Midian Unmade

 

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Table of Contents

About the Editors

Copyright Page

 

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For all those who have felt that sense of
unbelonging
so characteristic of the Nightbreed—never forget that you are not alone.

Joseph Nassise

For Clive Barker—your kindness, talent, and influence will last with me for the rest of my life … and maybe beyond.

Del Howison

 

PREFACE

In late 1992 I picked up the Pocket Books paperback edition of a new novel by a writer I'd never read before, Clive Barker. The book in question was called
Cabal,
and I remember the cover quite clearly, for it featured a dark, looming face superimposed on the night sky with the tagline “At last, the night has a hero” situated beneath the bright red letters of the main title.

Within the pages of that slim volume I was introduced to both an amazing world and an amazing writer. The tale of Boone and Midian and the creatures known as the Nightbreed instantly captivated me, drawing me into their dark embrace and never letting go.
Cabal
engaged my love of the dark fantastic in a way that few books before it ever had, turning me into a lifelong fan of Clive and his work.

Just a few months after I had picked up that book, in the spring of 1993, I had the pleasure of attending the first public solo showing of Clive's art at the Bess Cutler Gallery in New York City. Paintings and drawings with names like
Cenobite
and
Books of Blood
and
Frank
hung on the walls, places and characters and worlds that are familiar to any fan of Clive's work but about which, at the time, I was just learning. I bought a print of one of the pieces (
Books of Blood: Volume 1
) and was pleased to have a few moments to speak with Clive as he signed it for me. It was a short but memorable conversation because we discussed the life of a writer and what it meant to be able to bring one's visions to life on the page for others to experience.

Fast-forward eighteen years to the fall of 2012. My own writing career had taken off at this point, with more than a dozen novels to my credit, and I was casting about for a new project to begin when I came upon a battered copy of that original print edition of
Cabal
in a used bookstore.
Wouldn't it be fun to play in that world?
I thought to myself. I imagined picking up where Clive had left off, with the tribes of the moon scattered to the four corners of the globe, waiting for their savior, Cabal, to restore their sanctuary and call them all home again. What would their lives be like? What beauty and wonder and misery and madness would they have found, tossed out into the world like so much flotsam and jetsam, at the mercy of the monsters known as mankind? In that moment
Midian Unmade: Tales of Clive Barker's Nightbreed
was born.

It took another three years and the help of many people—my coeditor
Del Howison
(owner of the world's best horror bookstore, Dark Delicacies), editors Jim Frenkel and Melissa Singer at Tor Books, the twenty-three writers who penned the stories that appear herein, and, of course, Clive Barker himself—to turn that dream into a reality.

You hold in your hands the fruits of that effort, the physical embodiment of fantasy made flesh and blood, and within its pages you will find the Nightbreed in all their glory as they dance and sing and feast and yearn and hope and dream under the light of the moon.

I hope you find them as intriguing as I have.

J
OSEPH
N
ASSISE

 

INTRODUCTION

(Reprinted from
The Nightbreed Chronicles
, 1990)

Our lives are scattered throughout with periods of
un
belonging; in childhood, of course, and adolescence; but in adulthood too, when sudden loss (or gain) forces us to reassess things we believe immutable.

At such times we all become like changeling children, at odds with our friends and peers, looking to distant horizons for fresh comprehension of ourselves.

The fiction of the fantastic brims with metaphors for this condition: tales of people whose cells are protean and souls migrant, people called by mysterious forces to a place they've visited in other lives or states; a place never understood—at least until the moment of crisis—as their real home.

There, perhaps, they may enjoy the company of their own tribe.

Welcome, then, to the people I feel particularly at home with: the
Nightbreed.
They are a colony rather than a family. A collection of survivors of what were once small nomadic nations: werewolves, vampires, demons, shape-shifters …

In conventional Western mythology these are the villains; creatures who possess little more than an appetite for destruction and evil. But in cultures less brutalized by dualism these dream nations are as much celebrated as feared; they are the spirits of our darker natures which healthier theologies don't seek to repress.

