Cabal
by
Clive Barker


This paperback edition 1996 Previously published in paperback by Fontana
1989 Reprinted seven times

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPuWisiers 1988

Copyright Clive Barker 1988

The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of
this work

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Caledonian International Book
Manufacturing Ltd, Glasgow

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TO ANNIE

"We are all imaginary animals ..."

domingo d'ybarrondo A Bestiary of the Soul

PART ONE

LOCO

"I was born alive.  Isn't that punishment enough?"

Mary Hendrickson, at her trial for patricide

 The Truth all the rash and midnight promises made in the name of love
none, Boone now knew, was more certain to be broken than: I'll never
leave oou .

What time didn't steal from under your nose, circumstance did.  It was
useless to hope otherwise; useless to dream that the world somehow
meant you good.  Everything of value, everything you clung to for your
sanity would rot or be snatched in the long run, and the abyss would
gape beneath you, as it gaped for Boone now, and suddenly, without so
much as a breath of explanation, you were gone.  Gone to hell or worse,
professions of love and all.

His outlook hadn't always been so pessimistic.  There'd been a time not
all that long ago when he'd felt the burden of his mental anguish
lifting.  There'd been fewer psychotic episodes, fewer days when he
felt like slitting his wrists rather than enduring the hours till his
next medication.  There'd seemed to be a chance for happiness.

It was that prospect that had won the declaration of love from him;
that: I'll never leave you," whispered in Lori's ear as they lay in the
narrow bed he'd never dared hope would hold two.  The words had not
come in the throes of high passion.  Their love life, like so much else
between them, was fraught with problems.  But where other women had
given up on him, unforgiving of his failure, she'd persevered: told him
there was plenty of time to get it right, all the time in the world.

I'm with you for as long as you want me to be, patience had seemed to
say.

Nobody had ever offered such a commitment; he wanted to offer one in
return.  Those words: never leave you'.  Were it.

The memory of them, and of her skin almost luminous in the murk of his
room, and of the sound of breathing when she finally fell asleep beside
him; of it still had the power to catch his heart, and squeez it till
it hurt.

He longed to be free of both the memory and words, now that
circumstance had taken any hope their fulfilment out of his hands.  But
they wouldn't be forgotten.  They lingered on to torment him with
frailty.  His meagre comfort was that she know what she must now know
about him, would working to erase her memory; and that with time she'i
succeed.  He only hoped she'd understand his ignoranc of himself when
he'd voiced that promise.  He'd neverj have risked this pain if he'd
doubted health was finally!  within his grasp.

Dream on!

Decker had brought an abrupt end to those delusions!  the day he'd
locked the office door, drawn the blinds J on the Alberta spring
sunshine, and said, in a voice| barely louder than a whisper:

"Boone.  I think we're in terrible trouble, you and I."

He was trembling, Boone saw, a fact not easily!  concealed in a body so
big.  Decker had the physique of I a man who sweated out the day's
angst in a gym.  Even his tailored suits, always charcoal, couldn't
tame his bulk.  It had made Boone edgy at the start of their work
together, he felt intimidated by the doctor's physical and mental
authority.  Now it was the fallibility of that strength he feared.
Decker was a Rock; he was Reason; he was Calm.  This anxiety ran
counter to all he knew about the man.

"What's wrong?"  Boone asked.

"Sit, will you?  Sit and I'll tell you."

Boone did as he was told.  In this office, Decker was lord.  The doctor
leaned back in the leather chair and inhaled through his nose, his
mouth sealed in a downward curve.

"Tell me ..."  Boone said.

"Where to start."

"Anywhere."

"I thought you were getting better," Decker said.  "I really did.  We
both did."

"I still am Boone said.

Decker made a small shake of his head.  He was a man of considerable
intellect, but little of it showed on his tightly packed features,
except perhaps in his eyes, which at the moment were not watching the
patient, but the table between them.

"You've started to talk in your sessions," Decker said, 'about crimes
you think you've committed.  Do you remember any of that?"

"You know I don't."  The trances Decker put him in were too profound:
"I only remember when you play the tape back."

I won't be playing any of these," Decker said.  "I wiped them."

"Why?"

"Because ... I'm afraid, Boone.  For you."  He paused.  "Maybe for both
of us."

The crack in the Rock was opening and there was nothing Decker could do
to conceal it.

"What are these crimes?"  Boone asked, his words tentative.

"Murders.  You talk about them obsessively.  At first I thought they
were dream crimes.  You always had a violent streak in you."

"And now?"

"Now I'm afraid you may have actually committed them."

There was a long silence, while Boone studied

Decker, more in puzzlement than anger.  The blinds had not been pulled
all the way down.  A slice of sunlight fell across him, and on to the
table between them.  On the glass surface was a bottle, of still water,
two tumblers, and a large envelope.  Decker leaned forward and picked
it up.

"What I'm doing now is probably a crime in itself," he told Boone.
"Patient confidentiality is one thing; protecting a killer is another.
But part of me is still hoping to God it isn't true.  I want to believe
I've succeeded.  We've succeeded.  Together.  I want to believe you're
well."

"I am well."

hi lieu of reply Decker tore open the envelope.

"I'd like you to look at these for me," he said, sliding his hand
inside and bringing a sheaf of photographs out to meet the light.

"I warn you, they're not pleasant."

He laid them on his reflection, turned for Boone's perusal.  His
warning had been well advised.  The picture on the top of the pile was
like a physical assault.  Faced with it a fear rose in him he'd not
felt since being in Decker's care: that the image might possess him. 
He'd built walls against that superstition, brick by brick, but they
shook now, and threatened to fall.

"It's just a picture."

That's right," Decker replied.  "It's just a picture.  What do you
see?"

"A dead man."

"A murdered man."

"Yes.  A murdered man."

Not simply murdered: butchered.  The life slashed from him in a fury of
slices and stabs, his blood flung on the blade that had taken out his
neck, taken off his face, on to the wall behind him.  He wore only his
shorts, so the wounds on his body could be easily counted, despite the
blood.  Boone did just that now, to keep the horror from overcoming
him.  Even here, in

this room where the doctor had chiselled another self from the block
of his patient's condition, Boone had never choked on terror as he
choked now.  He tasted his breakfast in the back of his throat, or the
meal the night before, rising from' his bowels against nature.  Shit in
his mouth, like the dirt of this deed.

Count the wounds, he told himself; pretend they're beads on an abacus.
Three, four, five in the abdomen and chest: one in particular ragged,
more like a tear than a wound, gaping so wide the man's innards poked
out.  On the shoulder, two more.  And then the face, unmade with cuts.
So many their numbers could not be calculated, even by the most
detached of observers.  They left the victim beyond recognition: eyes
dug out, lips slit off, nose in ribbons.

"Enough?"  Decker said, as if the question needed asking.

"Yes."

"There's a lot more to see."

He uncovered the second, laying the first beside the pile.  This one
was of a woman, sprawled on a sofa, her upper body and her lower
twisted in a fashion life would have forbidden.  Though she was
presumably not a relation of the first victim the butcher had created a
vile resemblance.  Here was the same lipless ness the same eyeless ness
Born from different parents, they were siblings in death, destroyed by
the same hand.

And am I their father?  Boone found himself thinking.

"No," was his gut's response.  "I didn't do this."

But two things prevented him from voicing his denial.  First, he knew
that Decker would not be endangering his patient's equilibrium this way
unless he had good reason for it.  Second, denial was valueless when
both of them knew how easily Boone's mind had deceived itself in the
past.  If he was responsible for these atrocities there was no
certainty he'd know it.

Instead he kept his silence, not daring to look up at Decker for fear
he'd see the Rock shattered.

"Another?"  Decker said.

"If we must."

"We must."

He uncovered a third photograph, and a fourth, laying the pictures out
on the table like cards at Tarot reading, except that every one was
Death. In <. kitchen, lying at the open door of the refrigerator, the
bedroom, beside the lamp and the alarm.  At the top of the stairs; at
the window.  The victims were every age and colour; men, women and
children.  What-f ever fiend was responsible he cared to make no
distinction.  He simply erased life wherever he found it.  Not quickly,
not efficiently.  The rooms in which thesei people had died bore plain
testament to how the killer, < in his humour, had toyed with them. 
Furniture had| been overturned as they stumbled to avoid the coup de\
grace, their blood prints left on walls and paintwork.  | One had lost
his fingers to the blade, snatching at it?  perhaps, most had lost
their eyes.  But none had, escaped, however brave their resistance. 
They'd all fallen at last, tangled in their underwear, or seeking:
refuge behind a curtain.  Fallen sobbing; fallen retching.

There were eleven photographs in all.  Every one was ; different rooms
large and small, victims naked and dressed.  But each also the same:
all pictures of a madness performed, taken with the actor already
departed.

God almighty, was he that man?

Not having an answer for himself, he asked the question of the Rock,
speaking without looking up from the shining cards.

"Did I do this?  "he said.

He heard Decker sigh, but there was no answer forthcoming, so he
chanced a glance at his accuser.  As the photographs had been laid out
before him he'd felt the man's scrutiny like a crawling ache in his
scalp.  But now he once more found that gaze averted.

"Please tell me he said.  "Did I do this?"

Decker wiped the moist purses of skin beneath his grey eyes.  He was
not trembling any longer.

"I hope not," he said.

The response seemed ludicrously mild.  This was not some minor
infringement of the law they were debating.  It was death times eleven;
and how many more might there be; out of sight, out of mind?

Tell me what I talked about," he said.  "Tell me the words '

"It was ramblings mostly."

"So what makes you think I'm responsible?  You must have reasons."

"It took time," Decker said, 'for me to piece the whole thing
together."  He looked down at the mortuary on the table, aligning a
photograph that was a little askew with his middle finger.

"I have to make a quarterly report on our progress.  You know that.  So
I play all the tapes of our previous sessions sequentially, to get some
sense of how we're doing ..."  He spoke slowly; wearily.  '... and I
noticed the same phrases coming up in your responses.  Buried most of
the time, in other material, but there.  It was as if you were
confessing to something; but something so abhorrent to you even in a
trance state you couldn't quite bring yourself to say it.  Instead it
was coming out in this ... code."

Boone knew codes.  He'd heard them everywhere during the bad times.
Messages from the imagined enemy in the noise between stations on the
radio; or in the murmur of traffic before dawn.  That he might have
learned the art himself came as no surprise.

"I made a few casual enquiries," Decker continued, 'amongst police
officers I've treated.  Nothing specific.  And they told me about the
killings.  I'd heard some of the details, of course, from the press.
Seems they've been going on for two and a half years.  Several here in
Calgary; the rest within an hour's drive.  The work of one man."

 "I don't know Decker said, finally looking up Boone.  "If I was
certain, I'd have reported it all '

"But you're not."

"I don't want to believe this anymore than you do.!  doesn't cover me
in glory if this turns out to be true| There was anger in him, not well
concealed.  That's why I waited.  Hoping you'd be with me when the ne
one happened."

"You mean some of these people died while you knew?"

"Yes," Decker said flatly.

"Jesus!"

The thought propelled Boone from the chair, his leg catching the table.
The murder scenes flew.  "Keep your voice down," Decker demanded.

"People died, and you waited?"

"I took that risk for you, Boone.  You'll respect that."

Boone turned from the man.  There was a chill of sweat on his spine.

"Sit down," said Decker.  "Please sit down and tell me what these
photographs mean to you."

Involuntarily Boone had put his hand over the lower half of his face.
He knew from Decker's instruction what that particular piece of body
language signified.  His mind was using his body to muffle some
disclosure; or silence it completely.

"Boone.  I need answers."

"They mean nothing," Boone said, not turning.

"At all?"

"At all."

"Look at them again."

"No," Boone insisted.  "I can't."

He heard the doctor inhale, and half expected a demand that he face the
horrors afresh.  But instead Decker's tone was placatory.

"It's all right, Aaron," he said.  "It's all right.  I'll put them
away."

Boone pressed the heels of his hands against his closed eyes.  His
sockets were hot, and wet.

"They're gone, Aaron Decker said.

"No, they're not."

They were with him still, perfectly remembered.  Eleven rooms and
eleven bodies, fixed in his mind's eye, beyond exorcism.  The wall
Decker had taken five years to build had been brought down in as many
minutes, and by its architect.  Boone was at the mercy of his madness
again.  He heard it whine in his head, coming from eleven slit
windpipes from eleven punctured bellies.  Breath and bowel gas, singing
the old mad songs.

Why had his de fences tumbled so easily, after so much labour?  His
eyes knew the answer, spilling tears to admit what his tongue couldn't.
He was guilty.  Why else?  Hands he was even now wiping dry on his
trousers had tortured and slaughtered.  If he pretended otherwise he'd
only tempt them to further crime.  Better that he confessed, though he
remembered nothing, than offer them another unguarded moment.  "He
turned and faced Decker.  The photographs had been gathered up and laid
face down on the table.

"You remember something?"  the doctor said, reading the change on
Boone's face.

"Yes," he replied.

"What?"

"I did it," Boone said simply.  "I did it all."

 Academy

Decker was the most benign prosecutor any accused man could ask for.
The hours he spent with Boone after that first day were filled with
carefully plied questions as murder by murder they examined together
the evidence for Boone's secret life.  Despite the patient's insistence
that the crimes were his, Decker counselled caution.  Admissions of
culpability were not hard evidence.  They had to be certain that
confession wasn't simply Boone's self-destructive tendencies at work,
admitting to the crime out of hunger for the punishment.

Boone was in no position to argue.  Decker knew him better than he knew
himself.  Nor had he forgotten Decker's observation that if the worst
was proved true, the doctor's reputation as a healer would be thrown to
the dogs: they could neither of them afford to be wrong.  The only way
to be sure was to run through the details of the killings dates, names
and locations in the hope that Boone would be prompted into
remembering.  Or else that they'd discover a killing that had occurred
when he was indisputably in the company of others.

The only part of the process Boone balked at was reexamining the
photographs.  He resisted Decker's gentle pressure for forty-eight
hours, only conceding when the gentility faltered and Decker rounded on
him, accusing him of cowardice and deceit.  Was all this just a game,
Decker demanded; an exercise in self25

mortification that would end with them both none I wiser?  If so,
Boone could get the hell out of his of] now and bleed on somebody
else's time.

Boone agreed to study the photographs.

There was nothing in them that jogged his memc Much of the detail of
the rooms had been washed I by the flash of the camera; what remained
was cob mon place  The only sight that might have won.] response from
him the faces of the victims been erased by the killer, hacked beyond
recognitic the most expert of morticians would not be able piece those
shattered facades together again.  So it wlj all down to the petty
details of where Boone had I on this night or that; with whom; doing
what.  He '. never kept a diary so verifying the facts was difficult
but most of the time barring the hours he spent wit Lori or Decker,
none of which seemed to coincide wit; murder nights- he was alone, and
without alibi, the end of the fourth day the case against him began I
look very persuasive.  /

"Enough," he told Decker.  "We've done enough."

"I'd like to go over it all one more time."

"What's the use?"  Boone said.  "I want to get it finished with."

In the past days and nights many of the 61 symptoms, the signs of the
sickness he thought he' l been so close to throwing off forever, had
returned, could sleep for no more than minutes at a time be for
appalling visions threw him into befuddled wakefulj ness, he couldn't
eat properly; he was trembling fror his gut outwards, every minute of
the day.  He wanted an end to this; wanted to spill the story and
punished.

"Give me a little more time," Decker said.  "If we go to the police now
they'll take you out of my handsJ They probably won't even allow me
access to you| You'll be alone."

"I already am," Boone replied.  Since he'd first seer

the photographs he'd cut himself off from every contact, even with
Lori, fearing his capacity to do harm.

"I'm a monster he said.  "We both of us know that.  We've got all the
evidence we need."

"It's not just a question of evidence."

"What then?"

Decker leaned against the window frame, his bulk a burden to him of
late.

"I don't understand you, Boone," he said.

Boone's gaze moved off from man to sky.  There was a wind from the
south-east today, scraps of cloud hurried before it.  A good life,
Boone thought, to be up there, lighter than air.  Here everything was
heavy; flesh and guilt cracking your spine.

"I've spent four years trying to understand your illness, hoping I
could cure it.  And I thought I was succeeding.  Thought there was a
chance it would all come clear ..."

He fell silent, in the pit of his failure.  Boone was not so immersed
in his own agonies he couldn't see how profoundly the man suffered. But
he could do nothing to mitigate that hurt.  He just watched the clouds
pass, up there in the light, and knew there were only dark times
ahead.

"When the police take you ..."  Decker murmured, 'it won't just be you
who's alone, Boone.  I'll be alone too.  You'll be somebody else's
patient: some criminal psychologist.  I won't have access to you any
longer.  That's why I'm asking ... Give me a little more time.  Let me
understand as much as I can before it's over between us."

He's talking like a lover, Boone vaguely thought; like what's between
us is his life.

"I know you're in pain," Decker went on.  "So I've got medication for
you.  Pills, to keep the worst of it at bay.  just till we've finished
'

"I don't trust myself," Boone said.  "I could hurt somebody."

"You won't," Decker replied, with welcome cer taint "The drugs'll keep
you subdued through the night, rest of the time you'll be with me.
You'll be safe wit me."

"How much longer do you want?"

"A few days, at the most.  That's not so much to askj is it?  I need to
know why we failed."

The thought of re-treading that bloodied ground was abhorrent, but
there was a debt here to be paid.  Wit Decker's help he'd had a glimpse
of new possibilities!  he owed the doctor the chance to snatch somethir
from the ruins of that vision.

"Make it quick," he said.

"Thank you," Decker said.  "This means a lot to me."  *

"And I'll need the pills."

The pills he had.  Decker made sure of that.  Pills se strong he wasn't
sure he could have named him sel correctly once he'd taken them.  Pills
that made slee easy, and waking a visit to a half-life he was happy to
escape from again.  Pills that, within twenty-four hours he was
addicted to.

Decker's word was good.  When he asked for more they were supplied, and
under their soporific influenc they went back to the business of the
evidence, as the doctor went over, and over again, the details of
Boone's crimes, in the hope of comprehending them.  But nothing came
clear.  All Boone's increasingly passive mind could recover from these
sessions were slurred images of doors he'd slipped through and stairs
he'd climbed in the performance of murder.  He was less and less aware
of Decker, still fighting to salvage something I worth from his
patient's closed mind.  All Boone kne\ now was sleep, and guilt, and
the hope, increasinglyj cherished, of an end to both.

Only Lori, or rather memories of her, pricked the drugs' regime.  He
could hear her voice sometimes, in his inner ear, clear as a bell,
repeating words she'd spoken to him in some casual conversation, which
he was dredging up from the past.  There was nothing of consequence in
these phrases; they were perhaps associated with a look he'd treasured,
or a touch.  Now he could remember neither look nor touch the drugs had
removed so much of his capacity to imagine.  All he was left with were
these dislocated lines, distressing him not simply because they were
spoken as if by somebody at his shoulder, but because they had no
context that he could recall.  And worse than either, their sound
reminded him of the woman he'd loved and would not see again, unless
across a courtroom.  A woman to whom he had made a promise he'd broken
within weeks of his making it.  In his wretchedness, his thoughts
barely cogent, that broken promise was as monstrous as the crimes in
the photographs.  It fitted him for Hell.

Or death.  Better death.  He was not entirely sure how long had passed
since he'd done the deal with Decker exchanging this stupor for a few
more days of investigation, but he was certain he had kept his side of
the bargain.  He was talked out.  There was nothing left to say, nor
hear.  All that remained was to take himself to the law, and confess
his crimes, or to do what the state no longer had the power to do, and
kill the monster.

He didn't dare alert Decker to this plan; he knew the doctor would do
all in his power to prevent his patient's suicide.  So he went on
playing the quiescent subject one day more.  Then, promising Decker
he'd be at the office the following morning, he returned home and
prepared to kill himself.

There was another letter from Lori awaiting him, the fourth since he'd
absented himself, demanding to know what was wrong.  He read it as best
his befuddled thoughts would allow, and attempted a reply, but

couldn't make sense of the words he was trying write.  Instead,
pocketing the appeal she'd sent to '. he went out into the dusk to look
for death.

The truck he threw himself in front of was unkind, .  knocked the
breath from him but not the life.  Bruis and bleeding from scrapes and
cuts, he was scooped I and taken to hospital.  Later, he'd come to
under st how all of this was in the scheme of things, and tr.  he'd
been denied his death beneath the truck wheel for a purpose.  But
sitting in the hospital, waiting in | white room till people worse off
than he had attended to, all he could do was curse his bad fortund
Other lives he could take with terrible ease, his own resisted him. 
Even in this he was divided aga ins himself.

But that room- though he didn't know it when h< was ushered in- held a
promise its plain walls belied In it he'd hear a name that would with
time make I new man of him.  At its call he'd go like the mon ste he
was, by night, and meet with the miraculous.

That name was Midian.

It and he had much in common, not least that thej shared the power to
make promises.  But while his avowals of eternal love had proved hollow
in a matte of weeks, Midian made promises midnight, like his own,
deepest midnight that even death could notj break.

 The Rhapsodist

In the years of his illness, in and out of mental wards and hospices,
Boone had met very few fellow sufferers who didn't cleave to some
talisman, some sign 01 keepsake to stand guard at the gates of their
heads and hearts.  He'd learned quickly not to despise such charms.
Whatever gets you through the night was an axiom he understood from
hard experience.  Most of these safeguards against chaos were personal
to those that wielded them.  Trinkets, keys, books and photographs:
mementoes of good times treasured as defence against the bad.  But some
belonged to the collective mind.  They were words he would hear more
than once: nonsense rhymes whose rhythm kept the pain at bay; names of
Gods.  Amongst them, Midian.

He'd heard the name of that place spoken maybe half a dozen times by
people he'd met on the way through, usually those whose strength was
all burned up.  When they called on Midian it was as a place of refuge;
a place to be carried away to.  And more: a place where whatever sins
they'd committed real or imagined would be forgiven them.  Boone didn't
know the origins f this mythology; nor had he ever been interested
enough to enquire.  He had not been in need of forgiveness, or so he
thought.  Now he knew better.  He had Plenty to seek cleansing of;
obscenities his mind had kept from him until Decker had brought them to
light, which no agency he knew could lift from him.  He had Joined
another class of creature.

Midian called.

Locked up in his misery, he'd not been aware someone else now shared
the white room with until he heard the rasping voice.

"Midian

He thought at first it was another voice from past, like Lori's.  But
when it came again it was no his shoulder, as hers had been, but from
across room.  He opened his eyes, the left lid gummy blood from a cut
on his temple, and looked toward the speaker.  Another of the night's
walking wound apparently, brought in for mending and left to fend I
himself until some patchwork could be done.  He sitting in the corner
of the room furthest from door, on which his wild eyes were fixed as
though any moment his saviour would step into view.  It virtually
impossible to guess anything of his age true appearance: dirt and caked
blood concealed hot I must look as bad or worse, Boone thought.  He
didn| much mind; people were always staring at him.  their present
state he and the man in the corner we the kind folks crossed the street
to avoid.

But whereas he, in his jeans and his scuffed and black tee shirt was
just another nobody, there we some signs about the other man that
marked him outj The long coat he wore had a monkish severity to it his
grey hair pulled back tight on his scalp, hung to the middle of his
back in a plaited pony tail.  There was jewellery at his neck, almost
hidden by his high colla and on his thumbs two artificial nails that
looked the be silver, curled into hooks.

Finally, there was that name, rising from the ma again.

'... Will you take me?"  he asked softly.  "Take me to Midian?"

His eyes had not left the door for an instant.  It seemed he was
oblivious of Boone, until without warn|

he turned his wounded head and spat across the room.  The
blood-marbled phlegm hit the floor at Boone's feet.

"Get the fuck out of here!"  he said.  "You're keeping them from me.
They won't come while you're here."

Boone was too weary to argue, and too bruised to get up.  He let the
man rant.

"Get out!"  he said again.  "They won't show themselves to the likes of
you.  Don't you see that?"

Boone put his head back and tried to keep the man's pain from invading
him.

"Shit!"  the other said.  "I've missed them.  I've missed them."

He stood up and crossed to the window.  Outside there was solid
darkness.

They passed by," he murmured, suddenly plaintive.  The next moment he
was a yard from Boone, grinning through the dirt.

"Got anything for the pain?"  he wanted to know.

The nurse gave me something," Boone replied.

The man spat again; not at Boone this time, but at the floor.

"Drink, man ..."  he said.  "Have you got a drink?"

"No."

The grin evaporated instantly, and the face began to crumple up as
tears overtook him.  He turned away from Boone, sobbing, his litany
beginning again.

"Why won't they take me?  Why won't they come for me?"

"Maybe they'll come later," Boone said.  "When I've gone."

The man looked back at him.

"What do you know?"  he said.

Very little was the answer; but Boone kept that fact to himself.  There
were enough fragments of Midian's mythology in his head to have him
eager for more.  Wasn't it a place where those who had run out of
refuges could find a home?  And wasn't that his condition now?  He had
no source of comfort left.  Not

Decker, not Lori, not even Death.  Even though Mid was just another
talisman, he wanted to hear its st recited.

Tell me,"he said.

"I asked you what you know the other man replii catching the flesh
beneath his unshaven chin with a hook of his left hand.

"I know it takes away the pain," Boone replied.

"And?"

1 know it turns nobody away."

"Not true," came the response.

"No?"

"If it turned nobody away you think I wouldn't there already?  You
think it wouldn't be the biggest cit on earth?  Of course it turns
people away ..."

The man's tear-brightened eyes were fixed on Boone Does he realize I
know nothing?  Boone wondered.  l| seemed not.  The man talked on,
content to debate thef secret.  Or more particularly, his fear of it.

"I don't go because I may not be worthy he said.| "And they don't
forgive that easily.  They don't forgive at all.  You know what they do
... to those who aren't| worthy?"

Boone was less interested in Midian's rites of passage!  than in the
man's certainty that it existed at all.  Hcl didn't speak of Midian as
a lunatic's Shangri-la, but asj a place to be found, and entered, and
made peace with.

"Do you know how to get there?"  he asked.

The man looked away.  As he broke eye-contact a j surge of panic rose
in Boone: fearing that the bastard | was going to keep the rest of the
story to himself.

"I need to know Boone said.

The other man looked up again.

"I can see that he said, and there was a twist in his : voice that
suggested the spectacle of Boone's despair entertained him.

"It's north-west of Athabasca/ the man replied.

"Yes?"

"That's what I heard."

"That's empty country," Boone replied.  "You could wander forever, less
you've got a map."

"Midian's on no map the man said.  "You look east of Peace River; near
Shere Neck; north of Dwyer."

There was no taint of doubt in this recitation of directions.  He
believed in Midian's existence as much as, perhaps more than, the four
walls he was bound by.

"What's your name?"  Boone asked.

The question seemed to flummox him.  It had been a long time since
anyone had cared to ask him his name.

"Narcisse," he said finally.  "You?"

"Aaron Boone.  Nobody ever calls me Aaron.  Only Boone."

"Aaron," said the other.  "Where d'you hear about Midian?"

"Same place you did," Boone said.  "Same place anyone hears.  From
others.  People in pain."

"Monsters," said Narcisse.

Boone hadn't thought of them as such, but perhaps to dispassionate eyes
they were, the ranters and the weepers, unable to keep their nightmares
under lock and key.

"They're the only ones welcome in Midian," Narcisse explained.  "If
you're not a beast, you're a victim.  That's true, isn't it?  You can
only be one or the other.  That's why I don't dare go unescorted.  I
wait for friends to come for me."

"People who went already?"

That's right," Narcisse said.  "Some of them alive.  Some of them who
died, and went after."

Boone wasn't certain he was hearing this story correctly.

"Went afteiV he said.

"Don't you have anything for the pain, man?"  Narcisse said, his tone
veering again, this time to the wheedling.

"I've got some pills Boone said, remembering^ dregs of Decker's
supply.  "Do you want those?"

"Anything you got."

Boone was content to be relieved of them.  The kept his head in chains,
driving him to the point where.  he didn't care if he lived or died. 
Now he did.  He had place to go, where he might find someone at last
wlj understood the horrors he was enduring.  He would!  need the pills
to get to Midian.  He'd need strength" the will to be forgiven.  The
latter he had.  The formed his wounded body would have to find.

"Where are they?"  said Narcisse, appetite igniting ] features.

Boone's leather jacket had been peeled from his bac when he'd first
been admitted, for a cursory examin*f at ion of the damage he'd done
himself.  It hung on the back of a chair, a twice discarded skin.  He
plunged his!  hand into the inside pocket but found to his shock that f
the familiar bottle was not there.

"Someone's been through my jacket."

He rummaged through the rest of the pockets.  All off them were empty.
Lori's notes, his wallet, the pills: all | gone.  It took him seconds
only to realize why they'd!  want evidence of who he was and the
consequence of!  that.  He'd attempted suicide, no doubt they thought
him prepared to do the same again.  In his wallet was Decker's address.
The doctor was probably already on his way, to collect his erring
patient and deliver him to the police.  Once in the hands of the law
he'd never see Midian.

"You said there were pills1."  Narcisse yelled.

"They've been taken!"

Narcisse snatched the jacket from Boone's hands, and began to tear at
it.

"Where?"  he yelled.  "Where?"

His face was once more crumpling up as he realized he was not going to
get a fix of peace.  He dropped the

jacket and backed away from Boone, his tears beginning again, but
sliding down his face to meet a broad smile.

"I know what you're doing he said, pointing at Boone.  Laughter and
sobs were coming in equal measure.  "Midian sent you.  To see if I'm
worthy.  You came to see if I was one of you or not!"  He offered Boone
no chance to contradict, his elation spiralling into hysteria.

"I'm sitting here praying for someone to come, begging-, and you're
here all the time, watching me shit myself.  Watching me shit!"

He laughed hard.  Then, deadly serious:

"I never doubted.  Never once.  I always knew some body'd come.  But I
was expecting a face I recognized.  Marvin maybe.  I should have known
they'd send someone new.  Stands to reason.  And you saw, right?  You
heard.  I'm not ashamed.  They never made me ashamed.  You ask anyone.
They tried.  Over and over.  They got in my fucking head and tried to
take me apart, tried to take the Wild Ones out of me.  But I held on. I
knew you'd come sooner or later, and I wanted to be ready.  That's why
I wear these."

He thrust his thumbs up in front of his face.  "So I could show you."

He turned his head to right and left.

"Want to see?"  he said.

He needed no reply.  His hands were already up to either side of his
face, the hooks touching the skin at the base of each ear.  Boone
watched, words of denial or appeal redundant.  This was a moment
Narcisse had rehearsed countless times; he was not about to be denied
it.  There was no sound as the hooks, razor sharp, slit his skin, but
blood began to flow instantly, down his neck and arms.  The expression
on his face didn't change, it merely intensified: a mask in which comic
muse and tragic were united.  Then, fingers spread to either side of
his face, he steadily drew the

razor hooks down the line of his jaw.  He had al geon's precision. The
wounds opened with symmetry, until the twin hooks met at his chin.

Only then did he drop one hand to his side, b| dripping from hook and
wrist, the other moving ac his face to seek the flap of skin his work
had op ene

"You want to see?"  he said again.

Boone murmured:

"Don't."

It went unheard.  With a sharp, upward jerk Narcis detached the mask of
skin from the muscle be neat and began to tear, uncovering his true
face.

From behind him, Boone heard somebody sere The door had been opened,
and one of the nursing st stood on the threshold.  He saw from the
corner of eye: her face whiter than her uniform, her mouth op wide; and
beyond her the corridor, and freedom.  But ] couldn't bring himself to
look away from Narcisse,nc while the blood filling the air between them
kept revelation from view.  He wanted to see the man secret face: the
Wild One beneath the skin that ma def him fit for Midian's ease.  The
red rain was dispersir The air began to clear.  He saw the face now, a
littlej but couldn't make sense of its complexity.  Was that, beast's
anatomy that knotted up and snarled in front off him, or human tissue
agonized by self-mutilation?  AI moment more, and he'd know Then,
someone had hold of him, seizing his arms; and dragging him towards the
door.  He glimpsed Narcisse raising the weapons of his hands to keep
his saviours at bay, then the uniforms were upon him, and he was
eclipsed.  In the rush of the moment Boone took his chance.  He pushed
the nurse from him, snatched up his leather jacket, and ran for the
unguarded door.  His bruised body was not prepared for violent action.
He stumbled, nausea and darting pains in his bruised limbs vying for
the honour of bringing him to his

joiees, but the sight of Narcisse surrounded and tethered was enough
to give him strength.  He was away down the hall before anyone had a
chance to come after him.

As he headed for the door to the night he heard Narcisse's voice raised
in protest; a howl of rage that was pitifully human.

Necropolis

Though the distance from Calgary to Athabasca fas little more than
three hundred miles the , jurney took a traveller to the borders of
another world.  North of here the highways were few, and the
inhabitants fewer still, as the rich prairie lands of the province
steadily gave way to forest, marshland and wilderness.  It also marked
the limits of Boone's experience.  A short stint as a truck driver, in
his early twenties, had taken him as far as Bonnyville to the
south-east, Barrhead to the south-west and Athabasca itself.  But the
territory beyond was unknown to him except as names on a map.  Or more
correctly, as an absence of names.  There were great stretches of land
here that were dotted only with small farming settlements; one of which
bore the name Narcisse had used: Shere Neck.

The map which carried this information he found, along with enough
change to buy himself a bottle of brandy, in five minutes of theft on
the outskirts of Calgary.  He rifled three vehicles left in an
underground parking facility and was away, mapped and monied, before
the source of the car alarms had been traced by security.

The rain washed his face, his bloodied tee-shirt he dumped, happy to
have his beloved jacket next to his skin.  Then he found himself a ride
to Edmonton, and

another which took him through Athabasca to Prairie.  It was easy.

Easy?  To go in search of a place he'd only heard rumc of amongst
lunatics?  Perhaps not easy.  But it necessary; even inevitable.  From
the moment the 1 he'd chosen to die beneath had cast him aside journey
had been beckoning.  Perhaps from long be that, only he'd never seen
the invitation.  The sense I had of its Tightness might almost have
made a fat ali of him.  If Midian existed, and was willing to em brac
him, then he was travelling to a place where he would finally find some
self-comprehension and peace.  If j if it existed only as a talisman
for the frightened and the lost then that too was right, and he would
mce whatever extinction awaited him searching for ; nowhere.  Better
that than the pills, better that Decker's fruitless pursuit of rhymes
and reasons.

The doctor's quest to root out the monster in Boon had been bound to
fail.  That much was clear as skies overhead.  Boone the man and Boone
the mon ste could not be divided.  They were one, they travelle the
same road in the same mind and body.  And ever lay at the end of that
road, death or glory, would be the fate of both.

East of Peace River, Narcisse had said, near the townf of Shere Neck;
north of Dwyer.

He had to sleep rough in High Prairie, until the!  following morning
when he found a ride to Peace River, f The driver was a woman in her
late fifties, proud of the j

region she'd known since childhood and happy to give him a quick
geography lesson.  He made no mention of Midian, but Dwyer and Shere
Neck she knew the latter a town of five thousand souls away to the east
of Highway 67.  He'd have saved himself a good two hundred miles if
he'd not travelled as far as High Prairie, he was told, but taken
himself north earlier.  No matter, she said; she knew a place in Peace
River where the farmers stopped off to eat before heading back to their
homesteads.  He'd find a ride there, to take him where he wanted to go.
Got people there?  she asked.  He said he had.

It was close to dusk by the time the last of his rides dropped him a
mile or so shy of Dwyer.  He watched the truck take a gravel road off
into the deepening blue, then began to walk the short distance to the
town.  A night of sleeping rough, and travelling in farm vehicles on
roads that had seen better days, had taken its toll on his already
battered system.  It took him an hour to come within sight of the
outskirts of Dwyer, by which time night had fallen completely.  Fate
was once again on his side.  Without the darkness he might not have
seen the lights flashing ahead; not in welcome but in warning.

The police were here before him; three or four cars he judged.  It was
possible they were in pursuit of someone else entirely but he doubted
it.  More likely Narcisse, lost to himself, had told the law what he'd
told Boone.  In which case this was a reception committee.  They were
probably already searching for him, house to house.  And if here, in
Shere Neck too.  He was expected.

Thankful for the cover of the night, he made his way off the road and
into the middle of a rape seed field, where he could lie and think
through his next move.  There was certainly no wisdom in trying to go
into

Dwyer.  Better he set off for Midian now, putting hunger and weariness
aside and trusting to the stj and his instinct to give him
directions.

He got up, smelling of earth, and headed off in he judged to be a
northerly direction.  He knew v| well he might miss his destination by
miles with such rough bearings to travel by, or just as easily fail to
: it in the darkness.  No matter, he had no other choi| which was a
kind of comfort to him.

In his five minute spree as thief he'd not found watch to steal, so the
only sense he had of time pa ssi was the slow progression of the
constellations ov^j head.  The air became cold, then bitter, but he
kept his painful pace, avoiding the roads wherever possibli though they
would have been easier to walk than ploughed and seeded ground.  This
caution proved we founded at one point when two police vehicles, boo!
ending a black limousine, slid all but silently down!  road he had a
minute ago crossed.  He had no evidenc whatsoever for the feeling that
seized him as the passed by, but he sensed more than strongly that the
limo's passenger was Decker, the good doctor, still pursuit of
understanding.

Then, Midian.

Out of nowhere, Midian.  One moment the night ahead was featureless
darkness, the next there was cluster of buildings on the horizon, their
painted walls glimmering grey blue in the starlight.  Boone stood
several minutes and studied the scene.  There was light burning in any
window, or on any porch.  By no\ it was surely well after midnight, and
the men at women of the town, with work to rise to the followi morning,
would be in bed.  But not one single light| That struck him as strange.
Small Midian might be

forgotten by map-makers and signpost writers alike but did it not lay
claim to one insomniac?; or a child who needed the comfort of a lamp
burning through the night hours?  More probably they were in wait for
him _ Decker and the law concealed in the shadows until he was foolish
enough to step into the trap.  The simplest solution would be to turn
tail and leave them to their vigil, but he had little enough energy
left.  If he retreated now how long would he have to wait before
attempting a return, every hour making recognition and a rest more
likely?

He decided to skirt the edge of the town and get some sense of the lie
of the land.  If he could find no evidence of a police presence then
he'd enter, and take the consequences.  He hadn't come all this way to
turn back.

Midian revealed nothing of itself as he moved around its south eastern
flank, except perhaps its emptiness.  Not only could he see no sign of
police vehicles in the streets, or secreted between the houses, he
could see no automobile of any kind: no truck, no farm vehicle.  He
began to wonder if the-town was one of those religious communities he'd
read of, whose dogmas denied them electricity or the combustion
engine.

But as he climbed toward the spine of a small hill on the summit of
which Midian stood, a second and plainer explanation occurred.  There
was nobody in Midian.  The thought stopped him in his tracks.  He
stared across at the houses, searching for some evidence of decay, but
he could see none.  The roofs were intact, as far as he could make out,
there were no buildings that appeared on the verge of collapse.  Yet,
with the night so quiet he could hear the whoosh of falling stars
overhead, he could hear nothing from the town.  If somebody in Midian
had moaned in their sleep the night would have brought the sound his
way, but there was only silence.

