Midian Unmade (35 page)

“I think you'll be okay, Sarah. I should be going now.” Rook turned and opened the apartment door, then stopped and turned to look back over his shoulder. Standing there, the pale white light of the hallway behind him, he cast an imposing shadow over the room. “I'd avoid those alleys if I were you.”

The door closed behind him. Sarah was left there, uncertain of what had just happened. She didn't even know how long it had been since the assault. She leaned forward and pulled the open book from the table to her lap. On the page before her was an illustration of an androgynous devil-like figure. The caption read “Baphomet.”

*   *   *

Rook strolled lazily through the city, his hands in his pockets, his eyes cast to the pavement. The temperature had dropped sharply in the few hours since his encounter in the alley, and a frozen wind cut through the night. But he didn't notice, lost in his thoughts as he was. He didn't pay much attention to where he was going, letting his feet carry him forward without any intended destination. It wasn't until he stopped and looked up that he realized he'd walked completely around the block and was standing in front of Sarah's building again.

Something was obviously pulling him to her. His thoughts had never left her, and he couldn't really figure out why. She was pretty, and he was certainly attracted to her, but this—she—was different. The book with the picture of Baphomet. The book on the shelf that had “spoken” to him and flashed an image of Midian in his head. Those things, along with the images he'd seen in her eyes …

*   *   *

Sarah got up and went over to the bookshelf, reaching for the book the stranger had started to pull out. Her fingers danced hesitantly on the spine for moment.
Encyclopedia of the Old Testament
, the spine read. She pulled it out and allowed it to fall open in her hands, the yellowed pages giving off a slightly musty scent. A piece of paper near the middle of the book apparently serving as a bookmark allowed the pages to part near the middle of this sea of information, opening somewhere in the “M” entries. At the top of the page was the word “Midian.”

*   *   *

The door swung open as Rook raised his hand to knock. Sarah stood on the other side, the encyclopedia in her hand, a slight look of shock on her face at seeing him standing there. They both started speaking at the same time.

“I don't mean to bother you—” he apologized.

“I was just getting ready to come after you—” She moved aside to allow him inside. As he entered he caught a glimpse of the encyclopedia's open page. He went over to the window, pulling the curtain aside to look outside.

“Nice view.” He could see her reflection in the dark glass.

Sarah closed the door, set the book on the table on top of the Templar history so that the entry for Midian and the image of Baphomet were both visible, and moved up behind Rook. Her hand rested gently between his shoulder blades. He stiffened at her touch.

“I—” she faltered. “I didn't say thank you.” He shrugged. “Those books. Those pages. That wasn't an accident. And I don't think you saving me was an accident, either,” she said.

He turned.

“Maybe this was a mistake. I should go.”

She stepped in front of him, blocking his path to the door.

“No … please stay. I think this is important. I think I can help you.”

His effort to navigate around her ceased.

“Help me? You don't know anything about me. For all you know, I could have come back here to finish the job that guy in the alley started.” His words were cold and sharp, and sent a shiver up Sarah's spine, but she stood her ground.

“No. I know more than you think, and if you were going to hurt me, you would have done it already.”

He stared at the door, refusing to look at her.

“I know what you are. I know about the Nightbreed.”

His head snapped over, confirming her assertion, and their eyes locked. In the crystal blue of her gaze he could see symbols and images, glyphs that he had only ever seen in Midian; he could also see the sun. In the ebony depths of his she saw a burning city, the conflagration giving way to the first rays of dawn. She could also see the questions in his eyes, and knew she would have to answer them in order to gain his trust; he already had hers.

The question was, what would he do with it? She knew what the Breed were. Her long years of studious immersion in religion, folklore, and the occult had made the Nightbreed no secret to her. But he was the first she'd ever encountered. She couldn't help but consider it more than blind coincidence.

“I know about Midian.…” Her words trailed off, and though she offered them as a sort of comfort, he found none in them.

