Midian Unmade

by Joseph Nassise

  Owen I could see every time I turned my head. He was on the upper deck, at the wheel, frowning into the horizon. I decided to go and talk to him—for my sake more than his.

  “Chuckles,” he said, as I reached the top of the ladder. He didn’t turn around. I walked over and sat in the spare seat next to him.

  “Hey mate. I thought I’d come and see how you were holding up.”

  “Oh I’m great. I’m a fresh pack of fucking Juicy Fruit.”

  “Yeah.” I tried to smile. “Stupid question I know.”

  “But seriously, good job Chuckles. You and that old fuck made a hell of a team.” He turned to me then, predatory smile across his face.

  “Come on Owen, what the hell?”

  “You trying to get your dick into my wife, him trying to get his dick into my daughter. Hell of a team.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  I left him there, returning to the front of the boat with my bottle of whiskey. Far ahead in the distance I could see the docks. I thought about all the cigarettes I’d smoke when I finally got off.

  “Can I have a sip?” Shannon appeared next to me, her long hair tossing about in the wind.

  “You realize your dad is just there?” We each glanced up at Owen, who was scratching at one of his wrists. I turned away quickly.

  “I wish I could get drunk so bad right now,” she said.

  “How do you know it’d fix anything?”

  “Well, you’re doing it.”

  I looked at the bottle and grinned, in spite of myself.

  “We all just have to pretend like nothing happened, don’t we?”

  I took another swig. “You know, it’s actually easy to pretend. Especially when it’s something you’d rather forget.”

  “Like you and my mum?”

  I frowned. “Get out of here will you.”

  She started to leave, then paused and turned back to me. Her brown eyes were like perfect marbles catching the sun. “What was the deal with that old guy?”

  I took another swig and paused, thinking about what I should tell her. “Look Shannon, I’m just trying to get him out of my head, like everyone else. He was a bad man. That doesn’t make what your dad did right, but it kind of does make it righter. Is that what you wanted to hear?”

  She shrugged.

  “Give me a clue?”

  She rolled her eyes. “I already know he was, like, a pedophile, so you don’t need to shelter me.”

  “Yeah, all right. He was a dirty old pedophile.”

  “But there was something else.”

  I replayed the memory of Gideon Skillet in the water, his coat of smoke flapping and his body sinking into the deep. I took another swig.

  “Well, I’m sure he’s not the only ugly old pedo with nasty vibes.”

  She examined me for a moment, nodded, and left.

  * * *

  Two weeks later my phone came alive with Owen’s number on the screen.

  “Owen … hi.”

  “Hi Charlie.” It was Lydia.

  “Lydia! How are you?” I cursed my enthusiasm as soon as I’d spoken.

  “Charlie, I … we’re in some trouble.” She was in tears.

  “Oh Lydia. Oh no. What’s going on?”

  She tried to speak, but she was all at once crying so hard that I couldn’t make her out.

  “All right Lydia, I want you to take a deep breath and just say yes or no—the rest can wait. Do you want me to come over?”

  She sniffled a few times and then said, “Yes.”

  “Be there as quick as I can.”

  I hung up and got straight into my car, only realizing when I was more than halfway there that I hadn’t done up my belt.

  * * *

  Lydia answered the door and collapsed onto my shoulder, shaking with sobs. I put my arms around her and stroked her back.

  “We’ll sort this out, whatever it is,” I said into her ear.

  She pulled away after a moment and walked down the hallway, her socked feet silent on the wooden floorboards. I took my shoes off and followed her, noticing at once the smell of old cigarette smoke penetrating through the lavender air freshener.

  She led me to the kitchen, where several bottles of red wine sat on the counter—one of them half full of cigarette butts.

  “You’re smoking again?”

  “Don’t, Charlie.” Her eyes were red-rimmed and deep-set.

  “Where’s Shannon and Owen?”

  She reached into her jeans and took out a pack of smokes, shaking one loose and lighting it off the stove. “Shannon’s at her grandmother’s,” she said after a long drag. “Owen…” She shook her head and her lip trembled.

