Midian Unmade

by Joseph Nassise

  “I’m trembling because I’m cold, thank you,” he said politely, a quip to which a few of the group laughed.

  “And not out of fear?” said the half-human one, and from this distance, Jon could discern the strange pattern of cuts across his body. “We’re monsters, after all.”

  “Xxyzx, please,” said the woman who’d halted Neptune’s attack. It took Jonathan a moment to realize that the creature before him was naked, clothed rather in an odd assortment of drawings across her skin. Her breasts were full; her body was slender. The dark lines of her tattoos curved across her frame, drawing his eye and allowing it to linger perhaps a moment longer than was proper. The shapes traced down along her midsection, folding into the crevice just above her thighs, and continued to her feet. It was the first time that Jonathan had ever seen a woman in a state of such nakedness, at least in the flesh.

  “He’s staring,” chuckled Neptune.

  “I am not,” insisted Jon, using the exchange as an excuse to turn his attention away. “Or if I am, it’s because I’ve never dreamt about monsters before.”

  “Dreamt?” asked Xxyzx. “You think this is a dream?”

  “I may be ten,” said Jon, “but even I know that monsters aren’t real.”

  Jonas threw up his hands in a mockery of worship. “Praise Baphomet! Our suffering is diminished! If only because we don’t exist!”

  The tattooed woman turned. “Jonas, please. A month ago, there were things that even we might not have believed.”

  “Bite him, then,” said Neptune. “Turn him into one of us. Make him immortal, make him strong—unsick and forever. Let a few centuries pass and see if he wonders when he’ll wake.”

  “That’s enough,” said the woman. She kneeled slowly to Jon’s level, putting her hands softly onto his shoulders. “What’s your name, child?”

  “Jonathan,” he replied.

  She smiled sweetly. “My name is Allyaphasia, Jonathan. I had a son your age, and another slightly older.”

  “Monsters have children?” he asked, suddenly aware of his own naïveté. “Can I see them, please?”

  An emotion flickered across the woman’s face, one he’d seen a number of times before, on the face of his mother, which was not so dissimilar. It was the expression she wore in her most somber of moments, when she allowed herself to be weak and honest and weep in his presence. It was the face that followed the words “I’ll never see you marry, or your children be born.”

  “They died,” said Allyaphasia.

  “If this is a dream,” began Jonathan, “then maybe I can dream them back. You can do that in dreams.”

  “Would you trust me if I asked you to close your eyes?” she inquired, and to his own surprise, he did. She put a hand to his forehead, delicate and soft, and he felt the creature’s nails trail their way lightly across his skin, down over his eyelids and above his warm, rosy cheeks. It was a sensation at once both calming and real, as honest a touch as any he’d ever received in waking life, and when he opened his eyes a moment later he said, as if to himself—

  “This isn’t a dream.”

  5

  An hour passed in the company of the one they called Allyaphasia. It was an hour filled with a child’s questions, and with the patience of one who used to be a mother, she answered them as best she could. In the space behind them, where they sat gingerly on a damp bale of hay, the others paced nervously in the shadows.

  She told him of Midian, the underground city—of its immense, cavernous walls and magnificent chambers. She told him of its birth, of Baphomet and their history, of their tragedy and their wanderings. She spoke of Boone and his becoming with neither judgment nor scorn. She told him the story of the Nightbreed as one might tell it to a man, and when he pointed this out to her, she said only, “Having seen what you’ve seen, you cannot help but become one, as I, seeing you, am a child once again.”

  He told her of his mother and of Albert. He spoke of his plans to run away after her passing—for which he said he’d prepared himself, though Allyaphasia didn’t have the heart to say just how impossible that truly was. He stopped at one point in the evening and said excitedly, “You could stay here, or I could go with you,” to which Allyaphasia simply laughed and turned the topic to some story of Midian.

  And after an hour of conversation, the pacing Xxyzx finally broke free from the crowd and pulled her away to a quiet corner, saying, “Quit this, damn you. Quit this now!”

  “I know what you’re thinking,” she began.