Midian was a ghost town.

Never in his life had he felt such desolation, stood like a dog
returned home to find its mast gone, not knowing what his life now
meant or we ever mean again.

It took him several minutes to uproot himself continue his circuit of
the town.  Twenty yards on I where he'd stood, however, the height of
the hill him sight of a scene more mysterious even than vacant
Midian.

On the far side of the town lay a cemetery, vantage point gave him an
uninterrupted view despite the high walls that bounded the place. Presv
ably it had been built to serve the entire region, for was massively
larger than a town Midian's size cod ever have required. Many of the
mausoleums were j impressive scale, that much was clear even I
distance, the layout of avenues, trees and tombs le ing the cemetery
the appearance of a small city.

Boone began down the slope of the hill towards his route still taking
him well clear of the town its After the adrenalin rush of finding and
approach ii Midian he felt his reserves of strength failing fast; pain
and exhaustion that expectation had numbed no returned with a
vengeance.  It could not be long, knew, before his muscles gave out
completely and collapsed.  Perhaps behind the cemetery's walls he'd I
able to find a niche to conceal himself from his pi suers and rest his
bones.

There were two means of access.  A small gate in the side wall, and
large double gates that faced towards the town.  He chose the former.
It was latched but nc locked.  He gently pushed it open, and stepped
insidsj The impression he'd had from the hill, of the cemeter as city,
was here confirmed, the mausoleums risi house-high around him.  Their
scale, and, now that could study them close up, their elaboration,
puzzle him.  What great families had occupied the town or it surrounds,
moneyed enough to bury their dead in :

splendour?  The small communities of the prairie clung to the land as
their sustenance, but it seldom made them rich; and on the few
occasions when it did, with oil or gold, never in such numbers.  Yet
here were magnificent tombs, avenue upon avenue of them, built in all
manner of styles from the classical to the baroque, and marked though
he was not certain his fatigued senses were telling him the truth with
motifs from warring theologies.

It was beyond him.  He needed sleep.  The tombs had been standing a
century or more; the puzzle would still be there at dawn.

He found himself a bed out of sight between two graves and laid his
head down.  The spring growth of grass smelt sweet.  He'd slept on far
worse pillows, and would again.

3>*?Z?<

A Different Ape r the sound of an animal woke him, its growls I
finding their way into floating dreams and call

-Ling him down to earth.  He opened his eyes, and sat up.  He couldn't
see the dog, but he heard it still.  Was it behind him?; the proximity
of the tombs threw echoes back and forth.  Very slowly, he turned to
look over his shoulder.  The darkness was deep, but did not quite
conceal a large beast, its species impossible to read.  There was no
misinterpreting the threat from its throat however.  It didn't like his
scrutiny, to judge by the tenor of its growls.

"Hey, boy ..."  he said softly, 'it's OK."

Ligaments creaking, he started to stand up, knowing that if he stayed
on the ground the animal had easy access to his throat.  His limbs had
stiffened lying on the cold ground; he moved like a geriatric.  Perhaps
it was this that kept the animal from attacking, for it simply watched
him, the crescents of the whites of its eyes the only detail he could
make out widening as its gaze followed him into a standing position.
Once on his feet he turned to face the creature, which began to move
towards him.  There was something in its advance that made him think it
was wounded.  He could hear it dragging one of its limbs behind it; its
head low, its stride ragged.

He had words of comfort on his lips when an arm hooked about his neck,
taking breath and words away.

"Move and I gut you."

With the threat a second arm slid around his body,

the fingers digging into his belly with such force had no doubt the
man would make the threat gc with his bare hand.

Boone took a shallow breath.  Even that mine motion brought a
tightening of the death grip at knee and abdomen.  He felt blood run
down his belly into his jeans.

"Who the fuck are you?"  the voice demanded.

He was a bad liar, the truth was safer.

"My name's Boone.  I came here ."  .  I came to find Midian."

Did the hold on his belly relax a little when h| named his purpose?

Why?"  a second voice now demanded.  It took Boon<| no more than a
heart beat to realize that the voice ha come from the shadows ahead of
him, where the wounded beast stood.  Indeed from the beast.

"My friend asked you a question said the voice atf his ear.  "Answer
him."

Boone, disoriented by the attack, fixed his gaze again on whatever
occupied the shadows and found him sel doubting his eyes.  The head of
his questioner was no solid; it seemed almost to be inhaling its
redundant| features, their substance darkening and flowirj through
socket and nostrils and mouth back into itselfj

All thought of his jeopardy disappeared, what seize him now was
elation. Narcisse had not lied.  Here was the transforming truth of
that.

"I came to be amongst you he said, answering the miracle's question. "I
came because I belong here."

A question emerged from the soft laughter behind him.

"What does he look like, Peloquin?"

The thing had drunk its beast-face down.  There we ref human features
beneath, set on a body more reptile!  than mammal.  That limb he
dragged behind him was a I tail; his wounded lope the gait of a low
slung lizard.  |

That too was under review, as the tremor of change moved down its
jutting spine.

"He looks like a Natural," Peloquin replied.  "Not that that means
much."

Why could his attacker not see for himself, Boone wondered.

He glanced down at the hand on his belly.  It had six fingers, tipped
not with nails but with claws, now buried half an inch in his muscle.

"Don't kill me he said.  "I've come a long way to be here."

"Hear that, Jackie?"  said Peloquin, thrusting from the ground with its
four legs to stand upright in front of Boone.  His eyes, now level with
Boone's, were bright blue.  His breath was as hot as the blast from an
open furnace.

"What kind of beast are you, then?"  he wanted to know.  The
transformation was all but finished.  The man beneath the monster was
nothing remarkable.  Forty, lean and sallow skinned.

"We should take him below," said Jackie.  "Lylesburg will want to see
him."

"Probably," said Peloquin.  "But I think we'd be wasting his time. This
is a Natural, Jackie.  I can smell 'em."

"I've spilled blood .. ."  Boone murmured.  "Killed eleven people."

The blue eyes perused him.  There was humour in them.

"I don't think so Peloquin said.

"It's not up to us Jackie put in.  "You can't judge him."

"I've got eyes in my head, haven't I?"  said Peloquin.  "I know a clean
man when I see one."  He wagged his finger at Boone.  "You're not
Nightbreed/ he said.  "You're meat.  That's what you are.  Meat for the
beast."

The humour drained from his expression as he spoke, and hunger replaced
it.

"We can't do this the other creature protested.

"Who'll know?"  said Peloquin.  "Who'll ever know?"

"We're breaking the law."

Peloquin seemed indifferent to that.  He bared teeth, dark smoke oozing
from the gaps and rising over his face.  Boone knew what was coming
next."  man was breathing out what he'd moments inhaled: his lizard
self.  The proportions of his he were already altering subtly, as
though his skull we dismantling and re-organizing himself beneath the
hood of his flesh.

"You can't kill me!"  he said.  "I belong with you."

Was there a denial out of the smoke in front of himf If so it was lost
in translation.  There was to be nj further debate.  The beast intended
to eat him He felt a sharp pain in his belly, and glanced do\ to see
the clawed hand detach itself from his flesh.  Th l hold at his neck
slipped, and the creature behind him said:

"Go."

He needed no persuasion.  Before Peloquin could complete his
reconstruction Boone slid from Jackie's embrace and ran.  Any sense of
direction he might have| had was forfeited in the desperation of the
moment, desperation fuelled by a roar of fury from the hungryj beast,
and the sound almost instant, it seemed of pursuit.

The necropolis was a maze.  He ran blindly, ducking!  to right and left
wherever an opening offered itself, but he didn't need to look over his
shoulder to know that!  the devourer was closing on him.  He heard its
accusation in his head as he ran:

You're not Nightbreed.  You're meat.  Meat for the!  beast.

The words were an agony profounder than the ache j in his legs or his
lungs.  Even here, amongst the monsters of Midian he did not belong.
And if not here, where?  He was running, as prey had always run when
the hungry were on their heels, but it was a race he couldn't win.

He stopped.  He turned.

Peloquin was five or six yards behind him, his body still human, naked
and vulnerable, but the head entirely bestial, the mouth wide and
ringed with teeth like thorns.  He too stopped running, perhaps
expecting Boone to draw a weapon.  When none was forthcoming, he raised
his arms towards his victim.  Behind him, Jackie stumbled into view,
and Boone had his first glimpse of the man.  Or was it men?  There were
two faces on his lumpen head, the features of both utterly distorted;
eyes dislodged so they looked everywhere but ahead, mouths collided
into a single gash, noses slits without bones.  It was the face of a
freak show foetus.

Jackie tried one last appeal, but Peloquin's outstretched arms were
already transforming from fingertip to elbow, their delicacy giving way
to formidable power.

Before the muscle was fixed he came at Boone, leaping to bring his
victim down.  Boone fell before him.  It was too late now to regret his
passivity.  He felt the claws tear at his jacket to bare the good flesh
of his chest.  Peloquin raised his head and grinned, an expression this
mouth was not made for; then he bit.  The teeth were not long, but
many.  They hurt less than Boone had expected until Peloquin pulled
back, tearing away a mouthful of muscle, taking skin and nipple with
it.

The pain shocked Boone from resignation; he began to thrash beneath
Peloquin's weight.  But the beast spat the morsel from its maw and came
back for better, exhaling the smell of blood in its prey's face.  There
was reason for the exhalation; on its next breath it would suck Boone's
heart and lungs from his chest.  He cried out for help, and it came.
Before the fatal breath could be drawn Jackie seized hold of Peloquin
and dragged him from his sustenance.  Boone felt the weight of the
creature lifted, and through the blur of agony

saw his champion wrestling with Peloquin, thrashing limbs intertwined.
He didn't wait to el the victor.  Pressing his palm to the wound on his
chfi he got to his feet.

There was no safety for him here; Peloquin surely not the only occupant
with a taste for human meat.  He could feel others watching him as he
staggered through the necropolis, waiting for him to fall and fall so
they could take him with impunity.

Yet his system, traumatized as it was, didn't fail.  There was a vigour
in his muscles he'd not felt he'd done violence to himself, a thought
that repuls him now as it had never before.  Even the woi throbbing
beneath his hand, had its life, and wsf celebrating it.  The pain had
gone, replaced not numbness but by a sensitivity that was almost eroti|
tempting Boone to reach into his chest and stroke ] heart.  Entertained
by such non senses he let inst inc guide his feet and it brought him to
the double gate The latch defeated his blood-slicked hands so climbed,
scaling the gates with an ease that broug laughter to his throat.  Then
he was off up toward Midian, running not for fear of pursuit but for
pleasure his limbs took in usage, and his senses ijj speed.

"the town was indeed empty, as he'd known it I must be.  Though the
houses had seemed in good shape at half a mile's distance, closer
scrutiny showed them to be much the worse for being left unoccupied for
the cycle of seasons.  Though the feeling of well being still suffused
him, he feared that loss of blood would undo him in time.  He needed
something to bind his wound, however primitive.  In search of a length
of curtaining, or a piece of forsaken bed linen he opened the door of
one of the houses and plunged into the darkness within.

He hadn't been aware, until he was inside, how strangely attenuated his
senses had become.  His eyes pierced the gloom readily, discovering the
pitiful debris the sometime tenants had left behind, all dusted by the
dry earth years of prairie had borne in through broken window and the
ill-fitting door.  There was cloth to be found; a length of damp
stained linen that he tore between teeth and right hand into strips
while keeping his left upon the wound.

He was in that process when he heard the creak of boards on the stoop.
He let the bandaging drop from his teeth.  The door stood open.  On the
threshold a silhouetted man, whose name Boone knew though the face was
all darkness.  It was Decker's cologne he smelt; Decker's heartbeat he
heard; Decker's sweat he tasted n the air between them.

"So," said the doctor.  "Here you are."

There were forces mustering in the starlit street.

With ears preternaturally sharp Boone caught sound of nervous
whispers, and of wind passed 1 churning hotels, and of weapons cocked
ready to hunt the lunatic down should he try to slip them.

"How did you find me?"  he said.

"Narcisse, was it?"  Decker said.  "Your friend at hospital?"

"Is he dead?"

"I'm afraid so.  He died fighting."

Decker took a step into the house.

"You're hurt he said.  "What did you do to your self?

Something prevented Boone from replying.  Was| that the mysteries of
Midian were so bizarre he'd be believed?  Or that their nature was not
Decke business?  Not the latter surely.  Decker's commit me to
comprehending the monstrous could not be doubt.  Who better then to
share the revelation wit Yet he hesitated.

"Tell me Decker said again.  "How did you get wound?"

"Later/ said Boone.

There'll be no later.  I think you know that."

"I'll survive Boone said.  "This isn't as bad as it looks At least it
doesn't feel bad."

"I don't mean the wound.  I mean the police.  They'if waiting for
you."

"I know."

"And you're not going to come quietly, are you?"

Boone was no longer sure.  Decker's voice rem inde him so much of being
safe, he almost believed it woi be possible again, if the doctor wanted
to make it so.

But there was no talk of safety from Decker nov Only of death.

"You're a multiple murderer, Boone.  Desperate.  Da gerous.  It was
tough persuading them to let me see you."

"I'm glad you did."

"I'm glad too," Decker replied.  "I wanted a chance to say goodbye."
Why does it have to be this way?"

"You know why."

He didn't; not really.  What he did know, more and more certainly, was
that Peloquin had told the truth.

You're not Nightfaeed, he'd said.

Nor was he; he was innocent.

"I killed nobody," he murmured.

7 know that," Decker replied.

That's why I couldn't remember any of the rooms.  I was never there."

"But you remember now," Decker said.

"Only because Boone stopped, and stared at the man in the charcoal
suit."  because you showed me."

"Taught you," Decker corrected him.

Boone kept staring, waiting for an explanation that wasn't the one in
his head.  It couldn't be Decker.  Decker was Reason, Decker was
Calm.

There are two children dead in Westlock tonight," the doctor was
saying.  They're blaming you."

"I've never been to Westlock," Boone protested.

"But I have," Decker replied.  "I made sure they saw the pictures; the
men out there.  Child murderers are the worst.  It'd be better you died
here than be turned over to them."

"You?"  Boone said.  "You did it?"

"Yes."

"All of them?"

"And more."

"Why?"

Decker pondered on this a moment.

"Because I like it," he said flatly.

He still looked so sane, in his well cut suit.  Even his face,
whichjtopne could see clearly now, bore no visible erue'to the lunacy
beneath.  Who would have doubted, seeing the bloodied man and the
clean, which was the lunatic and which his healer?  But appearances

deceived.  It was only the monster, the child of Midy who actually
altered its flesh to parade its true The rest hid behind their calm,
and plotted the dea ii of children.

Decker drew a gun from the inside of his jacket.

"They armed me," he said.  "In case you lost con tro

His hand trembled, but at such a distance he con scarcely miss.  In
moments it would all be over, bullet would fly and he'd be dead, with
so ma mysteries unsolved.  The wound; Midian; Decker, many questions
that he'd never answer.

There was no other moment but now.  Flinging cloth he still held at
Decker, he threw himself asid behind it.  Decker fired, the shot
filling the room witj sound and light.  By the time the cloth hit the
grou Boone was at the door.  As he came within a yard of the gun's
light came again.  And an instant after, sound.  And with the sound a
blow to Boone's back threw him forward, out through the door and onto 1
stoop.

Decker's shout came with him.

"He's aimedV

Boone heard the shadows prepare to bring him dowr He raised his arms in
sign of surrender; opened mouth to protest his innocence.

The men gathered behind their cars saw only his bloodied hands, guilt
enough.  They fired.

Boone heard the bullets coming his way two fror the left, three from
the right, and one from straight ahead, aimed at his heart.  He had
time to wonder a| how slow they were, and how musical.  Then theA
struck him: upper thigh, groin, spleen, shoulder, cheel and heart.  He
stood upright for several seconds, then somebody fired again, and
nervous trigger finger unleashed a second volley.  Two of these shots
wenfj wide.  The rest hit home: abdomen, knee, two to the chest, one to
the temple.  This time he fell.

As he hit the ground he felt the wound Peloquin had J

ven him convulse like a second heart, its presence ^riously comforting
in his dwindling moments.  Somewhere nearby he heard Decker's voice and
his footsteps approaching as he emerged from the house to peruse the
body.

"Got the bastard somebody said.

"He's dead Decker said.

"No I'm not Boone thought.

Then thought no more.

PART TWO

DEATH'S A BITCH

"The miraculous too is born, has its season, and dies ..."

Carmel Sands Orthodoxies

 Knowing Boone was gone from her was bad enough, but what came after
was so much worse.  First, of course, there'd been that telephone call.
She'd met Philip Decker only once, and didn't recognize his voice until
he identified himself.  "I've got some bad news I'm afraid."

"You've found Boone."

"Yes."

"He's hurt?"

There was a pause.  She knew before the silence was broken what came
next.

"I'm afraid he's dead, Lori."

There it was, the news she'd half known was coming, because she'd been
too happy, and it couldn't last.  Boone had changed her life out of all
recognition.  His death would do the same.

She thanked the doctor for the kindness of telling her himself, rather
than leaving the duty to the police.  Then she put the phone down, and
waited to believe it.

There were those amongst her peers who said she'd never have been
courted by a man like Boone if he'd been sane, meaning not that his
illness made him choose blindly but that a face like his, which
inspired such fawning in those susceptible to faces, would have been in
the company of like beauty had the mind

behind it not been unbalanced.  These remarks bit deep,j because in
her heart of hearts she thought them true Boone had little by way of
possessions, but his face was his glory, demanding a devotion to its
study that embarrassed and discomfited him.  It gave him no pleasure to
be stared at.  Indeed Lori had more than once feared he'd scar himself
in the hope of spoiling whatever drew attention to him, an urge
rehearsed it his total lack of interest in his appearance.  She'd known
him go days without showering, weeks without!  shaving, half a year
without a hair cut.  It did little to| dissuade the devotees.  He
haunted them because he in his turn was haunted, simple as that.

She didn't waste time trying to persuade her friends | of the fact.
Indeed she kept conversation about him to 3 the minimum, particularly
when talk turned to sex.  She'd slept with Boone three times only, each
occasion a disaster.  She knew what the gossips would make of that. 
But his tender, eager way with her suggested his overtures were more
than dutiful.  He simply couldn't carry them through, which fact made
him rage, and fall into such depression she'd come to hold herself
back, cooling their exchanges so as not to invite further failure.

She dreamt of him often though; scenarios that were unequivocally
sexual.  No symbolism here.  Just she and Boone in bare rooms, fucking.
Sometimes there were people beating on the doors to get in and see, but
they never did.  He belonged to her completely; in all his beauty and
his wretchedness.

But only in dreams.  Now more than ever, only in dreams.

Their story together was over.  There'd be no more dark days, when his
conversation was a circle of defeat, no moments of sudden sunshine
because she'd chanced upon some phrase that gave him hope.  She'd not
been unprepared for an abrupt end.  But nothing like this.

Not Boone unmasked as a killer and shot down in a town she'd never
heard of.  This was the wrong ending.  But bad as it was, there was
worse to follow.

After the telephone call there'd been the inevitable cross questioning
by the police: had she ever suspected him of criminal activities?  had
he ever been violent in his dealings with her?  She told them a dozen
times he'd never touched her except in love, and then only with
coaxing.  They seemed to find an unspoken confirmation in her account
of his tentativeness, exchanging knowing looks as she made a blushing
account of their lovemaking.  When they'd finished with their questions
they asked her if she would identify the body.  She agreed to the duty.
Though she'd been warned it would be unpleasant, she wanted a
goodbye.

It was then that the times, which had got strange of late, got stranger
still.

Boone's body had disappeared.

At first nobody would tell her why the identification process was being
delayed; she was fobbed off with excuses that didn't quite ring true.
Finally, however, they had no option but to tell her the truth.  The
corpse, which had been left in the police mortuary overnight, had
simply vanished.  Nobody knew how it had been stolen- the mortuary had
been locked up, and there was no sign of forced entry or indeed why.  A
search was under way but to judge by the harassed faces that delivered
this news there didn't seem to be much hope held out of finding the
body snatchers.  The inquest on Aaron Boone would have to proceed
without a corpse.

That he might never now be laid to rest tormented her.  The thought of
his body as some pervert's plaything,

or worse some terrible icon, haunted her night and dayj She shocked
herself with her power to imagine wha| uses his poor flesh might be put
to, her mind set on downward spiral of morbidity which made her fearfu
for the first time in her life of her own mental processes.

Boone had been a mystery in life, his affection miracle which gave her
a sense of herself she'd never| had.  Now, in death, that mystery
deepened.  It see me she'd not known him at all, even in those moments
I traumatic lucidity between them, when he'd beeni ready to break his
skull open till she coaxed the distressf from him; even then he'd been
hiding a secret life off murder from her.

It scarcely seemed possible.  When she pictured him] now, making idiot
faces at her, or weeping in her lap, \ the thought that she'd never
known him properly was!  like a physical hurt.  Somehow, she had to
heal that.  hurt, or be prepared to bear the wound of his betrayal j
for ever.  She had to know why his other life had taken!  him off to
the back of beyond.  Maybe the best solution!  was to go looking where
he'd been found: in Midian.l Perhaps there she'd find the mystery
answered.

The police had instructed her not to leave Calgary until after the
inquest, but she was a creature of?  impulse like her mother.  She'd
woken at three in the ] morning with the idea of going to Midian.  She
was packing by five, and was heading north on Highway 2 an hour after
dawn.

Things went well at first.  It was good to be away from : the office
where she'd be missed, but what the hell?  and the apartment, with all
its reminders of her time

with Boone.  She wasn't quite driving blind, but as near as damn it;
no map she'd been able to lay hands on marked any town called Midian.
She'd heard mention of other towns, however, in exchanges between the
police.  Shere Neck was one, she remembered and that was marked on the
maps.  She made that her target.

She knew little or nothing about the landscape she was crossing.  Her
family had come from Toronto the civilized east as her mother had
called it to the day she died, resenting her husband for the move that
had taken them into the hinterland.  The prejudice had rubbed off.  The
sight of wheat fields stretching as far as the eye could see had never
done much for Lori's imagination and nothing she saw as she drove
changed her mind.  The grain was being left to grow, its planters and
reapers about other business.  The sheer monotony of it wearied her
more than she'd anticipated.  She broke her journey at McLennan, an
hour's drive short of Peace River, and slept a full night undisturbed
on a motel bed, to be up good and early the next morning, and off
again.  She'd make Shere Neck by noon, she estimated.

Things didn't quite work out that way, however.  Somewhere east of
Peace River she lost her bearings, and had to drive forty miles in what
she suspected was the wrong direction till she found a gas station, and
someone to help her on her way.

There were twin boys playing with plastic armies in the dirt of the
station office step.  Their father, whose blond hair they shared,
ground a cigarette out amongst the battalions and crossed to the car.

"What can I get you?"

"Gas, please.  And some information?"

"It'll cost you," he said, not smiling.

"I'm looking for a town called Shere Neck.  Do you know it?"

The war games had escalated behind him.  He turned on the children.

"Will you shut up?"  he said.

The boys threw each other sideways glances, and fell silent, until he
turned back to Lori.  Too many years < working outdoors in the summer
sun had aged him j prematurely.

"What do you want Shere Neck for?"  he said.

"I'm trying ... to track somebody."

"That so?"  he replied, plainly intrigued.  He offered!  her a grin
designed for better teeth.  "Anyone I know?"| he said.  "We don't get
too many strangers through^ here."

There was no harm in asking, she supposed.  Shel reached back into the
car and fetched a photograph from her bag.

"You didn't ever see this man I suppose?"

Armageddon was looming at the step.  Before looking \ at Boone's
photograph he turned on the children.

"I told you to shut the fuck up!"  he said, then turned back to study
the picture.  His response was immediate.  "You know who this guy
is?"

Lori hesitated.  The raw face before her was scowling.  It was too late
to claim ignorance, however.

"Yes," she said, trying not to sound offensive.  "I know who it is."

"And you know what he did?"  The man's lip curled as he spoke.  "There
were pictures of him.  I saw them."  Again, he turned on the children.
"Will you shut up?"

"It wasn't me," one of the pair protested.

"I don't give a fuck who it was!"  came the reply.

He moved towards them, arm raised.  They were out from his shadow in
seconds, forsaking the armies in fear of him.  His rage at the children
and his disgust at the picture were welded into one revulsion now.

"A fucking animal he said, turning to Lori.  "That's what he was.  A
fucking animal."

He thrust the tainted photograph back at her.  "Damn good thing they
took him out.  What you wanna do, go bless the spot?"

She claimed the photograph from his oily fingers without replying, but
he read her expression well enough.  Unbowed he continued his tirade.

"Man like that should be put down like a dog, lady.  Like a fucking
dog."

She retreated before his vehemence, her hands trembling so much she
could barely open the car door.

"Don't you want no gas?"  he suddenly said.

"Go to hell," she replied.

He looked bewildered.

"What's your problem?"  he spat back.

She turned the ignition, muttering a prayer that the car would not play
dead.  She was in luck.  Driving away at speed she glanced in her
mirror to see the man shouting after her through the dust she'd kicked
up.

She didn't know where his anger had come from, but she knew where it
would go: to the children.  No use to fret about it.  The world was
full of brutal fathers and tyrannical mothers; and come to that, cruel
and uncaring children.  It was the way of things.  She couldn't police
the species.

Relief at her escape kept any other response at bay for ten minutes,
but then it ran out, and a trembling overtook her, so violent she had
to stop at the first sign of civilization and find somewhere to calm
herself down.  There was a small diner amongst the dozen or so stores,
where she ordered coffee and a sugar fix of pie, then retired to the
rest room to splash some cold water on her flushed cheeks.  Solitude,
albeit snatched, was the only cue her tears needed.  Staring at her
blotchy, agitated features in the cracked mirror she began to sob so
insistently, nothing not even the entrance of another customer could
shame her into stopping.

The newcomer didn't do as Lori would have done in such circumstances,
and withdraw.  Instead, catching Lori's eye in the mirror, she said:

"What is it?  Men or money?"

Lori wiped the tears away with her fingers.

I'm sorry?  "she said.

"When I cry the girl said, putting a comb through!  her hennaed hair."
it's only ever men or money."

"Oh."  The girl's unabashed curiosity helped hold) fresh tears at bay.
"A man Lori said.

"Leave you, did he?"

"Not exactly."

"Jesus," said the girl.  "Did he come back?  That's even jj worse."

The remark earned a tiny smile from Lori.

"It's usually the ones you don't want, right?"  the girl went on.  "You
tell 'em to piss off, they just keep coming back, like dogs '

Mention of dogs reminded Lori of the scene at the garage, and she felt
tears mustering again.

"Oh shut up, Sheryl," the newcomer chided herself, 'you're making it
worse."

"No/ said Lori.  "No really.  I need to talk."

Sheryl smiled.

"As badly as I need coffee?"

Sheryl Margaret Clark was her name, and she could have coaxed gossip
from angels.  By their second hour of conversation and their fifth
coffee, Lori had told her the whole sorry story, from her first meeting
with Boone to the moment she and Sheryl had exchanged looks in the
mirror.  Sheryl herself had a story to tell more comedy than tragedy-
about her lover's passion for cars and hers for his brother, which had
ended in hard words and parting.  She was on the road to clear her
head.

"I've not done this since I was a kid she said, 'just going where the
fancy takes me.  I've forgotten how good it feels.  Maybe we could go
on together.  To Shere Neck.  I've always wanted to see the place."

"Is that right?"

Sheryl laughed.

"No.  But it's as good a destination as any.  All directions being
equal to the fancy-free."

Where He Fell

So they travelled on together, having taken directions from the owner
of the diner, who claimed he had a better than vague idea of Midian's
whereabouts.  The instructions were good.  Their route took them
through Shere Neck, which was bigger than Lori had expected, and on
down an unmarked road that in theory led to Midian.

"Why d'you wanna go there?"  the diner owner had wanted to know.
"Nobody goes there anymore.  It's empty."

"I'm writing an article on the gold rush-Sheryl had replied, an
enthusiastic liar.  "She's sightseeing."

"Some sight came the response.

The remark had been made ironically, but it was truer than its speaker
had known.  It was late afternoon, the light golden on the gravel road,
when the town came into view, and until they were in the streets
themselves they were certain this could not be the right place, because
what ghost town ever looked so welcoming?  Once out of the sun,
however, that impression changed.  There was something forlornly
romantic about the deserted houses, but finally the sight was
dispiriting and not a little eerie.  Seeing the place, Lori's first
thought was:

"Why would Boone come here?"

Her second:

"He didn't come of his own volition.  He was chased.  It was an
accident that he was here at all."

They parked the car in the middle of the main stree which was, give or
take an alleyway, the only street.

"No need to lock it Sheryl said.  "Ain't anybodj coming to steal it."

Now that they were here, Lori was gladder than eve of Sheryl's company.
Her verve and good humour were an affront to this sombre place; they
kept what eve haunted it at bay.

Ghosts could be laid with laughter; misery was made of sterner stuff.
For the first time since Decker's telephone call she felt something
approximating!  bereavement.  It was so easy to imagine Boone hereJ
alone and confused, knowing his pursuers were closing!  on him.  It was
easier still to find the place where they'd!  shot him down.  The holes
the stray bullets had madej were ringed with chalk marks; smears and
splashes of j blood had soaked into the planks of the porch.  She!
stood off from the spot for several minutes, unable to j approach it
yet equally unable to retreat.  Sheryl had tactfully taken herself off
exploring: there was nobody to break the hypnotic hold the sight of his
deathbed had upon her.

She would miss him forever.  Yet there were no tears.  Perhaps she'd
sobbed them out back in the diner \ washroom.  What she felt instead,
fuelling her loss, was the mystery of how a man she'd known and loved
or loved and thought she'd known- could have died here for crimes she'd
never have suspected him of.  Perhaps it was the anger she felt towards
him that prevented tears, knowing that despite his professions of love
he'd hidden so much from her, and was now beyond the reach of her
demands for explanation.  Could he not at least have left a sign?  She
found herself staring at the blood stains wondering if eyes more acute
than hers might have found some meaning in them.  If prophecies could
be read from the dregs in a coffee cup surely the last mark Boone had
made on the world carried some significance.  But she was no
interpreter.  The signs

were just of many unsolved mysteries, chief amongst them the feeling
she voiced aloud as she stared at the stairs:

"I still love you Boone."

Now there was a puzzle, that despite her anger and her bewilderment
she'd have traded the life that was left in her just to have him walk
out through that door now and embrace her.

But there was no reply to her declaration, however oblique.  No wraith
breath against her cheek; no sigh against her inner ear.  If Boone was
still here in some phantom form he was mute, and breathless; not
released by death, but its prisoner.

Somebody spoke her name.  She looked up.

' don't you think?"  Sheryl was saying.

"I'm sorry?"

Time we went Sheryl repeated.  "Don't you think it's time we went?"

"Oh."

"You don't mind me saying, you look like shit."

Thanks."

Lori put her hand out, in need of steadying.  Sheryl grasped it.

"You've seen all you need to, honey," she said.

"Yes ..."

"Let it go."

"You know it still doesn't seem quite real," Lori said.  "Even standing
here.  Even seeing the place.  I can't quite believe it.  How can he be
so ... irretrievable?  There should be some way we could reach, don't
you think, some way to reach and touch them."

"Who?"

The dead.  Otherwise it's all nonsense, isn't it?  It's all sadistic
nonsense."  She broke her hold with Sheryl; put her hand to her brow
and rubbed it with her fingertips.

"I'm sorry," she said, "I'm not making much sense, ami?"

 "Honestly?  No."

Lori proffered an apologetic look.

"Listen/ Sheryl said, 'the old town's not what it used to be.  I think
we should get out of here and leave I fall apart.  Whadda you say?"

To vote for that."

"I keep thinking ..."  Sheryl stopped.

"What?"

"I just don't like the company very much," she ; "I don't mean you,"
she added hurriedly.

"Who then?"

"All these dead folk," she said.

"What dead folk?"

"Over the hill.  There's a bloody cemetery."

"Really?"

"It's not ideal viewing in your state of mind," She said hurriedly. But
she could tell by the expression < Lori's face she shouldn't have
volunteered information.

"You don't want to see," she said.  "Really you don't.|

"Just a minute or two."  Lori said.

"If we stay much longer, we'll be driving back in > dark."

"I'll never come here again."

"Oh sure.  You should see the sights.  Great sight; Dead people's
houses."

Lori made a small smile.

"I'll be quick," she said, starting down the street the direction of
the cemetery.  Sheryl hesitated.  Shef left her sweater in the car, and
was getting chilly, all the time she'd been here she hadn't been able
dislodge the suspicion that they were being watche With dusk close she
didn't want to be alone in street.

"Wait for me," she said, and caught up with Lori who was already in
sight of the graveyard wall.

"Why's it so big?"  Lori wondered aloud.

"Lord knows.  Maybe they all died out at once."

"So many?  It's just a little town."

True."

"And look at the size of the tombs."

"I should be impressed?"

"Did you go in?"

"No.  And I don't much want to."

"Just a little way."

"Where have I heard that before?"

There was no reply from Lori.  She was at the cemetery gates now,
reaching through the ironwork to operate the latch.  She succeeded.
Pushing one of the gates open far enough to slip through, she entered.
Reluctantly, Sheryl followed.

"Why so many?"  Lori said again.  It wasn't simply curiosity that had
her voice the question; it was that this strange spectacle made her
wonder again if Boone had simply been cornered here by accident or
whether Midian had been his destination.  Was somebody buried here he'd
come hoping to find alive?; or at whose grave he'd wanted to confess
his crimes?  Though it was all conjecture, the avenues of tombs seemed
to offer some faint hope of comprehension the blood he'd shed would not
have supplied had she studied it till the sky fell.

"It's late," Sheryl reminded her.

"Yes."

"And I'm cold."

"Are you?"

"I'd like to go, Lori."

"Oh .. . I'm sorry.  Yes.  Of course.  It's getting too dark to see
much anyhow."

"You noticed."

They started back up the hill towards the town, Sheryl making the
pace.

What little light remained was almost gone by the time they reached the
outskirts of the town.  Letting Sheryl march on to the car Lori stopped
to take one final look at the cemetery.  From this vantage point it

resembled a fortress.  Perhaps the high walls kept animals out, though
it seemed an unnecessary precaution.  '\ The dead were surely secure,
beneath their memorial I stones.  More likely the walls were the
mourners' way; to keep the dead from having power over them. Within \
those gates the ground was sacred to the departed, tended in their
name.  Outside, the world belonged to the living, who had nothing left
to learn from those they'd lost.

She was not so arrogant.  There was much she wanted to say to the dead
tonight; and much to hear.  That was the pity of it.

She returned to the car oddly exhilarated.  It was only once the doors
were locked and the engine running that Sheryl said:

There's been somebody watching us."

"You sure?"

"I swear.  I saw him just as I got to the car."

She was rubbing her breasts vigorously.  "Jesus, my nipples get numb
when I'm cold."

What did he look like?"  Lori said.

Sheryl shrugged.  "Too dark to see," she said.  "Doesn't matter now.
Like you said, we won't be coming back here again."

True, Lori thought.  They could drive away down a straight road and
never look back.  Maybe the deceased citizens of Midian envied them
that, behind their fortress walls.

It wasn't difficult to choose their accommodation in Shere Neck; there
were only two places available, and one was already full to brimming
with buyers and sellers for a farm machinery sale that had just taken
place, some of the spillage occupying the rooms at the other
establishment: the Sweetgrass Inn.  Had it not been for SheryFs way
with a smile they might have been turned away from there too; but after
some debate a twin-bedded room was found that they could share.  It was
plain, but comfortable.

"You know what my mother used to tell me?"  said Sheryl, as she
unpacked her toiletries in the bathroom.

"What?"

"She used to say: there's a man out there for you, Sheryl; he's walking
around with your name on.  Mind you this is from a woman who's been
looking for her particular man for thirty years and never found him.
But she was always stuck on this romantic notion.  You know, the man of
your dreams is just around the next corner.  And she stuck me on it
too, damn her."

"Still?"

"Oh yeah.  I'm still looking.  You'd think I'd know better, after what
I've been through.  You want to shower first?"

"No.  You go ahead."

A party had started up in the next room, the walls too thin to muffle
much of the noise.  While Sheryl

took her shower Lori lay on the bed and turned the events of the day
over in her head.  The exercise didn't last long.  The next thing she
knew she was being stirred from sleep by Sheryl, who'd showered and was
ready for a night on the town.

"You coming?"  she wanted to know.

"I'm too tired," Lori said.  "You go have a good time."

"If there's a good time to be had said Sheryl ruefully.

"You'll find it Lori said.  "Give 'em something to talk about."

Sheryl promised she would, and left Lori to rest, but the edge had been
taken off her fatigue.  She could do no more than doze, and even that
was interrupted at intervals by loud bursts of drunken hilarity from
the adjacent room.

She got up to go in search of a soda machine and ice, returning with
her calorie-free nightcap to a less than peaceful bed.  She'd take a
leisurely bathe, she decided, until drink or fatigue quieted the
neighbours.  Immersed to her neck in hot water she felt her muscles un
knotting themselves, and by the time she emerged she felt a good deal
mellower.  The bathroom had no extractor, so both the mirrors had
steamed up.  She was grateful for their discretion.  The catalogue of
her frailties was quite long enough without another round of
self-scrutiny to swell it.  Her neck was too thick, her face too thin,
her eyes too large, her nose too small.  In essence she was one excess
upon another, and any attempt on her part to undo the damage merely
exacerbated it.  Her hair, which she grew long to cover the sins of her
neck, was so luxuriant and so dark her face looked sickly in its frame.
Her mouth, which was her mother's mouth to the last flute, was
naturally, even indecently, red, but taming its colour with a pale
lipstick merely made her eyes look vaster and more vulnerable than
ever.

It wasn't that the sum of her features was unattractive.  She'd had
more than her share of men at her feet.  No, the trouble was she didn't
look the way she felt.  It was a sweet face, and she wasn't sweet;
didn't want to be sweet, or thought of as sweet.  Perhaps the powerful
feelings that had touched her in the last few hours seeing the blood,
seeing the tombs would make their mark in time.  She hoped so.  The
memory of them moved in her still, and she was richer for them, however
painful they'd been.

Still naked, she wandered back into the bedroom.  As she'd hoped the
celebrants next door had quietened down.  The music was no longer rock
'n' roll, but something smoochy.  She sat on the edge of the bed and
ran her palms back and forth over her breasts, enjoying their
smoothness.  Her breath had taken on the slow rhythm of the music
through the wall; music for dancing groin to groin, mouth to mouth. She
lay back on the bed, her right hand sliding down her body.  She could
smell several months' accrual of cigarette smoke in the coverlet she
lay on.  It made the room seem almost a public place, with its nightly
comings and goings.  The thought of her nakedness in such a room, and
the smell of her skin's cleanliness on this stale bed, was acutely
arousing.