  On the bench was a folded-up piece of paper. She slid it toward me with trembling fingertips and then looked away.

  Nausea crept up on me as I unfolded it. I recognized Owen’s scrawl.

  Chuckles,

  If you’re reading this it means that I’m screwed and you’re not. That’s hardly fair, but neither is what happened to Ned Kelly.

  There’ll be nothing left of me when you read this—that old cunt you dredged up from the ocean put his eggs in me or something. I’m itching, flaking. It’s not just my skin, it’s my mind. I have such thoughts, Charlie. Dreams of old places like wombs in the earth, all dug up now and made barren.

  I’m sure you’ll realise why calling the cops is a terrible idea, once you look through the garage window. I’m sure you’ll realise exactly what has to happen. I’d have done it myself if I’d have known earlier, but now I can’t—I’m too much gone already.

  I don’t have much else to say to you. I begrudge you the opportunity to look after my wife and daughter, but I’m not the fucking idiot you think I am. I know you’re the best man for the job, so do it right, asshole.

  —Owen

  I frowned and shook my head at Lydia, handing her back the note. Her lips were pursed tight. She pointed to the high kitchen windows that opened out into their garage.

  I took a deep breath and hoisted myself onto the bench between all the wine bottles, rising cautiously and standing on my tiptoes to look through.

  In place of the four-wheel-drive that the garage usually housed were a futon mattress and a jug of water. Gideon Skillet sat on the mattress edge, looking up at me and smiling with his broken rows of rotting teeth. Draped around him was his black raincoat.

  “Hello, Chuckles,” he said, and laughed for a long time.

  * * *

  He called out to me as I worked.

  “We can each get our own now, can’t we, Chuckles? You take the old salt and I get the fresh.”

  I’d taken Lydia’s smokes off her before I sent her to her mother’s place and was chaining them down with big gulps of wine, scrawling out a step-by-step plan. I went through pages and pages of drafts and couldn’t help but think of eggs when I looked at all the scrunched-up balls of paper around me.

  “Why don’t you throw me a fish, Charlie? I’ll fillet it for you good and fast. Gideon Skillet’s famous Midian fillet!”

  I ignored him.

  Hours passed before I had a plan. In the backyard I burned all the drafts, mixing the ashes well with the garden soil. It had grown dark.

  I took a roll of duct tape from Owen’s shed and unhooked their garden hose, bundling it into loops and bringing it out to the driveway. Using the full roll, I taped one hose end to the exhaust pipe of my car. Then I ran the other down the hallway, into the kitchen, and poked it through the high window that overlooked the garage.

  Gideon looked up at me. “Hose me down will you Charles? Clean the dirty man up?”

  I thought about it for a moment. Then—unable to deny myself those parting words—told him, “Thank you.”

  I sat in my car, in the dark, engine softly rumbling beneath me. Faintly, I could hear him calling out.

  “Clever you, Chuckles,” he said, over and over until he choked. “Clever you.”

  * * *

  I waited an hour befo
re opening the garage door, to be certain. His body lay comfortable on the futon mattress, a three-dimensional shadow in the gloom. Without touching him, I rolled him up—raincoat and all—in a few blankets from the linen cupboard, then lifted him into the boot of my car. He weighed almost nothing.

  The next day I rose early and got in the car and drove west for about twelve hours, out to where the desert begins and the earth is the color of rust. I took the loneliest dirt track I could find, abandoning it in the late afternoon and turning off-road. On a northern bearing I drove, for another three hours until the sun had gone down and the stars lit every arc of the sky.

  I burned him there, wrapped in those blankets, in a nowhere place where the ground ran flat to all of the horizon’s edges. Each time the fire died I poured more gas and lit it again, holding vigil through the night.

  By the time dawn came there was nothing but fine ashes left, which I trampled and kicked until they were blended with the desert soil.

  I’d left my phone and GPS at home, instead jotting down all the turns I’d made onto a notebook in my lap. I followed these back, driving in silence for another whole day and arriving home as the afternoon shadows became bloated.

  Occasionally I’d scratch at my wrists.

