Midian Unmade (6 page)

The odor of meat filled her nostrils but her stomach clenched. Sange touched her shoulder very gently.

“Coeur?”

“I'm—I'm … I hate my words. They're the Dark ones,” she blurted. She was horrified. She hadn't planned to say that. It was sacrilege, she was sure of it, especially since her father was the leader of the elders.

Sange blew air out of his cheeks and took her hand. He hadn't touched her for years. When they'd been little, they'd roughhoused constantly. Her wings strained against their stitches and she had a sharp image of flying with Bobby. But Bobby had no wings.

“I'd hoped you get the words of the Light, like me,” he said, “so we could chant together.” His smile spoke other words. She'd always thought she'd wind up married to Sange. He was gentle and direct; she didn't think he knew what the word “duplicity” meant.

What am I going to do? What should I do?
She wanted to ask Sange. Instead she smiled sadly at him and said, “I was hoping for that too.”

He took her hand and laced his fingers through hers. “The right thing will happen.”

“Do you really believe that?” she asked, and he nodded.

She reached up on tiptoe and brushed her lips against his. He growled with pleasure; then she darted away, grabbing a chunk of meat.

But she still couldn't eat. She looked at the faces of her tribal family, so familiar, yet changing with the years. Then she felt a gaze on her, and looked in that direction: it was her grandmother, who had been horribly scarred during the fall of Midian. She wore a veil over her face; she had once been a great beauty.

Coeur glided over to her and offered her the meat in her bloodstained hands.

“Grandmama,” she said.

Her grandmother waved the meat away and Coeur set it on an empty plate. The old lady lifted her veil and Coeur didn't flinch as she kissed the deformed, crisscrossed cheek.

“Look at you, all grown up,” her grandmother said fondly. “Initiated.”

Coeur smiled falsely and nodded. “Ready to begin the work.”

“I wonder.” Her grandmother cocked her head. Her milky eyes bored in on Coeur; Coeur prickled with anxiety. “Walk with me, child,” her grandmother said, extending her hand.

Coeur helped her to a standing position and her grandmother laced arms with her. Then she lowered her veil into place and together they left the feasting hall. Coeur looked over her shoulder at Sange, who was across the room, surrounded by his brothers and sisters. He was laughing with them, celebrating. Coeur was an only child. Her father was first elder, and her mother was always busy with the affairs of the tribe.

Her grandmother was revered; she could go anywhere she wanted in Coraz
ó
n. Guards saluted her and moved aside from passageways Coeur had never seen before; together they descended a steep, dark tunnel.

The walls boomed and thrummed; the vibrations pulsated through Coeur as if she had walked into a gigantic living animal. As they went deeper, she saw rivulets in the surrounding rock that glowed then went dark, glowed-glowed, went dark. A heartbeat.

An arched wooden door maintained the rhythm, and it opened at the touch of the old lady's hand. She looked at Coeur and said, “Before we go in, I will speak three words to you:
Follow your heart.
”

Coeur gasped. Her grandmother smiled as gently as Sange and said, “I followed you up, child. I know about your human boy, and your plan. And you must follow your heart.”

Coeur was speechless. She swallowed acid. Her wings strained.

“But I don't know my own heart,” Coeur began, and her grandmother laid a finger across her lips.

“You love him. The Prophet has shown us that human and Nightbreed can become one. He was human.
She
was human.”

Coeur gaped at her. This went against all teachings.
All
. This was blasphemy.

“I'm older than this tribe,” her grandmother said. “I was there, Coeur. It's been forty years, and change must come. That is the lesson of Cabal.”

She spoke his name!

Cabal. He was the apex, the centrum, the new thing. If only she could speak to Cabal herself, and learn what she must do.

“And, I believe, the wish of Baphomet,” her grandmother continued.

And she spoke
His
name!

Coeur was nearly catatonic, unaware of movement as her grandmother led her into a dazzling chamber of visceral heat. Glowing, scintillating; Coeur had to shield her eyes. Her hands began to sear. She tried to turn away, but her grandmother planted a skeletal hand beneath her chin and turned her face to the fire.

