Midian Unmade

by Joseph Nassise

  She has learned about Oz since then—more pretty lies for the Natural children—but more, she has found that many among the tribes of man yearn for Midian and its darkness as much as she does. Anyone who sees her screen will take her for one of those yearning children, and look no further.

  The results of her search are a tangled complication of narratives. Here is someone claiming to have been at Midian when it fell; here is someone else saying that monsters are real and planning to remake the world in their own image. Here is truth and here are lies, all of them tangled together until it becomes impossible to distinguish them without knowing the true story, absolute and clean and down to your bones. They are still safe. They are still undiscovered.

  “Midian again, huh?”

  The voice is male, cocky, human. Babette tenses and blanks her screen before she turns to find a Natural boy behind her, his clothes as oversized and mismatched as her own, his hair a shock of bleached-out blond that reminds her of the cornfields in Ohio. “Were you spying on me?”

  “No,” he says, and then, “Maybe,” and then, “Yes,” with a grin that clearly aims to make all accusations dissolve into mist and forgiveness. “You come here once a week and do the same searches every time. A guy gets curious, you know? Wants to know what the mysterious girl with the curly hair is trying to find. You looking for monsters, Blondie?”

  Babette almost touches her own hair in reflexive response. Her curls are the color of moonlight on dead grass, a gold that is true and cold at the same time, unforgiving and fair. Instead, she says, “I don’t think I’d know what to do if I met a monster.”

  “Scream and run away, if you know what’s good for you,” says the boy, offering her his hand. There is dirt beneath his nails. She doubts it came from digging graves. “Matt.”

  “Blondie,” she says. Her name is a treasure she will not give to any Natural. She slips her hand into his—refusal will only draw more questions—and watches his puzzled blink at the coolness of her skin. “It’s rude to look at other people’s screens.”

  “But this is the library’s screen, and that makes it as much mine as yours,” he says, giving her hand a perfunctory shake before letting go. “Besides, if you’re looking for Midian, I can take you there.”

  Babette is too startled to hide her confusion. “You?” she asks, before caution tells her to be silent.

  It’s too late: the word is out, and the boy with the bleached corn hair is smirking, amusement in his eyes. “Me,” he says. “You think you’re the only one who ever wished she knew where the monsters were? Come on, Blondie. I won’t hurt you. But I might lead you to your heart’s desire.”

  The computer’s secrets have been spilled out on the floor like pearls, or teeth. There is nothing left to learn here, and the night is young. Babette rises like a wisp of smoke, too graceful for the gawky thing she seems to be, and inclines her head toward the boy who dared to speak to her. “Yes,” she says. “Take me to Midian.”

  * * *

  Once, Midian. Once, safety and security and home in the deep warrens and the living earth. Babette knows she is not walking backward through time—knows it better than any other member of the tribe. She has seen Cabal since the destruction of their sanctuary, seen him scouring the edges of the world looking for safe haven. She knows to the bones of her that whatever she walks toward, it can’t be home. But Babette, for all her cold-blooded strangeness, is a teenage girl, and teenage girls are vulnerable to dreaming.

  She follows Matt through the alleys behind the library like a rat following a piper, her girl-skin drawn tight around her bones, hiding her second face from view. Matt moves almost as quickly as one of the Nightbreed, skipping from one side of the alley to the other, his strong boy’s bones moving in his lanky boy’s limbs. The smell of him is everywhere, blood and flesh and sweetness. She isn’t the hungriest member of the tribe—can be sated on cat flesh and rat flesh more often than not—but she still wishes he would move a little more like a predator, and a little less like prey.

  After they have walked too far for her liking and not far enough for her to feel safely distant from her kin, Matt stops. “Here we are,” he says, waving a hand to indicate a rusty door set into the hard brick of a nearby wall. “Midian.”

  Babette frowns, searching his face for the joke she knows must be hidden there. No joke reveals itself. She looks to the rusted door, and passes judgment: “This is not Midian.”