  “And I you. Playing mother to incur our sympathies, as if the sight of you and the boy were some rite of protection.” He paused, sighing, and leaned in closer. “They want to kill him, you know. Here in the barn. Then across the field for the sleeping mother and uncle. And then move on…”

  “I won’t allow that.”

  “You can’t stop it!” He pressed his fist into the rafters behind her head. “If he proves too convincing, or brings them here, we’re through. If we let them live, they’ll invite more. The humans bring death, Allyaphasia—intended or otherwise.”

  “I can’t let you kill him, Xxyzx,” she said plainly. “Because if we do—if we slaughter a boy and his family—then we are, indeed, just as he claims. We’re monsters.”

  Xxyzx growled heavily, an element of his nature of which he’d never quite disposed. “What then do you suggest?”

  “Not me,” she said, and in that moment, Jonathan appeared at her side, his face alight with words unspoken, calling her ears to the question she’d been waiting for him to ask.

  6

  “Will you turn my mother?”

  The room erupted in whispered argument, for he’d addressed the question to them all, but Jonathan wavered not a bit. His mind had been turning in the time that Allyaphasia and Xxyzx had spoken, poring over the story of Boone, but mostly over the words that Neptune had uttered earlier.

  “Make him immortal—unsick and forever.”

  “You can do this,” he shouted into the deafening crowd. “You can help her. Why won’t you help her?”

  Allyaphasia moved to stand before him, putting herself between the child and the rabble. “Calm yourselves!” she cried.

  “That last human we turned,” began Jonas, motioning to the darkness of the room around them. “This is the result of that.”

  “Kill him!” cried some. “Kill them all!”

  Jonathan, frightened but stalwart, clung to the woman’s wrist. “Make them understand,” he whispered, uncertain if she’d heard him.

  “No killing,” cried Xxyzx into the room. “There’s been enough of that.”

  “What other option is there?” shouted Neptune.

  Allyaphasia stepped forward, leading the boy with every step.

  “Ours is a history of running,” she insisted. “And too often of fighting—but never of helping. Never a gesture of kindness for fear of being vulnerable. Never a moment of forgiveness. We cannot expect from them what we are unable to give ourselves.”

  “We’re broken, Allyaphasia!” cried Jonas.

  “Then this is how we mend,” she insisted. “By fixing ourselves.”

  She would have said more had Jonathan not stepped out from behind her, dropping a hand that reached back out for his own, and moved cautiously into the center of the room. Never before had he felt so small, so afraid, but if courage was the price, he would find it to pay.

  “My mom is dying,” he said, tears spilling from his eyes. “You can help her; you can do that. Whatever you are, you all were born. I’m just a kid with a sick mom and a dumb uncle and no hope except for you. And whatever you think we’ll do, we won’t, I swear, because she’ll be one of you. And that doesn’t matter to me as long as she’s okay.” He paused, weeping and embarrassed. “Your god left you, and I’m pretty sure that mine left me, too. So if all we have left is each other, then whatever we are, that’s better than being alone, right?”

  The room was silent. The world had fallen into a deep and lull
ing hush.

  “She’s dying,” he concluded. “Please.”

  The silence lingered for a long, lasting moment until Neptune finally spoke.

  “That’s a smart fucking kid,” she said. “I call for council.”

  “Council’s dead,” grumbled Jonas. “Council was a relic of Midian.”

  “We are Midian,” replied Xxyzx. “And I second the call.”

  Reluctantly, the creatures began to assemble in the center of the room as Allyaphasia turned to Jon.

  “You must go now,” she said. “This will be a long process.”

  “Will they help?” he asked, but she didn’t answer.

  “Go now, back to your mother. Give her your love and return here tomorrow. We’ll be waiting.”

  7

  In the darkness before dawn, Allyaphasia stood in the cool, rustling grass of the field, gazing upward at the stars. She knew of their patterns and portents, understood the workings of far-off worlds on her own. She was an old mystic, last in a long line of sky-gazing fortune-tellers, but tonight, for all their power to be more so, she wished them only to be what they were—pinpricks in the darkness.

