Cabal (3 page)

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 to write. Instead, pocketing the appeal she’d sent to him, he went out into the dusk to look for death.

The truck he threw himself in front of was unkind. It knocked the breath from him but not the life. Bruised, and bleeding from scrapes and cuts, he was scooped up and taken to hospital. Later, he’d come to understand how all of this was in the scheme of things, and that he’d been denied his death beneath the truck wheels for a purpose. But sitting in the hospital, waiting in a white room till people worse off than he had been attended to, all he could do was curse his bad fortune. Other lives he could take with terrible ease; his own resisted him. Even in this he was divided against himself.

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

That name was Midian.

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

I
n 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 or 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 of 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 that someone else now shared the white room with him until he heard the rasping voice.

‘Midian …’

He thought at first it was another voice from the past, like Lori’s. But when it came again it was not at his shoulder, as hers had been, but from across the room. He opened his eyes, the left lid gummy with blood from a cut on his temple, and looked towards the speaker. Another of the night’s walking wounded, apparently, brought in for mending and left to fend for himself until some patchwork could be done. He was sitting in the corner of the room furthest from the door, on which his wild eyes were fixed as though at any moment his saviour would step into view. It was virtually impossible to guess anything of his age or true appearance: dirt and caked blood concealed both. I must look as bad or worse, Boone thought. He didn’t much mind; people were always staring at him. In their present state he and the man in the corner were the kind folks crossed the street to avoid.

But whereas he, in his jeans and his scuffed boots and black teeshirt, was just another nobody, there were some signs about the other man that marked him out. 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 collar, and on his thumbs two artificial nails that looked to be silver, curled into hooks.

Finally, there was that name, rising from the man 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 warning. 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 Midian was just another talisman, he wanted to hear its story recited.

‘Tell me,’ he said.

‘I asked you what you know,’ the other man replied, catching the flesh beneath his unshaven chin with the hook of his left hand.

‘I know it takes away the pain,’ Boone replied.

‘And?’

‘I know it turns nobody away.’

‘Not true,’ came the response.

‘No?’

‘If it turned nobody away you think I wouldn’t be there already? You think it wouldn’t be the biggest city 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. It seemed not. The man talked on, content to debate the 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. He didn’t speak of Midian as a lunatic’s Shangri-la, but as 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 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
after?’
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 the dregs of Decker’s supply. ‘Do you want those?’

‘Anything you got.’

Boone was content to be relieved of them. They’d 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 a place to go, where he might find someone at last who understood the horrors he was enduring. He would not need the pills to get to Midian. He’d need strength, and the will to be forgiven. The latter he had. The former his wounded body would have to find.

‘Where are they?’ said Narcisse, appetite igniting his features.

Boone’s leather jacket had been peeled from his back when he’d first been admitted, for a cursory examination 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 the familiar bottle was not there.

‘Someone’s been through my jacket.’

He rummaged through the rest of the pockets. All of 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
pills
!’ 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 somebody’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 a surgeon’s precision. The wounds opened with perfect symmetry, until the twin hooks met at his chin.