  “It is if you want it to be. Midian isn’t a place, Blondie; it’s a state of mind. Places can be destroyed, but ideas are harder to kill.” He moves to the door and knocks twice, calling, “It’s me! Let me in; I brought new blood.”

  “What’s the password?” demands a voice from beyond the door.

  “Midian lives,” says Matt. He’s trying to sound old and wise and eerie. He sounds like a child playing at things he doesn’t understand.

  I should go, thinks Babette. Go now, while this farce is still unplayed, while she still has a chance to slip away unnoticed—but curiosity is a strong thing, and she wants to know what lies behind that door. So she stays where she is, stays as she is, as it swings open to reveal a teenage girl in too much makeup and a black lace dress two sizes too small for her.

  “Welcome to Midian,” says the girl. “Do you fear monsters?”

  Here is a question Babette can answer honestly. “Only the human ones,” she says.

  The girl looks disapproving. “This is not a place for pretenders or people looking for a scare. Do you come to Midian freely and with an open mind?”

  “I have always been coming to Midian,” says Babette. “Midian is where the monsters go.”

  “See, Danni? She’s one of us,” says Matt. “Let us in.”

  The girl he calls Danni rolls her eyes and steps to the side, holding the door open as she does. “Welcome to Midian,” she says. “Enter freely and be unafraid.”

  There are so many things Babette wants to tell her: wants to tell her that when one enters Midian, one should always be a little bit afraid, even if Midian is home and haven altogether. Living amongst monsters does not come without its share of dangers. But the first part was correct. One must always enter freely, for otherwise, why enter at all? So she slips like a shadow through the door and into the room beyond, where she stops, bewildered by the scene before her.

  It is not a large room. It was a coffee shop once, before its windows were covered with soap and cobwebs and these children, these pretenders to Midian, found a way to pry open the back door and slip into their secret sanctuary. There are eight of them, Matt and Danni included. Some are dressed in black with too much makeup; the rest are in patches and rags, layers that don’t quite match but echo Babette’s own. The unseeables of the city, gathered with the would-be children of the night that never falls.

  They are not her kind. She should never have come here.

  But the door clangs shut and she is trapped, Matt coming up behind her on one side, Danni on the other. “Welcome to Midian,” he says, waving a hand to indicate the tired, dirty space, lit by candles, with faded Halloween decorations and newspaper clippings plastering the walls. He looks to her, waiting for her reaction. When it’s not forthcoming he prompts, “Well?”

  “It’s not what I expected,” she manages, after a moment’s strangled silence. She wants to laugh. She wants to cry. Is this what they are now, the tribes of the moon? From reality to legend to children telling themselves stories in dark and dusty rooms? The other kids are watching her, taking her measure in a way that makes her yearn to breathe out her beast, to run wild and biting through their ranks until they end their credulous lives on the tiled floor. She struggles to contain herself (Lori, give me your strength) and adds, “How did you find this place?”

  “Danni’s dad used to be the general manager,” says Matt, looking proudly to the girl in the black lace dress. “She realized we could use this space. That we could all be monsters here.”

  “But you haven’t proven you’re
a monster,” says Danni, shoving her way back into the conversation like a crowbar. “Why should we trust you?”

  Answers pile up on Babette’s tongue, each one truer and sourer than the last. She swallows most of them, spitting out the most innocuous: “Because I have no one to tell about you. How can I be a danger if I have no threats to make?”

  “She’s no monster,” says Danni dismissively. “She’s a pet at best, and prey at worst. If you want to keep her, you’ll need to feed and water her, and make sure no one else eats her.”

  “Promise,” says Matt, with a small and secret smile that Babette can’t help feeling is intended only for her. “I won’t let her pee in the corners or anything.”

  Danni snorts—the most monstrous thing Babette has heard from her yet—and turns her back on them. “It’s your funeral,” she says, and walks away, showing how little she thinks of them. Babette doesn’t mind.

  It’s better to be disregarded.