“Open your eyes.”

It was a struggle, but she obeyed.

A flash of an image: inside a charred box, meat, jewel-like and glistening, dripping and bloody; her mouth watering until the saliva turned to steam. Beautiful, beautiful.

The heart of her god.

The tribe created barriers with their thoughts; Baphomet created universes. Into Coeur he poured His thoughts, His mantra.

Follow my heart.

Her brain bubbled.

Follow my heart.

“Child?” her grandmother whispered.

She grabbed her grandmother around the neck and choked, and choked, and choked. The old lady struggled, her eyes bulging, her atrophied wings fluttering. She could not live. Could not know and say such things and live.

Cabal would agree.

Coeur let the body fall to the floor.

She left the chamber and shut the door. Stumbled up into the feasting room; then clawed her way up into her own little tunnel; emerging in the desert where Bobby paced. His cry told her he was there; his arms were strong as he embraced her. His mouth on her.

His promises.

“Cut the stitches,” she whispered, turning.

He was ready; he had brought a hunting knife. He was not afraid or revolted. He cut through the thread, nicking her, apologizing. He didn't know that she saw nothing but light now. Some might say that she was blind. Others, that she was like Ashbery.

He kissed her, hard, murmured, “Fly us away.”

Her wings flapped for the first time in the cold desert night. She saw Baphomet's eyes and all other pieces of Him in the planets and moons above them. His heart in the vast desert below. She flew and flew with Bobby against her chest; Bobby, erect and ready to meld with her and make futures, to begin a new race.

The tribes had hidden their god for forty years.

She soared up, up, to where there was no air. By then, Bobby was frozen; he held fast to her, his penis a length of ice, his words adhered to his lips.

I love—

She let go of the corpse and it dropped, where it would be pulverized. Never traced. Then she ascended, out of the atmosphere and into space. Following Baphomet's heart. Of which she was now a piece.

Revival

Resurrection.

Rebirth.

Through the door.

Beyond the gate.

Out of the tomb.

Taking flight on a shining path of light, to Baphomet's Beloved, His Prophet, and His Gatherer:

I am the carrier of the Light:

To Cabal.

 

THE KINDNESS OF SURRENDER

Kurt Fawver

She loved to stand in the field behind her trailer and stare at the night sky just after new moon. She would go out, naked and filled with wonder, and watch the shadows begin to recede from the vast cavern of space. Night after night she would steal away to the field, and night after night she would delight in the revelation that what gradually emerged from the cosmic darkness was a luminiferous set of bared fangs, pointed as an assassin's stilettos and ready to sink deep into the earth and all its inhabitants. Beneath that ominous crescent she'd laugh, tip her head back at an impossible angle, and let her own fangs—all one hundred ninety-six of them—shine against the stars. And for a few hours, while the corn rows brushed her barbed flesh and she could taste blood on the wind, she would feel freedom and security and she would remember a lost paradise for the damned, a refuge long burned away, and she would whisper, “Midian.”

But, as with all things, the night would eventually end. Her head would snap back into place and her skin would again grow soft and supple and the world would return to the prison of banality it so dearly loved to be locked inside.

And it was then, in the bruised dawn light, that she would allow herself to miss her parents and her friends and, finally, cry.

*   *   *

“Can you believe it? Another one's gone missing. Chris Ritter. That's six in the past semester.”

“I don't understand. So much promise. Why would they run away?”

“Well, you know, a lot of these kids are into drugs and s-e-x. I wouldn't doubt that played a part.”

“No, no. Not boys like Chris. He sang in our church choir and Coach Kramer told me he was going to let Chris start at quarterback next year. No reason to run away. No reason at all.”

“What do you think, Amy?”

The two women at the table stared across the faculty lounge to the eleventh-grade history teacher, Amy Radigan, who was curled into herself on the room's cracked-leather couch, nursing a mug of coffee.

Amy glanced up and shrugged her slight shoulders.

