Midian Unmade

by Joseph Nassise

  He pulled on his shabby stocking cap and adjusted it so that his eyes could peek out through the holes cut in the sides. In the night-drenched streets of Skid Row, the cap’s snowflake pattern camouflaged the staring orbs.

  Hemmel sighed and trudged along in silence past shops that had rolled their steel doors down at sunset. Hardly any streetlights illuminated this part of town, so he navigated as much by smell as by sight. A pleasant background reek of rotting garbage from the burst trash bags that slouched on the sidewalk mingled with the pervasive undertone of human urine and feces that saturated the pavement. And here and there, the delectable scent of Meat whenever they neared a comatose vagrant slumped in a doorway. More than once, Hemmel had to restrain the squirming Sickle beneath his shirt. It wanted to feed.

  At last, they arrived at the entrance to a dilapidated movie palace that dated to the Roaring Twenties. THE ELYSIAN, its marquee announced, every bulb in its curling script either blown or broken. Skewed letters promised that the theater was only CLOSED F R REMOD LING. Burdock strode beyond the boarded-up ticket booth and rapped on the cinema’s double doors: four quick knocks, three slow.

  Hemmel jumped as a voice spoke from the vacant foyer behind them.

  “Took you long enough,” it said.

  Gisella rippled into visibility like a mirage.

  Burdock harrumphed. “Let’s see how quick you are after a couple more centuries.”

  He and Hemmel followed her into the lobby, where Amalek squatted, solemnly devouring Vagamel’s severed flank as if it were an enormous joint of raw mutton. Among some Nightbreed, consuming one’s dead kin was considered far more respectful than burying them. They became part of you—remained one with you forever.

  Another set of double doors led into the auditorium itself, current lair of the Enclave, one of the wandering tribes of the Midian diaspora. The theater was perversely apropos to house the Nightbreed: gilt-edged glamour gone to seed. Faux Egyptian pharaohs flanked the proscenium arch. A stage that had once hosted vaudeville performers now stood deserted except for an enormous torn film screen. Pigeons roosted in the dying galaxies of disintegrating chandeliers, and the atmosphere sagged with the musty stink of their droppings. If Midian had been a cemetery for the dead, the Elysian was a mausoleum for dreams.

  The Enclave had adapted the interior to suit their needs. Sconces that once sprouted electric candles now held burning torches. Rows of folding seats had been ripped out and rearranged around cooking fires and card tables. In the cleared spaces, velvet draperies had been refashioned into Bedouin-style tents on the gum-encrusted carpet of the theater floor. For a brief time, this place had become their home.

  But now, the tents were being dismantled. Even as the tiny community’s children still chased each other up and down the center aisle—some on two legs, some on all fours—their parents grimly packed up their makeshift shelters.

  “We need this area cleared,” Gisella explained. “For the trap.”

  Having finished his meal, Amalek strode up to Gisella, eyes gleaming in anticipation. “Tell us.”

  As the other Nightbreed completed their preparations, they too gathered around. Gisella held out her clawed fingers to indicate that all of them would be included in her instructions. “I’ve had Calay take the children away to hide them. The rest of us shall stay here, together. When that comes, we follow the plan.” Gisella snapped her fingers in the direction of a velvet curtain that had been tossed in a corner. “Crocus.”

  The curtain undulated, rippled, and flipped back like a hood to reveal what appeared to be a girl in her late teens. “I’m here.”

  Crocus had a moon-shaped face and white hair. As she stood up, freeing herself of the curtain, a roll of fat around her belly flopped over her hips, hanging downward to midthigh like a miniskirt of flesh. Under the fat roll peeked Crocus’s extra leg, which grew out of her groin, its foot planted forward between the girl’s two normal legs.

  Gisella indicated the auditorium doors. “We will leave the center door open. Crocus, you will stand just in front of those doors. When the Pariah comes in, that monster will see you. The second it does, what will you do?”

  “I’ll jump!” Crocus’s extra foot snapped to the floor as if spring-loaded, vaulting her whole body upward in an arc as if shot by a catapult. For a second, Hemmel lost sight of her. Then he spotted her standing on the other end of the theater.

  “Good.” Gisella nodded in satisfaction. “Go straight down the center aisle, and then off into the wings with you.” She gestured to a decorative arch near the right of the stage. “The fastest you’ve ever gone.”