  * * *

  Now, not-Midian. Now, human children playing dress-up in a dark room that isn’t theirs (which may be the most Breed aspect of this strange and deepening evening; they’re all squatters in their own ways, clinging to the sides of human society like ticks on a fawn), wearing their artfully tattered clothing, hissing at each other in a mockery of monstrosity. Babette finds herself a place in one of the corners and watches them, all wide eyes and silence. She knows there’s something to be learned here, if she can just sneak up on it and make it show its face to her.

  There have always been Naturals who aspired to become Nightbreed. She was too young in the days of Midian to have had much congress with them, but she remembers their faces, pale with pain and weeping like the moon, and their eyes. You could always tell the monsters-in-waiting by their eyes. Some of them came to Midian full of sin and secrets, and those ones might make it past the doors, down into the dark to be judged by Baphomet. Others came innocent and empty, and they were turned away, if they were lucky. (But Boone came empty of anything but darkness and dreams, and he became Cabal, their savior; Lori came empty of anything but love, and she became his savior, and Babette’s, and in the end, that made her everyone’s. Maybe they chose the wrong supplicants, opened their doors to the wrong design.) Babette searches the faces around her for signs of Midian, for the slivers of moonlight that invite the monsters in.

  She does not find them. She finds damage, yes; more damage than she could ever dream would lurk in the eyes of children. This world has used them harder than any monster, and for a moment she entertains the thought of taking them all home with her, handing them over to the members of the tribe who hunger, night after night, for the flesh they cannot have. Babette could feed her people and save the children in the same gesture: every bite would drive the balm deeper into the blood, until those who truly dreamed of Midian began to change, to breathe their true faces into the world.…

  But no. That is not the way, not now, not in this open, exposed place. Cabal will come for them and they will make themselves a new home, far from the prying eyes of mankind. Then, and only then, will they be able to think of saving anyone but themselves.

  “Having fun?” asks Matt. He thinks himself stealthy, moving through the shadows to appear suddenly beside her. She does not disabuse him, although he has taken no step without her knowing since they arrived.

  She looks to him, trusting the darkness to hide the way her pupils have expanded, the way her nostrils flare and scent the air. He smells of sunlight. “I should go,” she says. “It’s late.”

  “You just got here.”

  “No.” She pushes away from the wall. “It’s too late.”

  So she walks through the children of this unhallowed place, looking neither left nor right, until she reaches the door. Danni is already there, a sneer on her face.

  “Didn’t care for the monsters after all, did you, Blondie?”

  It takes Babette a moment to remember that she gave her hair color as a name to these people. When she does, she inclines her head as politely as she can and says, “Not these monsters.” Then Danni is opening the door with a joyful crow’s-cry of “Don’t come back!” and Babette is stepping out into the damp nighttime air, and Matt is running after her, asking what he did wrong, asking why she didn’t like their secret little kingdom.

  Babette keeps walking. It’s all she can think to do. Better not to run; running shows weakness, shows you should be pursued. So she walks, chin up and hands down, and Matt pursues away from the door (which closes behind them with a click, final as a coffin lid), away from the alley, into the warren of the midnight streets.

  There are men, and there are monsters, and then there are the monsters who are men; a different thing than honest Nightbreed, who know what they are and do not conceal it. Babette is distracted, trying on different ways to evade her pursuer without giving herself away, and does not hear the footsteps until they come too close.

  “What do we have here?” asks a voice, older and harder and colder than any of the children who played at being monsters.

  Matt cringes.

  Babette sighs. “My brother and I lost our way,” she says, turning, trusting the illusionary relationship granted to them by hair color to carry her story to willing ears. “Can you tell us how to get back to Pine?”

  The men behind him—worse luck, for there to be three of them, all large with muscle and smiling in a way she recognizes too well—laugh. “Not until you pay the toll,” says the one who spoke before. He thrusts out his hand. “Empty your pockets.”

  “My pockets are already empty,” says Babette, looking at his hand curiously, as if she expects it to fill with treasures. “What’s in yours?”