  * * *

  “Two days,” I’d told Lydia before she left for her mother’s. “Give me two days and then report Owen as missing.”

  It’s been ten now and I’ve not heard a thing. No police with questions, no phone calls from Lydia, nothing. The drama of Owen’s disappearance, playing out somewhere on the other side of my front door, is as unable to cross the threshold as I am.

  Worse than the face that my own is becoming is how well I now understand its owner. Eggs he lays, yes, but it’s the murder that makes them fertile, that gives him new life in his killer’s body.

  “Salt of the earth” he calls me. His voice gets louder in my head as he rises, up from the oceans of my mind.

  God, but he itches.

  A MONSTER AMONG MONSTERS

  Stephen Woodworth and Kelly Dunn

  “It’s Vagamel, all right,” Burdock declared. “Or it was, at any rate.” He peered at the scattered ash first with his right eye, then with the left. Placed on opposite sides of his head, the lidless eyes permitted Burdock a constant, 360-degree view, but they could never see the same thing simultaneously.

  Hemmel scratched at his flabby chest, the ropelike curve of the Sickle coiling beneath his grubby shirt. He was scared, and that made him hungry. It didn’t help that, since he was one of the few Nightbreed among them who could withstand daylight, they’d made him stand guard over the remains until they could convene an inquest after dusk. He hadn’t fed all day.

  Only one shaggy leg of Vagamel remained intact, from cloven hoof to heavy haunch. He had come to this dismal flophouse the previous night to feed on the homeless and drug addicts who sheltered there. Yet, for reasons unclear, he had stayed there past dawn, thereby dooming himself. Sunlight had streamed in through the flophouse window and severed his hind limb right at the crotch, leaving the enormous furred genitals unharmed.

  Hung like a horse even in death, Hemmel thought.

  Amalek crouched on all fours, his elongated snout sniffing the cracked linoleum of the floor. “I don’t get it,” he said. “There’s no blood. No restraints to hold him down. How did the Naturals—”

  Gisella leaned up against the peeling wallpaper, filing her talons between the spikes of her pointed teeth. “The Naturals had nothing to do with this.”

  “Vagamel wouldn’t go without a fight,” Amalek insisted. “He could easily have crawled into the shadows.”

  “He did not fight.” The glossy sheen of Gisella’s nude body shifted from indigo to maroon to ocher as she brooded. “And he didn’t crawl into the shadows. He crawled out of them.”

  “She’s right.” Burdock pointed to five-fingered gouges in the tiles where Vagamel must have sunk his claws into the floor, holding himself in the searing sunshine as he convulsed in agony until he finally, mercifully exploded.

  Amalek cocked his jackal’s head in puzzlement. “Why would he burn himself?”

  “For the same reason Jenya impaled herself, or Dandridge cut his own head off, or that Natural threw himself onto the Metro tracks.” Gisella’s skin turned to polished obsidian, but her eyes blazed orange. “Because that found them.”

  Hemmel abruptly lost his appetite. The Nightbreed used the usual pronouns to refer to one another with mutual respect: he or she or even it, for those among them who possessed no identifiable gender. Only one creature, however, merited the loathsome pejorative that.

  The Pariah.

  * * *

  Every race has its legends, and the Nightbreed were no exception. All of them had heard the story of the Pariah, though they seldom repeated it, except to frighten their children into obedience to the laws of Baphomet. That was how each of them had learned the tale—through fear.

  Down at the lowest depth of Midian—below the graves of the dead and the warrens of the undead, beneath the chambers where the Berserkers had been confined—lay a solitary oubliette, home and prison to a creature both pitiful and abhorrent. Its true name, if it had one, had long been forgotten, and no one but the Dark God knew what it looked like, for any who encountered it either lost all reason or spiraled to self-annihilation. Whatever the beast’s nature, it engendered nightmares in the Children of Nightmare, drove even the inhabitants of insanity to madness.

  It was not always so. In times distant, when the Immortals were young, an entity existed that could change its form with more divine skill than any Nightbreed before or since. It molded and reshaped itself into incarnations of such extraordinary art and beauty that one day it achieved a perfection that inflamed the lust of the great Lord Baphomet Himself.