  She heard Xxyzx before she saw him, and when the shadows parted to reveal his face, he looked exhausted.

  “We’ve been at this for hours,” he said. “With hours more to go.”

  “Jonas can smell it,” she said. “We all can. There aren’t many hours left.”

  A cricket sang its one-note song from somewhere in the darkness, and it took Xxyzx a moment to realize that it was doing so from the palm of Allyaphasia’s hand. The creature was her own, molded from a slice of flesh across her forearm, and it chirped quietly into the night. The two friends stood there, together in the tallgrass, listening to its music.

  “We’re only ever saved by the mercy we show to others,” said Allyaphasia after a time. “Lylesburg told me as much.”

  Xxyzx groaned at the name of the man who’d set him to bleed, but his skin remained unmarked. Nothing new had scrawled itself there. Rather, he only laughed—guttural and deep. “Lylesburg and his lessons,” he muttered. “When did he spin you that fiction?”

  “The day before the taking of Midian.” She paused. “The day before he’d decided to remove your curse.” She let the revelation hang delicately in the moonlight, and for a moment, there was only silence, save for the chirping of insects.

  If Xxyzx reacted, Allyaphasia couldn’t tell. “He said it to me after Boone arrived,” she continued, “before the fire followed. He confessed that he’d been wrong to curse you. Admitted that peace isn’t something to be forced, but discovered; that we have to come to it in our own way, in our own time. He would have healed you, Xxyzx. He was a good man.”

  She’d given him an opportunity to lament, she understood—to despair at the loss of a truth refused him. Instead, he simply said, “One day, love, you’ll find your peace,” words which led her to suspect that somehow, by chance, he’d begun to find his own.

  “I believe now that I will,” she replied after a while. “It’s why I’ve decided to help the boy. Whatever the verdict.”

  Before she could speak, Xxyzx sighed mournfully into the evening chill. “Ally, please—”

  “Oh, be still,” she chided. “Do what you must, I’ll understand. But if we are, the lot of us, more than just a tribe, greater than a simple pack of bickering drifters—if we are, by fate or family, bound—you’ll allow me this, Xxyzx. All of you.”

  “It won’t bring them back,” the creature said plainly. “The dead stay dead.… But you already know that.”

  Allyaphasia turned and touched his cheek. For the first time in a long time, her hand came away bloodless.

  “I’m a mother denied her children. I haven’t the right to deny a child his mother.”

  She smiled, thin-lipped but honest, and the expression she wore was one of resolution. She had finished wandering, it was clear—finished mourning, finished apologizing for her tears. She had decided, and there were no requests left in her. Seemingly unchanged, the world had somehow remade itself, and in that moment, he knew that she was no longer Nightbreed. She was singular; she was her own.

  “When?” he asked. “I’ll be there with you.”

  “Tomorrow,” replied Allyaphasia. “After nightfall.”

  Elizabeth Adler died the following morning.

  8

  Died, but not died. Half died.

  Jonathan awoke to the sound of the dream-demon—not in his mother’s head, however, but in his own. “It’s time,” said the shadow, vague against the light, a vision that Jonathan might have forgotten had it not carried him back into wakefulness.

  Finally, my mother … he began to think, but stopped himself. He’d found the way to help, so long as they would agree.

  He moved quickly from the bed, threw open his door, and saw Albert standing in the entrance to his mother’s room, face sullen. He feared for a moment that he was too late, but the voice of the demon—or was it an angel—persisted inside his skull. “It’s time” suggested somehow that there was time to be had, little though it might be, and it allowed precious few seconds for grief.

  “She’s alive?” he asked, the space between them immense.

  “I woke her for breakfast,” he stammered. “Oatmeal, the usual. But she won’t open her eyes. I think you should say your—”

  “I’ve gotta get to the barn,” he said, bare feet rushing toward the stairwell.

  “I don’t think you understand,” said his uncle.

  “I can help,” cried Jon. “They can help!”

  “Who, Jon? Who can help?”