She eased her first and middle fingers into her cunt, raising her hips
a little to meet the exploration.  This was a joy she offered herself
all too seldom, her Catholic upbringing had put guilt between her
instinct and her fingertips.  But tonight she was a different woman.
She found the gasping places quickly, putting her feet on the edge of
the bed and spreading her legs wide to give both hands a chance to
play.

It wasn't Boone she pictured as the first waves of gooseflesh came.
Dead men were bad lovers.  Better she forgot him.  His face had been
pretty, but she'd never kiss it again.  His cock had been pretty too,
but she'd never stroke it, or have it in her again.  All she had was

herself, and pleasure for pleasure's sake.  That was what she pictured
now: the very act she was performing.  A clean body naked on a stale
bed.  A woman in a strange room enjoying her own strange self.

The rhythm of the music no longer moved her.  She had her own rhythm,
rising and falling, rising and falling, each time climbing higher.
There was no peak.  Just height after height, till she was running with
sweat and gorged on sensation.  She lay still for several minutes.
Then, knowing sleep was quickly overtaking her and that she could
scarcely pass the night in her present position, she threw off all the
covers but a single sheet, put her head on the pillow, and fell into
the space behind her closed eyes.

The sweat on her body cooled beneath the thin sheet.  In sleep, she was
at Midian's necropolis, the wind coming to meet her down its avenues
from all directions at once north, south, east and west chilling her as
it whipped her hair above her head, and ran up inside her blouse.  The
wind was not invisible.  It had a texture, as though it carried a
weight of dust, the motes steadily gumming up her eyes and sealing her
nose, finding its way into her underwear and up into her body by those
routes too.

It was only as the dust blinded her completely that she realized what
it was- the remains of the dead, the ancient dead, blown on contrary
winds from pyramids and mausoleums, from vaults and dolmen, charnel
houses and cremator ia  Coffin-dust, and human ash, and bone pounded to
bits, all blown to Midian, and catching her at the crossroads.

She felt the dead inside her.  Behind her lids; in her throat; carried
up towards her womb.  And despite the

chill, and the fury of the four storms, she had no fear of them, nor
desire to expel them.  They sought her warmth and her womanliness.  She
would not reject them.

"Where's Boone?"  she asked in her dream, assuming the dead would know.
He was one of their number after all.

She knew he was not far from her, but the wind was getting stronger,
buffeting her from all directions, howling around her head.

"Boone?"  she said again.  "I want Boone.  Bring him to me."

The wind heard her.  Its howling grew louder.

But somebody else was nearby, distracting her from hearing its reply.

"He's dead, Lori," the voice said.

She tried to ignore the idiot voice, and concentrate on interpreting
the wind.  But she'd lost her place in the conversation, and had to
begin again.

"It's Boone I want," she said.  "Bring me '

"Afo!"

Again, that damn voice.

She tried a third time, but the violence of the wind had become another
violence; she was being shaken.

"Lori!  Wake up!"

She clung to sleep, to the dream of wind.  It might yet tell her what
she needed to know if she could resist the assault of consciousness a
moment longer.

"Boone!"  she called again, but the winds were receding from her, and
taking the dead with them.  She felt the itch of their exit from her
veins and senses.  What knowledge they had to impart was going with
them.  She was powerless to hold them.

"Lori."

Gone now; all of them gone.  Carried away on the storm.

She had no choice but to open her eyes knowing they

would find Sheryl, mere flesh and blood, sitting at the end of the bed
and smiling at her.

"Nightmare?"  she said.

"No.  Not really."

"You were calling his name."

"I know."

"You should have come out with me Sheryl said.  "Get him out of your
system."

"Maybe."

Sheryl was beaming; she clearly had news to tell.

"You met somebody?"  Lori guessed.

Sheryl's smile became a grin.

"Who'd have thought it?"  she said.  "Mother may have been right after
all."

That good?"

"That good."

"Tell all."

"There's not much to tell.  I just went out to find a bar, and I met
this great guy.  Who'd have thought it?"  she said again.  "In the
middle of the damn prairies?  Love comes looking for me."

Her excitement was a joy to behold; she could barely contain her
enthusiasm, as she gave Lori a complete account of the night's romance.
The man's name was Curtis; a banker, born in Vancouver, divorced and
recently moved to Edmonton.  They were perfect compliment aries she
said; star signs, tastes in food and drink, family background.  And
better still, though they'd talked for hours he'd not once tried to
persuade her out of her underwear.  He was a gentleman: articulate,
intelligent and yearning for the sophisticated life of the West Coast,
to which he'd intimated he'd return if he could find the right
companion.  Maybe she was it.

"I'm going to see him again tomorrow night," Sheryl said.  "Maybe even
stay over a few weeks if things go well."

"They will Lori replied.  "You deserve some good times."

"Are you going back to Calgary tomorrow?"  Sheryl asked.

"Yes' was the reply her mind was readying.  But the dream was there
before her, answering quite differently.

"I think I'll go back to Midian first it said.  "I want to see the
place one more time."

Sheryl pulled a face.

"Please don't ask me to go."  she said.  "I'm not up for another
visit."

"No problem Lori replied.  "I'm happy to go alone."

'*

Sun and Shade

The sky was cloudless over Midian, the air efferescent.  All the
fretfulness she'd felt during her -irst visit here had disappeared.
Though this was still the town where Boone had died, she could not hate
it for that.  Rather the reverse: she and it were allies, both marked
by the man's passing.

It was not the town itself she'd come to visit however, it was the
graveyard, and it did not disappoint her.  The sun gleamed on the
mausoleums, the sharp shadows flattering their elaboration.  Even the
grass that sprouted between the tombs was a more brilliant green today.
There was no wind, from any quarter; no breath of the dream-storms,
bringing the dead.  Within the high walls there was an extraordinary
stillness, as if the outside world no longer existed.  Here was a place
sacred to the dead, who were not the living ceased, but almost another
species, requiring rites and prayers that belonged uniquely to them.
She was surrounded on every side by such signs: epitaphs in English,
French, Polish and Russian; images of veiled women and shattered urns,
saints whose martyrdom she could only guess at, stone dogs sleeping
upon their masters' tombs all the symbolism that accompanied this other
people.  And the more she explored, the more she found herself asking
the question she'd posed the day before: why was the cemetery so big?
And why, as became apparent the more tombs she studied, were there so

many nationalities laid here?  She thought of her dream; of the wind
that had come from all quarters of the earth.  It was as if there'd
been something prophetic in it.  The thought didn't worry her.  If that
was the way the world worked by omens and prophecies then it was at
least a system, and she had lived too long without one.  Love had
failed her, perhaps this would not.

It took her an hour, wandering down the hushed avenues to reach the
back wall of the cemetery against which she found a row of animals'
graves cats interred beside birds, dogs beside cats; at peace with each
other as common clay.  It was an odd sight.  Though she knew of other
animal cemeteries she'd never heard of pets being laid in the same
consecrated ground as their owners.  But then should she be surprised
at anything here?  The place was a law unto itself, built far from any
who would care or condemn.

Turning from the back wall, she could see no sign of the front gate,
nor could she remember which of the avenues led back there.  It didn't
matter.  She felt secure in the emptiness of the place, and there was a
good deal she wanted to see: sepulchres whose architecture, towering
over its fellows, invited admiration.  Choosing a route that would take
in half a dozen of the most promising, she began an idling return
journey.  The sun was warmer by the minute now, as it climbed towards
noon.  Though her pace was slow she broke out into a sweat, and her
throat became steadily drier.  It would be no short drive to find
somewhere to quench her thirst.  But parched throat or no, she didn't
hurry.  She knew she'd never come here again.  She intended to leave
with her memories well stocked.

Along the way were several tombs which had been virtually overtaken by
saplings planted in front of them.  Evergreens mostly, reminders of the
life eternal, the trees flourished in the seclusion of the walls, fed
well on rich soil.  In some cases their spreading roots

had cracked the very memorials they'd been planted to offer shade and
protection.  These scenes of verdancy and ruin she found particularly
poignant.  She was lingering at one when the perfect silence was
broken.

Hidden in the foliage somebody, or something, was panting.  She
automatically stepped back, out of the tree's shadow and into the hot
sun.  Shock made her heart beat furiously, its thump deafening her to
the sound that had excited it.  She had to wait a few moments, and
listen hard, to be sure she'd not imagined the sound.  There was no
error.  Something was in hiding beneath the branches of the tree, which
were so weighed by their burden of leaves they almost touched the
ground.  The sound, now that she listened more carefully, was not
human; nor was it healthy.  Its roughness and raggedness suggested a
dying animal.

She stood in the heat of the sun for a minute or more, just staring
into the mass of foliage and shadow, trying to catch some sight of the
creature.  Occasionally there was a movement: a body vainly trying to
right itself, a desperate pawing at the ground as the creature tried to
rise.  Its helplessness touched her.  If she failed to do what she
could for it the animal would certainly perish, knowing this was the
thought that moved her to action that someone had heard its agony and
passed it by.

She stepped back into the shadow.  For a space the panting stopped
completely.  Perhaps the creature was fearful of her, and reading her
approach as aggression was preparing some final act of defence.
Readying herself to retreat before claws and teeth, she parted the
outer twigs and peered through the mesh of branches.  Her first
impression was not one of sight or sound but of smell: a bitter-sweet
scent that was not unpleasant, its source the pale flanked creature she
now made out in the murk, gazing at her wide-eyed.  It was a young
animal, she guessed, but of no species she could name.

A wild cat of some kind, perhaps, but that the skin resembled deer
hide rather than fur.  It watched her warily, its neck barely able to
support the weight of its delicately marked head.  Even as she returned
its gaze it seemed to give up on life.  Its eyes closed and its head
sank to the ground.

The resilience of the branches defied any further approach.  Rather
than attempting to bend them aside she began to break them in order to
get to the failing creature.  They were living wood, and fought back.
Halfway through the thicket a particularly truculent branch snapped
back in her face with such stinging force it brought a shout of pain
from her.  She put her hand to her cheek.  The skin to the right of her
mouth was broken.  Dabbing the blood away she attacked the branch with
fresh vigour, at last coming within reach of the animal.  It was almost
beyond responding to her touch, its eyes momentarily fluttering open as
she stroked its flank, then closing again.  There was no sign that she
could see of a wound, but the body beneath her hand was feverish and
full of tremors.

As she struggled to pick the animal up it began to urinate, wetting her
hands and blouse, but she drew it to her nevertheless, a dead weight in
her arms.  Beyond the spasms that ran through its nervous system there
was no power left in its muscles.  Its limbs hung limply, its head the
same.  Only the smell she'd first encountered had any strength,
intensifying as the creature's final moments approached.

Something like a sob reached her ears.  She froze.

Again, the sound.  Off to her left, some way, and barely suppressed.
She stepped back, out of the shadow of the evergreen, bringing the
dying animal with her.  As the sunlight fell on the creature it
responded with a violence utterly belied by its apparent frailty, its
limbs jerking madly.  She stepped back into the shade, instinct rather
than analysis telling her the brightness was responsible.  Only then
did she look again in the direction from which the sob had come.

The door of one of the mausoleums further down the avenue a massive
structure of cracked marble stood ajar, and in the column of darkness
beyond she could vaguely make out a human figure.  Vaguely, because it
was dressed in black, and seemed to be veiled.

She could make no sense of this scenario.  The dying animal, tormented
by light; the sobbing woman surely a woman in the doorway, dressed for
mourning.  What was the association?

"Who are you?"  she called out.

The mourner seemed to shrink back into the shadows as she was
addressed, then regretted the move and approached the open door again,
but so very tentatively the connection between animal and woman became
clear.

She's afraid of the sun too, Lori thought.  They belonged together,
animal and mourner, the woman sobbing for the creature Lori had in her
arms.

She looked at the pavement that lay between where she stood and the
mausoleum.  Could she get to the door of the tomb without having to
step back into the sun, and so hasten the creature's demise?  Perhaps,
with care.  Planning her route before she moved, she started to cross
towards the mausoleum, using the shadows like stepping stones.  She
didn't look up at the door- her attention was wholly focused on keeping
the animal from the light but she could feel the mourner's presence,
willing her on.  Once the woman gave voice; not with a word but with a
soft sound, a cradle-side sound, addressed not to Lori but to the dying
animal.

With the mausoleum door three or four yards from her, Lori dared to
look up.  The woman in the door could be patient no longer.  She
reached out from her refuge, her arms bared as the garment she wore
rode back, her flesh exposed to the sunlight.  The skin was white as
ice, as paper but only for an instant.  As the fingers stretched to
relieve Lori of her burden they

darkened and swelled as though instantly bruised.  The mourner made a
cry of pain, and almost fell back into the tomb as she withdrew her
arms, but not before the skin broke and trails of dust yellowish, like
pollen burst from her fingers and fell through the sunlight on to the
patio.

Seconds later, Lori was at the door; then through it into the safety of
the darkness beyond.  The room was no more than an antechamber.  Two
doors led out of it: one into a chapel of some sort, the other below
ground.  The woman in mourning was standing at this second door, which
was open, as far from the wounding light as she could get.  In her
haste, her veil had fallen.  The face beneath was fine-boned, and thin
almost to the point of being wasted, which lent additional force to her
eyes, which caught, even in the darkest corner of the room, some trace
of light from through the open door, so that they seemed almost to
glow.

Lori felt no trace of fear.  It was the other woman who trembled as she
nursed her sunstruck hands, her gaze moving from Lori's bewildered face
to the animal.

"I'm afraid it's dead," Lori said, not knowing what disease afflicted
this woman, but recognizing her grief from all too recent memory.

"No," the woman said with quiet conviction.  "She can't die."

Her words were statement not entreaty, but the stillness in Lori's arms
contradicted such certainty.  If the creature wasn't yet dead it was
surely beyond recall.

"Will you bring her to me?"  the woman asked.

Lori hesitated.  Though the weight of the body was making her arms
ache, and she wanted the duty done, she didn't want to cross the
chamber.

"Please," the woman said, reaching out with wounded hands.

Relenting, Lori left the comfort of the door and the sunlit patio
beyond.  She'd taken two or three steps, however, when she heard the
sound of whispering.

There could only be one source: the stairs.  There were people in the
crypt.  She stopped walking, childhood superstitions rising up in her.
Fear of tombs; fear of stairs descending; fear of the Underworld.

"It's nobody the woman said, her face pained.  "Please, bring me
Babette."

As if to further reassure Lori she took a step away from the stairs,
murmuring to the animal she'd called Babette.  Either the words, or the
woman's proximity, or perhaps the cool darkness of the chamber, won a
response from the creature: a tremor that ran down its spine like an
electric charge, so strong Lori almost lost hold of it.  The woman's
murmurs grew louder, as if she were chiding the dying thing, her
anxiety to claim it suddenly urgent.  But there was an impasse.  Lori
was no more willing to approach the entrance to the crypt than the
woman to come another step towards the outer door, and in the seconds
of stasis the animal found new life.  One of its claws seized Lori's
breast as it began to writhe in her embrace.

The chiding became a shout "Babettel'

but if the creature heard, it didn't care to listen.  Its motion became
more violent: a mingling of fit and sensuality.  One moment it
shuddered as though tortured; the next it moved like a snake sloughing
off its skin.

"Don't look, don't lookl' she heard the woman say, but Lori wasn't
about to take her eyes off this horrendous dance.  Nor could she give
the creature over to the woman's charge, while the claw gripped her so
tightly any attempt to separate them would draw blood.

But that Don't Look\ had purpose.  Now it was Lori's turn to raise her
voice in panic, as she realized that what was taking place in her arms
defied all reason.

"Jesus God!"

The animal was changing before her eyes.  In the luxury of slough and
spasm it was losing its bestiality,

not by re-ordering its anatomy but by liquefying itsj whole self
through to the bone until what had been!  solid was a tumble of matter.
Here was the origin of|| the bitter-sweet scent she'd met beneath the
tree: the, stuff of the beast's dissolution.  In the moment it lost its
coherence the matter was ready to be out of her grasp, but somehow the
essence of the thing its will, perhaps; perhaps its soul drew it back
for the business of re-making.  The last part of the beast to melt was
the claw, its disintegration sending a throb of pleasure through Lori's
body.  It did not distract her from the fact that she was released. 
Horrified, she couldn't get what she held from her embrace fast enough,
tipping it into the mourner's outstretched arms like so much
excrement.

"Jesus," she said, backing away.  "Jesus.  Jesus."

There was no horror on the woman's face however; only joy.  Tears of
welcome rolled down her pale cheeks, and fell into the melting pot she
held.  Lori looked away towards the sunlight.  After the gloom of the
interior it was blinding.  She was momentarily disoriented, and closed
her eyes to allow herself a reprieve from both tomb and light.

It was sobbing that made her open her eyes.  Not the woman this time,
but a child, a girl of four or five, lying naked where the muck of
transformation had been.

"Babette," the woman said.

Impossible, reason replied.  This thin white child could not be the
animal she'd rescued from beneath the tree.  It was sleight of hand, or
some idiot delusion she'd foisted upon herself.  Impossible; all
impossible.

"She likes to play outside," the woman was saying, looking up from the
child at Lori.  "And I tell her: never, never in the sun.  Never play
in the sun.  But she's a child.  She doesn't understand."

Impossible, reason repeated.  But somewhere in her gut Lori had already
given up trying to deny.  The

animal had been real.  The transformation had been real.  Now here was
a living child, weeping in her mother's arms.  She too was real.  Every
moment she wasted saying No to what she knew, was a moment lost to
comprehension.  That her world-view couldn't contain such a mystery
without shattering was its liability, and a problem for another day.
For now she simply wanted to be away; into the sunlight where she knew
these shape-shifters feared to follow.  Not daring to take her eyes off
them until she was in the sun, she reached out to the wall to guide her
tentative backward steps.  But Babette's mother wanted to hold her a
while longer.

"I owe you something ..."  she said.

"No/ Lori replied.  "I don't..  . want anything... from you."

She felt the urge to express her revulsion, but the scene of reunion
before her the child reaching up to touch her mother's chin, its sobs
passing were so tender.  Disgust became bewilderment, fear confusion.

"Let me help you," the woman said.  "I know why you came here."

"I doubt it," Lori said.

"Don't waste your time here."  the woman replied.  There's nothing for
you here, Midian's a home for the Nightbreed.  Only the Nightbreed."

Her voice had dropped in volume; it was barely a whisper.

"The Nightbreed?"  Lori said, more loudly.

The woman looked pained.

"Shh ..."  she said.  "I shouldn't be telling you this.  But I owe you,
this much at least."

Lori had stopped her retreat to the door.  Her instinct was telling her
to wait.

"Do you know a man called Boone?"  she said.

The woman opened her mouth to reply, her face a mass of contrary
feelings.  She wanted to answer, that much was clear; but fear
prevented her from speaking.

It didn't matter.  Her hesitation was answer enough | She did know
Boone; or had.

"Rachel."

A voice rose from the door that led down into earth.  A man's voice.

"Come away it demanded.  "You've nothing to tell."

The woman looked towards the stairs.

"Mister Lylesburg/ she said, her tone formal.  "She ; saved Babette."

"We know," came the reply from the darkness, "We saw.  Still, you must
come away."

We, Lori thought.  How many others were there below ground; how many
more of the Nightbreedl

Taking confidence from the proximity of the open door she challenged
the voice that was attempting to silence her informant.

"I saved the child," she said.  "I think I deserve something for
that."

There was a silence from the darkness, then a point of heated ash
brightened in its midst and Lori realized that Mister Lylesburg was
standing almost at the top of the stairs, where the light from outside
should have illuminated him, albeit poorly, but that somehow the
shadows were clotted about him, leaving him invisible but for his
cigarette.

"The child has no life to save," he said to Lori, 'but what she has is
yours, if you want it."  He paused.  "Do you want it?  If you do, take
her.  She belongs to you."

The notion of this exchange horrified her.

"What do you take me for?"  she said.

"I don't know," Lylesburg replied.  "You were the one demanded
recompense."

"I just want some questions answered," Lori protested.  "I don't want
the child.  I'm not a savage."

"No," the voice said softly.  "No, you're not.  So go.  You've no
business here."

He drew on the cigarette and by its tiny light Lori glimpsed the
speaker's features.  She sensed that he

willingly revealed himself in this moment, dropping the veil of shadow
for a handful of instants to meet her gaze face to face.  He, like
Rachel, was wasted, his gauntness more acute because his bones were
large, and made for solid cladding.  Now, with his eyes sunk into their
sockets, and the muscles of his face all too plain beneath papery skin,
it was the sweep of his brow that dominated, furrowed and sickly.

"This was never intended," he said.  "You weren't meant to see."

"I know that," Lori replied.

"Then you also know that to speak of this will bring dire
consequences."

"Don't threaten me."

"Not for you," Lylesburg said.  "For us."

She felt a twinge of shame at her misunderstanding.  She wasn't the
vulnerable one; she who could walk in the sunlight.

"I won't say anything," she told him.

"I thank you," he said.

He drew on his cigarette again, and the dark smoke took his face from
view.

"What's below .. ."  he said from behind the veil, '... remains
below."

Rachel sighed softly at this, gazing down at the child as she rocked it
gently.

"Come away," Lylesburg told her, and the shadows that concealed him
moved off down the stairs.

"I have to go," Rachel said, and turned to follow.  "Forget you were
ever here.  There's nothing you can do.  You heard Mister Lylesburg.
What's below '

' remains below.  Yes, I heard."

"Midian's for the Breed.  There's no-one here who needs you '

"Just tell me," Lori requested.  "Is Boone here?"

Rachel was already at the top of the stairs, and now began to
descend.

"He is, isn't he?"  Lori said, forsaking the safety of the

open door and crossing the chamber towards Rachel.  "You people stole
the body!"  It made some terrible, macabre sense.  These tomb dwellers,
this Nightbreed, keeping Boone from being' laid to rest.

"You did!  You stole him!'

Rachel paused and looked back up at Lori, her face barely visible in
the blackness of the stairs.

"We stole nothing," she said, her reply without rancour.

"So where is he?"  Lori demanded.

Rachel turned away, and the shadows took her completely from view.

"Tell me!  Please God!"  Lori yelled down after her.  Suddenly she was
crying: in a turmoil of rage and fear and frustration.  "Tell me,
please."

Desperation carried her down the stairs after Rachel, her shouts
becoming appeals.

"Wait... talk to me .. ."

She took three steps, then a fourth.  On the fifth she stopped, or
rather her body stopped, the muscles of her legs becoming rigid without
her instruction, refusing to carry her another step into the darkness
of the crypt.  Her skin was suddenly crawling with gooseflesh; her
pulse thumping in her ears.  No force of will could overrule the animal
imperative forbidding her to descend; all she could do was stand rooted
to the spot, and stare into the depths.  Even her tears had suddenly
dried, and the spit gone from her mouth, so she could no more speak
than walk.  Not that she wanted to call down into the darkness now, for
fear the forces there answered her summons.  Though she could see
nothing of them her gut knew they were more terrible by far than Rachel
and her beast-child.  Shape-shifting was almost a natural act beside
the skills these others had to hand.  She felt their perversity as a
quality of the air.  She breathed it in and out.  It scoured her lungs
and hurried her heart.

If they had Boone's corpse as a plaything it was beyond reclamation.
She would have to take comfort from the hope that his spirit was
somewhere brighter.

Defeated, she took a step backwards.  The shadows seemed unwilling to
relinquish her, however.  She felt them weave themselves into her
blouse and hook themselves on her eyelashes, a thousand tiny holds upon
her, slowing her retreat.

"I won't tell anyone," she murmured.  "Please let me go

But the shadows held on, their power a promise of retribution if she
defied them.

"I promise," she said.  "What more can I do?"

And suddenly, they capitulated.  She hadn't realized how strong their
claim was until it was withdrawn.  She stumbled backwards, falling up
the stairs into the light of the antechamber.  Turning her back on the
crypt she fled for the door, and out into the sun.

It was too bright.  She covered her eyes, holding herself upright by
gripping the stone portico, so that she could accustom herself to its
violence.  It took several minutes, standing against the mausoleum,
shaking and rigid by turn.  Only when she felt able to see through
half-closed eyes did she attempt to walk, her route back to the main
gate a farrago of cul-de-sacs and missed turnings.

By the time she reached it, however, she'd more or less accustomed
herself to the brutality of light and sky.  Her body was still not back
at her mind's disposal however.  Her legs refused to carry her more
than a few paces up the hill to Midian without threatening to drop her
to the ground.  Her system, overdosed on adrenalin, was cavorting.  But
at least she was alive.  For a short while there on the stairs it had
been touch and go.  The shadows that had held her by lash and thread
could have taken her, she had no doubt of that.  Claimed her for the
Underworld and snuffed her out.  Why had they released her?  Perhaps
because she'd saved the child;

perhaps because she'd sworn silence and they'd trusted | her. Neither,
however, seemed the motives of monsters and she had to believe that
what lived beneath!  Midian's cemetery deserved that name. Who other! 
than monsters made their nests amongst the dead??  They might call
themselves the Nightbreed, but neither words nor gestures of good faith
could disguise their true nature.

She had escaped demons things of rot and wickedness and she would have
offered up a prayer of thanks for her deliverance if the sky had not
been so wide and bright, and so plainly devoid of deities to hear.

PART THREE

DARK AGES

out on the town, with two skins.  The leather and the flesh.  Three if
you count the fore.  All out to be touched tonight, yessir.  All ready
to be rubbed and nuzzled and loved tonight, yessir."

Charles Kyd Hanging by a thread

The Stalking Ground

Driving back to Shere Neck, the radio turned up to a deafening level
both to confirm her existence and keep it from straying, she became
more certain by the mile that promises not withstanding she'd not be
able to conceal the experience from Sheryl.  How could it not be
obvious, in her face, in her voice?  Such fears proved groundless.
Either she was better at concealment than she'd thought, or Sheryl was
more insensitive.  Either way, Sheryl asked only the most perfunctory
questions about Lori's return visit to Midian, before moving on to talk
of Curtis.

"I want you to meet him," she said, 'just to be sure I'm not
dreaming."

"I'm going to go home, Sheryl," Lori said.

"Not tonight, surely.  It's too late."

She was right; the day was too advanced for Lori to contemplate a
homeward trip.  Nor could she fabricate a reason for denying Sheryl's
request without offending.

"You won't feel like a lemon, I promise," Sheryl said.  "He said he
wanted to meet you.  I've told him all about you.  Well ... not all.
But enough, you know, about how we met."  She made a forlorn face. "Say
you'll come," she said.

"I'll come."

"Fabulous!  I'll call him right now."

While Sheryl went about making her call Lori took a

shower.  There was news of the night's arrangements within two
minutes.

"He'll meet us at this restaurant he knows, around eight Sheryl
hollered.  "He'll even find a friend for you

_ /

"No, Sheryl '

"I think he was just kidding," came the reply.  Sheryl appeared at the
bathroom door.  "He's got a funny sense of humour," she said.  "You
know, when you're not sure if someone's making a joke or not?  He's
like that."

Great, Lori thought, a failed comedian.  But there was something
undeniably comforting about coming back to Sheryl and this girlish
passion.  Her endless talk of Curtis- none of which gave Lori more than
a street artist's portrait of the man: all surface and no insight was
the perfect distraction from thoughts of Midian and its revelations.
The early evening was so filled with good humour, and the rituals of
preparing for a night on the town, that on occasion Lori found herself
wondering if all that had happened in the necropolis had not been a
hallucination.  But she had evidence that confirmed the memory: the cut
beside her mouth from that wayward branch.  It was little enough sign,
but the sharp hurt of it kept her from doubting her sanity.  She had
been to Midian.  She had held the shape-shifter in her arms, and stood
on the crypt stairs gazing into a miasma so profound it could have
rotted the faith of a saint.

Though the unholy world beneath the cemetery was as far from Sheryl and
her whirlwind romances as night from day, it was no less real for that.
In time she would have to address that reality; find a place for it,
though it defied all sense, all logic.  For now, she would keep it in
mind, with the cut as its guardian, and enjoy the pleasures of the
evening ahead.

"It's a joke," said Sheryl, as they stood outside the Hudson Bay
Sunset.  "Didn't I tell you he had this weird sense of humour?"

The restaurant he'd named had been completely gutted by fire, several
weeks ago to judge by the state of the timbers.

"Are you sure you got the right address?"  Lori asked.

Sheryl laughed.

"I tell you it's one of his jokes she said.

"So we've laughed," said Lori.  "When do we get to eat?"

"He's probably watching us Sheryl said, her good humour slightly
forced.

Lori looked around for some sign of the voyeur.  Though there was
nothing to fear on the streets of a town like this, even on a Saturday
night, the neighbourhood was far from welcoming.  Every other shop
along the block was closed up- several of them permanently and the
sidewalks completely deserted in both directions.  It was no place they
wanted to linger.

"I don't see him she said.

"Neither do I."

"So what do we do now?"  Lori asked, doing her best to keep any trace
of irritation from her voice.  If this was Curtis the Beau's idea of a
good time Sheryl's taste had to be in doubt; but then who was she to
judge, who'd loved and lost a psycho in her time?

"He's got to be here somewhere Sheryl said hopefully.  "Curtis?"  she
called out, pushing open the heat blistered door.

"Why don't we wait for him out here, Sheryl?"

"He's probably inside."

"The place could be dangerous."

Her appeal was ignored.

"Sheryl."

"I hear you.  I'm OK."  She was already immersed in the darkness of the
interior.  The smell of burned wood and fabric stung Lori's nostrils.

"Curtis?"  she heard Sheryl call.

A car went past, its engine badly tuned.  The passenger, a youth,
prematurely balding, leaned out of the window.

"Need any help?"

"No thanks," Lori yelled back, not certain if the question was small
town courtesy or a come-on.  Probably the latter, she decided, as the
car picked up speed and disappeared; people were the same all over. Her
mood, which had improved by leaps and bounds since she'd been back in
Sheryl's company, was rapidly souring.  She didn't like being on this
empty street, with what little was left of the day sliding towards
extinction.  The night, which had always been a place of promise,
belonged too much to the Breed, who had taken its name for themselves.
And why not?  All darkness was one darkness in the end.  Of heart or
heavens; one darkness.  Even now, in Midian, they'd be dragging back
the doors of the mausoleums, knowing the starlight would not wither
them.  She shuddered at the thought.

Off down one of the streets she heard the car engine rev up, and roar,
then a squeal of brakes.  Were the Good Samaritans coming round for a
second look?

"Sheryl?"  she called out.  "Where are you?"

The joke, if joke it had been and not Sheryl's error had long since
lost what questionable humour it had.  She wanted to get back into the
car and drive, back to the hotel if necessary.

"Sheryl?  Are you there?"

There was laughter from the interior of the building;

Sheryl's gurgling laughter.  Suspecting now her compliance in this
fiasco, Lori stepped through the door in search of the tricksters.

The laughter came again, then broke off as Sheryl said:

"Curtis," in a tone of mock indignation that decayed into further inane
laughter.  So the great lover was here.  Lori half contemplated
returning to the street, getting back into the car and leaving them to
their damn fool games.  But the thought of the evening alone in the
hotel room, listening to more partying, spurred her on through an
assault course of burnt furniture.

Had it not been for the brightness of the floor tiles, throwing the
street light up towards the cage of ceiling beams, she might not have
risked advancing far.  But ahead she could dimly see the archways
through which Sheryl's laughter had floated.  She made her way towards
it.  All sound had ceased.  They were watching her every tentative
step.  She felt their scrutiny.

"Come on, guys she said.  "Joke's over.  I'm hungry."

There was no reply.  Behind her, on the street, she heard the
Samaritans yelling.  Retreat was not advisable.  She advanced, stepping
through the archway.

Her first thought was: he only told half a lie, this was a restaurant.
The exploration had taken her into a kitchen, where probably the fire
had started.  It too was tiled in white, surfaces smoke-stained but
still bright enough to lend the whole interior, which was large, an odd
luminescence.  She stood in the doorway, and scanned the room.  The
largest of the cookers was placed in the centre, racks of shining
utensils still hanging above it, truncating her view.  The jokers had
to be in hiding on the other side of the range, it was the only refuge
the room offered.

Despite her anxieties, she felt an echo here of remembered games of
hide-and-seek.  The first game, because the simplest.  How she'd loved
to be terrorized by her father; chased and caught.  If only he were
here

in hiding now, she found herself thinking, waiting to embrace her. But
cancer had caught him long since, by the throat.

"Sheryl?"  she said.  "I give up.  Where are you?"

Even as she spoke her advance brought her within sight of one of the
players, and the game ended.

Sheryl was not in hiding, unless death was hiding.  She was crouched
against the cooker, the darkness around her too wet for shadow, her
head thrown back, her face slashed open.

"Jesus God."

Behind Lori, a sound.  Somebody coming to find her.  Too late to hide.
She'd be caught.  And not by loving arms; not by her father, playing
the monster.  This was the monster itself.

She turned to see its face before it took her, but running at her was a
sewing-box doll: zipper for mouth, buttons for eyes, all sewn on white
linen and tied around the monster's face so tightly his saliva darkened
a patch around his mouth.  She was denied the face but not the teeth.
He held them above his head, gleaming knives, their blades fine as
grass-stalks, sweeping down to stab out her eyes.  She threw herself
out of their reach but he was after her in an instant, the mouth behind
the zipper calling her name.

"Better get it over with, Lori."

The blades were coming at her again, but she was quicker.  The Mask
didn't seem too hurried; he closed on her with a steady step, his
confidence obscene.

"Sheryl had the right idea," he said.  "She just stood there and let it
happen."

"Fuck you."

"Later maybe."

He ran one of the blades along the row of hanging pots, striking
squeals and sparks.

"Later, when you're a little colder."

He laughed, the zipper gaping.

There's something to look forward to."

She let him talk, while trying to get some sense of what escape routes
lay open to her.  The news was not good.  The fire door was blocked by
burnt timbers; her only exit was the arch through which she'd entered,
and the Mask stood between her and it, sharpening his teeth on each
other.

He started towards her again.  No jibes from him now; the time for talk
was over.  As he closed on her she thought of Midian.  Surely she'd not
survived its terrors to be hacked to death by some lone psycho?

Fuck him!

As the knives slid towards her she snatched a pot from the rack above
the range and brought it up to meet his face.  It connected squarely.
Her strength shocked her.  The Mask reeled, dropping one of his blades.
There was no sound from behind the linen, however.  He merely
transferred the remaining blade from right hand to left, shook his head
as if to stop it singing, and came at her again, at a rush.  She barely
had time to raise the pan in defence.  The blade slid down it and met
her hand.  For a moment there was no pain, nor even blood.  Then both
came in profusion, the pan falling from her hand at her feet.  Now he
made a sound, a cooing sound, the tilt of his head suggesting that it
was the blood he was staring at, as it ran from the wound he'd
fathered.

She looked towards the door, calculating the time it would take to get
there against his speed of pursuit.  But before she could act the Mask
began his last advance.  The knife was not raised.  Nor was his voice,
when he spoke.

"Lori," he said.  "We must talk, you and me."

"Keep the fuck away."

To her amazement he obeyed the instruction.  She seized what little
time this offered to claim his other blade from the floor.  She was
less competent with her unwounded hand, but he was a large target.  She
could do him damage; preferably through the heart.

"That's what I killed Sheryl with he said.  "I'd put it down if I were
you."

The steel was sticky in her palm.

"Yes, that slit little Sheryl, ear to ear he went on.  "And now you've
got your prints all over it.  You should have worn gloves, like me."

The thought of what the blade had done appalled her, but she wasn't
about to drop it, and stand unarmed.

"Of course, you could always blame Boone," the Mask was saying.  Tell
the police he did it."

"How do you know about Boone?"  she said.  Hadn't Sheryl sworn she'd
told her paramour nothing?

"You know where he is?"  the Mask asked.

"He's dead she replied.

The sewing-box face denied it with a shake.

"No, I'm afraid not.  He got up and walked.  God knows how.  But he got
up and walked.  Can you imagine that?  The man was pumped full of
bullets.  You saw the blood he shed '

He was watching us all the time, she thought.  He followed us to
Midian, that first day.  But why?  That was what she couldn't make
sense of; why?

' all that blood, all those bullets, and still he wouldn't lie down
dead."

"Somebody stole the body she said.

"No/ came the reply, 'that's not the way it was."

"Who the hell are you?"

"Good question.  No reason why you shouldn't have an answer."

His hand went up to his face and he pulled off the mask.  Beneath was
Decker, sweaty and smiling.

"I wish I'd brought my camera he said.  "The look on your face."

She couldn't wipe it off, though she hated to amuse him.  The shock
made her gape like a fish.  Decker was Curtis, Sheryl's Mister Right.

"Why?"  she demanded.

"Why what?"

"Why did you kill Sheryl?"

"For the same reason I killed all the others he said lightly, as though
the question hadn't much vexed him.  Then, deadly serious: "For the fun
of it, of course.  For the pleasure.  We used to talk a lot about why,
Boone and me.  Digging deep, you know; trying to understand. But when
it really comes down to it, I do it because I like it."

"Boone was innocent."

7s innocent, wherever he's hiding.  Which is a problem, because he
knows the real facts, and one of these days he might find someone to
convince of the truth."

"So you want to stop him?"

"Wouldn't you?  All the trouble I went to so he could die a guilty man.
I even put a bullet in him myself and he still gets up and walks
away."

"They told me he was dead.  They were certain."

"The mortuary was unlocked from the inside.  Did they tell you that?
His fingerprints were on the handle; his footprints on the floor: did
they tell you that!  No, of course not.  But I'm telling you.  I know.
Boone is alive.  And your death is going to bring him out of hiding,
I'll bet on it.  He'll have to show himself."

Slowly, as he spoke, he was raising the knife.

"If it's only to mourn."

Suddenly, he was at her.  She put the blade that had killed Sheryl
between her and his approach.  It slowed him, but he didn't stop
coming.

"Could you really do it?"  he said to her.  "I don't think so.  And I
speak from experience.  People are squeamish even when their lives are
at stake.  And that knife, of course, it's already been blunted on poor
Sheryl.  You'll have to really dig to make some impression on me."

He spoke almost playfully, still advancing.

"I'd like to see you try though," he said.  "I really would.  Like to
see you try."

Out of the corner of her eye she was aware that she'd

come abreast of piled plates mere inches from her elbow.  Might they
offer her time enough to get to the door, she wondered?  In knife to
knife combat with this maniac she'd lose, no doubt of it.  But she
might yet outwit him.

"Come on.  Try me.  Kill me if you can.  For Boone.  For poor, mad
Boone ' As the words became laughter she threw her wounded hand out
towards the plates, hooked them round, and flung them onto the floor in
front of Decker.  A second pile followed, and a third, china shards
flying up in all directions.  He took a step back, his hands going up
to his face to protect himself, and she took the chance while she had
it, bolting for the archway.  She got through it and into the
restaurant itself before she heard his pursuit.  By that time she had
sufficient lead to reach the outer door and fling herself through it,
onto the street.  Once on the sidewalk she immediately turned and faced
the door through which he would come.  But he had no intention of
following her into the light.