“Why do kids run away from anywhere?” she mused. “Probably because they're trying to escape what's inescapable. And in most cases that's people—people who judge them without understanding them, who despise them for their painfully marked differences, who'd like for all youths to be slaves or puppets or drones, standardized in the image of some ideal child that can't possibly exist except in the minds of the adults who designed it in the first place.”

The women at the table sat in silence, mouths agape.

“Or maybe they're all out getting high and having a big sex party. Who knows?”

Amy slammed her mug onto an end table, leaped off the couch, and stormed to the door, muttering behind her as she went, “Excuse me, ladies, I just remembered something.”

She flew to her classroom in a daze, palms clammy, heart beating in triple time. She wanted to punch the world. She wanted to smack the condemnation out of those women in the lounge. Most of all, she wanted to see if her room was empty.

It wasn't.

Through the little glass rectangle set in the door to the room, Amy could see a girl sitting motionless and unblinking in the back of the room. The girl stared straight ahead, at the dry-erase board at the front of the room, waiting for instruction that might never come.

Amy bit her lip and entered. The girl did not turn, did not speak. But her eyes, so blue, so like fire raging behind the curtain of the sky, somehow pinioned Amy from across the room.

Amy took a deep breath, shut the door, and locked it.

“So I'm going to assume you were with Chris Ritter last night?”

The girl nodded.

“I thought we agreed.” Amy sighed. “I thought you were going to make an effort. I thought that's why we moved out here, into the sticks. Farms full of pigs and sheep and cattle, deer running wild. It's all for you, Asteria.”

“It's not that simple,” the girl, Asteria, answered, her voice stretched taut and flat. “I've told you that for years. But you'd rather not hear it.”

Amy maneuvered around desks and crouched down beside Asteria. She rested a hand on the girl's shoulder.

“Okay. Fine. Then what do you need from me? What can I do to help you contain yourself? Please. Tell me.”

Asteria again stared toward the front of the room.

“You know,” she said, “that board up there isn't clean. Every time you wipe it off, you think you wipe it clean and new and fresh, but you don't. There's actually a perpetual buildup of residue. Every mark you make on it, every mark anyone makes on it, stays forever. And the harder you wipe, the more you scrub, the more you destroy the barrier between what you can erase from your vision and what lingers, unwanted. Eventually, you won't be able to clean anything off that board. Eventually, it will just be a chaos of scrawl.”

Amy squeezed Asteria's shoulder. She could feel the girl's unyielding and surprisingly heavy musculature beneath her shirt.

“I'm always here for you, Asteria. We'll deal with your condition together. I know it's difficult, but you're not alone.”

Asteria shivered and slid out of the desk in a blur. Before Amy had any real comprehension of movement, the girl was already standing ten feet away, gazing out a window, onto the gray miasma of snow and cinder in the parking lot beyond.

“I am alone, Amy. You think that because you read
Dracula
, you understand vampires. You think that because you watch
The Exorcist
, you understand demons. But you have no idea, Amy. For all your good intentions, you have no idea.”

And then, suddenly, Asteria was gone and the window gaped open. Amy slumped into a desk and wondered if she'd been wrong to take in Asteria all those years ago, if the girl had been better off living on the street in anonymity. After all, how could she parent a girl that didn't age, a girl with bloodlust inscribed on her soul, a girl that was both more and less than a girl? How many deaths had she been a party to? How many times had she covered the grim truth with a sheet, only because Asteria was so very special, so very different?

Amy had always believed that the world needed as much diversity as possible, and that Asteria was a particularly pointed example of such diversity. On the basis that it was good to keep an open mind and spirit, she had always championed the weird, the unconventional, the outright freakish. That was as much a reason as any why she hadn't run screaming when Asteria first showed Amy her other face, her other body. She had looked on Asteria's nettled flesh and her unhinged, nightmare mouth, and seen the wonder of an infinite, if unforgiving, cosmos. She had loved Asteria for merely existing, for being a thing so crazy and unexpected in a world of people that tried, with all their neurotic energy, to cage and order and homogenize reality.