Somehow, while he'd been caught off guard by the fact that she was aware of what he was, he was unsurprised. Baphomet had told him that he would find guideposts in his journeys. Rook just hadn't expected them to come in the form of mortals.

“I can help,” she offered again.

He turned his head away. Her hand, soft and warm, gently rested on his cheek and turned him back to her. Their eyes met again. This time, he saw hope. Warmth washed over him, a warmth he hadn't felt since he'd last stood in the sun, so long ago.

He believed her.

*   *   *

The last rays of the day beamed through the skyscrapers, reflecting off the mirrored windows and setting the city ablaze with twilight fire. Rook stood at the window. Behind him, Sarah was still sleeping in the bed they'd shared since that morning. The colors of dusk, filtered through the city's haze, filled the room with soft yellows, oranges, and reds, reminding Rook of the night Midian fell.

Sarah stirred in the bed. Turning to look at her, Rook took in the sight. Something in him stirred, and it was more than just the curves of her body or her milky skin; it was something deep, something … old?

“Hey…” The word was almost a whisper on her lips, and it was offered with a slight smile. She reached out for his hand.

“I need to know,” he said.

“I know.”

Sarah got up, grabbing the bathrobe that was draped over the back of a chair and putting it on. Going into the closet, she pulled a cardboard box from the top shelf, then sat on the edge of the bed.

“It's in here,” she said, digging through the contents of the box. He watched her silently, working actively to restrain his innate curiosity. After a moment, she produced an object wrapped in cloth. “Here it is. I found this in Saudi Arabia a few years ago on dig I did with school. There was more, but it disappeared before we could catalogue it and get photos or anything.”

Unwrapping the object, she handed it to him. It was a piece of stone, obviously broken off of a larger piece, rough on the back side, but it was the smooth front that caught Rook's attention. Carved into the face was a set of glyphs, glyphs that he'd seen before: in Midian, when he'd spoken to Baphomet.

“I'm sorry there's not more,” she said. “I got a look at the rest of the pieces before they disappeared, but not enough of one to remember what the other pictographs were.”

Rook knew he needed to see the rest of the symbols. He knew how to read them, or rather, that Baphomet would be able to read them through him, but there was only one way he was going to be able to see what Sarah saw.…

The last rays of sunset illuminated her face. He suddenly felt guilty. She was innocent. But she was also beautiful, and familiar. But now he knew why she was familiar—he'd seen her in the visions Baphomet had shared with him. His heart sank as he remembered the Baptizer's words to him. “You must do what must be done to find the path,” Baphomet had said.

“I'm sorry,” he whispered, brushing his hand along her cheek.

The room slipped into darkness as Rook leaned in to kiss Sarah one last time.

 

COLLECTOR

David J. Schow

W
HAT
C
AME
B
EFORE

The colorful logo emblazoned upon the can fascinated her.
Pabst Blue Ribbon
, it read. At least she could read. It resembled a medal, a commemoration of some kind in white and red and brilliant blue, a blue that evoked her own special eyes, which were a metallic cyan hue, nearly chromium. They did special things to the light messages they captured. She could see in total darkness, as indeed she was scanning the beer can now. The container itself smelled faintly poisonous, the reek of a lost soul lingering there. The truncated memory stored itself—it was an incomplete story, begging additional input that was unavailable.

Another incomplete story. She crushed the can, stomped on it with her beast foot, which designation was a misnomer because her left leg featured nothing that could be called a foot, merely an almost rectangular plinth of solid flesh from knee to ground, largely nerve-dead, an unwieldy tool that crippled her stride to a halting lurch, gimpy, giving unknowns another excuse to avert their gaze, which was a good thing.

She consigned the compacted can to her shopping cart with its load of plastic bags, castoffs, recyclables, satellite bags pendulant from port and starboard, the weight of the load anchoring the defrocked basket firmly to the earth, impossible to tip over. It was the latest of several such carts, never without at least one bumpy wheel, the sheer heft of its cargo making curbs a threat. The cart was additional reason unknowns rarely looked at her or engaged her eyes directly, also a good thing.