"Clever bitch," he said, from the darkness.  "I'll get you.  When I've
got Boone I'll come back for you; you just count the breaths till
then."

Eyes still fixed on the door she backed off down the sidewalk towards
the car.  Only now did she realize that she still carried the murder
weapon, her grip so strong she felt almost glued to it.  She had no
choice but to take it with her, and give it, and her evidence, to the
police.  Back to the car, she opened the door and got in, only looking
away from the burnt out building when the locks were on.  Then she
threw the knife onto the floor in front of the passenger seat, started
the engine, and drove.

The choice before her came down to this: the police, or Midian.  A
night of interrogation or a return to the necropolis.  If she chose the
former she would not be able to warn Boone of Decker's pursuit.  But
then suppose Decker had been lying, and Boone had not survived the
bullets?  She'd not only be fleeing from the scene of a murder but
putting herself within reach of the Nightbreed, and uselessly.

Yesterday she would have chosen to go to the law.  She would have
trusted that its procedures would make all these mysteries come clear,
that they would believe her story, and bring Decker to justice. But
yesterday she'd thought beasts were beasts, and children, children,
she'd thought that only the dead lived in the earth, and that they were
peaceful there.  She'd thought doctors healed, and that when the
madman's mask was raised she would say: "But of course, that's a
madman's face."

All wrong; all so wrong.  Yesterday's assumptions were gone to the
wind.  Anything might be true.

Boone might be alive.

She drove to Midian.

Ill

Above and Below

it visions came to meet her down the highway, \7 brought on by the
after-effects of shock, and the

V loss of blood from her bound but wounded hand.  They began like snow
blown towards the windscreen, flakes of brightness that defied the
glass and flew past her, whining as they went.  As her dreamy state
worsened, she seemed to see faces flying at her, and commas of life
like foetuses, which whispered as they tumbled past.  The spectacle did
not distress her; quite the reverse.  It seemed to confirm a scenario
her hallucinating mind had created: that she, like Boone, was living a
charmed life.  Nothing could harm her, not tonight.  Though her cut
hand was now so numb it could no longer grip the wheel, leaving her to
navigate an unlit road one-handed and at speed, fate had not let her
survive Decker's attack only to kill her on the highway.

There was a reunion in the air.  That was why the visions came, racing
into the headlamps, and skipping over the car to burst above her in
showers of white lights.  They were welcoming her.

To Midian.

Once she looked in the mirror and thought she glimpsed a car behind
her, its lights turned off.  But when she looked again it had gone.
Perhaps it had never been there.  Ahead lay the town, its houses
blinded by her headlights.  She drove down the main street, all the way
to the graveyard gates.

The mingled intoxications of blood loss and exhaustion had dulled all
fear of this place.  If she could survive the malice of the living she
could surely survive the dead, or their companions.  And Boone was
here; that hope had hardened into certainty as she drove.  Boone was
here, and finally she'd be able to take him into her arms.

She stumbled out of the car, and almost fell flat on her face.

"Get up ..."  she told herself.

The lights were still coming at her, though she was no longer moving,
but now all trace of detail in them had vanished.  There was only the
brightness, its ferocity threatening to wash the whole world away.
Knowing total collapse was imminent she crossed to the gates, calling
Boone's name.  She had an answer immediately, though not the one she
sought.

"He's here?"  somebody said.  "Boone is heieV

Clinging to the gate she turned her leaden head, and through the surf
of light saw Decker, standing a few yards from her.  Behind him, his
light-less car.  Even in her dizzied state she understood how she'd
been manipulated.  Decker had allowed her to escape, knowing she'd seek
out his enemy.

"Stupid!"  she told herself.

"Well yes.  But then, what were you to do?  No doubt you thought you
might save him."

She had neither the strength nor the wit left to resist the man.
Relinquishing the support of the gates, she staggered into the
cemetery.

"Boonel' she yelled.  Boo neV

Decker didn't come after her quickly; he had no need.  She was a
wounded animal going in search of another wounded animal.  Glancing
behind her she saw him checking his gun by the light of his headlamps.
Then he pushed the gate wider, and came in pursuit.

She could barely see the avenues in front of her for the bursts of
light in her head.  She was like a blind woman, sobbing as she
stumbled; no longer even certain if Decker was behind her or in front.
Any moment he would despatch her.  One bullet, and her charmed life
would end.

In the ground below, the Breed heard her arrival, their senses attuned
to panic and despair.  They knew the hunter's tread too, they heard it
behind them all too often.  Now they waited, pitying the woman in her
last moments but too covetous of their refuge to put it at risk.  There
were few enough hiding places left where the monstrous might find
peace.  They'd not endanger their hermitage for a human life.

Still it pained them, hearing her pleas and her calls.  And for one of
their number the sound was almost beyond endurance.

"Let me go to her."

"You can't.  You know you can't."

"I can kill him.  Who's to know he was ever here'

"He won't be alone.  There'll be others waiting outside the walls.
Remember how they came for you."

7 can't let her die."

"Boone!  Please God '

It was worse than anything he'd suffered, hearing her calling him, and
knowing Midian's law wouldn't let him answer.

"Listen to her, for god's sake!"  he said.  "Listen."

"You made promises when we took you in," Lyles burg reminded him.

"I know.  I understand."

7 wonder if you do.  They weren't demanded lightly, Boone.  Break them
and you belong nowhere.  Not with us.  Not with them."

"You're asking me to listen to her die."

"So block your ears.  It'll soon be over."

She could no longer find the breath to call his name.  No matter.  He
wasn't here.  Or if he was, he was dead in the earth, and corrupted.
Beyond help, in the giving or the taking.

She was alone, and the man with the gun was closing on her.

Decker took the mask from his pocket; the button mask he felt so safe
behind.  Oh, the number of times, in those tiresome days with Boone,
teaching him the dates and the places of the murders he was inheriting,
when Decker's pride had almost brimmed over and he'd itched to claim
the crimes back.  But he needed the scapegoat more than the quick
thrill of confession, to keep suspicion at bay.  Boone's admitting to
the crimes wouldn't have been an end to it all of course.  In time the
Mask would start speaking to its owner again, demanding to be bloodied,
and the killings would have to begin afresh.  But not until Decker had
found himself another name, and another city to set up his store in.
Boone had spoiled those well-laid plans, but he'd get

no chance to tell what he knew.  Of' Button Face would see to that.

Decker pulled the mask on.  It smelt of his excitement.  As soon as he
breathed in he got a hard.  Not the little sex-hard, but the
death-hard; the murder-hard.  It sniffed the air for him, even through
the thickness of his trousers and underwear.  It smelt the victim that
ran ahead of him.  The Mask didn't care that his prey was female; he
got the murder-hard for anyone.  In his time he'd had a heat for old
men, pissing their pants as they went down in front of him; for girls,
sometimes, sometimes women; even children.  Of' Button Face looked with
the same cross-threaded eyes on the whole of humanity.

This one, this woman in the dark up ahead, meant no more to the Mask
than any of the others.  Once they started to panic and bleed, they
were all the same.  He followed her with steady step; that was one of
Button Head's trade marks, the executioner's tread.  And she fled
before him, her pleas deteriorating into snot and gasps.  Though she
hadn't got breath to call for her hero, no doubt she prayed he'd still
come for her.  Poor bitch.  Didn't she know they never showed?  He'd
heard them all called upon in his time, begged for, bargained with, the
Holy Fathers and Mothers, the champions, the inter ceders none of them
ever showed.

But her agony would be over soon.  A shot through the back of the head
to bring her down, and then he'd take the big knife, the heavy knife,
to her face, the way he did with all of them.  Criss cross, crisscross,
like the threads in his eye, till there was nothing left to look at but
meat.

Ah!  She was falling.  Too tired to run any further.

He opened Of' Button Head's steel mouth, and spoke to the fallen girl
"Be still," he said.

"It's quicker that way."

She tried to get up one final time, but her legs had given out
completely, and the wash of whiteness was practically all consuming.
Giddily, she turned her head in the direction of Decker's voice, and in
a trough between the white waves, she saw that he'd put his mask back
on.  Its face was a death's head.

He raised the gun In the ground beneath her, she felt tremors.  Was it
the sound of a shot, perhaps?  She couldn't see the gun any longer, or
even Decker.  One final wave had washed him from sight.  But her body
felt the earth rock, and through the whine in her head she heard
somebody calling the name of the man she'd hoped to find here.

Boone!

She didn't hear an answer- perhaps there wasn't one but the call came
again, as if summoning him back into the earth.

Before she could muster the last of her power to counter the call her
good arm gave out beneath her and she was face down on the ground.

Button Head walked towards his quarry, disappointed that the woman
would not be conscious to hear his final benediction.  He liked to
offer a few words of insight at the penultimate moment; words he never
planned but that came like poetry from the zipper mouth.  On occasion
they'd laughed at his sermon, and that had made him cruel.  But if they
cried, and they often did, then he took it in good part, and made
certain the last moment, the very last, was swift and painless.

He kicked the woman over onto her back, to see if he could raise her
from her sleep.  And yes, her eyes flickered open slightly.

"Good," he said, pointing the gun at her face.

As he felt wisdom coming to his lips he heard the growl.  It drew his
gaze off the woman for a moment.  A soundless wind had risen from
somewhere, and was

shaking the trees.  There was complaint in the ground beneath his
feet.  The Mask was untouched.  Wandering in tomb yards didn't raise a
hair on his neck.  He was the New Death, tomorrow's face today: what
harm could dust do him?

He laughed at the melodrama of it.  Threw back his head and laughed.

At his feet the woman started moaning.  Time to shut her up.  He took
aim at her open mouth.

As he recognized the word she was shaping the dark ahead of him
divided, and that word stepped out of hiding.

"Boone," she'd said.

It was.

He emerged from the shadow of the shaking trees, dressed just as the
Mask remembered, in dirty tee shirt and jeans.  But there was a
brightness in his eyes the Mask did not remember; and he walked-
despite the bullets he'd taken like a man who'd never known an ache in
his life.

Mystery enough.  But there was more.  Even as he stepped into view he
began to change, breathing out a veil of smoke that took his flesh for
fantasy.

This was the scapegoat; yet not.  So much not.

The Mask looked down at the woman to confirm that they shared this
vision but she had fallen into unconsciousness.  He had to trust what
the cross-sewn eyes told him, and they told him terrors.

The sinews of Boone's arms and neck were rippling with light and
darkness; his fingers were growing larger; his face, behind the smoke
he exhaled, seemed to be running with dazzling filaments that described
a hidden form within his head which muscle and bone were conforming
to.

And out of the confusion, a voice.  It was not the voice the Mask
remembered.  No scapegoat's voice, hushed with guilt.  It was a yell of
fury.

"You're a dead man, Deckerl' the monster cried.

The Mask hated that name; that Decker.  The man was just some old
flame he'd fucked once in a while.  In a heat like this, with the
murder-hard so strong, Of' Button Head could barely remember whether
Dr.  Decker was alive or dead.

Still the monster called him by that name.

"You hear me, Decker!"  he said.

Bastard thing, the Mask thought.  Mis-begotten, half aborted bastard
thing.  He pointed a gun at its heart.  It had finished breathing
transformations, and stood before its enemy complete, if a thing born
on a butcher's slab could ever be called complete.  Mothered by a
she-wolf, fathered by a clown, it was ridiculous to a fault.  There'd
be no benediction for this one, the Mask decided.  Only phlegm on its
hybrid face when it was dead on the ground.

Without further thought he fired.  The bullet opened a hole in the
centre of Boone's tee shirt and in the changed flesh beneath but the
creature only grinned.

"You tried that already, Decker/ Boone said.  "Don't you ever learn?"

"I'm not Decker," the Mask replied, and fired again.  Another hole
opened up beside the first but there was no blood from either.

Boone had begun to advance on the gun.  No last, faltering step but a
steady approach which the Mask recognized as his own executioner's
tread.  He could smell the filth of the beast, even through the linen
across his face.  It was bitter-sweet, and sickened him to the
stomach.

"Be still," the monster said.

"It's quicker that way."

The stolen step was insult enough, but to hear the purity of his own
words from that unnatural throat drove the Mask to distraction.  He
shrieked against the cloth, and aimed the gun at Boone's mouth.  But
before he could blow out the offending tongue Boone's swollen hands
reached and took hold of the gun.  Even as it

was snatched from him the Mask pulled the trigger, firing against
Boone's hand.  The bullets blew off his smallest finger.  The
expression on his face darkened with displeasure.  He dragged the gun
out of the Mask's hands and flung it away.  Then he reached for his
mutilator and drew him close.

Faced with imminent extinction, the Mask and its wearer divided.  OP
Button Head did not believe he could ever die.  Decker did.  His teeth
grated against the cage across his mouth, as he began to beg.

"Boone ... you don't know what you're doing."

He felt the mask tighten over his head in fury at this cowardice but he
talked on, trying to find that even tone he remembered calming this man
with, once upon a time.

"You're diseased, Boone."

Don't beg, he heard the Mask saying: don't you dare beg.

"And you can heal me, can you?"  the monster said.

"Oh yes," Decker replied.  "Oh certainly.  Just give me a little
time."

Boone's wounded hand stroked the mask.

"Why do you hide behind this thing?"  he asked.

"It makes me hide.  I don't want to, but it makes me."

The Mask's fury knew no bounds.  It shrieked in Decker's head, hearing
him betray his master.  If he survived tonight it would demand the
vilest compensation for these lies.  He'd pay it gladly, tomorrow.  But
he had to outwit the beast to live that long.

"You must feel the same as me," he said.  "Behind that skin you have to
wear."

"The same?"  said Boone.

"Trapped.  Made to spill blood.  You don't want to spill blood any more
than I do."

"You don't understand," Boone said.  "I'm not behind this face.  I am
this face."

Decker shook his head.

"I don't think so.  I think that somewhere you're still Boone."

"Boone is dead.  Boone was shot down in front of you.  Remember?  You
put bullets in him yourself."

"But you survived."

"Not alive."

Decker's bulk had been trembling.  Now it stopped.  Every muscle in his
body became rigid, as the explanation for these mysteries came clear.

"You drove me into the hands of monsters, Decker.  And I became one.
Not your kind of monster.  Not the soulless kind."  He drew Decker very
close, his face inches from the mask.  "I'm dead, Decker.  Your bullets
mean nothing to me.  I've got Midian in my veins.  That means I'll heal
myself over and over.  But you '

The hand stroking the mask now gripped the fabric.

' you, Decker .. . when you die, you die.  And I want to see your face
when it happens."

Boone pulled at the mask.  It was tied on securely and wouldn't come.
He had to get his claws into the warp and weft to tear it open and
uncover the sweaty facts beneath.  How many hours had he spent watching
this face, hanging on its every flicker of approbation?  So much wasted
time.  This was the healer's true condition: lost and weak and
weeping.

"I was afraid," Decker said.  "You understand that, don't you?  They
were going to find me, punish me.  I needed someone to blame."

"You chose the wrong man."

"Man?"  said a soft voice from the darkness.  "You call yourself a
man?"

Boone stood corrected.

"Monster/ he said.

Laughter followed.  Then:

"Well are you going to kill him or not?"

Boone looked away from Decker to the speaker squatting on the tomb. His
face was a mass of scar tissue.

"Does he remember me?"  the man asked Boone.

"I don't know.  Do you?"  Boone demanded of Decker.  "His name's
Narcisse."

Decker just stared.

"Another of Midian's tribe Boone said.

1 was never quite certain I belonged," Narcisse mused.  "Not till I was
picking the bullets from my face.  Kept thinking I was dreaming it
all."

"Afraid," said Boone.

"I was.  You know what they do to natural men."

Boone nodded.

"So kill him," Narcisse said.  "Eat out his eyes or I'll doit for
you."

"Not till I get a confession from him."

"Confession said Decker, his eyes widening at the thought of reprieve.
"If that's what you want, say the word."

He began rummaging in his jacket, as if looking for a pen.

"What the fuck's the use of a confession?"  Narcisse said.  "You think
anybody's ever gonna forgive you now?  Look at yourself!"

He jumped down off the tomb.

"Look," he whispered, 'if Lylesburg knows I came up here he'll have me
out.  Just give me his eyes, for old times' sake.  Then the rest's
yours."

"Don't let him touch me," Decker begged Boone.  "Anything you want ...
full confession ... anything.  But keep him off me!"

Too late; Narcisse was already reaching for him, with or without
Boone's permission.  Boone attempted to keep him at bay with his free
hand, but the man was too eager for revenge to be blocked.  He forced
himself between Boone and his prey.

"Look your last," he grinned, raising his hooked thumbs.

But Decker's rummaging hadn't been all panic.  As the hooks came at his
eyes he drew the big knife out of

hiding in his jacket and thrust it into his attacker's belly.  He'd
made long and sober study of his craft.  The cut he gave Narcisse was a
disembowelling manoeuvre learnt from the Japanese: deep into the
intestines and up towards the navel, drawing the blade two-handed
against the weight of meat.  Narcisse cried out more in memory of pain
than in pain itself.

In one smooth motion Decker pulled the big knife out, knowing from
researches in the field that the well packed contents were bound to
follow.  He wasn't wrong.  Narcisse's gut uncoiled, falling like a
flesh apron to its owner's knees.  The wounding which would have
dropped a living man to the ground on the spot- merely made a clown of
Narcisse.  Howling in disgust at the sight of his innards, he clutched
at Boone.

"Help me," he hollered, "I'm coming undone."

Decker took the moment.  While Boone was held fast he fled towards the
gates.  There wasn't much ground to cover.  By the time Boone had
struggled free of Narcisse the enemy was within sight of unconsecrated
earth.  Boone gave chase, but before he was even halfway to the gates
he heard Decker's car door slam and the engine rev.  The doctor was
away.  Damn it, awayl

"What the fuck do I do with this?"  Boone heard Narcisse sob.  He
turned from the gates.  The man had his guts looped between his hands
like so much knitting.

"Go below Boone said flatly.  It was useless to curse Narcisse for his
interference.  "Somebody'll help you," he said.

"I can't.  They'll know I was up here."

"You think they don't know already?"  Boone replied.  They know
everything."

He was no longer concerned about Narcisse.  It was the body sprawled on
the walkway that had claimed his attentions.  In his hunger to
terrorize Decker he'd forgotten Lori entirely.

"They'll throw us both out," Narcisse was saying.

"Maybe," said Boone.

"What will we do?"

"Just go below Boone said wearily.  Tell Mister Lylesburg I led you
astray."

"You did?"  said Narcisse.  Then, warming to the idea, "Yes, I think
you did."

Carrying his guts, he limped away.

Boone knelt beside Lori.  Her scent made him dizzy, the softness of her
skin beneath his palms was almost overpowering.  She was still alive,
her pulse strong despite the traumas she must have endured at Decker's
hand.  Gazing on her gentle face the thought that she might wake and
see him in the shape he'd inherited from Peloquin's bite distressed him
beyond measure.  In Decker's presence he'd been proud to call himself a
monster, to parade his Nightbreed self.  But now, looking at the woman
he had loved, and had been loved by in return for his frailty and his
humanity, he was ashamed.

He inhaled, his will making flesh smoke, which his lungs drew back into
his body.  It was a process as strange in its ease as its nature.  How
quickly he'd become accustomed to what he'd once have called
miraculous.

But he was no wonder; not compared with this woman.  The fact that
she'd enough faith to come looking for him with death on her heels was
more than any natural man could hope for, and for one such as himself,
the true miracle.

Her humanity made him proud: of what he'd been, and could still pretend
to be.

So it was in human form he picked her up, and tenderly carried her
underground.

The Prophetic Child

El listened to the fury of the voices.  "You cheated us!"  The first
was Lylesburg.

7 had no choice!"

The second, Boone.

"So Midian's put at risk for your finer feelings?"

"Decker won't tell anyone," Boone responded.  ' What's he going to say?
That he tried to kill a girl and a dead man stopped him?  Talk
sense."

"So suddenly you're the expert.  A few days here and you're re-writing
the law.  Well do it somewhere else, Boone.  Take the woman and
leave."

Lori wanted to open her eyes and go to Boone; calm him before his anger
made him say or do something stupid.  But her body was numb.  Even the
muscles of her face wouldn't respond to instruction.  All she could do
was lie still, and listen as the argument raged.

7 belong here," Boone said.  "I'm Nightbreed now."

"Not any longer."

7 can't live out there."

"We did.  For generations we took our chances in the natural world, and
it nearly extinguished us.  Now you come along and damn near destroy
our one hope of surviving.  If Midian's unearthed, you and the woman
will be responsible.  Think of that on your travels."

There was a long silence.  Then Boone said:

"Let me make amends."

"Too late.  The law makes no exceptions.  The other one goes too."

"Narcissel No.  You'll break his heart.  He spent half his life
waiting to come here."

"The decision's made."

"Who by?  You?  Or Baphomet?"

At the sound of that name Lori felt a chill.  The wordf meant nothing
to her, but clearly it did to others | nearby.  She heard whispers
echoing around her;J repeated phrases like words of worship.

7 demand to speak with it," Boone said.

"Out of the question."

"What are you afraid of!  Losing your grip on your tribe.  I want to
see Baphomet.  If you want to try and stop me, do it now."

As Boone threw the challenge down, Lori's eyes opened.  There was a
vaulted roof above her, where last there'd been sky.  It was painted
with stars; however, more fireworks than celestial bodies; Catherine
wheels, throwing off sparks as they rolled across the stone heavens.

She inclined her head a little.  She was in a crypt.  There were sealed
coffins on every side of her, upended against the walls.  To her left a
profusion of squat candles, their wax grimy, their flame as weak as
she.  To her right, Babette, sitting cross-legged on the floor,
watching her intently.  The child was dressed completely in black, her
eyes catching the candlelight and steadying its flicker.  She was not
pretty.  Her face was too solemn for prettiness.  Even in the smile she
offered Lori, seeing her wake, couldn't mellow the sadness in her
features.  Lori did her best to return the welcoming look, but wasn't
certain her muscles were yet obeying her.

"It was a bad hurt he did us," Babette said.

Lori assumed she meant Boone.  But the child's next words put her
right.

"Rachel made it clean.  Now it doesn't sting."

She raised her right hand.  It was bandaged with dark linen, around
thumb and forefinger.

"Nor you either."

Mustering her will, Lori raised her own right hand from her side.  It
was bandaged identically.

"Where ... is Rachel?"  Lori asked, her voice barely audible to
herself.  Babette heard the question clearly however.

"Somewhere near she said.

"Could you get her for me?"

Babette's perpetual frown deepened.

"Are you here forever?"  she asked.

"No," came the reply, not from Lori but from Rachel, who had appeared
at the door, 'no she's not.  She's going to be away very soon."
"Why?"said Babette.

"I heard Lylesburg," Lori murmured.

"Mister Lylesburg," Rachel said, crossing to where Lori lay.  "Boone
broke his word going over ground to fetch you.  He's put us all in
danger."

Lori understood only a fraction of Midian's story, but enough to know
that the maxim she'd first heard from Lylesburg's lips' what below
remains below' was not some idle catch phrase  It was a law the
inhabitants of Midian had sworn to live by or else forfeit their place
here.

"Can you help me?"  she asked.  She felt vulnerable lying on the
floor.

It wasn't Rachel who came to her aid, however, but Babette, by laying
her small, bandaged hand on Lori's stomach.  Her system responded
instantly to the child's touch, all trace of numbness leaving her body
at once.  She remembered the same sensation, or its like, from her last
encounter with the girl: that feeling of transferred power that had
moved through her when the beast had dissolved in her arms.

"She's formed quite a bond with you," Rachel said.

"So it seems."  Lori sat up.  "Is she hurt?"

"Why don't you ask me?"  Babette said.  "I'm here too."

I'm sorry," Lori said, chastened.  "Did you get cut too?"

"No.  But I felt your hurt."

"She's empathic Rachel said.  "She feels what others feel; particularly
if she has some emotional connection with them."

"I knew you were coming here," Babette said.  "I saw through your eyes.
And you can see through mine."

"Is that true?"  Lori asked Rachel.

"Believe her," came the reply.

Lori wasn't quite certain she was ready to get to her feet yet, but she
decided to put her body to the test.  It was easier than she'd
expected.  She stood up readily, her limbs strong, her head clear.

"Will you take me to Boone?"  she requested.

"If that's what you want."

"He was here all along, wasn't he?"  she said.

"Yes."

"Who brought him?"

"Brought him?"

"To Midian."

"Nobody."

"He was almost dead," Lori said.  "Somebody must have got him out of
the mortuary."

"You still don't understand, do you?"  said Rachel grimly.

"About Midian?  No; not really."

"Not just Midian.  About Boone, and why he is here."

"He thinks he's Nightbreed," Lori said.

"He was, until he broke his word."

"So we'll go," Lori replied.  "That's what Lylesburg wants, isn't it?
And I've got no wish to stay."

"Where will you go?"  Rachel asked.

"I don't know.  Maybe back to Calgary.  It shouldn't be so hard to
prove Decker's the guilty man.  Then we can start over."

Rachel shook her head.

"That won't be possible, "she said.

"Why not?  Have you got some prior claim on him?"

"He came here because he's one of us."

"Us.  Meaning what?"  Lori replied sharply.  She was tired of evasion
and innuendo.  "Who are you?  Sick people living in the dark.  Boone
isn't sick.  He's a sane man.  A sane, healthy man."

"I suggest you ask him how healthy he feels," was Rachel's retort.

"Oh I will, when the time comes."

Babette was not untouched by this exchange of contempt.

"You mustn't go," she said to Lori.

"I have to."

"Not into the light."  She took fierce hold of Lori's sleeve.  "I can't
come with you there."

"She has to go," Rachel said, reaching over to prise her child loose.
"She doesn't belong with us."

Babette held fast.

"You can," she said, looking up at Lori.  "It's easy."

"She doesn't want to," Rachel said.

Babette looked up at Lori.

"Is that true?"  she asked.

"Tell her," Rachel said, taking plain satisfaction in Lori's
discomfort.  "Tell her she's one of the sick people."

"But we live forever," Babette said.  She glanced at her mother, "Don
we?"

"Some of us."

"All of us.  If we want to live for ever and ever.  And one day, when
the sun goes out '

"Enough!"  said Rachel.

But Babette had more to say.

' when the sun goes out and there's only night, we'll live on the
earth.  It'll be ours."

Now it was Rachel's turn to be ill at ease.

"She doesn't know what she's saying," the woman muttered.

"I think she knows very well," Lori replied.

The proximity of Babette, and the thought that she had some bond with
the child, suddenly chilled her J What little peace her rational mind
had made withf Midian was rapidly crumbling.  She wanted more that
anything to be away from here, from children whoi talked of the end of
the world, from candles and coffins^ and the life of the tomb.

"Where's Boone?"  she said to Rachel.

"Gone to the Tabernacle.  To Baphomet."

"Who or what is Baphomet?"

Rachel made a ritualistic gesture at mention of Baphomet, touching her
forefinger to tongue and heart.  It was so familiar to her, and so
often performed, Lori doubted she even knew she'd done it.

"Baphomet is the Baptiser," she said.  "Who Made Midian.  Who called us
here."

Finger touched tongue and heart again.

"Will you take me to the Tabernacle?"  Lori asked.

Rachel's reply was a plain and simple: "No."

"Direct me at least."

"I'll take you," Babette volunteered.

"No you won't," Rachel said, this time snatching the child's hand from
Lori's sleeve with such speed Babette had no chance to resist.

"I've paid my debt to you," Rachel said, 'healing the wound.  We've no
more business together."

She took hold of Babette, and lifted the child up into her arms.
Babette squirmed in her mother's embrace so as to look back at Lori.

"I want you to see beautiful things for me."

"Be quiet," Rachel chided.

"What you see I'll see."

Lori nodded.

"Yes?"  Babette said.

"Yes."

Before her child could utter another mournful word Rachel had carried
her out of the room, leaving Lori to the company of the coffins.

She threw her head back and exhaled slowly.  Calm, she thought; be
calm.  It'll be over soon.

The painted stars cavorted overhead, seeming to turn as she watched.
Was their riot just the artist's fancy, she wondered, or was this the
way the sky looked to the Breed, when they stepped out of their
mausoleums at night to take the air?

Better not to know.  It was bad enough that these creatures had
children and art; that they might also have vision was too dangerous a
thought to entertain.

When first she'd encountered them, halfway down the stairs into this
underworld, she'd feared for her life.  She still did, in some hushed
corner of herself.  Not that it would be taken away, but that it would
be changed; that somehow they'd taint her with their rites and visions,
so she'd not be able to scrub them from her mind.

The sooner she was out of here, with Boone beside her, the sooner she'd
be back in Calgary.  The street lights were bright there.  They tamed
the stars.

Reassured by the thought, she went in search of the Baptiser.

Tabernacle

This was the true Midian.  Not the empty town in the hill; not even the
necropolis above her, _ut this network of tunnels and chambers which
presumably spread beneath the entire cemetery.  Some of the tombs were
occupied only by the undisturbed dead; their caskets laid on shelves to
moulder.  Were these the first occupants of the cemetery, laid to rest
here before the Nightbreed had taken possession?  Or were they Breed
who had died from their half-life, caught in the sun, perhaps, or
withered by longing?  Whichever, they were in the minority.  Most of
the chambers were ten anted by more vital souls, their quarters lit by
lamps or candles, or on occasion by the occupant itself: a being that
burned with its own light.  Only once did she glimpse such an entity,
supine on a mattress in the corner of its boudoir.  It was naked,
corpulent and sexless, its sagging body a motley of dark oily skin and
larval eruptions which seeped phosphorescence, soaking its simple bed. 
It seemed every other doorway let on to some fragment as mysterious,
her response to them problematic as the tableaux that inspired it.  Was
it simply disgust that made her stomach flip, seeing the stigma tic in
full flood, with sharp-toothed adherents sucking noisily at her wounds;
or excitement, confronting the legend of the vampire in the flesh?  And
what was she to make of the man whose body broke into birds when he saw
her

watching, or the dog-headed painter who turned from his fresco and
beckoned her to join his apprentice mixing paint?  Or the machine
beasts running up the walls on caliper legs?  After a dozen corridors
she no longer knew horror from fascination.  Perhaps she'd never
known.

She might have spent days lost and seeing the sights, but luck or
instinct brought her close enough to Boone that further progress was
blocked.  It was Lylesburg's shadow that appeared before her, seeming
to step from the solid wall.

"You may go no further."

"I intend to find Boone/ she told him.

"You're not to blame in this," Lylesburg said.  "That's completely
understood.  But you must in turn understand: what Boone did has put us
all in danger'

"Then let me speak to it.  We'll get out of here together."

"That might have been possible, a little while ago," Lylesburg said,
the voice emerging from his shadow coat as measured and authoritative
as ever.

"And now?"

"He's beyond my recall.  And yours too.  He's made appeal to another
force entirely."

Even as he spoke there was noise from further down the catacomb,- a din
the like of which Lori had never heard.  For an instant she felt
certain an earthquake was at its source, the sound seemed to be in and
of the earth around them.  But as the second wave began she heard
something animal in it: a moan of pain, perhaps, or of ecstasy .. .
Surely this was Baphomet Who Made Midian, Rachel had said.  What other
voice could shake the very fabric of the place?

Lylesburg confirmed the belief.

"That is what Boone has gone to parley with," he said.  "Or so he
thinks."

"Let me go to him."

"It's already devoured him Lylesburg said.  "Taken him into the
flame."

"I want to see for myself Lori demanded.

Unwilling to delay a moment longer she pushed past Lylesburg, expecting
resistance.  But her hands sank into the darkness he wore and touched
the wall behind him.  He had no substance.  He couldn't keep her from
going anywhere.

"It will kill you too she heard him warn, as she ran in pursuit of the
sound.  Though it was all around her, she sensed its source.  Every
step she took it got louder, and more complex, layers of raw sound each
of which touched a different part of her: head, heart, groin.

A quick backward glance confirmed what she'd already guessed: that
Lylesburg had made no attempt to follow.  She turned a corner, and
another, the undercurrents in the voice still multiplying, until she
was walking against them as if in a high wind, head down, shoulders
hunched.

There were no chambers now along the passageway; and consequently no
lights.  There was a glow up ahead however fitful and cold, but bright
enough to illuminate both the ground she stumbled over, which was bare
earth, and the silvery frost on the walls.

"Boone?"  she shouted.  "Are you there?  Boone?"

After what Lylesburg had said she didn't hope too hard for an answer,
but she got one.  His voice came to meet her from the core of light and
sound ahead.  But all she heard through the din was:

"Don't'

Don't what?  she wondered.

Don't come any further?  Don't leave me here?

She slowed her pace, and called again, but the noise the Baptiser was
making virtually drowned out the sound of her own voice, never mind a
reply.  Having come so far, she had to go forward, not knowing if his
call had been a warning or not.

Ahead, the passageway became a slope a steep

slope.  She halted at the top, and squinted into the brightness.  This
was Baphomet's hole, no doubt of that.  The din it was making eroded
the walls of the slope and carried the dust up into her face.  Tears
began to fill her eyes to wash the grit away, but it kept coming.
Deafened by voice, blinded by dust, she teetered on the lip of the
slope, unable to go forward or back.

Suddenly, the Baptiser fell silent, the layers of sound all dying at
once, and completely.

The hush that followed was more alarming than the din that had preceded
it.  Had it shut its mouth because it knew it had a trespasser in its
midst?  She held her breath, afraid to utter a sound.

At the bottom of the slope was a sacred place, she had not the
slightest doubt of that.  Standing in the great cathedrals of Europe
with her mother, years before, gazing at the windows and the altars,
she'd felt nothing approaching the surge of recognition she felt now.
Nor, in all her life dreaming or awake had such contradictory impulses
run in her.  She wanted to flee the place with a passion wanted to
forsake it and forget it; and yet it summoned.  It was not Boone's
presence there that called her, but the pull of the holy, or the
unholy, or the two in one; and it wouldn't be resisted.

Her tears had cleared the dust from her eyes now.  She had no excuse
but cowardice to remain where she stood.  She began down the slope.  It
was a descent of thirty yards, but she'd covered no more than a third
of it when a familiar figure staggered into view at the bottom.

The last time she'd seen Boone had been over ground as he emerged to
confront Decker.  In the seconds before she'd passed out she'd seen him
as never before: like a man who'd forgotten pain and defeat entirely.
Not so now.  He could barely hold himself upright.

She whispered his name, the word gathering weight as it tumbled
towards him.

He heard, and raised his head towards her.  Even in his worst times,
when she'd rocked him and held him to keep the terrors at bay, she'd
not seen such grief on his face as she saw now.  Tears coming and
coming, his features so crumpled with sorrow they were like a baby's.

She began the descent again, every sound her feet made, every tiny
breath she took, multiplied by the acoustics of the slope.

Seeing her approach he left off holding himself up to wave her away,
but in doing so lost his only means of support and fell heavily.  She
picked up her pace, careless now of the noise she was making.  Whatever
power occupied the pit at the bottom it knew she was there.  Most
likely it knew her history.  In a way she hoped it did.  She wasn't
afraid of its judgement.  She had loving reason for her trespass; she
came weaponless, and alone.  If Baphomet was indeed the architect of
Midian then it understood vulnerability, and would not act against her.
She was within five yards of Boone by now.  He was attempting to roll
himself onto his back.

"Wait!"  she said, distressed by his desperation.

He didn't look her way, however.  It was Baphomet his eyes went to,
once he got onto his back.  Her gaze went with his, into a room with
walls of frozen earth, and a floor the same, the latter split from
corner to corner, and a fissure opened in it from which a flame column
rose four or five times the size of a man.  There was bitter cold off
it rather than heat, and no reassuring flicker in its heart.  Instead
its innards churned upon themselves, turning over and over some freight
of stuff which she failed to recognize at first, but her appalled stare
rapidly interpreted.

There was a body in the fire, hacked limb from limb, human enough that
she recognized it as flesh, but no

more than that.  Baphomet's doing presumably; some torment visited on
a transgressor.

Boone said the Baptiser's name even now, and she readied herself for
sight of its face.  She had it too, but from inside the flame, as the
creature there not dead, but alive; not Midian's subject, but its
creator rolled its head over in the turmoil of flame and looked her
way.

This was Baphomet.  This diced and divided thing.  Seeing its face, she
screamed.  No story or movie screen, no desolation, no bliss had
prepared her for the maker of Midian.  Sacred it must be, as anything
so extreme must be sacred.  A thing beyond things.  Beyond love or
hatred, or their sum, beyond the beautiful or the monstrous, or their
sum.  Beyond, finally, her mind's power to comprehend or catalogue.  In
the instant she looked away from it she had already blanked every
fraction of the sight from conscious memory and locked it where no
torment or entreaty would ever make her look again.

She hadn't known her own strength till the frenzy to be out of its
presence had her hauling Boone to his feet and dragging him up the
slope.  He could do little to help her.  The time he'd spent in the
Baptiser's presence had driven all but the rags of power from his
muscles.  It seemed to Lori that it took an age staggering up to the
head of the slope, the flame's icy light throwing their shadows before
them like prophecies.

The passageway above was deserted.  She had half expected Lylesburg to
be in wait somewhere with more solid cohorts, but the silence of the
chamber below had spread throughout the tunnel.  Once she'd hauled
Boone a few yards from the summit of the slope she halted, her lungs
burning with the effort of bearing him up.  He was emerging from the
daze of grief or terror she'd found him in.

"Do you know a way out of here?"  she asked him.

"I think so," he said.

"You're going to have to give me some help.  I can't support you much
longer."

He nodded, then looked back at the entrance to Baphomet's pit.

"What did you see?  "he asked.

"Nothing."

"Good."

He covered his face with his hands.  One of his fingers was missing,
she saw, the wound fresh.  He seemed indifferent to it, however, so she
asked no questions but concentrated on encouraging him to move.  He was
reluctant, almost sullen in the aftermath of high emotion, but she
chivvied him along, until they reached a steep stairway which took them
up through one of the mausoleums and into the night.

The air smelt of distance after the confinement of the earth, but
rather than linger to enjoy it, she insisted they get out of the
cemetery, threading their way through the maze of tombs to the gate.
There Boone halted.

The car's just outside," she said.

He was shuddering, though the night was quite warm.

"I can't..  he said.

"Can't what?"

"I belong here."

"No you don't," she said.  "You belong with me.  We belong with each
other."

She stood close to him, but his head was turned towards the shadow. She
took hold of his face in her hands and pulled his gaze round upon
her.

"We belong to each other, Boone.  That's why you're alive.  Don't you
see?  After all this.  After all we've been through.  We've
survived."

"It's not that easy."

"I know that.  We've both had terrible times.  I understand things
can't be the same.  I wouldn't want them to be."

"You don't know ..."  he began.

"Then you'll tell me she said.  "When the time's right.  You have to
forget Midian, Boone.  It's already forgotten you."

The shudders were not cold, but the precursors of tears, which broke
now.

"I can't go he said, "I can't go."

"We've got no choice she reminded him.  "All we've got is each
other."

The pain of his hurt was almost bending him double.

"Stand up, Boone/ she said.  "Put your arms around me.  The Breed don't
want you; they don't need you.  I do.  Boone.  Please."