  “The Nightbreed,” he said, almost casually. “The monsters in the basement.”

  Albert stopped at the top of the stairs as Jon looked back up. It was the first time that his uncle had ever worn a human face, he thought, and it was one of sorrow. Jon knew it well and pitied him for the fashion.

  “She’s dying,” said Albert. “Jon, son, it’s time.”

  “No,” said the boy by his place at the door. “Not quite yet.”

  9

  He ran across the field, ignoring his uncle’s calls, scrambled through the break in the barn wall and into the darkened cellar.

  “She’s dying!” he called loudly into the room. “Please, help! Please!”

  From the shadows, a lamplight began to glow—then another, and another. The monsters stirred from their sleep, rousing into the shadows of the midafternoon. A few lay on improvised beds of dirt and hay; others slept in crossed-legged meditation, while others still hung from the rafters overhead. As the lamplight brightened the vague shape of the cellar, they slowly began to assemble, eyes squinted against the darkness. Xxyzx was the first to speak.

  “We said to come at night, boy!”

  “She’s dying!” he cried. “Allyaphasia, she’s dying!”

  There was some commotion among the crowd as Allyaphasia appeared, exchanging nervous glances with Xxyzx across the room. From the space above, the distant shouts of Albert crossing the field could be faintly discerned, but Jonas had already sensed the threat from its smell alone. He looked frantically up the stairs, then back toward Xxyzx at the center of the Breed.

  “Fool!” cried the puppet. “Who have you brought?”

  “It’s my uncle,” said Jon, crossing the room toward the tattooed woman. “I didn’t have time to wait. He’s harmless, I promise, but we have to go now.”

  He took her hand, attempting to drag her forward, but she resisted, digging her feet into the earth below. “I can’t—” she began.

  “Can’t what?” asked Jon. “Can’t why?”

  Before she could answer, Albert’s voice sounded from the top of the stairs. His footsteps echoed off the creaking boards—one step, another—as he shouted down below.

  “Dammit, Jon, this is serious. Your mother’s ill and you’re talking about monsters? It’s not time to be a child now!”

  He might have said more had he not breached th
e lamplight, nearly collapsing to the bottom at the sight of their assembly. His footing faltered as he yelped a nervous, half-formed scream, caught in his throat by Jonas’s six-fingered hand. The creature rushed toward its victim, pinning him violently against the wall, yellow eyes against Albert’s dull, muddy brown.

  From his mouth, a set of pincers revealed themselves—spit-covered and sharp—extending past the creature’s lips and hefting themselves against the meat of Jonas’s cheeks. Thick, viscous choking sounds gurgled from the back of his throat, contracting painfully as if something were making its way out. From between his teeth, the glistening curvature of the puppeteer’s head emerged into the light, soft and dark like so much mud, or shit. It was larger than it should have been, and oddly shaped, contorting itself impossibly into the open air. It had a mouth of its own—eyes and hands—like some cancerous newborn tearing bloody into the world, but rather than cry—or roar, as Albert might have expected—it trained its narrow slits on the terrified man and said simply—

  “Boo.”

  Albert fainted, an unintended gesture which Jon would later assume had saved his life. He was, for the moment, a threat averted. No need for a murder so late in the day.

  Jonas’s face fell back like a hood, absent of muscle or bone, as the puppet adjusted itself upright. “Tell him,” it hissed to Xxyzx. “Tell him why his mother’s going to die.”

  Jonathan looked back toward Allyaphasia. “What does he mean? I thought you would help. I needed you to help.”

  Before she could speak, Xxyzx interrupted. “We would have,” he admitted. “We’d agreed.… But we can’t go just now. Later, perhaps—”

  “There is no later,” he protested. “She’ll be dead later!”

  “It’s why we’re here,” said Neptune from behind him. “Hiding in the dark. The sun can burn us. Kill us.”

  Jonathan moaned—half in mourning, half in anguish. The world seemed determined that a life would be taken this afternoon, and who was he to fight against the world? Just a boy, after all. Certainly nothing more.