  Crocus’s luminescent paleness paled still more, a mixture of fear and determination. “That thing won’t catch me.”

  “No, it won’t.” Gisella moved to the arch and faded into it as her skin matched its color. “I will be here in case. And Franchesco will know what to do. Franchesco! Are you prepared?”

  A voice from overhead whooped, “You bet I am!”

  Hemmel craned his neck toward the sound, which came from one of the decrepit chandeliers near the stage. The crystals clattered together musically as Franchesco shifted a little from his perch on top of the chandelier. He had the stocky build and broad shoulders of a bodybuilder, but a down of vestigial feathers plumed the skin in brilliant shades of tropical green and iridescent red. His nose dipped, sharply and cruelly, into a beaklike bend, giving him the visage of a bird of prey.

  “The monstruo’ll be chasing Crocus, right? But my friends will drive him back, just where we want him.” Franchesco let out a high, piercing cry. Suddenly the air filled with feathers: not only the pigeons that had claimed the theater before the Nightbreed had, but also crows, parrots, and even a seagull or two. Quickly falling into formation, the birds formed an arc, diving toward the arch and turning abruptly toward the orchestra pit. Franchesco gave out another cry, and the birds scattered, disappearing with such dispatch they seemed to melt into the air. “The asesino will fall right in!”

  Burdock snorted. “And if it doesn’t?”

  “And if it doesn’t…” From the far side of the orchestra pit, Lantana stepped forward, an ancient pixie, freakishly thin, her nightshade-purple hair spiking around her wrinkled face. “And if that doesn’t, we might just cloud the issue, so to speak.”

  Lantana heaved, then vomited billows of an opaque violet mist into the auditorium. Hemmel suddenly felt off-balance, no longer sure of his footing. He took a shaky step forward, then another, and another. He couldn’t see anything now but the hues of the mist: tints of sunset and the promise of fine hunting in the darkest hour of night. Voices seemed to float to him from several directions at once. “Gisella? Burdock?” he called uncertainly.

  His head abruptly cleared as Lantana’s rough laugh pealed out and the mist evaporated like a popping soap bubble. Hemmel realized that he had unwittingly advanced to the lip of the pit. One more step, and he would tumble down into it. He saw that all the other Nightbreed stood on the orchestra pit’s edge, too.

  Lantana smiled wickedly. “If I can entrance you to step forth to the pit, I can lure that, too.”

  Hemmel considered. “Okay, you get the thing in the hole. Then what?”

  From deep below him, a smooth, deep voice replied, “What happens next, my friend, is also what happens last.”

  Hemmel looked into the blackness of the pit. Something shuffled into better view, and Hemmel gasped in surprise. “Desai?”

  “None other.”

  Desai rarely showed himself. In fact, Hemmel had only met him once before. Desai preferred to live below the stage, where a decayed warren of dressing rooms, long since half buried in dust, provided the dark, cool hiding place he craved. Dozens of hands sprouted like cilia from the sides of his unclothed body, extending and retracting at will. Six of Desai’s hands were out at the moment, reaching around on stubby, rubbery arms to frame his back as he slowly did a pirouette for the Enclave’s benefit. He had many hands, but only two feet, and t
hese supported him awkwardly.

  “You see, my friends, I am fit as ever where it matters the most.” As he turned, the hands, deft as a game-show model’s, pointed to the hard ridges running down Desai’s spine. At the small of his back, a jointed tail whipped upward, its sharp stinger dangling just above Desai’s head. “When our tormentor falls in here, I will give him a taste of my Sleep.”

  “You’re going to stun the Pariah?” Burdock asked.

  “If possible. Keep in mind, I may have to use all my poison, and then I cannot guarantee that creature’’s safety.”

  Hemmel felt absurdly touched. Desai’s mother had used all her poison in the fight at Midian, and it had killed her. Yet Desai was willing to risk his own life for other Nightbreed, with whom he seldom interacted.

  Gisella flicked out her talons. “We understand. The Dark God’s will be done. We appreciate your sacrifice.”

  She surveyed the semicircle of Nightbreed. “Everyone, get to your places. Someone must keep watch and warn us when that is near.”