Slowly he drew himself upright, and embraced her.

Tight/ she told him.  "Hold me tight, Boone."

His grip tightened.  When she dropped her hands from his face to
reciprocate, his gaze did not now return to the necropolis.  He looked
at her.

"We're going to go back to the Inn and pick up all my belongings, yes?
We have to do that.  There are letters, photographs lots of stuff we
don't want anyone finding."

Then?"he said.

Then we find somewhere to go where no-one will look for us, and work
out a way to prove you innocent."

"I don't like the light he said.

Then we'll stay out of it she replied.  Till you've got this damn place
in perspective."

She couldn't find anything in his face resembling an echo of her
optimism.  His eyes shone, but that was only the dregs of his tears.
The rest of him was so cold; so much still a part of Midian's darkness.
She didn't wonder at that.  After all this night (and the days that had
preceded it) had brought, she was surprised to find such capacity for
hope in herself.  But it was there, strong as a heart-beat, and she
wouldn't let the fears she'd learned from the Breed undercut it.

"I love you, Boone/ she said, not expecting an answer.

Maybe in time he'd speak up.  If not words of love, at least of
explanation.  And if he didn't, or couldn't, it was not so bad.  She
had better than explanations.  She had the fact of him, the flesh of
him.  His body was solid in her arms.  Whatever claim Midian had upon
his memories Lylesburg had been perfectly explicit: he would never be
allowed to return there.  Instead he would be beside her again at
night, his simple presence more precious than any display of passion.

And as time went by she'd persuade him from the torments of Midian, as
she had from the self-inflicted torments of his lunacy.  She hadn't
failed in that, as Decker's deceits had convinced her she had.  Boone
had not concealed a secret life from her; he was innocent.  As was she.
Innocents both, which fact had brought them alive through this
precarious night and into the safety of the day.

PART FOUR

SAINTS AND SINNERS

"You want my advice?  Kiss the Devil, eat the worm'

Jan de Mooy Another matter; or, Man remade

 The Toll

The sun rose like a stripper, keeping its glory jell covered by cloud
till it seemed there'd be no _how at all, then casting its rags off one
by one.  As the light grew so did Boone's discomfort.  Rummaging in the
glove compartment Lori rooted out a pair of sunglasses, which Boone put
on to keep the worst of the light from his sensitized eyes.  Even then
he had to keep his head down, his face averted from the brightening
East.

They spoke scarcely at all.  Lori was too concerned to keep her weary
mind on the task of driving, and Boone made no attempt to break the
silence.  He had thoughts of his own, but none that he could have
articulated to the woman at his side.  In the past Lori had meant a
great deal to him, he knew, but making contact with those feelings now
was beyond him.  He felt utterly removed from his life with her, indeed
from life at all.  Through the years of his sickness he'd clung always
to the threads of consequence he saw in living: how one action resulted
in another; this feeling in that.  He'd got through, albeit with
stumbling steps, by seeing how the path behind him became the one
ahead.  Now he could see neither forward nor backward, except dimly.

Clearest in his head, Baphomet, the Divided One.  Of all Midian's
occupants it was the most powerful and the most vulnerable, taken apart
by ancient enemies

but preserved, suffering and suffering, in the flame Lylesburg had
called the Trial Fire.  Boone had gone into Baphomet's pit hoping to
argue his case; but it was the Baptiser that had spoken, oracles from a
severed head.  He could not now remember its pronouncements but he knew
the news had been grim.

Amongst his memories of the whole and the human, sharpest was that of
Decker.  He could piece together several fragments of their shared
history, and knew it should enrage him, but he could not find it in
himself to hate the man who'd led him to Midian's deeps, anymore than
he could love the woman who'd brought him out of them.  They were part
of some other biography; not quite his.

What Lori understood of his condition he didn't know, but he suspected
she remained for the most part ignorant.  Whatever she guessed, she
seemed content to accept him as he was, and in a simple, animal way he
needed her presence too much to risk telling her the truth, assuming
that he could have found the words.  He was as much and as little as he
was.  Man.  Monster.  Dead.  Alive.  In Midian he'd seen all these
states in a single creature: they were, most likely, all true of him.
The only people who might have helped him understand how such
contraries could co-exist were behind him, in the necropolis.  They'd
only begun the long, long process of educating him in Midian's history
when he'd defied them.  Now he was exiled from their presence forever,
and he'd never know.

There was a paradox.  Lylesburg had warned him clearly enough as they'd
stood together in the tunnels and listened to Lori's cries for help;
told him unequivocally that if he broke cover he broke his covenant
with the Breed.

"Remember what you are now he'd said.  "You can't save her, and keep
our refuge.  So you have to let her die."

Yet he couldn't.  Though Lori belonged in another

life, a life he'd lost forever, he couldn't leave her to the fiend.
What that meant, if anything, was beyond his capacity to grasp right
now.  These few circling thoughts aside he was sealed in the moment he
was living, and the next moment, and the moment after that; moving
second by second through his life as the car moved over the road,
ignorant of the place it had been and blind to where it was headed.

They were almost within sight of the Sweetgrass Inn when it occurred to
Lori that if Sheryl's body had been found at the Hudson Bay Sunset
there was a chance their destination would already be crawling with
police.

She stopped the car.

"What's wrong?"  Boone asked.

She told him.

"Perhaps it'd be safer if I went there alone she said.  "If it's safe
I'll get my things and come back for you."

"No,"he said.  "That's not so good."

She couldn't see his eyes behind the sunglasses, but his voice carried
fear in it.

"I'll be quick," she said.

"No."

"Why not?"

"It's better we stay together," he replied.  He put his hands over his
face, as he had at Midian's gates.  "Don't leave me alone," he said,
his voice hushed.  "I don't know where I am, Lori.  I don't even know
who I am.  Stay with me."

She leaned over to him, and kissed the back of his hand.  He let both
fall from his face.  She kissed his cheek, then his mouth.  They drove
on together to the Inn.

In fact her fears proved groundless.  If Sheryl's body had indeed been
located overnight which was perhaps unlikely given its location- no
connection had been made with the Inn.  Indeed not only were there no
police to bar their way there was little sign of life at all.  Only a
dog yapping in one of the upper rooms, and a baby crying somewhere.
Even the lobby was deserted, the desk clerk too occupied with the
Morning Show to keep his post.  The sound of laughter and music
followed them through the hall and up the stairs to the first floor.
Despite the ease of it, by the time they'd reached the room Lori's
hands were trembling so much she could scarcely align the key with the
lock.  She turned to Boone for assistance, only to discover that he was
no longer close behind her but lingering at the top of the stairs,
looking back and forth along the corridor.  Again, she cursed the
sunglasses, which prevented her reading his feelings with any
certainty.  At least until he backed against the wall, his fingers
seeking some purchase though there was none to be had.

"What's the problem, Boone?"

There's nobody here," he returned.

"Well that's good for us, isn't it?"

"But I can smell..."

"What can you smell?"

He shook his head.

"Tell me."

"I smell blood."

"Boone?"

"I smell so much blood."

"Where?  Where from?"

He made no answer, nor did he look her way, but stared off down the
corridor.

"I'll be quick," she told him.  "Just stay where you are, and I'll be
back with you."

Going down on her haunches she clumsily fitted key to lock, then stood
up and opened the door.  There was no scent of blood from the room,
only the stale perfume

of the previous night.  It reminded her instantly of Sheryl, and of
the good times they'd had together, even in the midst of such bad. Less
than twenty-four hours ago she'd been laughing in this very room, and
talking of her killer as the man of her dreams.

Thinking of which, Lori looked back towards Boone.  He was still
pressed against the wall, as if it was the only way to be certain the
world wasn't toppling.  Leaving him to it, she stepped into the room,
and went about her packing.  First into the bathroom, to collect up her
toiletries, and then back into the bedroom to gather her strewn
clothes.  It was only as she put her bag on the bed to pack it that she
saw the crack in the wall.  It was as if something had hit it from the
other side, very hard.  The plaster had come away in clods, and
littered the floor between the twin beds.  She stared at the crack a
moment.  Had the party got so riotous they'd started throwing the
furniture around?

Curious, she crossed to the wall.  It was little more than a
plasterboard partition, and the impact from the far side had actually
opened a hole in it.  She pulled a piece of loose plaster away and put
her eye to the aperture.

The curtains were still drawn in the room beyond, but the sun was
strong enough to penetrate, lending the air an ochre gloom.  Last
night's party must have been even more debauched than the one the night
before, she thought.  Wine stains on the walls, and the celebrants
still asleep on the floor.

But the smell: it wasn't wine.

She stepped back from the wall, her stomach turning.

Fruit spilled no such juice Another step.

flesh did.  And if it was blood she smelt then it was blood she saw,
and if it was blood she saw then the sleepers were not sleeping,
because who lies down in an abattoir?  Only the dead.

She went quickly to the door.  Down the corridor

Boone was no long standing, but crouched against the wall, hugging his
knees.  His face, as he turned to her, was full of distressing tics.

"Get up," she told him.

"I smell blood he said softly.

"You're right.  So get up.  Quickly.  Help me."

But he was rigid; rooted to the floor.  She knew this posture of old:
hunched in a corner, shivering like a beaten dog.  In the past she'd
had comforting words to offer, but there was no time for such solace
now.  Perhaps someone had survived the blood-bath in the next room.  If
so, she had to help, with Boone or without.  She turned the handle of
the slaughterhouse door, and opened it.

As the smell of death came out to meet her Boone started to moan.

'... blood..."  she heard him say.

Everywhere, blood.  She stood and stared for a full minute before
forcing herself over the threshold to search for some sign of life. But
even the most cursory glance at each of the corpses confirmed that the
same nightmare had claimed all six.  She knew his name too.  He'd left
his mark; wiping their features out with his knives the way he had
Sheryl's.  Three of the six he'd caught in flagrante delicto.  Two men
and a woman, partially undressed and slumped over each other on the
bed, their entanglements fatal.  The others had died lying in spirit
sodden comas around the room, most likely without even waking.  Hand
over her mouth to keep the smell out and the sobs in, she retreated
from the room, the taste of her stomach in her throat.  As she stepped
out into the corridor her peripheral vision caught sight of Boone.  He
wasn't sitting any longer, but moving purposefully down the passageway
towards her.

"We have ... to get... out," she said.

He made no sign that he'd even heard her voice, but moved past her
towards the open door.

"Decker ..."  she said,"... it was Decker."

He still offered no reply.

"Talk to me, Boone."

He murmured something "He could still be here," she said.  "We have to
hurry."  but he was already stepping inside to view the carnage at
closer quarters.  She had no desire to look again.  Instead she
returned to the adjacent room to finish her hurried packing.  As she
went about it she heard Boone moving around the room next door, his
breathing almost pained.  Afraid of leaving him on his own for any time
she gave up on trying to collect all but the most telling items the
photographs and an address book chief amongst them and that done went
out into the corridor.

The din of police sirens was there to meet her, their panic fuelling
hers.  Though the cars were still some way off she couldn't doubt their
destination.  Louder with every whoop, they were coming to the Sweet
grass, hot for the guilty.

She called for Boone.

"I'm finished!"  she said.  "Let's get going!"

There was no reply from the room.

"Boone?"

She went to the door trying to keep her eyes off the bodies.  Boone was
on the far side of the room, silhouetted against the curtains.  His
breath was no longer audible.

"Do you hear me?"  she said.

He didn't move a muscle.  She could read no expression on his face it
was too dark but she could see that he'd taken the sunglasses off.

"We haven't got much time," she said.  "Will you come on?"

As she spoke, he exhaled.  It was no normal breath; she knew that even
before the smoke started from his throat.  As it came he raised his
hands to his mouth as

if to stop it, but at his chin they halted and began to convulse.

"Get out," he said, on the same breath that brought the smoke.

She couldn't move, or even take her eyes off him.  The murk was not so
thick she couldn't see the change coming, his face re-ordering itself
behind the veil, light burning in his arms and climbing his neck in
waves to melt the bones of his head.

'/ don't want you to see," he begged her, his voice deteriorating.

Too late.  She'd seen the man with fire in his flesh at Midian; and the
dog-headed painter, and more besides: Boone had all their diseases in
his system, undoing his humanity before her eyes.  He was the stuff of
nightmares.  No wonder he howled, head thrown back as his face was
forfeited.

The sound was almost cancelled by the sirens, however.  They could be
no more than a minute from the door.  If she went now she might still
outpace them.

In front of her, Boone was done, or undone, entirely.  He lowered his
head, remnants of smoke evaporating around him.  Then he began to move,
his new sinews bearing him lightly, like an athlete.

Even now she hoped he understood his jeopardy and was coming to the
door to be saved.  But no.  It was to the dead he moved, where the
menage a trois still lay, and before she had the wit to look away one
of his clawed hands was reaching down and claiming a body from the
heap, drawing it up towards his mouth.

"No, Boone!"  she shrieked.  WeI'

Her voice found him, or a part that was still Boone, lost in the chaos
of this monster.  He let the meat drop a little and looked up at her.
He still had his blue eyes, and they were full of tears.

She started towards him.

"Don't," she begged.

For an instant he seemed to weigh up love and

appetite.  Then he forgot her, and lifted the human meat to his lips.
She didn't watch his jaws close on it, but the sound reached her, and
it was all she could do to stay conscious, hearing him tear and chew.

From below, brakes screeching, doors slamming.  In moments they'd have
the building surrounded, blocking any hope of escape; moments later
they'd be coming up the stairs.  She had no choice but to leave the
beast to its hunger.  Boone was lost to her.

She elected not to return the way they'd come, but to take the back
stairs.  The decision was well made; even as she turned the corner of
the upper corridor she heard the police at the other end, rapping on
doors.  Almost immediately afterwards she heard the sound of forced
entry from above, and exclamations of disgust.  This couldn't be on
finding Boone,he wasn't behind a locked door.  Clearly they'd
discovered something else on the upper corridor.  She didn't need to
hear the morning news to know what.  Her instinct told her loud and
strong how thorough Decker had been the night before.  There was a dog
alive somewhere in the building, and he'd overlooked a baby in his
heat, but the rest he'd taken.  He'd just come straight back from his
failure at Midian and killed every living soul in the place.

Above and below the investigating officers were discovering that very
fact, and the shock of it made them incompetent.  She had no difficulty
slipping out of the building and away into the scrub at the back.  Only
as she reached the cover of the trees did one of the cops appear round
the corner of the building, but even he had other business than the
search.  Once out of sight of his colleagues he threw up his breakfast
in the dirt, then scrupulously wiped his mouth with his handkerchief
and went back to the job in hand.

Secure that they wouldn't start a search of the exterior until they'd
finished inside, she waited.  What

would they do to Boone when they found him?  Shoot him down, most
likely.  There was nothing she could think of to prevent it.  But the
minutes passed, and though there were shouts from within, there was no
sound of gunfire.  They must have found him by now.  Maybe she'd get a
better grasp of what had happened from the front of the building.

The Inn was shielded on three sides by shrubbery and trees.  It wasn't
difficult to make her way through the undergrowth to the flank, her
movement countered by an influx of rifle-bearing cops from the front,
to take up stations at the rear exit.  Two more patrol cars were
arriving at the scene.  The first contained further armed troopers, the
second a selection of interested parties.  Two ambulance vans
followed.

They'll need more, she thought grimly.  A lot more.

Though the congregation of so many cars and armed men had attracted an
audience of passers by, the scene at the front was subdued, even
casual.  There were as many men standing and staring at the building as
moving to enter and explore it.  They grasped the point now.  The place
was a two storey coffin.  More people had probably been murdered here
in one night than had died by violence in Shere Neck over its entire
life.  Anyone here this bright morning was part of history.  The
knowledge hushed them.

Her attention went from the witnesses to a knot of people standing
around the lead car.  A break in the circle of debaters allowed for a
glimpse of the man at its centre.  Sober-suited, polished spectacles
glinting in the sun.  Decker held court.  What was he arguing for: a
chance to coax his patient out into the open air?  If that was his
pitch he was being overruled by the only member of the circle in
uniform, Shere Neck's Police Chief presumably, who dismissed his appeal
with a wave of the hand, then stepped out of the argument entirely.
From a distance it was impossible to read Decker's response, but he
seemed perfectly in control

of himself, leaning to speak into the ear of one of the others, who
nodded sagely at the whispered remark.

Last night Lori had seen Decker the madman unmasked.  Now she wanted to
unmask him again.  Strip away this facade of civilized concern.  But
how?  If she stepped out of hiding and challenged him tried to begin to
explain all that she'd seen and experienced in the last twenty four
hours they'd be measuring her up for a strait-jacket before she'd taken
a second breath.

He was the one in the well cut suit, with the doctorate and the friends
in high places; he was the man, the voice of reason and analysis, while
she a mere woman!  -what credentials did she have?  -lover of a lunatic
and a sometime beast?  Decker's midnight face was quite secure.

There was a sudden eruption of shouts from inside the building.  On an
order from their chief the troopers outside levelled their weapons at
the front door; the rest retired a few yards.  Two cops, pistols aimed
at someone inside, backed out of the door.  A beat later, Boone, his
hands cuffed in front of him, was pushed into the light.  It near
blinded him.  He tried to turn from its brilliance, back into the
shadows, but there were two armed men following, who pressed him
forward.

There was no sign remaining of the creature Lori had seen him become,
but there was ample reminder of his hunger.  Blood glued his tee shirt
to his chest, and spattered his face and arms.

There was some applause from the audience, uniformed and otherwise, at
the sight of the killer chained.  Decker joined it, nodding and
smiling, as Boone was led away, head averted from the sun, and put into
the back of one of the cars.

Lori watched the scene with so many feelings grappling for her
attention.  Relief that Boone had not been shot on sight, mingled with
horror at what she now

knew he was; rage at Decker's performance, and disgust at those who
were taken in by it.

So many masks.  Was she the only one who had no secret life; no other
self in marrow or mind?  If not, then perhaps she had no place in this
game of appearances-, perhaps Boone and Decker were the true lovers
here, swapping blows and faces but necessary to each other.

And she'd hugged this man, demanded he embrace her, put her lips to his
face.  She could never do that again, knowing what lay in wait behind
his lips, behind his eyes.  She could never kiss the beast.

So why did the thought make her heart hammer?

 Now or Never

"That are you telling me?  That there's more of these people involved?
Some kind of V V cult?"

Decker drew breath to deliver his warning about Midian over again.  The
troopers called their Chief everything but his name behind his back.
Five minutes in his presence and Decker knew why, ten and he was
plotting the man's dismemberment.  But not today.  The day he needed
Irwin Eigerman: and Eigerman, did he but know it, needed him.  While
daylight lasted Midian was vulnerable, but they had to be swift.  It
was already one o'clock.  Nightfall might still be a good distance
away, but so was Midian.  To get a task force out there to uproot the
place was the work of several hours, and every minute lost to argument
was a minute lost to action.

"Beneath the cemetery," Decker said, beginning again at the place he'd
begun half an hour before.

Eigerman scarcely made a pretence of listening.  His euphoria had
increased in direct proportion to the number of bodies brought out of
the Sweetgrass Inn, a count which presently stood at sixteen.  He had
hopes for more.  The only human survivor was a year-old baby found in a
tumble of blood-soaked sheets.  He'd taken her out of the building
himself, for the benefit of the cameras.  Tomorrow the country would
know his name.

None of this would have been possible without

Decker's tip off, of course, which was why he was humouring the man,
though at this stage in proceedings, with interviewers and flashlights
calling, he was damned if he was going to go after a few freaks who
liked corpses for company, which was what Decker was suggesting he
do.

He took out his comb and began to rake over his thinning crop, in the
hope of fooling the cameras.  He was no beauty, he knew.  Should it
ever slip his mind he had Annie to remind him.  You look like a sow,
she was fond of remarking, usually before bedtime on a Saturday night.
But then people saw what they wanted to see.  After today, he'd look
like a hero.

"Are you listening?"  Decker said.

"I hear you.  There's folks grave robbing.  I hear you."

"Not grave robbing.  Not folks."

"Freaks," Eigerman said.  "I seen 'em."

"Not the likes of these."  "You're not saying any of them were at the
Sweet grass are you?"

"No."

"We've got the man responsible right here?"

"Yes."

"Under lock and key."

"Yes.  But there are others in Midian."

"Murderers?"

"Probably."

"You're not sure?"

"Just get some of your people out there."

"What's the hurry?"

"If I told you once I told you a dozen times."

"So tell me again."

"They have to be rounded up by daylight."

"What are they?  Some kind of bloodsuckers?"  He chuckled to himself.
"That what they are?"

"In a manner of speaking Decker replied.

"Well, in a manner of speaking I gotta tell you, it's

gonna have to wait.  I got people want to interview me, doctor.  Can't
leave them begging.  It's not polite."

"Fuck polite.  You've got deputies, haven't you?  Or is this a one cop
town?"

Eigerman clearly bridled at this.

"I've got deputies."

"Then may I suggest you dispatch some of them to Midian?"

"To do what?"

"Dig around."

"That's probably consecrated ground, mister," Eigerman replied. "That's
holy."

"What's under it isn't," Decker replied, with a gravity that had
Eigerman silenced.  "You trusted me once, Irwin," he said.  "And you
caught a killer.  Trust me again.  You have to turn Midian upside
down."

There had been terrors, yes, but the old imperatives remained the same:
the body had to eat, had to sleep.  After leaving the Sweetgrass Inn
Lori satisfied the first of these, wandering the streets until she
found a suitably anonymous and busy store, then buying a collection of
instant gratification foods: doughnuts, custard filled and dutch apple,
chocolate milk, cheese.  Then she sat in the sun and ate, her numbed
mind unable to think much beyond the simple business of biting, chewing
and swallowing.  The food made her so sleepy she couldn't have denied
her lids falling if she'd tried.  When she woke her side of the street,
which had been bathed in sunshine, was in shadow.  The stone step was
chilly, and her body ached.  But the food and the rest, however
primitive, had done her some good.  Her thought processes were a little
more in order.  She had little cause for optimism, that was certain,

but the situation had been bleaker when she'd first come through this
town, on her way to find the spot where Boone had fallen.  Then she'd
believed the man she loved was dead; it had been a widow's pilgrimage.
Now at least he was alive, though God alone knew what horror,
contracted in the tombs of Midian, possessed him.  Given that fact, it
was perhaps good that he was safe in the hands of the law, the slow
process of which would give her time to think their problems through.
Most urgent of those, a way to unmask Decker.  No-one could kill so
many without leaving some trace of evidence.  Perhaps back at the
restaurant, where he'd murdered Sheryl.  She doubted he'd lead the
police there as he'd led them to the Inn.  It would seem too like
complicity with the accused, knowing all the murder sites.  He'd wait
for the other corpse to be found by accident, knowing the crime would
be ascribed to Boone.  Which meant perhaps the site was untouched, and
she might still find some clue that would incriminate him; or at very
least open a crack in that pristine face of his.

Returning to where Sheryl had died, and where she'd endured Decker's
provocations, would be no picnic, but it was the only alternative to
defeat she had.

She went quickly.  By daylight, she had a hope of getting up the
courage to step through that burnt out door.  By night it would be
another matter.

Decker watched as Eigerman briefed his deputies, four men who shared
with their Chief the looks of bullies made good.

"Now I trust our source," he said magnanimously, throwing a look back
at Decker, 'and if he tells me something bad's going down in Midian,
then I think

that's worth listening to.  I want you to dig around a little.  See
what you can see."

"What exactly are we looking for?"  one of the number wanted to know.
His name was Pettine.  A forty-year old with the wide, empty face of a
comedian's foil; and a voice too loud, and a belly too big.

"Anything weird," Eigerman told him.

"Like people been messing with the dead?"  the youngest of the four
said.

"Could be, Tommy," Eigerman said.

"It's more than that," Decker put in.  "I believe Boone's got friends
in the cemetery."

"A fuck wit like that has friends?"  Pettine said.  "Sure as shit wanna
know what they look like."

"Well you bring 'em back, boys."

"And if they won't come?"

"What are you asking, Tommy?"

"Do we use force?"

"Do unto others, boy, before they do unto you."

They're good men," Eigerman told Decker, when the quartet had been
dispatched.  "If there's anything to find there, they'll find it."
"Good enough."

"I'm going to see the prisoner.  You want to come?"  I've seen as much
of Boone as I ever want to see."  "No problem," Eigerman said, and left
Decker to his calculations.

He'd almost elected to go with the troopers to Midian but there was too
much work to do here preparing the ground for the revelations ahead.
There would be revelations.  Though so far Boone had declined to
respond to even the simplest enquiries, he'd break his silence
eventually, and when he did Decker would have questions asked of him.
There was no chance any of Boone's accusations could stick the man had
been found with human meat in his mouth, bloodied from head to foot but
there were elements

of recent events that confounded even Decker, and until every variable
in the scenario had been pinned down and understood he would fret.

What, for instance, had happened to Boone?  How had the scapegoat
filled with bullets and filed as dead become the ravening monster he'd
almost lost his life to the night before?  Boone had even claimed he
was dead, for Christ's sake and in the chill of the moment Decker had
almost shared the psychosis.  Now he saw more clearly.  Eigerman was
right.  They were freaks, albeit stranger than the usual stuff.  Things
in de france of nature, to be poked from under their stones and soaked
in gasoline.  He'd happily strike the match himself.

"Decker?"

He turned from his thoughts to find Eigerman closing the door on the
babble of journalists outside.  All trace of his former confidence had
fled.  He was sweating profusely.

"OK.  What the fuck's going on?"

"Do we have a problem, Irwin?"

"Shit alive, do we have a problem."

"Boone?"

"Of course Boone."

"What?"

"The doctors have just looked him over.  That's procedure."

"And?"

"How many times did you shoot him?  Three, four?"

"Yeah, maybe."

"Well the bullets are still in him."

"I'm not that surprised," Decker said.  "I told you we're not dealing
with ordinary people here.  What are the doctors saying?  He should be
dead?"

"He is dead."

"When?"

"I don't mean lying down dead, shithead," Eigerman

said.  "I mean sitting in my fucking cell dead.  I mean his heart
isn't beating."

That's impossible."

"I've got two fuckers telling me the man is walking dead, and inviting
me to listen for myself.  You wanna tell me about that, doctor?"

Delirium

He stood across the street from the burnt out estaurant, and watched it
for five minutes, to see if there was any sign of activity.  There was
none.  Only now, in the full light of day, did she realize just how run
down this neighbourhood was.  Decker had chosen well.  The chance of
anyone having seen him enter or leave the place the night before was
most likely zero.  Even in the middle of the afternoon no pedestrian
passed along the street in either direction, and the few vehicles that
used the thoroughfare were speeding on their way to somewhere more
promising.  Something about the scene perhaps the heat of the sun, in
contrast to Sheryl's unmarked grave brought her solitary adventure in
Midian back to her; or more particularly, her encounter with Babette.
It wasn't just her mind's eye which conjured the girl.  It seemed her
whole body was reliving their first meeting.  She could feel the weight
of the beast she'd picked up from beneath the tree against her breast.
Its laboured breathing was in her ears, its bitter sweetness pricked
her nostrils.

The sensations came with such force they almost constituted a
summoning: past jeopardy signalling present.  She seemed to see the
child looking up at her from her arms, though she'd never carried
Babette in human form.  The child's mouth was opening and closing,
forming an appeal Lori could not read from lips alone.

Then, like a cinema screen blanked out in mid movie, the images
disappeared, and she was left with only one set of sensations: the
street, the sun, the burnt out building ahead.

There was no purpose in putting off the evil moment any longer.  She
crossed the street, mounted the sidewalk, and without allowing herself
to slow her step by a beat stepped through the carbonized door frame
into the murk beyond.  So quickly dark!  So quickly cold!  One step out
of the sunlight, and she was in another world.  Her pace slowed a
little now, as she negotiated the maze of debris that lay between front
door and the kitchen.  Fixed clearly in her mind was her sole
intention: to turn up some shred of evidence that would convict Decker.
She had to keep all other thoughts at bay: revulsion, grief, fear. She
had to be cool and calm.  Play Decker's game.

Girding herself, she stepped through the archway.

Not into the kitchen, however: into Midian.

She knew the moment it happened where she was the chill and the dark of
the tombs was unmistakable.  The kitchen had simply vanished: every
tile.

Across the chamber from her stood Rachel, looking up at the roof,
distress on her face.  For a moment she glanced at Lori, registering no
surprise at her presence.  Then she returned to watching and
listening.

"What's wrong?"  Lori said.

"Hush/ Rachel said sharply, then seemed to regret her harshness and
opened her arms.  "Come to me, child," she said.

Child.  So that was it.  She wasn't in Midian, she was in Babette,
seeing with the child's eyes.  The memories she'd felt so strongly on
the street had been a prelude to a union of minds.

"Is this real?"  she said.

"Real?"  Rachel whispered.  "Of course it's real..  ."

Her words faltered, and she looked at her daughter with enquiry on her
face.

"Babette?"  she said.

"No .. ."  Lori replied.

"Babette.  What have you done?"

She moved towards the child, who backed away from her.  Her view
through these stolen eyes brought a taste of the past back.  Rachel
seemed impossibly tall, her approach ungainly.

"What have you done?"  she asked a second time.

"I've brought her," the girl said.  To see."

Rachel's face became furious.  She snatched at her daughter's arm.  But
the child was too quick for her.  Before she could be caught she'd
scooted away, out of Rachel's reach.  Lori's mind's eye went with her,
dizzied by the ride.

"Come back here," Rachel whispered.

Babette ignored the instructions, and took to the tunnels, ducking
round corner after corner with the ease of one who knew the labyrinth
back to front.  The route took runner and passenger off the main
thoroughfares and into darker, narrower passages, until Babette was
certain she was not being pursued.  They had come to an opening in the
wall, too small to allow adult passage.  Babette clambered through, and
into a space no larger than a refrigerator, and as cold, which was the
child's hideaway.  Here she sat to draw breath, her sensitive eyes able
to pierce the total darkness.  Her few treasures were gathered around
her.  A doll made of grasses, and crowned with spring flowers; two bird
skulls, a small collection of stones.  For all her other ness Babette
was in this like any child: sensitive, ritualistic.  Here was her
world.  That she'd let Lori see it was no small compliment.

But she hadn't brought Lori here simply to see her hoard.  There were
voices overhead, close enough to be heard clearly.

"Who-eel Will you look at this shit?  You could hide a fuckin' army
here."

"Don't say it, Cas."

"Shittin' your pants, Tommy?"

"Nope."

"Sure smells like it."

"Fuck you."

"Shut up, the both of you.  We've got work to do."

"Where do we start?"

"We look for any signs of disturbance."

There's people here.  I feel 'em.  Decker was right."

"So let's get the fuckers out where we can see 'em."

"You mean ... go down?  I ain't going down."

"No need."

"So how the fuck do we bring 'em up, asshole?"

The reply wasn't a word but a shot, ringing off stone.

"Be like shootin' fish in a barrel," somebody said.  "If they won't
come up they can stay down there permanent."

"Saves digging a grave!"

Who are these people!  Lori thought.  No sooner had she asked the
question than Babette was up and clambering into a narrow duct that led
off her playroom.  It was barely large enough to accommodate her small
body; a twinge of claustrophobia touched Lori.  But there was
compensation.  Daylight up ahead, and the fragrance of the open air,
which, warming Babette's skin, warmed Lori too.

The passage was apparently some kind of drainage system.  The child
squirmed through an accumulation of debris, pausing only to turn over
the corpse of a shrew that had died in the duct.  The voices from over
ground were distressingly close.

"I say we just start here and open up every damn tomb till we find
something to take home."

"Nothing here I wanna take home."

"Shit, Pettine, I want prisoners1.  As many of the fuckers as we can
get."

"Shouldn't we call in first?"  a fourth speaker now asked.  This
dissenting voice had not so far been heard

in the exchanges.  "Maybe the Chief's got fresh instructions for
us."

"Fuck the Chief/ Pettine said.

"Only if he says please," came the response from Cas.

Amid the laughter that followed there were several other remarks
exchanged, obscenities mostly.  It was Pettine who silenced the
hilarity.

"OK.  Let's get the fuck on with it."

"Sooner the better," said Cas.  "Ready Tommy?"

"I'm always ready."

The source of the light Babette was crawling towards now became
apparent: a latticed grille in the side of the tunnel.

Keep out of the sun, Lori found herself thinking.

It's all right, Babette's thoughts replied.  Clearly this wasn't the
first time she'd used the spy hole.  Like a prisoner without hope of
parole she took what entertainment she could find to ease the passage
of time.  Watching the world from here was one such distraction, and
she'd chosen her vantage point well.  The grille offered a view of the
avenues but was so placed in the mausoleum wall that direct sunlight
did not fall through it.  Babette put her face close to the grille, to
get a clearer grasp of the scene outside.

Lori could see three of the four speakers.  All were in uniform; all
despite their brave talk looked like men who could think of a dozen
better places to be than this.  Even in broad daylight, armed to the
teeth and safe in the sun, they were ill at ease.  It wasn't difficult
to guess why.  Had they come to take prisoners from a tenement block
there'd be none of the half glances and nervous tics on display here.
But this was Death's territory, and they felt like trespassers.

In any other circumstances she would have taken some delight in their
discomfiture.  But not here, not now.  She knew what men afraid, and
afraid of their fear were capable of.

They'll find us, she heard Babette think.

Let's hope not, her thoughts replied.

But they will, the child said.  The Prophetic says so.

Who?

Babette's answer was an image, of a creature Lori had glimpsed when
she'd gone in pursuit of Boone in the tunnels: the beast with larval
wounds, lying on a mattress in an empty cell.  Now she glimpsed it in
different circumstances, lifted up above the heads of a congregation by
two Breed, down whose sweating arms the creature's burning blood
coursed.  It was speaking, though she couldn't hear its words.
Prophecies, she presumed; and amongst them, this scene.

They'll find us, and try to kill us all, the child thought.

And will they'1.

The child was silent.

Will they, Babette?

The Prophetic can't see, because it's one of those that'll die.  Maybe
I'll die too.

The thought had no voice, so came as pure feeling, a wave of sadness
that Lori had no way to resist or heal.

One of the men, Lori now noticed, had sidled towards his colleague, and
was surreptitiously pointing at a tomb to their right.  Its door stood
slightly ajar.  There was movement within.  Lori could see what was
coming; so could the child.  She felt a shudder run down Babette's
spine, felt her fingers curl around the lattice, gripping it in
anticipation of the horror ahead.  Suddenly the two men were at the
tomb door, and kicking it wide.  There was a cry from within, somebody
fell. The lead cop was inside in seconds, followed by his partner, the
din alerting the third and fourth to the tomb door.

"Out of the way!"  the cop inside yelled.  The trooper stepped back and
with a grin of satisfaction on his face the arresting officer dragged
his prisoner out of hiding, his colleague kicking from behind.

Lori caught only a glimpse of their victim, but quick eyed Babette
named him with a thought.

Ohnaka.

"On your knees, asshole," the cop bringing up the rear demanded, and
kicked the legs from under the prisoner.  The man went down, bowing his
head to keep the sun from breaching the defence of his wide brimmed
hat.

"Good work, Gibbs," Pettine grinned.

"So where's the rest of them?"  the youngest of the four, a skinny kid
with a coxcomb, demanded.

"Underground, Tommy," the fourth man announced.  "That's what Eigerman
said."

Gibbs closed in on Ohnaka.

"We'll get fuck face to show us," he said.  He looked up at Tommy's
companion: a short, wide man.  "You're good with the questions, Cas."

"Ain't nobody ever said no to me," the man replied.  True or false?"

True,"said Gibbs.

"You want this man on your case?"  Pettine asked Ohnaka.  The prisoner
said nothing.

"Don't think he heard," Gibbs said.  "You ask him, Cas."

"Sure enough."

"Ask him hard."

Cas approached Ohnaka, reaching down and snatching the brimmed hat from
off his head.  Instantly, Ohnaka began to scream.

"Shut the fuck up!"  Cas yelled at him, kicking him in the belly.
Ohnaka went on screaming, his arms crossed over his bald head to keep
the sun off it as he clambered to his feet.  Desperate for the succour
of the dark he started back towards the open door, but young Tommy was
already there to block his way.

"Good man, Tommy!"  Pettine hollered.  "Go get him Cas!"

Forced back into the sun, Ohnaka had begun to shudder as though a fit
had seized him.

"What the fuck?"  said Gibbs.

The prisoner's arms no longer had the strength to protect his head.
They fell to his sides, smoking, leaving Tommy to look straight into
his face.  The boy cop didn't speak.  He just took two stumbling steps
backwards, dropping his rifle as he did so.

"What are you doin', dickhead?"  Pettine yelled.  Then he reached and
took hold of Ohnaka's arm to prevent him claiming the dropped weapon.
In the confusion of the moment it was difficult for Lori to see what
happened next, but it seemed Ohnaka's flesh gave way.  There was a cry
of disgust from Cas, and one of fury from Pettine as he pulled his hand
away, dropping a fistful of fabric and dust.

"What the fackl' Tommy shouted.  "What the fuckl What the fuck!"

"Shut up!"  Gibbs told him, but the boy had lost control.  Over and
over, the same question:

"What the fuckV

Unmoved by Tommy's panic, Cas went in to beat Ohnaka back down to his
knees.  The blow he delivered did more than he intended.  It broke
Ohnaka's arm at the elbow, and the limb fell off at Tommy's feet.  His
shouts gave way to puking.  Even Cas backed off, shaking his head in
disbelief.

Ohnaka was past the point of no return.  His legs buckled beneath him,
his body growing frailer and frailer beneath the assault of the sun.
But it was his face turned now towards Pettine that brought the loudest
shouts, as the flesh dropped away and smoke rose from his eye sockets
as though his brain were on fire.

He no longer howled.  There was no strength in his body left for that.
He simply sank to the ground, head thrown back as if to invite the
sun's speed, and have the agony over.  Before he hit the paving some
final

stitch in his being snapped with a sound like a shot.  His decaying
remains flew apart in a burst of blood dust and bones.

Lori willed Babette to look away, as much for her own sake as that of
the child.  But she refused to avert her eyes.  Even when the horror
was over Ohnaka's body spread in pieces across the avenue she still
pressed her face to the grille, as if to know this death by sunlight in
all its particulars.  Nor could Lori look away while the child stared
on.  She shared every quiver in Babette's limbs; tasted the tears she
was holding back, so as not to let them cloud her vision.  Ohnaka was
dead, but his executioners were not finished with their business yet.
While there was more to see the child kept watching.

Tommy was trying to wipe spattered puke from the front of his uniform.
Pettine was kicking over a fragment of Ohnaka's corpse; Cas was taking
a cigarette from Gibbs' breast pocket.

"Gimme a light, will you?"  he said.  Gibbs dug his trembling hand into
his trouser pocket for matches, his eyes fixed on the smoking
remains.

"Never saw nothin' like that before," Pettine said, almost casually.

"You shit yourself this time, Tommy?"  Gibbs said.

"Fuck you," came the reply.  Tommy's fair skin was flushed red.  "Cas
said we should have called the Chief," he said.  "He was right."