C
LIVE
B
ARKER

Pinewood Studios, England

September 1989

 

RETURN TO MIDIAN

 

Midian—the name means a place of refuge, a legendary city where all sins are forgiven.

—Clive Barker's The Nightbreed Chronicles

Twenty-five years ago, Clive Barker was the tour guide for our journey into Midian, a place he described as a “labyrinthine necropolis” occupied by “an ancient race of mythological creatures.” During this sojourn, he challenged our perceptions and prejudices when he declared that “evil hides behind a human mask and even monsters have souls.”

Barker's “grotesques and freaks, noble beasts and exquisite transformers” were both apart from and a part of the world. Whether the sense of isolation sprang from an uncommon visage or, like Narcisse, a knowing from deep within, Midian called out to each of them.

More than a literary locale, the “hidden city” represented a liminal space familiar to anyone who felt that he or she did not belong; simultaneously a safe haven and a precarious dwelling where self-destruction, annihilation, or even transcendence was possible.

While no two Nightbreed looked alike, their sins were in essence singular; they were the Other. As such, they were feared and hated, for as Julia Kristeva posited in
Powers of Horror
: “The abject has only one quality of the object—that of being opposed to
I
.”

Even though sympathetic creatures populated other works, they often appeared as loners forced to the dark edges of society. If more than one type of monster inhabited the same landscape, they were enemies. Battle lines drawn, man's oft-repeated history of “us versus them” was allowed to play out, neither questioned nor challenged.

Cabal
was a tale written for the readers of its day but also in anticipation of the future. Like Rachel and Babette, the Other was and is a shape-shifter, transforming at the behest of a time, a people, or a nation. The constant? A seemingly insatiable need by humans for this space to be, at all times, occupied.

Although Barker engineered Midian's destruction, he also left among the ruins pieces of hope. For the Nightbreed came together as one, not because they were the same, but because they were different.

L
ISA
M
AJEWSKI

 

THE MOON INSIDE

Seanan McGuire

Once, Midian. Once, the caves carved from the living rock, the warrens and rabbit-runs like veins through the flesh of the earth. Once, a world lived in constant descent, down, down, ever down, until it seemed that one day in their expansion they would strike the hot molten core of the world, where magma flowed like the blood of Baphomet. Once, safety. Once, home.

Now, Seattle. Now, the cold, cruel cities of the Naturals, which rise towering above their foundations like they would deny the very stone that birthed them. They bloom like grotesque flowers, these misshapen cities of the sun, spreading their petals to greedily block the sky from those they have left behind them on the ground. There is no safety here.

Babette curls in her room—a corner of attic in a warehouse whose ownership has become tangled over the years, bills of sale disappearing and deeds being mysteriously lost—and watches the rain patter on her small and fiercely guarded window. Some of the others consider her strange for coveting this slice of the outside; she's too fragile to risk the sun the way she does, she should be more careful, she should move deeper into the communal room, forsaking privacy for safety. But her visions are their only connection to Lori (who came to them in skin and left in leather, wings against the moon, oh Lori,
see how she flies
), and hence, to Cabal. If she demands the window, and the sweet-faced moon beyond, she'll be indulged.

Seattle is a good city, as Natural cities go. The sun shines more often than the tourist brochures they once stole from a travel agent's office promised them it would, but it vanishes often enough that the braver and stronger of them can go abroad in the daylight, hoods pulled over heads, parasols shielding skins from an unexpected break in the clouds. They mingle with the Naturals that way, making their faces known among the community. They won't be caught unprepared if another Decker rises, another human monster with a vendetta to pursue. Even Babette has seen the streets by daylight, thanks to heavy cloud cover and well-placed awnings. She could be happy here, if this were home …

But this is not home. This will never be home. Cabal is moving through the world, and his woman moves through the world with him, and together they will find a new Midian, a strong, secure place driven deep into the rock, and the tribes of the moon will come together once more, living and dead alike, in the place where the monsters go.