  Burdock squinted at Hemmel. “That would be you, of course. You’re practically a Natural.”

  “Yeah?” Hemmel raised his shirt and let the Sickle coil forth in all its hunger.

  Burdock was unimpressed. “You look a whole lot more Natural than any of the rest of us.”

  Hemmel glanced around. He couldn’t argue with that one. “Fine.”

  “You got your cell phone?” Burdock asked.

  “Of course.” Hemmel absently felt the lump in the breast pocket of his overcoat to be sure. Since leaving Midian, the Nightbreed had adopted many of the Naturals’ technological conveniences.

  “And you remembered to charge it this time?”

  “Yeah! Yeah! I’m not stupid.” In fact, Hemmel had recently walked over a mile to an all-night doughnut shop to find a working outlet where he could hook up the damned phone.

  “All right then. Be ready for further orders.” Burdock pivoted his head to glower at Hemmel through the hole in his stocking cap. “And keep an eye out!”

  Hemmel grunted acknowledgment, and reluctantly left the auditorium to take up his post outside the theater.

  Standing alone beneath the Elysian’s marquee, he shifted from foot to foot and pulled his coat more tightly around himself even though he didn’t feel cold. Beneath his shirt, the Sickle hissed like an asp. In all the fuss over the Pariah, everyone seemed to have forgotten about food. Everyone but Hemmel. He’d actually been tempted to ask Amalek for a bite of Vagamel’s leg but thought that might be rude.

  He sniffed the chill air. There was Meat nearby, no doubt about it. Hemmel glanced up and down the desolate thoroughfare until he spotted her—a plump, solitary bag lady, shambling in distraction along the opposite sidewalk.

  Hemmel’s mouth twisted in hesitation. She was just across the street. He could still watch the front of the theater from there, and it would only take a minute.…

  The Sickle would not be denied. Hemmel unbuttoned his shirt as he moved to intercept her.

  The old hag must have been demented or delirious or both. She tore at her gray hair, waggling her head, peppering the air with frantic mutters. “No, no! I can’t—it mustn’t. Horrible, horrible.”

  Hemmel opened wide his arms. “No need to fret, Granny. You won’t feel a thing.”

  The Sickle sprang forth from his exposed abdomen. He pulled her against him, and the cartilaginous point of the arced proboscis pierced her threadbare clothing and penetrated her midriff. The appendage oozed a numbing, coagulant pus as the three-pronged point opened inside her, questing for an organ to harvest.

  The bag lady slackened in Hemmel’s embrace as she succumbed to the narcotic effect of the ooze. A casual observer would have thought they were hugging. He patted her back. “That’s it. Just relax.”

  There was a time when Hemmel might have treated himself to a brain or a heart or a lung. Now that he was forced to coexist with Naturals, though, he found it better to use more discretion when selecting his snacks. An appendix for an appetizer. The bonbon of a gall bladder. Half a liver—no more! Or in this case, one of a pair of nice, juicy kidneys.

  “Never even know it’s gone,” he whispered, as the prongs of the Sickle closed around the chosen meal. The proboscis pumped in stomach acid to digest the kidney inside the bag lady, then sucked the dissolved organ into Hemmel like soda through a straw. The coagulant would seal her wounds and keep her from bleeding to death.

  Before he could finish, however, a new agitation seized the bag lady, so strong it overcame the sedation of Hemmel’s pus. She flailed in his grasp, shrieking. “Oh, God! Oh, God! That is here! Stop that! Stop that!”

  Her odd use of the pronoun chilled Hemmel. She was a Natural. She couldn’t possibly know about …

  He loosened his grip, and she wrenched loose from the Sickle’s impalement. In the struggle, the proboscis ripped wide the wound instead of sealing it. Entrails bulged from the red maw, blood speckling the pavement as she stumbled away in a haphazard delirium.

  As if forgetting to zip his fly, Hemmel stood there, dumbfounded, with the blood-smeared Sickle hanging out in plain sight. He glanced over his shoulder in the direction the old lady had gaped—toward the theater. No hideous monstrosity there. The only thing moving was a haggard-looking black man in an Army-surplus jacket limping along the sidewalk.

  Yet when the man looked at him with his sorrowful eyes, Hemmel sickened with an overwhelming revulsion. A revulsion that metastasized into terror when the man turned and entered the Elysian.

