be thankful it was only a boy.”

The creature behind him—Neptune, they'd called her—whispered quietly into his ear—“Don't scream, darling”—and before he could even consider doing so, she'd wrapped four of her arms around his chest, lifted him off the upmost step, and carried him down into the midst of the monsters.

“He's trembling,” she said, half laughing into the room. “Fancy that. First time in my life I've ever been found
imposing
.”

It was at that moment that Jonathan decided that he was dreaming. Whether it was the casual, lightly spoken manner of whatever thing had just moved him across the room, or the way in which the freakish assembly failed to meet a young boy's definition of “monster,” Jon felt little immediate threat of being devoured or torn to pieces. And since such creatures did not, of course, exist—monstrous or otherwise—he felt, as one occasionally does in dreams, that however terrifying this might become, he would wake eventually. And so he spoke bravely in an attempt to hide his lie.

“I'm trembling because I'm cold, thank you,” he said politely, a quip to which a few of the group laughed.

“And not out of fear?” said the half-human one, and from this distance, Jon could discern the strange pattern of cuts across his body. “We're monsters, after all.”

“Xxyzx, please,” said the woman who'd halted Neptune's attack. It took Jonathan a moment to realize that the creature before him was naked, clothed rather in an odd assortment of drawings across her skin. Her breasts were full; her body was slender. The dark lines of her tattoos curved across her frame, drawing his eye and allowing it to linger perhaps a moment longer than was proper. The shapes traced down along her midsection, folding into the crevice just above her thighs, and continued to her feet. It was the first time that Jonathan had ever seen a woman in a state of such nakedness, at least in the flesh.

“He's staring,” chuckled Neptune.

“I am not,” insisted Jon, using the exchange as an excuse to turn his attention away. “Or if I am, it's because I've never dreamt about monsters before.”

“Dreamt?” asked Xxyzx. “You think this is a dream?”

“I may be ten,” said Jon, “but even I know that monsters aren't real.”

Jonas threw up his hands in a mockery of worship. “Praise Baphomet! Our suffering is diminished! If only because we don't exist!”

The tattooed woman turned. “Jonas, please. A month ago, there were things that even
we
might not have believed.”

“Bite him, then,” said Neptune. “Turn him into one of us. Make him immortal, make him strong—unsick and forever. Let a few centuries pass and see if he wonders when he'll wake.”

“That's enough,” said the woman. She kneeled slowly to Jon's level, putting her hands softly onto his shoulders. “What's your name, child?”

“Jonathan,” he replied.

She smiled sweetly. “My name is Allyaphasia, Jonathan. I had a son your age, and another slightly older.”

“Monsters have children?” he asked, suddenly aware of his own na
ï
vet
é
. “Can I see them, please?”

An emotion flickered across the woman's face, one he'd seen a number of times before, on the face of his mother, which was not so dissimilar. It was the expression she wore in her most somber of moments, when she allowed herself to be weak and honest and weep in his presence. It was the face that followed the words “I'll never see you marry, or your children be born.”

“They died,” said Allyaphasia.

“If this is a dream,” began Jonathan, “then maybe I can dream them back. You can do that in dreams.”

“Would you trust me if I asked you to close your eyes?” she inquired, and to his own surprise, he did. She put a hand to his forehead, delicate and soft, and he felt the creature's nails trail their way lightly across his skin, down over his eyelids and above his warm, rosy cheeks. It was a sensation at once both
calming
and
real
, as honest a touch as any he'd ever received in waking life, and when he opened his eyes a moment later he said, as if to himself—

“This isn't a dream.”

5

An hour passed in the company of the one they called Allyaphasia. It was an hour filled with a child's questions, and with the patience of one who used to be a mother, she answered them as best she could. In the space behind them, where they sat gingerly on a damp bale of hay, the others paced nervously in the shadows.

She told him of Midian, the underground city—of its immense, cavernous walls and magnificent chambers. She told him of its birth, of Baphomet and their history, of their tragedy and their wanderings. She spoke of Boone and his becoming with neither judgment nor scorn. She told him the story of the Nightbreed as one might tell it to a man, and when he pointed this out to her, she said only, “Having seen what you've seen, you cannot help but become one, as I, seeing you, am a child once again.”

He told her of his mother and of Albert. He spoke of his plans to run away after her passing—for which he said he'd prepared himself, though Allyaphasia didn't have the heart to say just how impossible that truly was. He stopped at one point in the evening and said excitedly, “You could stay here, or I could go with you,” to which Allyaphasia simply laughed and turned the topic to some story of Midian.

And after an hour of conversation, the pacing Xxyzx finally broke free from the crowd and pulled her away to a quiet corner, saying, “Quit this, damn you. Quit this now!”

“I know what you're thinking,” she began.

“And I you. Playing mother to incur our sympathies, as if the sight of you and the boy were some rite of protection.” He paused, sighing, and leaned in closer. “They want to kill him, you know. Here in the barn. Then across the field for the sleeping mother and uncle. And then move on…”

“I won't allow that.”

“You can't stop it!” He pressed his fist into the rafters behind her head. “If he proves too convincing, or brings them here, we're through. If we let them live, they'll invite more. The humans bring death, Allyaphasia—intended or otherwise.”

“I can't let you kill him, Xxyzx,” she said plainly. “Because if we do—if we slaughter a boy and his family—then we are, indeed, just as he claims. We're monsters.”

Xxyzx growled heavily, an element of his nature of which he'd never quite disposed. “What then do you suggest?”

“Not me,” she said, and in that moment, Jonathan appeared at her side, his face alight with words unspoken, calling her ears to the question she'd been waiting for him to ask.

6

“Will you turn my mother?”

The room erupted in whispered argument, for he'd addressed the question to them all, but Jonathan wavered not a bit. His mind had been turning in the time that Allyaphasia and Xxyzx had spoken, poring over the story of Boone, but mostly over the words that Neptune had uttered earlier.