For another, her garb—also cargo, of a sort. A stratification of layers; sweaters, old hoodies, torn discards that muted her shape to that of a hunched, tiny monk, her unique eyes cowled in shadows, hidden and safe from inquiry. Sunlight had the power to raise ugly brown welts on her alabaster skin. She kept to the nightside, moving in darkness, good shelter a priority for sleeping sunlessly.

Recycling centers stayed open late, another good thing.

No biography, and few memories, one of the most prevalent being her brief time on the limelight as “Missus Humpty Dumpty,” before the rural carny shows were hustled toward politically correct extinction. Her hairless white head, indeed egg-shaped, had gotten her the job a long while back. Her special eyes burned hotly from the center of that head. Two punctures for a nose, a rude down-turned rip of a lipless mouth. People had paid to look at her, and some to touch her, and when they did, she collected their stories until the accumulated sadness was too much to bear.

Now, there was only sustenance. A life of continuing, little more, without strategy or goal, because the world in which she moved was not her world. She was the intruder here, the outsider, and she kept that knowledge as a shield. This was the land of the Upworlders, the reivers, the monsters who had destroyed Midian long ago, way back in the before-times. The “Naturals.”

This much she did know: Sired of Avo, born of Matilda. They were merely blank names to her now, forever wanting a nurturing that never came because of the bad thing called the fall of Midian. A young life of running and hiding; learning the art of concealment in plain sight among the denizens of the Upworld. Running? Hardly, not with her special leg.

Years elapsed.

The larger cities beckoned with their anonymity.

Counting years was pointless, because the stars she could see at night had no cognizance of time. Upworlders had little concept of how fluid and malleable the human conceit of “time” could be. What mattered was perception, survival, safety. She had not been schooled in her own hereditary mythology, and carried no religious bias as a result. The crucible of her personal rules was experiential. There was a lingering feeling, more akin to stolen and truncated memory, that between human beings and her own kind, one of them was not meant to be on this planet. The few books through which she had labored without guidelines only offered conflict and confusion.

That all changed when she was gang-raped and set on fire.

*   *   *

“Dare ya to fuck it,” said Dane, his scratchy voice slurred by vodka. Fulton dealt the bag lady another wallop with a steel-toed boot. She—it—absorbed the kick and contracted like a hedgehog, making not a sound. “Stinks,” said Brad, leery. The trio were predictable to the point of clich
é
. Surly, pissed off, too drunk, too young to matter.

“Pussy,” Fulton shot back at Brad. “Virgin pussy. You've gotta lose your cherry, bust that nut, pop it or drop it, chickenshit.”

Dane, the oldest (according to his fake ID), busily peeled back layers of clothing from the ragbag. “Jesus, this looks like some kinda freak! Holy shit, check out the stump!”

“Circus freak,” said Fulton. “Still, better than fucking a clown.” He kept dancing in to kick their victim again with macho certitude.

“No fucking way,” said Brad. He searched his mind, his history, for a better counterargument, but all that came out of his pale and disbelieving face was a mumbled mantra of no fucking way, over and over, like the babble of, well, a crazy person.

Fulton chugged the dregs of flask bourbon and shattered the curved bottle as punctuation. “Tonight's the night, Brad-lad!”

“No fucking way,” Brad said again, with anything but conviction.

“Tell ya what,” said Dane. “We'll all take her.”

“Yeah, we got your back, bro.”

That was how it started. The particulars of the violence were not new or important to note, for in a violent world it was just one more incident no one would record, or so she thought as it happened, Dane first, then Brad, then Fulton, amid much cackling and bonding that served the purpose, for them, of both display and power ritual. Semen ejaculated and nasty verve thus temporarily muted, their embarrassment and potential future humiliation prompted the next event of the evening. It was Fulton who produced the squeeze bottle of lighter fluid, Brad who lit the book of matches, and all three who backed nervously away when the cooking smells first struck them. They fled while she smoldered.