  “Don’t mess with me, kid,” says the man, and grabs her shoulder.

  Babette twists her head enough to keep looking at his hand, and sighs.

  “I wish you hadn’t done that,” she says.

  The screaming begins shortly after.

  * * *

  Babette is not the most deceitful of her kind: the face she presents most often is that of a sweet-faced girl with a liar’s halo of golden curls, and down deep, that girl is real, is not a lie. But that girl is not the only thing she is. The stranger’s hand weighs heavy on her shoulder as she breathes out the fog that rests in the swampy depths of her lungs, breathes out flesh and fierceness and fury. This is a terrible idea, she thinks, and He laid hands upon me, she thinks, and through it all, the beast is unfolding across her person, until she has claws, until she has fangs, until she can make her displeasure known.

  The process takes several seconds. The men do not move. Terror that comes too quickly can do that to a man; can freeze his feet in place while his mind denies the reality of what he sees before him.

  When her teeth find the throat of the first man, he remembers movement, but he remembers it too late. Babette is not the most deceitful of her kind. Like all of the Nightbreed, she is exactly deceitful enough.

  Once, Midian; once hiding through isolation, humans intruding rarely, for they knew the wisdom of staying far from the houses of the dead. Now, Seattle, where isolation is not the only way, for they lurk in the stronghold of the enemy. When they must kill, it is to be done quickly and well and leave no witnesses, for witnesses might remember the things they have seen, the impossible miracles of flesh and claw.

  The first man falls, still twitching, as the flash of motion that is Babette finds the second. Cool wetness on his stomach, and he thinks she has missed, thinks he can run, but as he takes his first step his offal splatters to the ground, and the shell of his body follows, landing hard, so much discarded trash. Matt screams. It is the first sound since Babette breathed her secrets into the night, and he is still screaming when the third man falls, and Babette closes the distance between them, her hand over his mouth, his thin shoulders pressed against the nearest wall.

  “You said you would take me to Midian,” she says, and her voice is broken glass and rusty nails filtered through a mouthful of teeth
like knives. “You lied.”

  He says nothing, only whimpers as she pins him there, and the alley smells of blood, and his flesh smells of fear.

  “Forget monsters; forget Midian,” she says. “Run into the light, and do not look back. If you do—if you whisper a word of what you saw here—I will know, and I will come for you, and I will show you Midian. Now run, little liar, and forget, for your own sake.”

  She releases him, and he runs, a fleeing fawn in this obscene, exposed forest of a city. Babette looks at the carnage and sighs before tilting back her head and howling to the hidden face of the moon, blocked out by clouds but no less present. She howls like she could bring back Midian through the sheer power of her grieving, and stops only when an answering howl from the rooftops tells her that her message is received.

  Alone in the rain, Babette breathes her beast back into her body, and waits for the Nightbreed to come.

  * * *

  Messes are inevitable; when one world presses up against another, they cannot be avoided. Some messes serve a purpose. There are mouths to feed, after all, and three more of them on the way. Children are always born hungry. The Breed who answer Babette’s call are happy enough to remove the bodies, carrying them in pieces back across the city to the warehouse. Rachel resolves out of the mist, her eyes wet with sorrow, and Babette flings herself into her almost-mother’s arms, clinging there like a much younger child.

  “Are you all right, my dear?” asks Rachel.

  Babette does not respond. She is thinking of children who play at being monsters and monsters who play at being children, of men who cross lines they should have stayed far away from, and of the line between truth and legend, between legend and fairy tale. The rain will wash the blood away. The Nightbreed will remove the rest, and this night will enter the uncomfortable country between truth and lies. She has spent too many of her days there. She no longer knows where the boundary lies.

  Babette is too large now, to be held with ease; too old now, to be carried. But she closes her eyes and lets Rachel carry her, and all her thoughts are far away, of Lori, and of Midian, where such boundaries will no longer be needed—where it will be only monsters, safe at last, forever.