"What the fuck does Eigerman know?"  Pettine commented, and spat into
the red dust at his feet.

"You see the face on that fucker?"  Tommy said.  "You see the way it
looked at me?  I was near dead, I tell you.  He would have had me."

"What's going on here?"  Cas said.

Gibbs had the answer almost right.

"Sunlight," he replied.  "I heard there's diseases like that.  It was
the sun got him."

"No way, man," said Cas.  "I never seen or heard of nothin' like
that."

"Well we seen and heard it now," said Pettine with more than a little
satisfaction.  "It weren't no hallucination."

"So what do we do?"  Gibbs wanted to know.  He was having difficulty
getting the match in his shaking fingers to the cigarette between his
lips.

"We look for more," said Pettine, 'and we keep looking."

"I ain't," said Tommy.  "I'm calling the fuckin' Chief.  We don't know
how many of these freaks there are.  There could be hundreds.  You said
so yourself.  Hide a fuckin' army you said."

"What are you so scared of?"  Gibbs replied.  "You saw what the sun did
to it."

"Yeah.  And what happens when the sun goes down, fuck wit  was Tommy's
retort.

The match flame burnt Gibbs' fingers.  He dropped it with a curse.

"I seen the movies," Tommy said.  "Things come out at night."

fudging by the look on Gibbs' face he'd seen the same movies.

"Maybe you should call up some help," he said.  "Just in case."

Lori's thoughts spoke hurriedly to the child.

You must warn Rachel.  Tell her what we've seen.

They know already, came the child's reply.

Tell them anyway.  Forget me!  Tell them, Babette, before it's too
late.

I don't want to leave you.

I can't help you Babette.  I don't belong with you.  I'm

She tried to prevent the thought coming, but it was too late.

- I'm normal.  The sun won't kill me the way it'll

kill you.  I'm alive.  I'm human.  I don't belong with you.

She had no opportunity to qualify this hurried response.  Contact was
broken instantly the view from Babette's eyes disappearing and Lori
found herself standing on the threshold of the kitchen.

The sound of flies was loud in her head.  Their buzzing was no echo of
Midian, but the real thing.  They were circling the room ahead of her.
She knew all too well what scent had brought them here, egg laden and
hungry, and she knew with equal certainty that after all she'd seen in
Midian she couldn't bear to take another step towards the corpse on the
floor.  There was too much death in her world, inside her head and out.
If she didn't escape it she'd go mad.  She had to get back into the
open air, where she could breathe freely.  Maybe find some unremarkable
shop girl to talk to about the weather, about the price of sanitary
towels; anything as long as it was banal, predictable.

But the flies wanted to buzz in her ears.  She tried to swat them away.
Still they came at her and at her, their wings buttered with death,
their feet red with it.

"Let me alone," she sobbed.  But her excitement drew them in larger and
still larger numbers, rising at the sound of her voice from their
dining table out of sight behind the ovens.  Her mind struggled to take
hold of the reality she'd been thrown back into, her body to turn and
leave the kitchen.

Both failed, mind and body.  The cloud of flies came at her, their
numbers now so large they were a darkness unto themselves.  Dimly she
realized that such a multiplicity was impossible and that her mind was
creating this terror in its confusion.  But the thought was too far
from her to keep the madness at bay; her reason reached for it, and
reached, but the cloud was upon her now.  She felt their feet on her
arms and face, leaving trails of whatever they'd been dabbling in:
SheryFs

blood, Sheryl's bile, Sheryl's sweat and tears.  There; were so many
of them they could not all find flesh to j occupy, so they began to
force their way between her lips, and crawl up her nostrils and across
her eyes.

Once, in a dream of Midian, hadn't the dead come as dust, from all four
corners of the world?  And hadn't she stood in the middle of the storm
caressed, eroded and been happy to know that the dead were on the wind?
Now came the companion dream: horror to the splendour of the first.  A
world of flies to match that world of dust,- a world of incomprehension
and blindness, of the dead without burial, and without a wind to carry
them away.  Only flies to feast on them, to lay in them and make more
flies.

And matching dust against flies, she knew which she favoured, knew as
consciousness went out of her completely, that if Midian died and she
let it if Pettine and Gibbs and their friends dug up the Night breed's
refuge, then she, dust herself one day, and touched by Midian's
condition would have nowhere to be carried, and would belong, body and
soul, to the flies.

Then she hit the tiles.

The Wrath of the Righteous

For Eigerman bright ideas and excretion were inextricably linked; he
did all his best thinking with his trousers around his ankles.  More
than once, in his cups, he'd explained to any who'd listen that world
peace and a cure for cancer could be achieved overnight if the wise and
the good would just sit down and take a crap together.

Sober, the thought of sharing that most private of functions would have
appalled him.  The can was a place for solitary endeavour, where those
weighed down by high office could snatch a little time to sit and
meditate upon their burdens.

He studied the graffiti on the door in front of him.  There was nothing
new amongst the obscenities, which was reassuring.  Just the same old
itches, needing to be scratched.  It gave him courage in the face of
his problems.

Which were essentially twofold.  First, he had a dead man in custody.
That, like the graffiti, was an old story.  But zombies belonged in the
late movie, like sodomy on a lavatory wall.  They had no place in the
real world.  Which brought him onto the second problem: the panicked
call from Tommy Caan, reporting that something bad was going down in
Midian.  To those two, on reflection, he now added a third: Doctor
Decker.  He wore a fine suit, and he talked fine talk, but there was
something unwholesome about him.

Eigerman hadn't admitted the suspicion to himself | until now, sitting
on the crapper, but it was plain as| his dick once he thought about it.
The bastard knew| more than he was telling: not just about Dead Man!
Boone, but about Midian and whatever was going on I there.  If he was
setting Shere Neck's finest up for a fall | then there'd come a
reckoning time, sure as shit, and he'd regret it.

Meanwhile the Chief had to make some decisions.  He'd begun the day as
a hero, leading the arrest of the Calgary Killer, but instinct told him
events could very quickly get out of hand.  There were so many
imponderables in all of this; so many questions to which he had no
answers.  There was an easy way out, of course.  He could call up his
superiors in Edmonton and pass the whole fuck-up along to them to deal
with.  But if he gave away the problem he also gave the glory.  The
alternative was to act now before nightfall, Tommy had kept saying, and
how far was that?  three, four hours- to root out the abominations of
Midian.  If he succeeded he'd double his helping of accolades.  In one
| day he'd not only have brought a human evil to justice but scoured
the cess-pit in which it had found succour: an appealing notion.

But again the answered questions raised their heads, and they weren't
pretty.  If the doctors who'd examined Boone and reports coming out of
Midian were to be trusted then things he'd only heard in stories were
true | today.  Did he really want to pit his wits against dead men who
walked, and beasts that sunlight killed?

He sat, and crapped, and weighed up the alternatives.  It took him half
an hour, but he finally came to a decision.  As usual, once the sweat
was over, it looked very simple.  Perhaps today the world was not quite
the way it had been yesterday.  Tomorrow, God willing, it would be its
old self: dead men dead, and sodomy on !| the walls where it belonged.
If he didn't seize his chance to become a man of destiny there wouldn't
be

another, at least not till he was too old to do more than tend his
haemorrhoids.  This was a God given opportunity to show his mettle.  He
couldn't afford to ignore it.  With new conviction in his gut he wiped
his ass, hauled up his pants, flushed the crapper and went out to meet
the challenge head-on.

"I want volunteers, Cormack, who'll come out to Midian with me and get
digging."

"How soon do you need them?"

"Now.  We don't have much time.  Start with the bars.  Take Holliday
with you."

"What are we telling them it's for?"

Eigerman mused on this a moment: what to tell.

"Say we're looking for grave-robbers.  That'll get a sizeable turnout.
Anyone with a gun and a shovel's eligible.  I want 'em mustered in an
hour.  Less if you can do it."

Decker smiled as Cormack went on his way.

"You happy now?"  Eigerman said.

"I'm pleased to see you've taken my advice."

"Your advice, shit."

Decker just smiled.

"Get the fuck out of here," Eigerman said.  "I've got work to do.  Come
back when you've found yourself a gun."

"I just might do that."

Eigerman watched him leave, then picked up the phone.  There was a
number he'd been thinking about dialling since he'd made up his mind to
go into Midian; a number he hadn't had reason to call in a long time.
He dialled it now.  In seconds, Father Ashbery was on the line.

"You sound breathless, Father."

Ashbery knew who his caller was without need prompting.

"Eigerman."

"Got it in one.  What have you been up to?"

"I've been out running."

"Good idea.  Sweat out the dirty thoughts."

"What do you want?"

"What do you think I want?  A priest."

"I've done nothing."

"That's not what I hear."

"I'm not paying, Eigerman.  God forgave me my sins."

"Not in question."

"So leave me alone."

"Don't hangup!"

Ashbery was quick to detect the sudden anxiety in Eigerman's voice.

"Well, well, "he said.

"What?"

"You've got a problem."

"Maybe both of us do."

"Meaning?"

"I want you here real quick, with whatever you've got in the way of
crucifixes and Holy Water."

"What for?"

Trust me."

Ashbery laughed.

"I'm not at your beck and call any longer, Eigerman.  I've got a flock
to tend."

"So do it for them."

"What are you talking about?"

"You preach the Day of Judgement, right?  Well they're warming up for
it, over in Midian."

"Who are?"

"I don't know who and I don't know why.  All I know is, we need a
little holiness on our side, and you're the only priest I've got."

"You're on your own, Eigerman."

"I don't think you're listening.  I'm talking serious shit here."

"I'm not playing any of your damn fool games."

"I mean it, Ashbery.  If you don't come of your own accord, I'll make
you."

"I burned the negatives, Eigerman.  I'm a free man."

"I kept copies."

There was a silence from the Father.  Then:

"You swore."

"I lied came the reply.

"You're a bastard, Eigerman."

"And you wear lacy underwear.  So how soon can you be here?"

Silence.

"Ashbery.  I asked a question."

"Give me an hour."

"You've got forty-five minutes."

"Fuck you."

"That's what I like: a God-fearing lady."

Must be the hot weather, Eigerman thought when he saw how many men
Cormack and Holliday had rounded up in the space of sixty minutes.  Hot
weather always got folks itchy: for fornication maybe, or killing.  And
Shere Neck being what it was, and fornication not being so easy to get
just whenever you wanted it, the hunger to do some shooting was well up
today.  There were twenty men gathered outside in the sun, and three or
four women coming along for the ride; plus Ashbery and his Holy
Water.

There'd been two more calls from Midian in that hour.  One from Tommy,
who was ordered back into the cemetery to help Pettine contain the
enemy until reinforcements arrived, the second from Pettine himself,
informing Eigerman that there'd been an escape

bid made by one of Midian's occupants.  He'd slipped  away through the
main gate while accomplices create a diversion.  The nature of this
diversion not onljji explained Pettine's choking as he delivered his
report,!  but also why they'd failed to give chase.  Somebody had!
ignited the tyres of the cars.  The conflagration was!  quickly
consuming the vehicles, including the radio!  upon which the report was
being made.  Pettine was in | the process of explaining that there
would be no further^ bulletins when the airwaves went dead.

Eigerman kept this information to himself, for fear it cooled anyone's
appetite for the adventure ahead.  Killing was all very fine, but he
wasn't so sure there'd ; be quite so many ready to roll now if it was
common knowledge that some of the bastards were ready to' fight back.

As the convoy moved off he looked at his watch.  They had maybe two and
a half hours of good light left before dusk began to settle in.  Three
quarters of an hour to Midian, which left an hour and three quarters to
get these fuckers dealt with before the enemy had night on its side.
That was long enough, if they were organized about it.  Best to treat
it like a regular shakedown, Eigerman supposed.  Drive the bastards out
into the light and see what happened.  If they came apart at the seams,
the way piss pants Tommy had kept saying, then that was all the proof a
Judge would need that these creatures were unholy as hell.  If not if
Decker was lying, Pettine on dope again, and all this a fool's errand
he'd find someone to shoot, so it wasn't all a wasted journey.  Might
just turn around and put a bullet through the zombie in Cell Five; the
man with no pulse and blood on his face.

Either way, he wouldn't let the day end without tears.

PART FIVE

THE GOOD NIGHT

"No sword shall touch you.  Unless it be mine'

Lover's Oath (Anon)

A Friendless Face

Why did she have to wake?  Why did there have :o be a coming to?
Couldn't she just sink and ink, further into the nowhere she'd taken
refuge in?  But it didn't want her.  She rose from it, unwillingly, and
into the old pain of living and dying.

The flies had gone.  That at least was something.  She got to her feet,
her body cumbersome; an embarrassment.  As she made an attempt to dust
the dirt from her clothes she heard the voice calling her name.  She
hadn't woken of her own accord, it seemed.  Someone had called her. For
a ghastly moment, she thought the voice was Sheryl's; that the flies
had succeeded in their ambition, and driven her to lunacy.  But when it
came a second time she put another name to it: Babette.  The child was
calling her.  Turning her back on the kitchen she picked up her bag and
started through the debris towards the street.  The light had changed
since she'd made the first crossing; hours had passed while she'd
debated with sleep.  Her watch, broken in the fall, refused to tell how
many.

It was still balmy on the street, but the heat of noon had long passed.
The afternoon was winding down.  It could not be long until dusk.

She began to walk, not once looking back at the restaurant.  Whatever
crisis of reality had overcome her there, Babette's voice had called
her from it, and she

felt oddly buoyant, as though something about the way the world worked
had come clear.

She knew what it was, without having to think too hard.  Some vital
part of her, heart or head or both, had made its peace with Midian and
all it contained.  Nothing in the chambers had been as agonizing as
what she'd confronted in the burnt out building: the loneliness of
Sheryl's body, the stench of creeping decay, the inevitability of it
all. Against that the monsters of Midian -transforming, rearranging,
ambassadors of tomorrow's flesh and reminders of yesterday's seemed
full of possibilities.  Weren't there, amongst those creatures,
faculties she envied?  The power to fly; to be transformed; to know the
condition of beasts; to defy death?

All that she'd coveted or envied in others of her species now seemed
valueless.  Dreams of the perfected anatomy the soap opera face, the
cent refold body had distracted her with promises of true happiness.
Empty promises.  Flesh could not keep its glamour, nor eyes their
sheen.  They would go to nothing soon.

But the monsters were forever.  Part of her forbidden self.  Her dark,
transforming midnight self.  She longed to be numbered amongst them.

There was still much she had to come to terms with; not least their
appetite for human flesh, which she'd witnessed first-hand at the
Sweetgrass Inn.  But she could learn to understand.  In a real sense
she had no choice.  She'd been touched by a knowledge that had changed
her inner landscape out of all recognition.  There was no way back to
the bland pastures of adolescence and early womanhood.  She had to go
forward.  And tonight that meant along this empty street, to see what
the coming night had in store.

The idling engine of a car on the opposite side of the road drew her
attention.  She glanced across at it.  Its windows were all wound up
despite the warmth of the air- which struck her as odd.  She could not
see

the driver; both windows and windshield were too thick with grime. But
an uncomfortable suspicion was growing in her.  Clearly the occupant
was waiting for someone.  And given that there was nobody else on the
street, that someone was most likely her.

If so, the driver could only be one man, for only one knew that she had
a reason to be here: Decker.

She started to run.

The engine revved.  She glanced behind her.  The car was moving off
from its parking place, slowly.  He had no reason to hurry.  There was
no sign of life along the street.  No doubt there was help to be had,
if only she knew which direction to run.  But the car had already
halved the distance between them.  Though she knew she couldn't outrun
it, she ran anyway, the engine louder and louder behind her.  She heard
the tyre walls squeal against the sidewalk.  Then the car appeared at
her side, keeping pace with her yard for yard.

The door opened.  She ran on.  The car kept its companion pace, the
door scraping the concrete.

Then, from within, the invitation.

"Get in."

Bastard, to be so calm.

"Get in, will you, before we're arrested."

It wasn't Decker.  The realization was not a slow burn but a sudden
comprehension: it wasn't Decker speaking from the car.  She stopped
running, her whole body heaving with the effort of catching her
breath.

The car also stopped.

"Get in the driver said again.

"Who ... ?"  she tried to say, but her lungs were too jealous of her
breath to provide the words.

The answer came anyway.

"Friend of Boone's."

Still she hung back from the open door.

"Babette told me how to find you," the man went on.

"Babette?"

"Will you get in!  We've got work to do."

She approached the door.  As she did so, the man said, "Don't scream."
She didn't have the breath to make a sound, but she certainly had the
inclination, when her eyes fell on the face in the gloom of the car.
This was one of Midian's creatures, no doubt, but not a brother to the
fabulous things she'd seen in the tunnels.  The man's appearance was
horrendous, his face raw and red, like uncooked liver.  Had it been any
other way she might have distrusted it, knowing what she knew about
pretenders.  But this creature could pretend nothing: his wound was a
vicious honesty.

"My name's Narcisse," he said.  "Will you shut the door please?  It
keeps the light out.  And the flies."

His story, or at least its essentials, took two and a half blocks to
tell.  How he'd first met with Boone in the hospital; how he'd later
gone to Midian, and once more encountered Boone,how together they'd
broken Midian's laws, trespassing over ground  He had a souvenir of
that adventure, he told her,- a wound in his belly the like of which a
lady should never have to set eyes upon.

"So they exiled you, like Boone?"  she said.

They tried to," he told her.  "But I hung on there, hoping I could
maybe get myself a pardon.  Then when the troopers came I thought:
well, we brought this on the place.  I should try and find Boone.  Try
and stop what we started."  The sun doesn't kill you?"

"Maybe I've not been dead long enough, but no I can bear it."

"You know Boone's in prison?"

"Yeah, I know.  That's why I got the child to help me find you.  I'm
thinking together we can get him out."

"How in God's name do we do that?"

"I don't know," Narcisse confessed.  "But we'd damn well better try.
And be quick about it.  They'll have people out at Midian by now,
digging it up."

"Even if we can free Boone, I don't see what he can do."

"He went into the Baptiser's chamber Narcisse replied, his finger going
to lip and heart.  "He spoke with Baphomet.  From what I hear nobody
other than Lylesburg ever did that before, and survived.  I'm figuring
the Baptiser had some tricks to pass on.  Something that'll help us
stop the destruction."

Lori pictured Boone's terrified face as he stumbled from the chamber.

"I don't think Baphomet told him anything Lori said.  "He barely
escaped alive."

Narcisse laughed.

"He escaped, didn't he?  You think the Baptiser would have allowed that
if there hadn't been a reason for it?"

"All right... so how do we get access to him?  They'll have him guarded
within an inch of his life."

Narcisse smiled.

"What's so funny?"

"You forget what he is now Narcisse said.  "He's got powers."

"I don't forget Lori replied.  "I simply don't know."

"He didn't tell you?"

"No."

"He went to Midian because he thought he'd shed blood '

"I guessed that much."

"He hadn't, of course.  He was guiltless.  Which made him meat."

"You mean he was attacked?"

"Almost killed.  But he escaped, at least as far as the town."

"Where Decker was waiting for him Lori said, finishing the story; or
beginning it.  "He was damn lucky that none of the shots killed him."

Narcisse's smile, which had more or less lingered on; his face since
Lori's remark about Boone being guarded within an inch of his life,
disappeared.

"What do you mean ..."  he said, '... none of the shots killed him?
What do you think took him back to Midian?  Why do you think they
opened the tombs to him the second time?"

She stared at him blankly.

"I don't follow," she said, hoping she didn't.  "What are you telling
me?"

"He was bitten by Peloquin," Narcisse said.  "Bitten and infected.  The
balm got into his blood .. ."  He stopped speaking '..  . You want me
to go on?"

"Yes."

The balm got into his blood.  Gave him the powers.  Gave him the
hunger. And allowed him to get up off the slab and go walking .. ."

His words had grown soft by the end of his statement, in response to
the shock on Lori's face.

"He's dead?"  she murmured.

Narcisse nodded.

"I thought you understood that," he said.  "I thought you were making a
joke before .. . about his being ..."  The remark trailed into
silence.

This is too much," Lori said.  Her fist had closed on the door-handle,
but she lacked the strength to pull on it."... too much."

"Dead isn't bad," Narcisse said.  "It isn't even that different.  It's
just..  . unexpected."

"Are you speaking from experience?"

"Yes."

Her hand dropped from the door.  Every last ounce of strength had gone
from her.

"Don't give up on me now," Narcisse said.

Dead; all dead.  In her arms, in her mind.

"Lori.  Speak to me.  Say something, if it's only goodbye."

"How ... can ... you joke about it?"  she asked him.

"If it's not funny, what is it?  Sad.  Don't want to be sad.  Smile,
will you?  We're going to save lover-boy, you and me."

She didn't reply.

"Do I take silence as consent?"

Still she made no answer.

"Then I do."

 Driven

Eigerman had only been to Midian once before, when providing back up
for the Calgary force in their pursuit of Boone.  It had been then that
he'd met Decker who'd been the hero of that day, risking his life to
try and coax his patient out of hiding.  He'd failed, of course.  The
whole thing had ended in Boone's summary execution as he stepped out
into plain sight.  If ever a man should have laid down and died, it was
that man.  Eigerman had never seen so many bullets in one lump of meat.
But Boone hadn't laid down.  At least not stayed down.  He'd gone
walkabout, with no heartbeat and flesh the colour of raw fish.

Sickening stuff.  It made Eigerman's hide crawl to think of it.  Not
that he was about to admit that fact to anyone.  Not even to his
passengers on the back seat, the priest and the doctor, both of whom
had secrets of their own.  Ashbery's he knew.  The man liked to dress
in women's dainties, which fact Eigerman had chanced upon and used as
leverage when he'd needed sanctification of a sin or two of his own.
But Decker's secrets remained a mystery.  His face betrayed nothing,
even to an eye as practised in the recognition of guilt as
Eigerman's.

Re-angling the mirror, the Chief looked at Ashbery, who shot him a
sullen glance.

"Ever exorcize anyone?"  he asked the priest.

"No."

"Ever watch it done?"

Again, "No."

"You do believe though," Eigerman said.

"In what?"

"In Heaven and Hell, for Christ's sake."

"Define your terms."

"Huh?"

"What do you mean by Heaven and Hell?"

"Jesus, I don't want a fucking debate.  You're a priest, Ashbery.
You're supposed to believe in the Devil.  Isn't that right, Decker?"

The doctor grunted.  Eigerman pushed a little harder.

"Everyone's seen stuff they can't explain, haven't they?  Especially
doctors, right?  You've had patients speaking in tongues '

"I can't say that I have," Decker replied.

"Is that right?  It's all perfectly scientific, is it?"

Tdsayso."

"You'd say so.  And what would you say about Boone?"  Eigerman pressed.
"Is being a fucking zombie scientific too?"

"I don't know," Decker murmured.

"Well, will you look at this?  I've got a priest who doesn't believe in
the Devil, and a doctor who doesn't know science from his asshole. That
makes me feel real comfortable."

Decker didn't respond.  Ashbery did.

"You really think there's something up ahead, don't you?"  he said.
"You're sweating a flood."

"Don't push, sweetheart," Eigerman said.  "Just dig out your little
book of Exorcisms.  I want those freaks sent back wherever the fuck
they came from.  You're supposed to know how."

There are other explanations these days, Eigerman," Ashbery replied.
"This isn't Salem.  We're not going to a burning."

Eigerman turned his attention back to Decker, floating his next
question lightly.

"What do you think, Doc?  Think maybe we should try putting the zombie
on the couch?  Ask him if he ever wanted to fuck his sister?"  Eigerman
threw a look at Ashbery.  "Or dress in her underwear?"

"I think we ate going to Salem/ Decker replied.  There was an
undercurrent in his voice Eigerman hadn't heard before.  "And I also
think you don't give a fuck what I believe or don't believe.  You're
going to burn them out anyway."

"Right on Eigerman said, with a throaty laugh.

"And I think Ashbery's right.  You're terrified."

That silenced the laugh.

"Asshole/ Eigerman said quietly.

They drove the rest of the way in silence, Eigerman setting a new pace
for the convoy, Decker watching the light getting frailer with every
moment, and Ashbery, after a few minutes of introspection, leafing
through his Book of Prayers, turning the onionskin pages at speed,
looking for the Rites of Expulsion.

Pettine was waiting for them fifty yards from the necropolis gate, his
face dirtied by smoke from the cars, which were still burning.

"What's the situation?"  Eigerman wanted to know.

Pettine glanced back towards the cemetery.

"There's been no sign of movement in there since the escape.  But we've
heard stuff."

"Like what?"

"Like we're sitting on a termite hill Pettine said.  "There's things
moving around underground.  No doubt about that.  You can feel it as
much as hear it."

Decker, who'd travelled in one of the later cars, came across and
joined the debate, cutting Pettine off in mid flow to address
Eigerman.

"We've got an hour and twenty minutes before thel sun sets."  < "I can
count Eigerman replied.

"So are we going to get digging?"

"When I say so, Decker."

"Decker's right, Chief," Pettine said.  "It's sun these bastards are
afraid of.  I tell you, I don't think we want to be here at nightfall.
There's a lot of them down there."

"We'll be here as long as it takes to clear this shit up," said
Eigerman.  "How many gates are there?"

"Two.  The big one, and another on the northeast side."

"All right.  So it shouldn't be difficult to contain them.  Get one of
the trucks in front of the main gate, and then we'll post men at
intervals around the wall just to make sure nobody gets out.  Once
they're sealed in we make our approach."

"See you brought some insurance," Pettine commented, looking at
Ashbery.

"Damn right."

Eigerman turned to the priest.

"You can bless water, right?  Make it holy?"

"Yes."

"So do it.  Any water we can find.  Bless it.  Spread it amongst the
men.  It may do some good if bullets don't.  And you, Decker, stay out
of the fucking way.  This is police business now."

Orders given, Eigerman walked down towards the cemetery gates. Crossing
the dusty ground he rapidly understood what Pettine had meant by the
termite hill.  There was something going on below ground.  He even
seemed to hear voices bringing thoughts of premature burial to mind. 
He'd seen that once; or its consequences.  Done the spadework
disinterring a woman who'd been heard screaming underground.  She'd had
reason: she'd given birth and died in her coffin.  The

child, a freak, had survived.  Ended up in an asylum, probably.  Or
here perhaps, in the earth with the rest of the motherfuckers.

If so, he could count the minutes left of his sick life on his
six-fingered hand.  Soon as they showed their heads Eigerman would kick
them right back where they came from, bullets in their brain.  So let
them come.  He wasn't afraid.  Let them come.  Let them try and dig
their way out.

His heel was waiting.

Decker watched the organization of the troops until it began to make
him uneasy.  Then he withdrew up the hill a little.  He loathed being
an observer of other men's labour.  It made him feel impotent.  It made
him long to show them his power.  And that was always a dangerous urge.
The only eyes that could stare safely at his murder-hard were eyes
about to glaze" and even then he had to erase them when they'd looked,
for fear they told what they'd seen.

He turned his back on the cemetery and entertained himself with plans
for the future.  With Boone's trial over, he'd be free to begin the
Mask's work afresh.  He looked forward to that with a passion.  He'd go
further afield from now on.  Find slaughtering places in Manitoba and
Saskatchewan,or maybe over in Vancouver.  He became hot with pleasure
just thinking about it.  From the briefcase he was carrying he could
almost hear Button-Face sigh through his silver teeth.

"Hush," he found himself telling the Mask.

"What's that?"

Decker turned.  Pettine was standing a yard from him.

"Did you say something?"  the cop wanted to know.  fl

He'll go to the wall, the Mask said.  '*!

"Yes," Decker replied.

"I didn't hear."

"Just talking to myself."

Pettine shrugged.

"Word from the Chief.  He says we're about to move in.  Do you want to
give a hand?"

"I'm ready," the Mask said.

"No," said Decker.

"Don't blame you.  Are you just a head-doctor?"

"Yes.  Why?"

Think we might need some medics before too long.  They're not going to
give up without a fight."

"I can't help.  Don't even like the sight of blood."

There was laughter from the briefcase, so loud Decker was certain
Pettine would hear.  But no.

"You'd better keep your distance, then," he said, and turned away to
head back to the field of action.

Decker drew the bag up towards his chest, and held it tight in his
arms.  From inside he could hear the zipper opening and closing,
opening and closing.

"Shut the fuck up," he whispered.

"Don't lock me away," the Mask whined.  Wot tonight of all nights.  If
you don't like the sight of blood let me look or you."

"I can't."

"You owe me," it said.  "You denied me in Midian, remember'1."

"I had no choice."

"You have now.  You can give me some air.  You know you'd like it."

"I'd be seen."

"Soon then."

Decker didn't reply.

"Soon!"  the Mask yelled.

"Hush."

"Just say it."  '..  . please .. ."  "Say it."  "Yes.  Soon."

That Desire we men had been left on duty at the station to guard the
prisoner in Cell Five.  Eigerman had -given them explicit instructions.
They were not on any account to unlock the cell door, whatever noises
they heard from within.  Nor was any outside agency Judge, doctor or
the Good Lord Himself to be given access to the prisoner.  And to
enforce these edicts, should enforcement be necessary, troopers Cor
mack and Koestenbaum had been given the keys to the arsenal, and carte
blanche to use extreme prejudice should the security of the station be
in jeopardy.  They weren't surprised.  Shere Neck would most likely
never see another prisoner so certain to find his way into the annals
of atrocity as Boone.  If he were to be sprung from custody Eigerman's
good name would be cursed from coast to coast.

But there was more to the story than that, and both of them knew it.
Though the Chief had not been explicit about the condition of the
prisoner, rumours had been rife.  The man was in some way freakish;
possessed of powers that made him dangerous, even behind a locked and
bolted door.

Cormack was grateful, then, to have been left to guard the front of the
station, while Koestenbaum watched the cell itself.  The whole place
was a fortress.  Every window and door sealed.  Now it was simply a

question of sitting it out, rifle at the ready, until the'j cavalry
returned from Midian.

It wouldn't be long.  The kind of human garbage: they'd be likely to
find at Midian addicts, perverts, radicals would be rounded up in a few
hours, and the convoy on its way back to relieve the sentinels.  Then
tomorrow there'd be a force up from Calgary to take possession of the
prisoner, and things would settle back into their regular pattern.
Cormack wasn't in the policing business to sit and sweat the way he was
now -he was in it for the easy feeling that came on a summer night when
he could drive down to the corner of South and Emmett, and coerce one
of the professionals to put her face in his lap for half an hour.  That
was what he liked the law for.  Not this fortress under siege shit.

"Help me," somebody said.

He heard the words quite clearly.  The speaker a woman was just outside
the front door.

"Help me, please."

The appeal was so pitiful he couldn't ignore it.  Rifle cocked he went
to the door.  There was no glass in it, not even a spy-hole, so he
couldn't see the speaker on the step.  But he heard her again.  First a
sob; then a soft rapping, which was failing even as it came.

"You'll have to go someplace else," he said.  "I can't help you right
now."

"I'm hurt," she seemed to say, but he wasn't sure.  He put his ear to
the door.  "Did ya hear me?"  he asked.  "I can't help you.  Go on down
to the drug store."

There was not even a sob by way of reply.  Only the faintest of
breaths.

Cormack liked women; liked to play the boss-man and bread-winner.  Even
the hero, as long as it didn't cost him too much sweat.  It went
against the grain not to open the door to a woman begging for help.
She'd sounded young, and desperate.  It was not his heart that

hardened, thinking of her vulnerability.  Checking first that
Koestenbaum wasn't in sight to witness his de france of Eigerman's
orders, he whispered:

"Hold on."

And unbolted the door top and bottom.

He'd only opened it an inch and a hand darted through, its thumb
slashing his face.  The wound missed his eye by a centimetre, but the
spurting blood turned half the world red.  Semi-blind, he was thrown
backwards as the force on the other side of the door threw it open.  He
didn't let the rifle go, however.  He fired, first at the woman (the
shot went wide), then at her companion, who ran at him half-crouching
to avoid the bullets.  The second shot, though as wide as the first,
brought blood.  Not his target's, however.  It was his own boot, and
the good flesh and bone inside, that was spattered across the floor.

"Jesus Fucking Christ!"

In his horror he let the rifle drop from his fingers.  Knowing he'd not
be able to bend and snatch it up again without losing his balance he
turned and started to hop towards the desk, where his gun lay.

But Silver Thumbs was already there, swallowing the bullets like
vitamin pills.

Denied his de fences and knowing he could not stay vertical for more
than a few seconds, he began to howl.

Outside Cell Five, Koestenbaum held his post.  He had his orders.
Whatever happened beyond the door into the station itself he was to
stand guard by the cell, defending it from any and every assault.  That
he was determined to do, however much Cormack yelled.

Grinding out his cigarette he drew the shutter in the cell door aside
and put his eyes to the peep-hole.  The

killer had moved in the last few minutes, edging into the corner by
degrees, as if hunted by a patch of weak sunlight that fell through the
tiny window high above him.  Now he could go no further.  He was wedged
in the corner, wrapped up in himself.  Movement aside, he looked much
as he had all along: like wreckage.  No danger to anyone.

Appearances deceived, of course; Koestenbaum had been in uniform too
long to be naive about that.  But he knew a defeated man when he saw
one.  Boone didn't even look up when Cormack let out another yelp.  He
just watched the crawling sunlight from the corner of his eye, and
shook.

Koestenbaum slammed the peep-hole shut and turned back to watch the
door through which Cor mack's attackers whoever they were had to come.
They'd find him ready and waiting, guns blazing.

He didn't have long to contemplate his last stand, as a blast blew out
the lock and half the door with it, shards and smoke filling the air.
He fired into the confusion, seeing somebody coming at him.  The man
was tossing away the rifle he'd used to blow the door, and was raising
his hands, which glinted as they swept towards Koestenbaum's eyes.  The
trooper hesitated long enough to catch sight of his assailant's face
like something that should have been under bandages or six feet of
earth then he fired.  The bullet struck its target, but slowed the man
not a jot, and before he could fire a second time he was up against the
wall, with the raw face inches from his.  Now he saw all too clearly
what glinted in the man's hands.  A hook hovered an inch from the gleam
of his left eye.  There was another at his groin.

"Which do you want to live without?"  the man said.

"No need," said a woman's voice, before Koestenbaum had a chance to
choose between sight and sex.

"Let me," Narcisse said.

"Don't let him," Koestenbaum murmured.  "Please ... don't let him."

The woman came into view now.  The parts of her that showed seemed
natural enough, but he wouldn't have wanted to lay bets on what she
looked like under her blouse.  More tits than a bitch, most likely.  He
was in the hands of freaks.

"Where's Boone?"  she said.

There was no purpose in risking his balls, eye or otherwise.  They'd
find the prisoner with or without his help.

"Here," he said, glancing back towards Cell Five.

"And the keys?"

"On my belt."  The woman reached down and took the keys from him.

"Which one?"  she said.

"Blue tag," he replied.

"Thank you."

She moved past him to the door.

"Wait Koestenbaum said.

"What?"

' make him let me alone."

"Narcisse," she said.

The hook was withdrawn from his eye, but the one at his groin remained,
pricking him.

"We have to be quick," Narcisse said.

"I know," the woman replied.

Koestenbaum heard the door swing open.  He glanced round to see her
stepping into the cell.  As he looked back the fist came at his face,
and he dropped to the floor with his jaw broken in three places.

Cormack had suffered the same summary blow, but he'd been already
toppling when it came, and instead of knocking him solidly into
unconsciousness it had merely left him in a daze, from which he quickly
shook himself.  He crawled to the door, and hauled himself, hand over
hand, to his foot.  Then he stumbled out in the street.  The rush of
homeward traffic was over, but there were still vehicles passing in
both directions, and the sight of a toe less trooper hobbling into the
middle of the street, arms raised, was enough to bring the flow of
traffic to a squealing halt.

But even as the drivers and their passengers stepped out of the trucks
and cars to come to his assistance Cormack felt the delayed shock of
his self-wounding closing his system down.  The words his helpers were
mouthing to him reached his befuddled mind as nonsense.

He thought (hoped) somebody had said:

I'll get a gun."

But he couldn't be sure.

He hoped (prayed) his lolling tongue had told them where to find the
felons, but he was even less sure of that.

As the ring of faces faded around him, however, he realized his seeping
foot would have left a trail that would lead them back to the
transgressors.  Comforted, he passed out.

"Boone," she said.  His sallow body, bared to the waist scarred, and

missing a nipple shuddered as she spoke his name.  But he didn't look
up at her.

"Get him going, will you?"

Narcisse was at the door, staring at the prisoner.

"Not with you yelling I won't," she told him.  "Leave us alone a little
while, huh?"

"No time for fucky fucky."

"Just get out."

"OK."  He raised his arms in mock surrender.  "I'm going."

He closed the door.  It was just her and Boone now.  The living and the
dead.

"Get up," she told him.

He did nothing but shudder.

"Will you get up?  We don't have that much time."

"So leave me," he said.

She ignored the sentiment but not the fact that he'd broken his
silence.

"Talk to me," she said.

"You shouldn't have come back," he said, defeat in his every word. "You
put yourself at risk for nothing."

She hadn't expected this.  Anger maybe, that she'd left him to be
captured at the Sweetgrass Inn.  Suspicion even, that she'd come here
with someone from Midian.  But not this mumbling, broken creature,
slumped in a corner like a boxer who'd fought a dozen too many fights.
Where was the man she'd seen at the Inn, changing the order of his very
flesh in front of her?  Where was the casual strength she'd seen; and
the appetite?  He scarcely seemed capable of lifting his own head,
never mind meat to his lips.

That was the issue, she suddenly understood.  That forbidden meat.

"I can still taste it," he said.

There was such shame in his voice; the human he'd been repulsed by the
thing he'd become.

"You weren't answerable," she told him.  "You weren't in control of
yourself."

"I am now," he replied.  His nails dug into the my of his forearms,
she saw, as though he were hold!  himself down.  "I'm not going to let
go.  I'm going wait here till they come to string me up."

"That won't do any good, Boone," she reminded him.^1

"Jesus ..."  The word decayed into tears.  "You knowf everything?"

"Yes, Narcisse told me.  You're dead.  So why wish a| hanging on
yourself?  They can't kill you."

They'll find a way," he said.  "Take off my head.  Blow out my
brains."

"Don't talk like that!"

"They have to finish me, Lori.  Put me out of my misery."

"I don't want you out of your misery," she said.

"But I do!"  he replied, looking up at her for the first time.  Seeing
his face, she remembered how many had doted on him, and understood why.
Pain could have no more persuasive apologists than his bones, his
eyes.

"I want out," he said.  "Out of this body.  Out of this life."

"You can't.  Midian needs you.  It's being destroyed, Boone."

"Let it go!  Let it all go.  Midian's just a hole in the ground, full
of things that should lie down and be dead.  They know that, all of
'em. They just haven't got the balls to do what's right."

"Nothing's right," she found herself saying (how far she'd come, to
this bleak relativity), 'except what you feel and know."

His small fury abated.  The sadness that replaced it was profounder
than ever.

"I feel dead," he said.  "I know nothing."