  He appeared to the shape-shifter as a thunderhead with eyes of lightning. “You are favored above every creature that walks or crawls or flies,” He announced in a voice that resounded like planets colliding. “For I have chosen you to be My consort.”

  “Great Lord,” the shape-shifter replied, “I am humbled by Your honor. But I cannot give myself to You, for I love another.” And with that, it turned into air and fled.

  But one cannot hide from Baphomet, Who sees all. The Dark God followed the shape-shifter to its lover. To an amorphous being, all forms are equal, and so the shape-shifter did not have the prejudice of beauty. Its beloved turned out to be a hog-sized, ratlike thing, and Baphomet became enraged that His chosen one had spurned Him for such an inferior being. Although the shape-shifter attempted to shield its beloved from the Dark God’s wrath, Baphomet struck the rat thing with a beam of blinding radiance that shattered the creature into a thousand fragments, a horde of tiny, pathetic rodent replicas that immediately scattered in terror.

  Baphomet turned His baleful gaze upon the shape-shifter. “Since you have denied Me,” He said, “you shall have no one. You who have rejected your god shall be rejected by all, yea, even the lowliest of the low. Shunned by the shunned, loathed by the loathed, you shall endure alone forever. So have I spoken.”

  And with that, Baphomet cursed the once-enticing shape-shifter, changed it in some unimaginable way that made it repulsive to Natural and Nightbreed alike. Or so the story went.

  “A bunch of hogwash, you ask me.” Burdock scowled at Gisella, the brow of the eye at his right temple slanting downward severely. “The Pariah is a myth, a bugaboo for toddlers and fools!”

  Gisella flushed crimson. “I tell you, that has escaped! When Midian crumbled, that got out, and now it’s come after us to claim its vengeance.”

  “Nonsense!”

  “Then what do you think drove Vagamel to this? Or Jenya and the others?”

  Burdock had no ready answer. “Some mischief from the Naturals, you ask me. Maybe they’re on to us.”

  Gisella gave an arch smile. “Then let us catch the thing that did this and see who is right.”

  The others all l
ooked at one another, each waiting for someone else to object. Even Burdock paled and seemed less sure of himself. “I don’t see how that’s necessary.…”

  “So we let that take us, one by one? Or let it slay so many Naturals that they come hunting for all of us?”

  Amalek drew himself up to his full seven-foot height, tattooed hieroglyphs undulating as he puffed out his chest. “No! Natural or Nightbreed—we find it and kill it.”

  “There is no need to seek it. It will come to us. For us. And I will be waiting.” Gisella grinned, the pointed teeth interlocking in a jigsaw of ivory. In the wan illumination of Burdock’s flashlight, she seemed to disappear, for her skin altered its pigment again until it exactly mimicked the faded floral wallpaper behind her.

  Hemmel licked sweat from his upper lip, fidgeting with the Sickle beneath his shirt. “Wh-what if it is the Pariah? Baphomet cursed it. If we kill it, won’t He be mad?”

  Only Gisella’s orange eyes remained visible. The glare they gave Hemmel made him wish he hadn’t spoken.

  Burdock seized on the argument. “He has a point. If this Pariah does exist, it’s still Nightbreed. To kill it for being what it is makes us no better than the Naturals.”

  “Then we shall try to capture it,” Gisella replied. “And if that fails, we kill. Either way, it shall be Baphomet’s will. Now let us return to the Enclave and prepare.”

  She shut her eyes and vanished.

  * * *

  As they departed the flophouse, Amalek took Vagamel’s singed hindquarter and slunk down the nearest manhole to seek the secluded passageways of the sewers. That left Burdock and Hemmel to meander back to the Enclave at street level.

  “D-do you really think it’s the Pariah?” Hemmel stammered when they were alone, waddling to keep up with his companion. “What if it does to us what it did to the others?”

  Burdock snorted and put on the dark glasses he used to hide the smooth, featureless brow above his nose. “Don’t be such a dullard. You ask me, some blasted Natural is at the bottom of this, and we’ll make him suffer for it.”