  Hemmel fumbled the cell phone out of his pocket, fought to steady his finger long enough to push the right contact number.

  “Burdock!” he babbled before the other even had a chance to speak. “The Pariah—it is a shape-shifter!” He grimaced at the stunning obviousness of the statement. “The black guy that just came in—”

  “Hemmel?” Burdock interrupted. “But you just came in. Great Baphomet—what is that smell?”

  Shouts of alarm sounded in the background, and Hemmel snapped his phone shut to cut them off. His instinct was to run away, to let Gisella and the others deal with that. But he knew their plan was doomed, for they could never have anticipated what they were up against. They had never expected that the enemy could so easily masquerade as a friend. The Pariah was far worse than any of them had guessed.

  Hemmel could have abandoned them, but for what? He had never been without Burdock and the others. A life without the Nightbreed was no life at all. Better to perish with them than survive alone.

  He waddled back across to the theater, the Sickle bobbing in front of him. As he charged through the lobby, he nearly collided with Amalek, who lurched out of the auditorium with his arms wrapped around his head.

  “It touched me! Oh, dear Vagamel, now I understand—that touched me!” Amalek flattened his ears back miserably and yowled, pawing at his snout with his man-hands like a dog that’s been sprayed by a skunk. He collapsed and writhed on the marble floor, whining.

  And there was a smell. The odor hit Hemmel like an arctic draft as he advanced into the inner sanctum of the theater.

  Few scents can appall creatures who regularly revel in the miasma of the swamp, the stench of the charnel house, the reek of the grave. But this one curdled Hemmel to his marrow. It smelled antiseptic and bitter—a gust of wind across the glacier left by a nuclear winter, tasting of nothing but ash and ice. It blew from a world in which there would be neither blood nor flesh, ever again. An absolute desolation unknown even to the dead that lay in Midian.

  The citizens of the Enclave stood in a circle in the center of the theater. They had surrounded that. But Hemmel blanched as he saw, in the center of the circle, the mirror image of himself. The Pariah had duplicated him perfectly, even down to the slight bulge of the Sickle beneath his shirt. Hemmel’s gorge rose, and his skin broke out in a feverish sweat.

  But he did not have to endure the sight of himself as Pariah for long.

  It was appa
rent that Gisella’s meticulous battle plan had already unraveled. Caught off guard by the Pariah’s deception, Crocus had not jumped until the disguised intruder had come close enough to lay hands on her. The girl had since leapt to the far end of the theater and ran in circles there, gibbering hysterically, disordered by fright.

  Now, while Hemmel watched, Franchesco marshaled his avian squadron against the enemy. As the flock swooped from the rafters, though, the birds seemed to hit an invisible barrier, an impenetrable bubble around the Pariah that sent them glancing off, fluttering and squawking, in every direction.

  The attack only succeeded in drawing the intruder’s attention to Franchesco’s perch. The impostor Hemmel looked upward and shook itself. It lost shape for an instant, then shivered into feathers of gold and silver and bronze, coalescing into the most glorious bird of prey imaginable. The false phoenix took flight, soaring up to circle around Franchesco’s chandelier. When it dove toward him, Franchesco batted it away with disgust, flailing so much that he lost his balance and tumbled to the theater floor with a bone-breaking crack.

  As he lay there, helpless and gasping, the majestic bird glided down to land beside him, craning its beak forward to bill Franchesco’s cheek and coo in his ear. Paralyzed from the fall, Franchesco could barely lift his head, yet he so dreaded the Pariah’s affection that he pounded the base of his cracked skull against the floor until it spilled grayish-blue cerebral jelly.

  Before Franchesco’s body twitched to stillness, a vague blurriness, like heat vapor, darted from an archway and assaulted the bird creature from behind. As it flapped and shrieked, Gisella crimsoned to the color of war paint and dug her talons into its hide.

  “We know what you are,” she shouted. Hemmel had never seen her tremble before. “How dare you violate our Enclave! Murdering your own kind! Accursed thing, now you will die!”

  She snapped her wolf-trap jaws shut on its neck and clung to it as it began to change. It melted out of her clutches, then re-formed in front of her. It opened arms with taloned hands like Gisella’s own, enfolding her in its embrace.