That's not true," she replied, taking the first steps towards him she'd
taken since entering the cell.  He flinched as if he expected her to
strike him.

"You know me," she said.  "You feel me."

She took hold of his arm, and pulled it up towards

her.  He didn't have time to make a fist.  She laid his palm on her
stomach.

"You think you disgust me, Boone?  You think you horrify me?  You
don't."

She drew his hand up towards her breasts.

"I still want you, Boone.  Midian wants you too, but I want you more. I
want you cold, if that's the way you are.  I want you dead, if that's
the way you are.  And I'll come to you if you won't come to me.  I'll
let them shoot me down."

"No," he said.

Her grip on his hand was light now.  He could have slipped it.  But he
chose to leave his touch upon her, with only the thin fabric of her
blouse intervening.  She wished she could dissolve it at will; have his
hand stroking the skin between her breasts.

"They're going to come for us sooner or later," she said.

Nor was she bluffing.  There were voices from outside.  A lynch-mob
gathering.  Maybe the monsters were forever.  But so were their
persecutors.

They'll destroy us both, Boone.  You for what you are.  Me for loving
you.  And I'll never hold you again.  I don't want that, Boone.  I
don't want us dust in the same wind.  I want us flesh."

Her tongue had outstripped her intention.  She hadn't meant to say it
so plainly.  But it was said now; and true.  She wasn't ashamed of
it.

I won't let you deny me, Boone/ she told him.  The words were their own
engine.  They drove her hand to Boone's cold scalp.  She snatched a
fist of his thick hair.

He didn't resist her.  Instead the hand on her chest closed on the
blouse, and he went down onto his knees in front of her, pressing his
face to her crotch, licking at it as if to tongue her clean of clothes
and enter her with spit and spirit all in one.

She was wet beneath the fabric.  He smelt her heat for him.  Knew what
she'd said was no lie.  He kissed

her cunt, or the cloth that hid her cunt, over and over and over.

"Forgive yourself, Boone," she said.

He nodded.

She took tighter hold on his hair, and pulled him away from the bliss
of her scent.

"Say it," she told him.  "Say you forgive yourself."

He looked up from his pleasure, and she could see before he spoke the
weight of shame had gone from his face.  Behind his sudden smile she
met the monster's eyes, dark, and darkening still as he delved for
it.

The look made her ache.

"Please ..."  she murmured,"... love me."

He pulled at her blouse.  It tore.  His hand was through the gap in one
smooth motion, and beneath her bra for her breast.  This was madness of
course.  The mob would be upon them if they didn't get out quickly. But
then madness had drawn her into this circle of dust and flies in the
first place; why be surprised that her jjj; journey had brought her
round to this new insanity?  Better this than life without him.  Better
this than practically anything.

He was getting to his feet, teasing her tit from hiding, putting his
cold mouth to her hot nipple, flicking it, licking it, tongue and teeth
in perfect play.  Death had made a lover of him.  Given him knowledge
of clay, and how to rouse it; made him easy with the body's mysteries.
He was everywhere about her, working his hips against hers in slow
grinding circles trailing his tongue from her breasts to the sweat-bowl
between her clavicles, and up along the ridge of her throat to her
chin, thence to her mouth.  K

Only once in her life had there been such wrenching j hunger in her. In
New York, years before, she'd met |j and fucked with a man whose name
she'd never || known, but whose hands and lips seemed to know her |j
better than herself.  It

"Have a drink with me?"  she'd said, when they'd unglued themselves.

He'd told her no almost pityingly, as though someone so ignorant of the
rules was bound for grief.  So she'd watched him dress and leave, angry
with herself for asking, and with him for such practised detachment.
But she'd dreamt of him a dozen times in the weeks after, revisiting
their squalid moments together, hungry for them again.

She had them here.  Boone was the lover of that dark corner, perfected.
Cool and feverish, urgent and studied.  She knew his name this time;
but he was still strange to her.  And in the fervour of his possession,
and in her heat for him, she felt that other lover, and all the lovers
who'd come and gone before him, burned up.  It was only their ash in
her now where their tongues and cocks had been and she had power over
them completely.

Boone was unzipping himself.  She took his length in her hand.  Now it
was his turn to sigh, as she ran her fingers along the underside of his
erection, up from his balls to where the ring of his circumcision scar
bore a nugget of tender flesh.  She stroked him there, tiny movements
to match the measure of his tongue back and forth between her lips.
Then, on the same sudden impulse, the teasing time was over.  He was
lifting her skirt, tearing at her underwear, his fingers going where
only hers had been for too long.  She pushed him back against the wall;
pulled his jeans down to mid-thigh.  Then, one arm hooked around his
shoulders, the other hand enjoying the silk of his cock before it was
out of sight, she took him inside.  He resisted her speed, a delicious
war of want which had her at screaming pitch in seconds.  She was never
so open, nor had ever needed to be.  He filled her to overflowing.

Then it really began.  After the promises, the proof.  Bracing his
upper back against the wall he angled himself so as to throw his fuck
up into her, her weight

its own insistence.  She licked his face.  He grinned.; spat in it. He
laughed and spat back.

"Yes," she said.  "Yes.  Go on.  Yes."

All she could manage were affirmatives.  Yes to his|!  spittle, yes to
his cock; yes to this life in death, and jc in life in death forever
and ever.

His answer was honey-hipped; wordless labour, teetfi clenched, brow
ploughed.  The expression on his facgijj| made her cunt spasm.  To see
him shut his eyes against!  her pleasure; to know that the sight of her
bliss took him too close to be countenanced.  They had such power, each
over each.  She demanded his motion with motion of her own, one hand
gripping the brick beside his head so she could raise herself along his
length then impale herself again.  There was no finer hurt.  She wished
it could never stop.

But there was a voice at the door.  She could hear it through her
whining head.

"Quickly."  ~g

It was Narcisse.  3j|

"Quickly."  Boone heard him too; and the din behind H his voice as the
lynchers gathered.  He matched her J| new rhythm; up to meet her
descent.  ||

"Open your eyes," she said.  If

He obeyed, grinning at the command.  It was too much for him, meeting
her eyes.  Too much for her, '.jOi meeting his.  The pact struck, they
parted till her cunt only sucked at the head of his cock so slicked it
JJ might slip from her then closed on each other for one || final
stroke.  ||

The joy of it made her cry out, but he choked her i| yell with his
tongue, sealing their eruption inside their mouths.  Not so below.
Undammed after months, his come overflowed and ran down her legs, its
course colder than his scalp or kisses.

It was Narcisse who brought them back from their world of two into that
of many.  The door was now open.  He was watching them without
embarrassment.

"Finished?"  he wanted to know.

Boone wiped his lips back and forth on Lori's, spreading their saliva
from cheek to cheek.

"For now," he said, looking only at her.

"So can we get going?"  Narcisse said.

"Whenever.  Wherever."

"Midian," came the instant reply.

"Midian then."

The lovers drew apart.  Lori pulled up her underwear.  Boone tried to
get his cock, still hard, behind his zip.

"There's quite a mob out there," Narcisse said.  "How the hell are we
going to get past them?"

"They're all the same Boone said, all afraid."

Lori, her back turned to Boone, felt a change in the air around her.  A
shadow was climbing the walls to left and right, spreading over her
back, kissing her nape, her spine, her buttocks and what lay between.
It was Boone's darkness.  He was in it to its length and breadth.

Even Narcisse was agog.

"Holy Shit," he muttered, then flung the door wide to let the night go
running.

The mob was itching for fun.  Those with guns and rifles had brought
them from their cars; those with the luck to have been travelling with
rope in their trunks were practising knots; and those without rope or
guns had picked up stones.  For justification they needed to look no
further than the spattered remains of Cor mack's foot, spread on the
station floor.  The leaders of the group- who'd established themselves
immediately by natural selection (they had louder voices and more
powerful weapons) -were treading this red ground when a noise from the
vicinity of the cells drew their attention.

Somebody at the back of the crowd started shouting: "Shoot the
bastards downl'

It was not Boone's shadow the leaders' target-hungry^ eyes first
alighted upon.  It was Narcisse.  His ruined face brought a gasp of
disgust from several of the throng, and shouts for his dispatch from
many more.

"Shoot the fucker!

"Through the heartl'

The leaders didn't hesitate.  Three of them fired.  One of them hit the
man, the bullet catching Narcisse in the shoulder and passing straight
through him.  There was a cheer from the mob.  Encouraged by this first
wounding they surged into the station in still greater numbers, those
at the back eager to see the bloodletting, those at the front mostly
blind to the fact that their target had not shed a single drop.  He
hadn't fallen either, that they did see.  And now one or two acted to
put that to rights, firing a volley at Narcisse.  Most of the shots
went wide, but not all.

As the third bullet struck home, however, a roar of fury shook the
room, exploding the lamp on the desk and bringing dust from the
ceiling.

Hearing it one or two of those just crossing the threshold changed
their minds.  Suddenly careless of what their neighbours might think
they began to dig their way out into the open air.  It was still light
on the street; there was warmth to cancel the chill of fear that ran
down every human spine, hearing that cry.  But for those at the head of
the mob there was no retreat.  The door was jammed.  All they could do
was stand their ground and aim their weapons, as the roarer emerged
from the darkness at the back of the station.

One of the men had been a witness at the Sweetgrass Inn that morning,
and knew the man who now came into sight as the killer he'd seen
arrested.  Knew his name too.

That's him!"  he started to yell.  That's Boone!"

The man who'd fired the first shot to strike Narcisse aimed his
rifle.

"Bring him down!"  somebody shouted.

The man fired.

Boone had been shot before; and shot; and shot.  This little bullet,
entering his chest and nicking his silent heart, was nothing.  He
laughed it off and kept coming, feeling the change in him as he
breathed it out.  His substance was fluid.  It broke into droplets and
became something new; part the beast he'd inherited from Peloquin, part
a shade warrior, like Lylesburg; part Boone the lunatic, content with
his visions at last.  And oh!  the pleasure of it, feeling this
possibility liberated and forgiven; the pleasure of bearing down on
this human herd and seeing it break before him.

He smelt their heat, and hungered for it.  He saw their terror, and
took strength from it.  They stole such authority for themselves, these
people.  Made themselves arbiters of good and bad, natural and
unnatural, justifying their cruelty with spurious laws.  Now they saw a
simpler law at work, as their bowels remembered the oldest fear: of
being prey.

They fled before him, panic spreading throughout their unruly ranks.
The rifles and the stones were forgotten in the chaos, as howls for
blood became howls for escape.  Trampling each other in their haste,
they clawed and fought their way into the street.

One of the riflemen stood his ground, or else was rooted to it in
shock.  Whichever, the weapon was dashed from his grip by Boone's
swelling hand, and the man flung himself into the throng of people to
escape further confrontation.

Daylight still ruled the street outside, and Boone was loath to step
into it, but Narcisse was indifferent to such niceties.  With the route
cleared he made his way out into the light, weaving through the fleeing
crowd unnoticed, until he reached the car.

There was some regrouping of forces going on, Boone

could see.  A knot of people on the far sidewalk comforted by the
sunlight, and their distance from beast- talking heatedly together as
though they mightlj rally.  Dropped weapons were being claimed from the
ground.  It could only be a matter of time before the| shock of Boone's
transformation died away and they!  renewed their assault.

But Narcisse was swift.  He was in the car and revving' it by the time
Teri reached the door.  Boone held her back, the touch of his shadow,
(which he trailed like smoke) more than enough to cancel any lingering
fear she might have had of his reworked flesh.  Indeed, she found
herself imagining what it would be like to fuck with him in this
configuration, to spread herself for the shadow and the beast at its
heart.

The car was at the door now, squealing to a halt in a cloud of its own
fumes.  M:

"Go!"  Boone said, pitching her through the door, his >,

shadow covering the sidewalk to confound the enemy's ||

sights.  With reason.  A shot blew out the back window it even as she
threw herself into the car; a barrage of  stones followed.

Boone was at her side already, and slamming the door.  |j|

"They're going to come after us!"  Narcisse said.  '-M

"Let them," was Boone's response.  If

ToMidian?"  |f

"It's no secret now."

"True."  j|

Narcisse put his foot down, and the car was away.  f|

"We'll lead them to Hell," said Boone, as a quartet of H

vehicles began to give chase, 'if that's where they want 1|

to go."  "J|

His voice was guttural from the throat of the creature 3

he'd become, but the laugh that followed was Boone's j laugh, as though
it had always belonged to this beast; JJ

a humour more ecstatic than his humanity had room ||

for, that had finally found its purpose and its face.  |f

218 it

Triumph of the Mask if he never saw another day like today, Eigerman
thought, he'd have little to complain to the Lord about, when he was
eventually called.  First the sight of Boone in chains.  Then bringing
the baby out to meet the cameras, knowing his face would be on the
cover of every newspaper across the country tomorrow morning.  And now
this: the glorious sight of Midian in flames.

It had been Pettine's notion, and a damn good one, to pour lighted
gasoline down the gullets of the tombs, to drive whatever was
underground up into the light.  It had worked better than either of
them had anticipated.  Once the smoke began to thicken and the fires to
spread, the enemy had no choice but to exit their cess-pit into the
open air, where God's good sun took many of them apart at a stroke.

Not all however.  Some of them had time to prepare for their emergence,
protecting themselves against the light by whatever desperate means
they could.  Their invention was in vain.  The pyre was sealed: gates
guarded, walls manned.  Unable to escape skyward with wings and heads
covered against the sun, they were driven back into the
conflagration.

In other circumstances Eigerman might not have allowed himself to enjoy
the spectacle as openly as he did.  But these creatures weren't human
that much was apparent even from a safe distance.  They were

mis created fuck heads no two the same, and he was!  sure the saints
themselves would have laughed to see them bested.  Putting down the
Devil was the Lord's own sport.

But it couldn't last forever.  Night would soon be;?  falling.  When it
did their strongest defence against the; enemy would drop out of sight,
and the tide might turn.  They'd have to leave the bonfire to burn
over5 night, and at dawn return to dig the survivors out of their
niches and finish them off.  With crosses and holy water securing the
walls and gates there'd be little chance of any escaping before
daybreak.  He wasn't sure what power was working to subdue the
monsters: fire, water, daylight, faith: all, or some combination of
these.  It didn't matter.  All that concerned him was that he had the
power to crack their heads.

A shout from down the hill broke Eigerman's train of thought.

"You've got to stop thisl'

It was Ashbery.  It looked like he'd been standing too close to the
flames.  His face was half-cooked, basted in sweat.

"Stop what?"  Eigerman yelled back.

"This massacre."

"I see no massacre."

Ashbery was within a couple of yards of Eigerman, but he still had to
shout over the noise from below: the din of the freaks and the fires
punctuated now and again by louder dins as the heat broke a slab, or
brought a mausoleum down.

"They don't stand a chancel' Ashbery hollered.

"They're not supposed to," Eigerman pointed out.  ||

"But you don't know who's down there!  Eigerman!  You don't know who
you're killing."

The Chief grinned.

"I know damn well," he said, a look in his eyes that Ashbery had only
ever seen in mad dogs.  "I'm killing the dead, and how can that be
wrong?  Eh?  Answer me,

Ashbery.  How can it be wrong to make the dead lie down and stay
dead!"

"There's children down there, Eigerman," Ashbery replied, jabbing a
finger in the direction of Midian.

"Oh yes.  With eyes like headlamps!  And teeth!  You seen the teeth on
those fuckers?  That's the Devil's children, Ashbery."  "You're out of
your mind."

"You haven't got the balls to believe that, have you?  You haven't got
balls at all!"

He took a step towards the priest, and caught hold of the black
cassock.

"Maybe you're more like them than us," he said.  "Is that what it is,
Ashbery?  Feel the call of the wild, do you?"

Ashbery wrested his robes from Eigerman's grip.  They tore.

"All right .. ."  he said, "I tried reasoning with you.  it you've got
such God-fearing executioners, then maybe a man of God can stop
them."

"You leave my men alone!"  Eigerman said.

But Ashbery was already half way down the hill, his voice carried above
the tumult.

"Stop!"  he yelled.  "Lay down your weapons1."

Centre-stage in front of the main gates he was visible to a good number
of Eigerman's army, and though few, if any, had stepped into a church
since their wedding or their baptism they listened now.  They wanted
some explanation of the sights the last hour had provided; sights
they'd happily have fled from but that some urge they'd barely
recognize as their own kept them at the wall, childhood prayers on
their lips.

Eigerman knew their loyalty was only his by default.  They didn't obey
him because they loved the law.  They obeyed because they were more
afraid of retreating in front of their companions than of doing the
job.  They obeyed because they couldn't defy the ant-under-the
magnifying-glass fascination of watching helpless

things go bang.  They obeyed because obeying was simpler than not.

Ashbery might change their minds.  He had the robes, he had the
rhetoric.  If he wasn't stopped he might still spoil the day.

Eigerman took his gun from his holster, and followed the priest down
the hill.  Ashbery saw him coming; saw the gun in his hand.

He raised his voice still louder.

This isn't what God wants!"  he yelled.  "And it's not what you want
either.  You don't want innocent blood on your hands."

Priest to the bitter end, Eigerman thought, laying on the guilt.

"Shut your mouth, faggot he hollered.

Ashbery had no intention of doing so; not when he had his audience in
the palm of his hand.

"They're not animals in there!"  he said.  "They're people.  And you're
killing them just because this J| lunatic tells you to."  3f,

His words carried weight, even amongst the atheists.  If He was voicing
a doubt more than one had entertained ; but none had dared express.
Half a dozen of the non- J| uniformed began to retire towards their
cars, all enthu- J| siasm for the extermination drained.  One of
Eigerman's H men also withdrew from his station at the gate, his |j|
slow retreat becoming a run as the chief fired a shot in , W his
direction.  |j|

"Stand your ground!"  he bellowed.  But the man was "M" away, lost in
the smoke.  5|

Eigerman turned his fury back on Ashbery.  |f

"Got some bad news," he said, advancing towards the H priest.  H

Ashbery looked to right and left for someone willing it to defend him,
but nobody moved.  *

"You going to watch him kill me?"  he appealed.  "For ill God's sake,
won't somebody help me?"  If

Eigerman levelled his gun.  Ashbery had no intention H

222 ll

of attempting to outrun the bullet.  He dropped to his knees.

"Our Father ..."  he began.

"You're on your own, cocksucker Eigerman purred.  "Nobody's
listening."

"Not true," somebody said.

"Huh?"

The prayer faltered.

"I'm listening."

Eigerman turned his back on the priest.  A figure loomed in the smoke
ten yards from him.  He pointed the gun in the newcomer's direction.

"Who are you?"

"Sun's almost set," the other said.

"One more step and I'll shoot you."

"So shoot said the man, and took a step towards the gun.  The tatters
of smoke that clung to him blew away, and the prisoner in Cell Five
walked into Eigerman's sights, his skin bright, his eyes brighter.  He
was stark naked.  There was a bullet hole in the middle of his chest
and more wounds besides, decorating his body.

"Dead," Eigerman said.

"You bet."

"Jesus Lord."

He backed off a step; and another.

"Ten minutes maybe, before sundown," Boone said.  "Then the world's
ours."

Eigerman shook his head.

"You're not getting me," he said.  "I won't let you get me!"

His backward steps multiplied and suddenly he was away at speed, not
looking behind him.  Had he done so, he would have seen that Boone was
not interested in pursuit.  He was moving instead towards the besieged
gates of Midian.  Ashbery was still on the ground there.

"Get up," Boone told him.

"If you're going to kill me, do it will you?"  Ashberyjl said.  "Get
it over with."

"Why should I kill you?"  Boone said.

"I'm a priest."

"So?"

"You're a monster."

"And you're not?"

Ashbery looked up at Boone.

The?"

"There's lace under the robe," Boone said.

Ashbery pulled together the tear in his cassock.

"Why hide it?"

"Let me alone."

"Forgive yourself," Boone said.  "I did."

He walked on past Ashbery to the gates.

"Wait!"  the priest said.

"I'd get going if I were you.  They don't like the robes in Midian. Bad
memories."

"I want to see," Ashbery said.

"Why?"

"Please.  Take me with you."

"It's your risk."

"I'll take it."

From a distance it was hard to be sure of what was || going on down at
the cemetery gates, but of two facts the doctor was sure: Boone had
returned, and somehow |j bested Eigerman.  At the first sight of his
arrival Decker j| had taken shelter in one of the police vehicles.
There || he sat now, briefcase in hand, trying to plot his next
action.

It was difficult, with two voices each counselling different things.
His public self demanded retreat, before events became any more
dangerous.

Leave now, it said.  Just drive away.  Let them all die together.

There was wisdom in this.  With night almost fallen, and Boone there to
rally them, Midian's hosts might still triumph.  If they did, and they
found Decker, his heart would be ripped from his chest.

But there was another voice demanding his attention.

Stay, it said.

The voice of the Mask, rising from the case on his lap.

You've denied me here once already, it said.

So he had, knowing when he did it there'd come a time for repaying the
debt.

"Not now," he whispered.

Now, it said.

He knew rational argument carried no weight against its hunger, nor did
pleading.

Use your eyes, it said.  I've got work to do.

What did it see that he didn't?  He stared out through the window.

Don't you see her?

Now he did.  In his fascination with Boone, naked at the gates, he'd
missed the other newcomer to the field: Boone's woman.

Do you see the bitch?  the Mask said.

"I see her."

Perfect timing, chi In this chaos who's going to see me finish her
off'!  Nobody.  And with her gone there'll be no-one left who knows our
secret.

"There's still Boone."

He'll never testify, the Mask laughed.  He's a dead man, for Christ's
sake.  What's a zombie's word worth, tell me that?

"Nothing," Decker said.

Exactly.  He's no danger to us.  But the woman is.  Let me silence
her.

"Suppose you're seen?"

Suppose I am, the Mask said.  They'll think I was one of Midian's clan
all along.

"Not you," Decker said.

The thought of his precious Other being confused with the degenerates
of Midian nauseated him.

"You're pure," he said.

Let me prove it, the Mask coaxed.

"Just the woman?"

Just the woman.  Then we'll leave.

He knew the advice made sense.  They'd never have a better opportunity
of killing the bitch.

He started to unlock the case.  Inside, the Mask grew agitated.

Quickly or we'll lose her.

His fingers slid on the dial as he ran the numbers of the lock.

Quickly, damn you.

The final digit clicked into place.  The lock sprang open.

Of' Button Face was never more beautiful.

Though Boone had advised Lori to stay with Narcisse, the sight of
Midian in flames was enough to draw her companion away from the safety
of the hill and down towards the cemetery gates.  Lori went with him a
little way, but her presence seemed to intrude upon his grief, so she
hung back a few paces, and in the smoke and deepening twilight was soon
divided from him.

The scene before her was one of utter confusion.  Any attempt to
complete the assault on the necropolis had ceased since Boone had sent
Eigerman running.  Both his men and their civilian support had
retreated from around the walls.  Some had already driven away, most
likely fearing what would happen when the sun sank

over the horizon.  Most remained however, prepared to beat a retreat
if necessary, but mesmerized by the spectacle of destruction.  Her gaze
went from one to another, looking for some sign of what they were
feeling, but every face was blank.  They looked like death masks, she
thought, wiped of response.  Except that she knew the dead now.  She
walked with them, talked with them.  Saw them feel and weep.  Who then
were the real dead?  The silent hearted, who still knew pain, or their
glassy-eyed tormentors?

A break in the smoke uncovered the sun, teetering on the rim of the
world.  The red light dazzled her.  She closed her eyes against it.

In the darkness, she heard a breath a little way behind her.  She
opened her eyes, and began to turn, knowing harm was coming.  Too late
to slip it.  The Mask was a yard from her, and closing.

She had seconds only before the knife found her, but it was long enough
to see the Mask as she'd never seen it before.  Here was the blankness
on the faces she'd studied perfectly perfected; the human fiend made
myth.  No use to call it Decker.  It wasn't Decker.  No use to call it
anything.  It was as far beyond names as she was beyond power to tame
it.

It slashed her arm.  Once, and again.

There were no taunts from it this time.  It had come only to despatch
her.

The wounds stung.  Instinctively she put her hand to them, her motion
giving him opportunity to kick the legs from under her.  She had no
time to cushion her fall.  The impact emptied her lungs.  Sobbing for
breath, she turned her face to the ground to keep it from the knife.
The earth seemed to shudder beneath her.  Illusion, surely.  Yet it
came again.

She glanced up at the Mask.  He too had felt the tremors, and was
looking towards the cemetery.  His distraction would be her only
reprieve; she had to take it.  Rolling out of his shadow she got to her
feet.  There

was no sign of Narcisse, or Rachel; nor much hope o| I help from the
death-masks, who'd forsaken their vigil | and were hurrying away from
the smoke as the tremors intensified.  Fixing her eyes on the gate
through which Boone had stepped, she stumbled down the hill, the dusty
soil dancing at her feet.

The source of the agitation was Midian.  Its cue, the disappearance of
the sun, and with it the light that had trapped the Breed underground.
It was their noise that made the ground shake, as they destroyed their
refuge.  What was below could remain below no longer.

The Nightbreed were rising.

The knowledge didn't persuade her from her course.  Whatever was loose
inside the gate she'd long ago made her peace with it, and might expect
mercy.  From the horror at her back, matching her stride for stride,
she could expect none.

There were only the fires from the tombs up ahead to light her way now,
a way strewn with the debris of the siege: petrol cans, shovels,
discarded weapons.  She was almost at the gates before she caught sight
of Babette standing close to the wall, her face terror stricken.

"Rum' she yelled, afraid the Mask would wound the child.

Babette did as she was told, her body seeming to melt into beast as she
turned and fled through the gates.  Lori came a few paces after her,
but by the time she was over the threshold the child had already gone,
lost down the smoke filled avenues.  The tremors here were strong
enough to unseat the paving stones, and topple the mausoleums, as
though some force underground - Baphomet, perhaps, Who Made Midian was
shaking its foundations to bring the place to ruin.  She hadn't
anticipated such violence; her chances of surviving the cataclysm were
slim.

But better to be buried in the rubble than succumb to the Mask.  And be
flattered, at the end, that Fate had at least offered her a choice of
extinctions.

The Harrowing

In the cell back at Shere Neck memories of Midian's labyrinth had
tormented Boone.  Closing his eyes against the sun he'd found himself
lost here, only to open them again and find the maze echoed in the
whirls of his fingertips and the veins on his arms.  Veins in which no
heat ran; reminders, like Midian, of his shame.

Lori had broken that spell of despair, coming to him not begging but
demanding he forgive himself.

Now, back in the avenues from which his monstrous condition had sprung,
he felt her love for him like the life his body no longer possessed.

He needed its comfort, in the pandemonium.  The Nightbreed were not
simply bringing Midian down, they were erasing all clue to their nature
or keepsake of their passing.  He saw them at work on every side,
labouring to finish what Eigerman's scourge had begun.  Gathering up
the pieces of their dead and throwing them into the flames; burning
their beds, their clothes, anything they couldn't take with them.

These were not the only preparations for escape.  He glimpsed the Breed
in forms he'd never before had the honour to see: unfurling wings,
unfolding limbs.  One becoming many (a man, a flock); many becoming one
(three lovers, a cloud).  All around, the rites of departure.

Ashbery was still at Boone's side, agog.

"Where are they going?"

"I'm too late Boone said.  "They're leaving Midian."

The lid of a tomb ahead flew off, and a ghost form rose like a rocket
into the night sky.

"Beautiful," Ashbery said.  "What are they?  Why have I never known
them?"

Boone shook his head.  He had no way to describe the Breed that were
not the old ways.  They didn't belong to Hell; nor yet to Heaven.  They
were what the species he'd once belonged to could not bear to be.  The
unpeople; the anti-tribe; humanity's sack unpicked and sewn together
again with the moon inside.

And now, before he'd a chance to know them and by knowing them, know
himself-he was losing them.  They were finding transport in their
cells, and rising to the night.

Too late," he said again, the pain of this parting bringing tears to
his eyes.

The escapes were gathering momentum.  On every side doors were being
thrown wide, and slabs overturned, as the spirits ascended in
innumerable forms.  Not all flew.  Some went as goat or tiger, racing
through the flames to the gate.  Most went alone, but some whose
fecundity neither death nor Midian had slowed went with families of six
or more, their littlest in their arms.  He was witnessing, he knew, the
passing of an age, the end of which had begun the moment he'd first
stepped on Midian's soil.  He was the maker of this devastation, though
he'd set no fire and toppled no tomb.  He had brought men to Midian. In
doing so, he'd destroyed it.  Even Lori could not persuade him to
forgive himself that.  The thought might have tempted him to the
flames, had he not heard the child calling his name.

She was only human enough to use words; the rest was beast.

"Lori," she said.

"What about her?"

"The Mask has her."

The Mask?  She could only mean Decker.

"Where?"

Close, and closer still.

Knowing she couldn't outpace him she tried instead to out dare him,
going where she hoped he would not.  But he was too hot for her life to
be shaken off.  He followed her into territory where the ground erupted
beneath their feet, and smoking stone rained around them.

It was not his voice that called her, however.

"Lori!  This way!"  She chanced a desperate look, and there God love
him!  was Narcisse, beckoning.  She veered off the pathway, or what was
left of it, towards him, ducking between two mausoleums as their
stained glass blew, and a stream of shadow, pricked with eyes, left its
hiding place for the stars.  It was like a piece of night sky itself,
she marvelled.  It belonged in the heavens.

The sight slowed her pace by an all but fatal step.  The Mask closed
the gap between them and snatched at her blouse.  She threw herself
forward to avoid the stab she knew must follow, the fabric tearing as
she fell. This time he had her.  Even as she reached for the wall to
haul herself to her feet she felt his gloved hand at her nape.

"Fuckheactt' somebody shouted.

She looked up to see Narcisse at the other end of the passage between
the mausoleums.  He'd clearly caught Decker's attention.  The hold on
her neck was relaxing.  It wasn't enough for her to squirm free, but if
Narcisse could only keep up his distraction he might do the trick.

"Got something for you," he said, and took his hands from his pocket
to display the silver hooks on his thumbs.

He struck the hooks together.  They sparked.

Decker let Lori's neck slip from his fingers.  She slid out of his
reach and began to stumble towards Narcisse.  He was moving down the
passage towards her or rather towards Decker, on whom his eyes were
fixed.

"Don't she gasped.  "He's dangerous."

Narcisse heard her he grinned at the warning but he made no reply.  He
just moved on past her to intercept the killer.

Lori glanced back.  As the pair came within a yard of each other the
Mask dragged a second knife, its blade as broad as a machete, from his
jacket.  Before Narcisse had a chance to defend himself the butcher
delivered a swift downward stroke that separated Narcisse's left hand
from his wrist in a single cut.  Shaking his head, Narcisse took a
backward step, but the Mask matched his retreat, raising the machete a
second time and bringing it down on his victim's skull.  The blow
divided Narcisse's head from scalp to neck.  It was a wound even a dead
man could not survive.  Narcisse's body began to shake, and then like
Ohnaka, trapped in sunlight he came apart with a crack, a chorus of
howls and sighs emerging, then taking flight.

Lori let out a sob, but stifled anything more.  There was no time to
mourn.  If she waited to shed a single tear the Mask would claim her,
and Narcisse's sacrifice would have been for nothing.  She started to
back away, the walls shaking to either side of her, knowing she should
simply run but unable to detach herself from the sight of the Mask's
depravity.  Rooting amid the carnage he skewered half of Narcisse's
head on the finer of his blades, then rested the knife on his shoulder,
trophy and all, before renewing his pursuit.

Now she ran, out of the shadow of the mausoleums

and back onto the main avenue.  Even if memory could have offered a
guide to her whereabouts all the monuments had gone to the same rubble,
she could not tell north from south.  It was all one in the end.
Whichever way she turned the same ruin, and the same pursuer.  If he
would come after her forever and forever and he would what was the use
of living in fear of him?  Let him have his sharp way.  Her heart beat
too hard to be pressed any further.

But even as she resigned herself to his knife the stretch of paving
between her and her slaughterer cracked open, a plume of smoke
shielding her from the Mask.  An instant later the whole avenue opened
up.  She fell.  Not to the ground.  There was no ground.  But into the
earth ' falling!"  the child said.

The shock of it almost toppled her from Boone's shoulders.  His hands
went up to support her.  She took fiercer hold of his hair.

"Steady?"  he said.

"Yes."

She wouldn't countenance Ashbery accompanying them.  He'd been left to
fend for himself in the maelstrom, while they went looking for Lori.

"Ahead," she said, directing her mount.  "Not very far."

The fires were dying down, having devoured all they could get their
tongues to.  Confronted with cold brick all they could do was lick it
black, then gutter out.  But the tremors from below had not ceased.
Their motions still ground stone on stone.  And beneath the
reverberations there was another sound, which Boone didn't so much hear
as feel: in his gut and balls and teeth.

The child turned his head with her reins.

"That way," she said.

The diminishing fires made progress easier; their brightness hadn't
suited Boone's eyes.  Now he went more quickly, though the avenues had
been ploughed by the quake and he trod turned earth.

"How far?  "he asked.

"Hush," she told him.

"What?"

"Stand still."

"You hear it too?"  he said.

"Yes."

"What is it?"

She didn't answer at first, but listened again.

Then she said:

"Baphomet."

In his hours of imprisonment he'd thought more than once of the
Baptiser's chamber, of the cold time he'd spent witness to the divided
God.  Hadn't it spoken prophecies to him?  whispered in his head and
demanded he listen?  It had seen this ruin.  It had told him Midian's
last hour was imminent.  Yet there'd been no accusations, though it
must have known that it spoke to the man responsible.  Instead it had
seemed almost intimate, which had terrified him more than any assault.
He could not be the confidant of divinities.  He'd come to appeal to
Baphomet as one of the newly dead, requesting a place in the earth. But
he'd been greeted like an actor in some future drama.  Called by
another name, even.  He'd wanted none of it.  Not the auguries; not the
name.  He'd fought them, turning his back on the Baptiser; stumbling
away, shaking the whispers from his head.

In that he'd not succeeded.  At the thought of Baphomet's presence its
words, and that name, were back like Furies.

You're Cabal, it had said.

He'd denied it then; he denied it now.  Much as he pitied Baphomet's
tragedy, knowing it couldn't escape

this destruction in its wounded condition, he had more urgent claims
upon his sympathies.

He couldn't save the Baptiser.  But he could save Lori.

"She's there!"  the child said.

"Which way?"

"Straight ahead.  Look!"

There was only chaos visible.  The avenue in front of them had been
split open; light and smoke poured up through the ruptured ground.
There was no sign of anything living.

"I don't see her," he said.

"She's underground," the child replied.  "In the pit."

"Direct me then."

"I can't go any further."

"Why not?"

"Put me down.  I've taken you as far as I can."  A barely suppressed
panic had crept into her voice.  Tut me down," she insisted.

Boone dropped to his haunches, and the child slid off his shoulders.

"What's wrong?"  he said.

"I mustn't go with you.  It's not allowed."

After the havoc they'd come through, her distress was bewildering.

"What are you afraid of ?"  he said.

"I can't look," she replied.  "Not at the Baptiser."

"It's here?"

She nodded, retreating from him as new violence opened the fissure
ahead even wider.

"Go to Lori," she told him.  "Bring her out.  You're all she has."

Then she was gone, two legs becoming four as she fled, leaving Boone to
the pit.

Lori's consciousness flickered out as she fell.  When she came round,
seconds later, she was lying half way up, or down, a steep slope.  The
roof above her was still intact, but badly fractured, the cracks
opening even as she watched, presaging total collapse.  If she didn't
move quickly she'd be buried alive.  She looked towards the head of the
slope.  The cross tunnel was open to the sky.  She began to crawl
towards it, earth cascading down on her head, the walls creaking as
they were pressed to surrender.

"Not yet..  ."  she murmured.  "Please, not yet..."

It was only as she came within six feet of the summit that her dazed
senses recognized the slope.  She'd carried Boone up this very incline
once, away from the power that resided in the chamber at the bottom.
Was it still there, watching her scrabblings?  Or was this whole
cataclysm evidence of its departure: the architect's farewell?  She
couldn't feel its surveillance, but then she could feel very little.
Her body and mind functioned because instinct told them to.  There was
life at the top of the slope.  Inch by wracking inch she was crawling
to meet it.

Another minute and she reached the tunnel, or its roofless remains. She
lay on her back for a time, staring up at the sky.  With her breath
regained she got to her feet and examined her wounded arm.  The cuts
were gummed up with dirt, but at least the blood had ceased to flow.

As she coaxed her legs to move something fell in front of her, wet in
the dirt.  Narcisse looked up at her with half a face.  She sobbed his
name, turning her eyes to meet the Mask.  He straddled the tunnel like
a gravedigger then dropped down to join her.

The spike was aimed at her heart.  Had she been stronger it would have
struck home, but the earth at the head of the slope gave way beneath
her backward step and she had no power to keep herself from falling,
head over heels, back down the incline Her cry gave Boone direction. He
clambered over upended slabs of paving into the exposed tunnels, then
through the maze of toppled walls and dying fires towards her.  It was
not her figure he saw in the passage ahead, however, turning to meet
him with knives at the ready.

It was the doctor, at last.

From the precarious safety of the slope Lori saw the Mask turn from
her, diverted from its purpose.  She had managed to arrest her fall by
catching hold of a crack in the wall with her good hand, which did its
duty long enough for her to glimpse Boone in the passageway above.
She'd seen what the machete had done to Narcisse.  Even the dead had
their mortality.  But before she could utter any word of warning to
Boone a wave of cold power mounted the slope behind her.  Baphomet had
not vacated its flame.  It was there still, its grasp un picking her
fingers from the wall.

Unable to resist it, she slid backwards down the slope, into the
erupting chamber.

The ecstasies of the Breed hadn't tainted Decker.  He came at Boone
like an abattoir worker to finish a slaughter he'd been called from:
without flourish, without passion.

It made him dangerous.  He struck quickly, with no signal of his
intention.  The thin blade ran straight through Boone's neck.

To disarm the enemy Boone simply stepped away from him.  The knife slid
through Decker's fingers, still caught in Boone's flesh.  The doctor
made no attempt to claim it back.  Instead he took a two-handed grip
on

the skull splitter.  Now there was some sound from him: a low moan
that broke into gasps as he threw himself forward to despatch his
victim.

Boone ducked the slicing blow, and the blade embedded itself in the
tunnel wall.  Earth spattered them both as iDecker pulled it free. Then
he swung again, this time missing his target's face by a finger
length.

Caught off balance, Boone almost fell, and his downcast eyes chanced on
Decker's trophy.  He couldn't mistake that maimed face.  Narcisse/ cut
up and dead in the dirt.

"You bastardl' he roared.

Decker paused for a moment, and watched Boone.  Then he spoke.  Not
with his own voice, but with someone else's; a grinning whine of a
voice.

"You can die," it said.

As he spoke he swung the blade back and forth, not attempting to touch
Boone, merely to demonstrate his authority.  The blade whined like the
voice, the music of a fly in a coffin, to and fro between the walls.
Boone retreated before the display, with mortal terror in his gut.
Decker was right.  The dead could die.

He drew breath, through mouth and punctured throat.  He'd made a near
fatal error, staying human in the presence of the Mask.  And why?  From
some absurd idea that this final confrontation should be man to man;
that they'd trade words as they fought, and he'd undo the doctor's ego
before he undid his life.

It wouldn't be that way.  This wasn't a patient's revenge on his
corrupted healer: this was a beast and a butcher, tooth to knife.

He exhaled, and the truth in his cells came forth like honey.  His
nerves ran with bliss; his body throbbed as it swelled.  In life he'd
never felt so alive as he did at these moments, stripping off his
humanity and dressing for the night.

"No more ..."  he said, and let the beast come from him everywhere.

Decker raised his machete to undo the enemy before the change had been
completed.  But Boone didn't wait.  Still transforming, he tore at the
butcher's face, taking off the mask buttons, zipper and all to uncover
the infirmities beneath.

Decker howled at being revealed, putting his hand up to his face to
half cover it against the beast's stare.

Boone snatched the mask up from the ground, and began to tear it apart,
his claws shredding the linen.  Decker's howls mounted.  Dropping his
hand from his face he began to swipe at Boone with insane abandon.  The
blade caught Boone's chest, slicing it open, but as it returned for a
second cut Boone dropped the rags and blocked the blow, carrying
Decker's arm against the wall with such force he broke the bones.  The
machete fell to the ground, and Boone reached out for Decker's face.

The steep howl stopped as the claws came at him.  The mouth closed. 
The features slackened.  For an instant Boone was looking at a face
he'd studied for hours, hanging on its every word.  At that thought his
hand went from face to neck and he seized Decker's windpipe, which had
funded so many lies.  He closed his fist, his claws piercing the meat
of Decker's throat.  Then he pulled.  The machinery came out in a wash
of blood.  Decker's eyes widened, fixed on his silencer.  Boone pulled
again, and again.  The eyes glazed.  The body jerked, and jerked, then
started to sag.

Boone didn't let it drop.  He held it as in a dance, and undid the
flesh and bone as he'd undone the mask, clots of Decker's body striking
the walls.  There was only the dimmest memory of Decker's crimes
against him in his head now.  He tore with a Breed's zeal, taking
monstrous satisfaction in a monstrous act.  When he'd done his worst he
dropped the wreckage to the earth, and finished the dance with his
partner underfoot.

There'd be no rising from the grave for this body.  No

hope of earthly resurrection.  Even in the full flood of his attack
Boone had withheld the bite that would have passed life after death
into Decker's system.  His flesh belonged only to the flies, and their
children; his reputation to the vagaries of those who chose to tell his
story.  Boone didn't care.  If he never shrugged off the crimes Decker
had hung around his neck it scarcely mattered now.  He was no longer
innocent.  With this slaughter he became the killer Decker had
persuaded him he was.  In murdering the prophet he made the prophecy
true..)'

He let the body lie, and went to seek Lori.  There was only one place
she could have gone: down the slope into Baphomet's chamber.  There was
pattern in this, he saw.  The Baptiser had brought her here, un
knitting the ground beneath her feet so as to bring Boone after.

The flame its divided body occupied threw a cold glamour up into his
face.  He started down the slope towards it, dressed in the blood of
his enemy.

 Cabal

Dit in the wasteland, Ashbery was found by a light, lickering up from
between the fractured paving stones.  Its beams were bitterly cold, and
sticky in a way light had no right to be, adhering to his sleeve and
hand before fading away.  Intrigued, he tracked its source from one
eruption to another, each point brighter than the one before.

A scholar in his youth, he would have known the name Baphomet had
somebody whispered it to him, and understood why the light, springing
from the deity's flame, exercised such a claim upon him.  He would have
known the deity as god and goddess in one body.  Would have known too
how its worshippers had suffered for their idol, burned as heretics, or
for crimes against nature.  He might have feared a power that demanded
such homage; and wisely.

But there was nobody to tell him.  There was only the light, drawing
him on.

The Baptiser was not alone in its chamber, Boone found.  He counted
eleven members of the Breed around the walls, kneeling blindfolded with
their backs to the flame.  Amongst them, Mister Lylesburg and Rachel.

On the ground to the right of the door lay Lori.  There-1 was blood on
her arm, and on her face, and her eye$| were closed.  But even as he
went to her aid the thing; in the flame set its eyes on him, turning
him round with an icy touch.  It had business with him, which it was
not about to postpone.

"Approach," it said.  "Ofyouz own free will."

He was afraid.  The flame from the ground was twice the size it had
been when last he'd entered, battering the roof of the chamber.
Fragments of earth, turned to either ice or ash, fell in a glittering
rain and littered the floor.  Standing a dozen yards from the flame the
assault of its energies was brutal.  Yet Baphomet invited him closer.

"You're safe," it said.  "You came in the blood of your enemy.  It'll
keep you warm."

He took a step towards the fire.  Though he'd suffered bullet and blade
in his life since death, and felt none of them, he felt the chill from
Baphomet's flame plainly enough.  It pricked his nakedness, made frost
patterns on his eyes.  But Baphomet's words were no empty promise.  The
blood he wore grew hot as the air around him grew colder.  He took
comfort from it, and braved the last few steps.

The weapon, Baphomet said.  Discard it.

He'd forgotten the knife in his neck.  He drew it out of his flesh and
threw it aside.

Closer still, the Baptiser said.

The flame's fury concealed all but glimpses of its freight, but enough
to confirm what his first encounter with Baphomet had taught him: that
if this deity had made creatures in its own image then he'd never set
eyes on them.  Even in dreams, nothing that approached the Baptiser. It
was one of one.

Suddenly some part of it reached for him, out of the flame.  Whether
limb, or organ, or both he had no chance to see.  It snatched at his
neck and hair and pulled him towards the fire.  Decker's blood didn't

*

-(C?

shield him now; the ice scorched his face.  Yet there was no fighting
free.  It immersed his head in the flame, holding him fast.  He knew
what this was the instant the fire closed around his head: Baptism.

And to confirm that belief, Baphomet's voice in his head.

You are Cabal, it said.

The pain was mellowing.  Boone opened his mouth to draw breath, and the
fire coursed down his throat and into his belly and lungs, then through
his whole system.  It carried his new name with it, baptizing him
inside out.

He was no longer Boone.  He was Cabal.  An alliance of many.

From this cleansing on he would be capable of heat and blood and making
children: that was in Baphomet's gift, and the deity gave it.  But he
would be frail too, or frailer.  Not just because he bled, but because
he was charged with purpose.

I must be hidden tonight, Baphomet said.  We all have enemies, but mine
have lived longer and learned more cruelty than most.  I will be taken
from here and hidden from them.

Now the presence of the Breed made sense.  They'd remained behind to
take a fraction of the Baptiser with them and conceal it from whatever
forces came in pursuit.

This is your doing, Cabal, Baphomet said.  / don't accuse you.  It was
bound to happen.  No refuge is forever.  But I charge you "Yes?"he
said.  "Tell me."

Rebuild what you've destroyed.

"A new Midian?"

No.

"What then?"

You must discover for us in the human world.

"Help me," he said.

I can't.  From here on, it's you must help me.  You have undone the
world.  Nowyou must re-make it.

There were shudders in the flame.  The Rites o| Baptism were almost
over.

"How do I begin?"  Cabal said.

Heal me, Baphomet replied.  Find me, and heal me.  Save me from my
enemies.

The voice that had first addressed him had changed its nature utterly.
All trace of demand had gone from it.  There was only this prayer to be
healed, and kept from harm, delivered softly at his ear.  Even the
leash on his head had been slipped, leaving him free to look left and
right.  A call he hadn't heard had summoned Baphomet's attendants from
the wall.  Despite their blindfolds they walked with steady steps to
the edge of the flame, which had lost much of its ferocity.  They'd
raised their arms, over which shrouds were draped, and the flame wall
broke as pieces of Baphomet's body were dropped into the travellers'
waiting arms, to be wrapped up instantly and put from sight.

This parting of piece from piece was agonizing.  Cabal felt the pain as
his own, filling him up until it was almost beyond enduring.  To escape
it he began to retreat from the flame.

But as he did so the one piece yet to be claimed tumbled into view in
front of his face.  Baphomet's head.  It turned to him, vast and white,
its symmetry fabulous.  His entire body rose to it: gaze, spittle and
prick.  His heart began to beat, healing its damaged wing with its
first throb.  His congealed blood liquefied like a saint's relics, and
began to run.  His testicles tightened; sperm ran up his cock.  He
ejaculated into the flame, pearls of semen carried up past his eyes to
touch the Baptiser's face.

Then the rendezvous was over.  He stumbled out of the fire as Lylesburg
the last of the adherents in the chamber- received the head from the
flames and wrapped it up.

Its tenants departed, the flame's ferocity redoubled.  Cabal stumbled
back as it unleashed itself with terrifying vigour On the ground above,
Ashbery felt the force build, and tried to retreat from it, but his
mind was full of what he'd spied upon, and its weight slowed him.  The
fire caught him, sweeping him up as it hurtled heavenward.  He shrieked
at its touch, and at the aftertaste of Baphomet that flooded his
system.  His many masks were burned away.  The robes first, then the
lace he'd not been able to pass a day of his adult life without
wearing.  Next the sexual anatomy he'd never much enjoyed.  And
finally, his flesh, scrubbing him clean.  He fell back to earth more
naked than he'd been in his mother's womb, and blind.  The impact
smashed his legs and arms beyond repair.

Below, Cabal shook himself from the daze of revelation.  The fire had
blown a hole in the roof of the chamber, and was spreading from it in
all directions.  It would consume flesh as easily as earth or stone.
They had to be out of here before it found them.  Lori was awake.  From
the suspicion in her eyes as he approached it was plain she'd seen the
Baptism, and feared him.

"It's me," he told her.  "It's still me."

He offered her a hand.  She took it, and he pulled her to her feet.

"I'll carry you," he said.

She shook her head.  Her eyes had gone from him to something on the
floor behind him.  He followed her gaze.  Decker's blade lay close to
the fissure, where the man he'd been before the Baptism had cast it
aside.

"You want it?"  he said.

"Yes."

Shielding his head from the debris he retraced his steps and picked it
up.

"Is he dead?"  she asked, as he came back to her.  "He's dead."

There was no sign of the corpse to verify his claim.  The tunnel,
collapsing on itself, had already buried him, as it was burying all of
Midian.  A tomb for the tombs.

With so much already levelled it wasn't difficult to find their way out
to the main gates.  They saw no sign of Midian's inhabitants on their
way.  Either the fire had consumed their remains, or rubble and earth
covered them.

Just outside the gate, left where they could not fail to find it, was a
reminder for Lori of one whom she prayed had escaped unharmed.
Babette's doll woven from grasses, and crowned with spring flowers lay
in a small ring of stones.  As Lori's fingers made contact with the toy
it seemed she saw one final time through the child's eyes a landscape
moving by as somebody speeded her away to safety.  The glimpse was all
too brief.  She had no time to pass a prayer for good fortune along to
the child before the vision was startled from her by a noise at her
back.  She turned to see that the pillars which had supported Midian's
gates were beginning to topple.  Cabal snatched her arm as the two
stone slabs struck each other, teetered head to head like matched
wrestlers, then fell sideways to hit the ground where moments before
Lori and Cabal had stood.

Though he had no watch to read the hour, Cabal had a clear sense
Baphomet's gift, perhaps of how long they had until daybreak.  In his
mind's eye he could see the planet, like a clock face decorated with
seas, the magical divide of night from day creeping around it.

He had no fear of the sun's appearance on the horizon.  His Baptism
had given him a strength denied his brothers and sisters.  The sun
wouldn't kill him.  This he knew without question.  Undoubtedly it
would be a discomfort to him.  Moonrise would always be a more welcome
sight than daybreak.  But his work wouldn't be confined to the night
hours. He wouldn't need to hide his head from the sun the way his
fellow Breed were obliged to.  Even now they'd be looking for a place
of refuge before morning broke.

He imagined them in the sky over America, or running beside its
highways, groups dividing when some amongst them grew tired, or found a
likely haven: the rest moving on, more desperate by the moment.
Silently he wished them safe journeys and secure harbour.

More: he promised he would find them again with time.  Gather them up
and unite them as Midian had done.  Unwittingly, he'd harmed them. Now,
he had to heal that harm, however long it took.

"I have to start tonight," he told Lori.  "Or their trails will be
cold.  Then I'll never find them."

"You're not going without me, Boone."

"I'm not Boone any longer," he told her.

"Why?"

They sat on the hill overlooking the necropolis, and he recited to her
all he'd learned at the Baptism.  Hard lessons, which he had too few
words to communicate.  She was weary, and shivering, but she wouldn't
let him stop.

"Go on ..."  she'd kept saying, when he'd faltered.  Tell me
everything."

She knew most of it.  She'd been Baphomet's instrument as much as he,
or more.  Part of the prophecy.  Without her he'd never have returned
to Midian to save it, and to fail.  The consequence of that return and
that failure was the task before him.

Yet she revolted.

"You can't leave me she said.  "Not after all that's happened."

She put her hand on his leg.

"Remember the cell..."  she murmured.

He looked at her.

"You told me to forgive myself.  And it was good advice.  But it
doesn't mean I can turn my back on what happened here.  Baphomet;
Lylesburg; all of them ... I destroyed the only home they ever had."

"You didn't destroy it."

"If I'd never come here, it'd still be standing he replied.  "I have to
undo that damage."

"So take me with you she said.  "We'll go together."

"It can't be that way.  You're alive, Lori.  I'm not.  You're still
human.  I'm not."

"You can change that."

"What are you saying?"

"You can make me the same as you.  It's not difficult.  One bite and
Peloquin changed you forever.  So change me."

"I can't."

"You won't you mean."

She turned the point of Decker's blade in the dirt.

"You don't want to be with me.  Simple as that, isn't it?"  She made a
small, tight-lipped smile.  "Haven't you got the guts to say it?"

"When I've finished my work ..."  he answered.  "Maybe then."

"Oh, in a hundred years or so?"  she murmured, tears beginning. "You'll
come back for me then will you?  Dig me up.  Kiss me all over. Tell me
you would have come sooner, but the days just kept slipping by."

"Lori."

"Shut up she said.  "Don't give me any more excuses.  They're just
insults."  She studied the blade, not him.  "You've got your reasons. 
I think they stink, but you

keep hold of them.  You're going to need something to cling to."

He didn't move.

"What are you waiting for?  I'm not going to tell you it's all right.
Just go.  I never want to set eyes on you again."

He stood up.  Her anger hurt, but it was easier than tears.  He backed
away three or four paces, then understanding that she wouldn't grant
him a smile or even a look he turned from her.

Only then did she glance up.  His eyes were averted.  It was now or
never.  She put the point of Decker's blade to her belly.  She knew she
couldn't drive it home with only one hand, so she went on to her knees,
wedged the handle in the dirt, and let her body weight carry her down
onto the blade.  It hurt horribly.  She yelled in pain.

He turned to find her writhing, her good blood pouring out into the
soil.  He ran back to her, turning her over.  The death spasms were
already in her.

7 lied," she murmured.  "Boone ... I lied.  You're all I ever want to
see."

"Don't die," he said.  "Oh God in Heaven, don't die."

"So stop me."

"I don't know how."

"Kill me.  Bite me ... give me the balm."

Pain twisted up her face.  She gasped.

"Or let me die, if you can't take me with you.  That's better than
living without you."

He cradled her, tears dropping onto her face.  Her pupils were turning
up beneath her lids.  Her tongue was twitching at her lips.  In
seconds, she'd be gone, he knew.  Once dead, she'd be beyond his power
of recall.

"Is ... it... no?"  she said.  She wasn't seeing him any longer.

He opened his mouth to provide his answer, raising her neck to his
bite.  Her skin smelled sour.  He bit deep into the muscle, her blood
meaty on his tongue, the

alm rising in his throat to enter her bloodstream.  But the shudders
in her body had already ceased.  She slumped in his embrace.

He raised his head from her torn neck, swallowing what he'd taken. He's
waited too long.  Damn him!  She was his mentor and his confessor, and
he'd let her slip from him.  Death had been upon her before he'd had
time to turn sting into promise.

Appalled at this last and most lamentable failure he laid her down on
the ground in front of him.

As he drew his arms out from beneath her she opened her eyes.

"I'll never leave you," she said.

b250

 Abide with Me

It was Pettine who found Ashbery, but it was Eiger man who recognized
the remnants for the man they'd been.  The priest still had life in
him, a fact given the severity of his injuries that verged on the
miraculous.  Both his legs were amputated in the days following, and
one of his arms up to mid-bicep.  He didn't emerge from his coma after
the operations, nor did he die, though every surgeon opined that his
chances were virtually zero.  But the same fire that had maimed him had
lent him an unnatural fortitude.  Against all the odds, he endured.

He was not alone through the nights and days of unconsciousness.
Eigerman was at his side twenty hours out of every twenty-four, waiting
like a dog at a table for some scrap from above, certain that the
priest could lead him to the evil that had undone both their lives.

He got more than he bargained for.  When Ashbery finally rose from the
deep, after two months of teetering on extinction, he rose voluble.
Insane, but voluble.  He named Baphomet.  He named Cabal.  He told, in
the hieroglyphs of the hopelessly lunatic, of how the Breed had taken
the pieces of their divinity's body and hidden them.  More than that.
He said he could find them again.  Touched by the Baptiser's fire, and
its survivors, he wanted the touch again.

"I can smell God," he'd say, over and over.

"Can you take us to Him?"  Eigerman asked.

The answer was always yes.

"I'll be your eyes then Eigerman volunteered.  "We'll go together."

Nobody else wanted the evidence Ashbery offered, there were too many
non senses to be accounted for as it was, without adding to the burden
on reality.  The authorities gladly let Eigerman have custody of the
priest.  They deserved each other, was the common opinion.  Not one
sane cell between them.

Ashbery was utterly dependent on Eigerman: incapable, at least at the
beginning, of feeding, shitting or washing without help.  Repugnant as
it was to tend the imbecile, Eigerman knew Ashbery was a God-given
gift.  Through him he might yet revenge himself for the humiliations of
Midian's last hours.  Coded in Ashbery's rantings were clues to the
enemy's whereabouts.  With time he'd decipher them.

And when he did oh when he did there would come such a day of reckoning
the Last Trump would pale beside.

The visitors came by night, stealthily, and took refuge wherever they
could find it.

Some revisited haunts their forebears had favoured; towns under wide
skies where believers still sang on Sunday, and the picket fences were
painted every spring.  Others took to the cities: to Toronto,
Washington, Chicago, hoping to avoid detection better where the streets
were fullest, and yesterday's corruption today's commerce.  In such a
place their presence might not be noticed for a year, or two or three.
But not forever.  Whether they'd taken refuge in city canyon or bayou
or dust bowl none pretended this was a permanent residence.  They would
be discovered in time, and

rooted out.  There was a new frenzy abroad, particularly amongst their
old enemies the Christians, who were a | daily spectacle, talking of
their martyr and calling for || purges in His name.  The moment they
discovered the ;% Breed in their midst the persecutions would begin -I
again.

So, discretion was the by-word.  They would only 5 .  take meat when
the hunger became crippling, and only then victims who were unlikely to
be missed.  They would refrain from infecting others, so as not to
advertise their presence.  If one was found, no other would risk
exposure by going to their aid.  Hard laws to live by, but not as hard
as the consequences of breaking them.

The rest was patience, and they were well used to that.  Their
liberator would come eventually, if they could only survive the wait.
Few had any clue as to the shape he'd come in.  But all knew his name.
Cabal, he was called.  Who Unmade Midian.  Their prayers were full of
him.  On the next wind, let him come.  If not now, then tomorrow.

They might not have prayed so passionately had they known what a
sea-change his coming would bring.  They might not have prayed at all
had they known I they prayed to themselves.  But these were revelations
for a later day.  For now, they had simpler concerns.  Keeping the
children from the roofs at night; the bereaved from crying out too
loud; the young in summer from falling in love with the human.  It was
a life.

Clive Barker's previous novel was WEAVE WORLD The following pages are
taken from the early part of that novel.

THE SUIT OF LIGHTS

The day Cal stepped out into was humid and stale.  It could not be long
before the summer let fall take its toll.  Even the breeze seemed
weary, and its condition was contagious.  By the time Cal reached the
vicinity of Rue Street his feet felt swollen in his shoes and his brain
in his skull.

And then, to add insult to injury, he couldn't find the damn street.
He'd made his way to the house the previous day with his eyes on the
birds rather than on the route he was following, so he had only an
impressionistic notion of its whereabouts.  Knowing he could well
wander for several hours and not find the street, he asked the way from
a gaggle of six-year-olds, engaged in war games on a street corner.  He
was confidently re-directed.  Either through ignorance or malice,
however, the directions proved hopelessly incorrect, and he found
himself in ever more desperate circles, his frustration mounting.

Any sixth sense he might have hoped for some instinct that would lead
him unerringly to the region of his dreams- was conspicuous by its
absence.

It was luck then, pure luck, that brought him finally to the corner of
Rue Street, and to the house that had once belonged to Mimi
Laschenski.

Suzanna had spent much of the morning attempting to do as she had
promised Doctor Chai: notifying Uncle

Charlie in Toronto.  It was a frustrating business.  For one thing,
the small hotel she'd found the previous night only boasted a single
public telephone, and other guests wanted access to it as well as she.
For another, she had to call round several friends of the family until
she located one who had Charlie's telephone number, all of which took
the best part of the morning.  When, around one, she finally made
contact, Mimi's only son took the news without a trace of surprise.
There was no offer to drop his work and rush to his mother's bedside,
only a polite request that Suzanna call back when there was 'more
news'.  Meaning, presumably, that he didn't expect her to ring again
until it was time for him to send a wreath.  So much for filial
devotion.

The call done, she rang the hospital.  There was no change in the
patient's condition.  She's hanging on, was the duty nurse's phrase. It
conjured an odd image of Mimi as mountaineer, clinging to a cliff-face.
She took the opportunity to ask about her grandmother's personal
effects, and was told that she'd come into hospital without so much as
a nightgown.  Most probably the vultures Mrs.  Fumphrey had spoken of
would by now have taken anything of worth from the house the tall-boy
included but she elected to call by anyway, in case she could salvage
anything to make Mimi's dwindling hours a little more comfortable.

She found a small Italian restaurant in the vicinity of the hotel to
lunch in, then drove to Rue Street.

The back yard gate had been pushed closed by the removal men, but left
unbolted.  Cal opened it, and stepped into the yard.

If he had expected some revelation, he was disappointed.  There was
nothing remarkable here.  Just

parched chickweed sprouting between the paving stones, and a litter of
chattels the trio had discarded as worthless.  Even the shadows, which
might have hidden some glory, were wan and un secretive

Standing in the middle of the yard where all of the mysteries that had
overturned his sanity had been unveiled he doubted for the first time,
truly doubted, that anything had in fact happened the previous day.

Maybe there would be something inside the house, he told himself; some
flotsam he could cling to that would bear him up in this flood of
doubt.

He crossed the ground where the carpet had lain, to the back door.  The
removal men had left it unlocked; or else vandals had broken in. Either
way, it stood ajar.  He stepped inside.

At least the shadows were heavier within, there was some room for the
fabulous.  He waited for his eyes to accommodate the murk.  Was it
really only twenty four hours since he'd been here, he thought, as his
sharpening gaze scanned the grim interior; only yesterday that he'd
entered this house with no more on his mind than catching a lost bird?
This time he had so much more to find.

He wandered through to the hallway, looking everywhere for some echo of
what he'd experienced the day before.  With every step he took his
hopes fell further.  Shadows there were, but they were deserted.  The
place was shorn of miracles.  They'd gone when the carpet was
removed.

Half way up the stairs he halted.  What was the use of going any
further?  It was apparent he'd missed his chance.  If he was to
rediscover the vision he'd glimpsed and lost he'd have to search
elsewhere.  It was mere doggedness, therefore- one of Eileen's
attributes- that made him continue to climb.

At the top of the stairs the air was so leaden it made drawing breath a
chore.  That, and the fact that he felt like a trespasser today
unwelcome in this tomb 259

made him anxious to confirm his belief that the place had no magic to
show him, then get gone.

As he went to the door of the front bedroom something moved behind him.
He turned.  The labourers had piled several articles of furniture at
the top of the stairs, then apparently decided they weren't worth the
sweat of moving any further.  A chest of drawers, several chairs and
tables.  The sound had come from behind this furniture.  And now it
came again.

Hearing it, he imagined rats.  The sound suggested several sets of
scurrying paws.  Live and let live, he thought: he had no more right to
be here than they did.  Less, perhaps.  They'd probably occupied the
house for rat generations.

He returned to the job at hand, pushed open the door, and stepped into
the front room.  The windows were grimy, and the stained lace curtains
further clogged the light.  There was a chair overturned on the bare
boards, and three odd shoes had been placed on the mantelpiece by some
wit.  Otherwise empty.

He stood for a few moments and then, hearing laughter in the street and
needing its reassurance, crossed to the window and drew the curtain
aside.  But before he found the laughter's source he forsook the
search.  His belly knew before his senses could confirm it that
somebody had entered the room behind him.  He let the curtain drop and
looked around.  A wide man in late middle-age, dressed too well for
this dereliction, had joined him in the half-light.  The threads of his
grey jacket were almost iridescent.  But more eye-catching still, his
smile.  A practised smile, belonging on an actor, or a preacher.
Whichever, it was the expression of a man looking for converts.

"Can I be of help?"  he said.  His voice was resonant, and warm, but
his sudden appearance had chilled Cal.

"Help me?"  he said, floundering.

"Are you perhaps interested in purchasing property?"  the other man
said.

"Purchasing?  No ... I... was just... you know ... looking around."
"It's a fine house said the stranger, his smile as steady as a
surgeon's handshake, and as antiseptic.  "Do you know much about
houses?"  The line was spoken like its predecessors, without irony or
malice.  When Cal didn't reply, the man said: I'm a salesman.  My
name's Shadwell."  He teased the calf-skin glove from his
thick-fingered hand.  "And yours?"

"Cal Mooney.  Calhoun, that is."

The bare hand was extended.  Cal took two steps towards the man he was
fully four inches taller than Cal's five foot eleven- and shook hands.
The man's cool palm made Cal aware that he was sweating like a

Pig The handshake broken, friend Shadwell unbuttoned his jacket, and
opened it, to take a pen from his inside pocket.  This casual action
briefly revealed the lining of the Salesman's garment, and by some
trick of the light it seemed to shine, as though the fabric were woven
of mirrored threads.

Shadwell caught the look on Cal's face.  His voice was feather-light as
he said: "Do you see anything you like?"  Cal didn't trust the man. 
Was it the smile or the calfskin gloves that made him suspicious?
Whichever, he wanted as little time in the man's company as possible.
But there was something in the jacket.  Something that caught the
light, and made Cal's heart beat a little faster.

"Please ..."  Shadwell coaxed.  "Have a look."  His hand went to the
jacket again, and opened \fe "Tell me ..."  he purred, '... if there's
anything there that takes your fancy."

This time, he fully opened the jacket, exposing the lining.  And yes,
Cal's first judgement had been correct.  It did shine.

"I am, as I said, a salesman," Shadwell was explaining.

"I make it a Golden Rule always to carry some samples of my
merchandise around with me."

Merchandise.  Cal shaped the word in his head, his eyes still fixed on
the interior of the jacket.  What a word that was: merchandise.  And
there, in the lining of the jacket, he could almost see that word made
solid.  Jewellery, was it, that gleamed there?  Artificial gems with a
sheen that blinded the way only the fake could.  He squinted into the
glamour, looking to make sense out of what he saw, while the Salesman's
voice went about its persuasions:

Tell me what you'd like and it's yours.  I can't say fairer than that,
can I?  A fine young man like you should be able to pick and choose.
The world's your oyster.  I can see that.  Open in front of you.  Have
what you like.  Free, gratis and without charge.  You tell me what you
see in there, and the next minute it's in your hands..."

Look away, something in Cal said; nothing comes free.  Prices must be
paid.

But his gaze was so infatuated with the mysteries in the folds of the
jacket that he couldn't have averted his eyes now if his life depended
upon it.

'... tell me ..."  the Salesman said,"... what you see

/

Ah, there was a question '... and it's yours."

He saw forgotten treasures, things he'd once upon a time set his heart
upon, thinking that if he owned them he'd never want for anything
again.  Worthless trinkets, most of them, but items that awoke old
longings.  A pair of X-ray spectacles he'd seen advertised at the back
of a comic book (see thru walls!  impress your friends!) but had never
been able to buy.  There they were now, their plastic lens gleaming,
and seeing them he remembered the October nights he'd lain awake
wondering how they worked.

And what was that beside them?  Another childhood

fetish.  A photograph of a woman dressed only in stiletto heels and a
sequin ned G-string, presenting her over-sized breasts to the viewer.
The boy two doors down from Cal had owned that picture, stolen it from
his uncle's wallet, he'd claimed, and Cal had wanted it so badly he
thought he'd die of longing.  Now it hung, a dog-eared memento, in the
glittering flux of Shadwell's jacket, there for the asking.

But no sooner had it made itself apparent than it too faded, and new
prizes appeared in its place to tempt him.

"What is it you see, my friend?"

The keys to a car he'd longed to own.  A prize pigeon, the winner of
innumerable races, that he'd been so envious of he'd have happily
abducted '. just tell me what you see.  Ask, and it's yours

/

There was so much.  Items that had seemed- for an hour, a day the pivot
upon which his world turned, all hung now in the miraculous store-room
of the Salesman's coat.

But they were fugitive, all of them.  They appeared only to evaporate
again.  There was something else there, which prevented these
trivialities from holding his attention for more than moments.  What it
was, he couldn't yet see.

He was dimly aware that Shadwell was addressing him again, and that the
tone of the Salesman's voice had altered.  There was some puzzlement in
it now, tinged with exasperation.

"Speak up, my friend ... why don't you tell me what you want?"

"I can't... quite .. . see it."

"Then try harder.  Concentrate."

Cal tried.  The images came and went, all insignificant stuff.  The
mother-lode still evaded him.

"You're not trying," the Salesman chided.  "If a man

wants something badly he has to zero in on it.  Has to make sure it's
clear in his head."

Cal saw the wisdom of this, and re-doubled his efforts.  It had become
a challenge to see past the tinsel to the real treasure that lay
beyond.  A curious sensation attended this focusing; a restlessness in
his chest and throat, as though some part of him were preparing to be
gone; out of him and along the line of his gaze.  Gone into the
jacket.

At the back of his head, where his skull grew the tail of his spine,
the warning voices muttered on.  But he was too committed to resist.
Whatever the lining contained, it teased him, not quite showing itself.
He stared and stared, defying its decorum until the sweat ran from his
temples.

Shadwell's coaxing monologue had gained fresh confidence.  Its sugar
coating had cracked and fallen away.  The nut beneath was bitter and
dark.

"Go on ..."  he said.  "Don't be so damn weak.  There's something here
you want, isn't there?  Very badly.  Go on.  Tell me.  Spit it out.  No
use waiting.  You wait, and your chance slips away."

Finally, the image was coming clear "Tell me and it's yours."

Cal felt a wind on his face, and suddenly he was flying again, and
wonderland was spread out before him.  Its deeps and its heights, its
rivers, its towers all were displayed there in the lining of the
Salesman's jacket.

He gasped at the sight.  Shadwell was lightning swift in his
response.

"What is it?"

Cal stared on, speechless.

"What do you see2."

A confusion of feelings assailed Cal.  He felt elated, seeing the land,
yet fearful of what he would be asked to give (was already giving,
perhaps, without quite

knowing it) in return for this peep-show.  Shadwell had harm in him,
for all his smiles and promises.

"Tell me ..."  the Salesman demanded.

Cal tried to keep an answer from coming to his lips.  He didn't want to
give his secret away.

'..  what do you seer

The voice was so hard to resist.  He wanted to keep his silence, but
the reply rose in him unbidden.

"I..."  (Don't say it, the poet warned), "I see ..."  {Fight it.
There's harm here.) "I... see .. ."

"He sees the Fugue."

The voice that finished the sentence was that of a woman.

"Are you sure?"  said Shadwell.

"Never more certain.  Look at his eyes."

Cal felt foolish and vulnerable, so mesmerized by the sights still
unfolding in the lining he was unable to cast his eyes in the direction
of those who now appraised him.

"He knows," the woman said.  Her voice held not a trace of warmth.
Even, perhaps, of humanity.

"You were right then," said Shadwell.  "It's been here."

"Of course."

"Good enough," said Shadwell, and summarily closed the jacket.  ,/

The effect orTCal was cataclysmic.  With the world the Fugue, she'd
called it- so abruptly snatched away he felt weak as a babe.  It was
all he could do to stand upright.  Queasily, his eyes slid in the
direction of the woman.

She was beautiful: that was his first thought.  She was dressed in reds
and purples so dark they were almost black, the fabric wrapped tightly
around her upper body so as to seem both chaste, her ripeness bound and
sealed, and, in the act of sealing, eroticized.  The same paradox
informed her features.  Her hairline had been shaved back fully two
inches, and her eyebrows totally removed, which left her face eerily
innocent of expression.  Yet her flesh gleamed as if oiled,

and though the shaving, and the absence of any scrap of make-up to
flatter her features, seemed acts in de france of her beauty, her face
could not be denied its sensuality.  Her mouth was too sculpted; and
her eyes umber one moment, gold the next too eloquent for the feelings
there to be disguised.  What feelings, Cal could only vaguely read.
Impatience certainly, as though being here sickened her, and stirred
some fury Cal had no desire to see unleashed.  Contempt for him most
likely and yet a great focus upon him, as though she saw through to his
marrow, and was preparing to congeal it with a thought.

There were no such contradictions in her voice however.  It was steel
and steel.

"I^ow long?"  she demanded of him.  "How long since you saw the
Fugue?"

He couldn't meet her eyes for more than a moment.  His gaze fled to the
mantelpiece, and the tripod's shoes.

"Don't know what you're talking about," he said.

"You've seen it.  You saw it again in the jacket.  It's fruitless to
deny it."

"It's better you answer," Shadwell advised.

Cal looked from mantelpiece to door.  They had left it open.  "You can
both go to Hell," he said quietly.

Did Shadwell laugh?  Cal wasn't certain.

"We want the carpet," said the woman.

"It belongs to us, you understand," Shadwell said.  "We have a
legitimate claim to it."

"So, if you'd be so kind .. ."  the woman's lip curled at this
courtesy, '... tell me where the carpet's gone, and we can have the
matter done with."

"Such easy terms," the Salesman said.  "Tell us, and we're gone."

Claiming ignorance would be no defence, Cal thought; they knew that he
knew, and they wouldn't be persuaded otherwise.  He was trapped.  Yet
dangerous as things had become, he felt inwardly elated.  His
tormentors had confirmed the existence of the world

he'd glimpsed: the Fugue.  The urge to be out of their presence as
fast as possible was tempered by the desire to play them along, and
hope they'd tell him more about the vision he'd witnessed.

"Maybe I did see it," he said.

"No maybe," the woman replied.

"It's hazy .. ."  he said.  "I remember something, but I'm not quite
sure what."

"You don't know what the Fugue is?"  said Shadwell.

"Why should he?"  the woman replied.  "He came on it by luck."

"But he saw," said Shadwell.

"A lot of Cuckoos have some sight, it doesn't mean they understand.
He's lost, like all of them."

Cal resented her condescension, but in essence she was right.  Lost he
was.

"What you saw isn't your business," she said to him.  "Just tell us
where you put the carpet, then forget you ever laid eyes on it."

"I don't have the carpet," he said.

The woman's entire face seemed to darken, the pupils of her eyes like
moons barely eclipsing some apocalyptic light.

From the landing, Cal heard again the scuttling sounds he'd previously
taken to be rats.  Now he wasn't so sure.

"I won't be polite with you much longer she said.  "You're a thief."

"No he protested.

"Yes.  You came here to raid an old woman's house and you got a glimpse
of something you shouldn't."

"We shouldn't waste time said Shadwell.

Cal had begun to regret his decision to play the pair along.  He should
have run while he had half a chance.  The noise from the other side of
the door was getting louder.

"Hear that?"  said the woman.  "Those are some of my sister's bastards.
Her by-blows."

"They're vile said Shadwell.

He could believe it.

"Once more she said.  "The carpet."

And once more he told her.  "I don't have it."  This time his words
were more appeal than defence.

Then we must make you tell said the woman.

"Be careful, Immacolata/ said Shadwell.

If the woman heard him, she didn't care for his warning.  Softly, she
rubbed the middle and fourth fingers of her right hand against the palm
of her left, and at this all but silent summons her sister's children
came running.

The Great and Secret Show

Clive Barker

ARMAGEDDON BEGINS QUIETLY.

In the small Californian town of Palomo Grove several children are
born, the offspring of the Jail, a man-spirit obsessed with darkness
and depravity, and of Fletcher, a force for light, who has fought the
Jaff across America.

Their prize is the Art, the greatest power known to mankind, a doorway
to the dream-life of the species.  To possess it, the two men intend to
fight through their children.  Until their children fall in love.  Then
all hell breaks loose.

This time, they will fight to the death, gathering their armies from
the souls of Palomo Grove.  Nightmares will walk the streets.  Dreams
will be made real.  At last, the Grove will see the Great and Secret
Show.

"A major work, a millennial fantasy for the 90s and beyond."

Locus

"A dizzying tale.  Barker has constructed an entire new j mythology
here.  His prose is as exquisite as ever."  20120

"Clive Barker's career has been building up to The Great and Secret
Show.  In its vast loopy sprawl, it is nothing so much as a cross
between Gravity's Rainbow and Lord of the Rings .. . allusive and
mythic, complex and entertaining .. . extravagantly metaphorical,
wildly symbolic, skilful and funny."

New York Times Book Review

ISBN 0 00 617908 8

Everyille

Clive Barker

Five years ago, in his bestseller The, Great and Secret Show, Clive
Barker mesmerised millions of readers worldwide with an extraordinary
vision of human passions and possibilities.  Welcome to a new volume in
that epic adventure.  Welcome to Everyille.

On a mountain peak, high above the city of Everyille, a door stands
open: a door that opens onto the shores of the dream sea Quiddity.  And
there's not a soul below who'll not be changed by that fact... Phoebe
Cobb is about to forget her old life and go looking for her lost lover
Joe Flicker in the world on the other side of that door; a strange,
sensual wonderland the likes of which only Barker could make real.

Tesla Bombeck who knows what horrors lurk on the far side of Quiddity,
must solve the mysteries of the city's past if she is to keep those
horrors from crossing the threshold.

Harry D'Amour, who has tracked the ultimate evil across America, will
find it conjuring atrocities in the sunlit streets of Everyille.

Step into Everyille's streets, and enter a world like no other...
"Clive Barker is so good I am almost tongue-tied.  What Barker does
makes the rest of us look like we've been asleep for the last ten years
.. . His stories are compulsorily readable and original.  He is an
important, exciting and enormously saleable writer."  Stephen King



