Gisella screamed, a sound that made the chandelier crystals resound in an unbearably high frequency.
Heads formed with faces that were the male counterparts of Gisella’s own. Their many colors, which changed in exactly the way Gisella’s skin could change, pulsed around her as multiple mouths kissed, sucked, licked, seemingly on her everywhere at once in their ardor.
Gisella screamed again, her body convulsing, her skin rapidly losing its color until it turned a lifeless gray.
With their general dead, the rest of the troops fell into disarray. Even the great Desai had clambered out of the pit and was now skittering toward the nearest exit on all hands like a frightened roach.
“Retreat!” Lantana yelled. She exhaled gouts of purple smoke that clouded the entire room for nearly a minute. Under the cover Lantana had given them, Hemmel heard a stampede of feet and paws and hooves, and someone roughly shoved him against a wall in their haste to leave.
When the violet mist finally dissipated, Hemmel realized that, other than the bodies of Franchesco and Gisella, he was alone. The others had escaped, or else gone elsewhere to die of the Pariah’s darkness.
But the monster’s sickening miasma remained. Out of the air, the Pariah’s energy gathered up into one brutal mouth, its corners turned down as it opened in a hideous, pitiable, earsplitting wail. Even from a monster among monsters, the noise could not be mistaken. An anguished sob filled the abandoned auditorium, the sound of utter despair.
Desperately wanting to flee and yet unable to look away, Hemmel stood transfixed as the Pariah’s shape altered again. Out of one half materialized a shape Hemmel had never seen before. This new form had two faces looking Janus-like in opposite directions. The single body beneath possessed supernal symmetry, at the same time glowing with two separate facets like a jewel: on the left a male, its muscles rippling and sex organ thrusting in powerful display, and on the right a female, with soft curves and one lush ripe breast. Though every nerve in Hemmel shrieked and his stomach writhed in abhorrence, Hemmel could still gasp with awe at its beauty. Such a creature could certainly captivate Baphomet, could seduce the darkest of gods.
Yet as Hemmel marveled, the Pariah’s other half began to take on a very different shape. It shrank, forming a sort of hairy oblong close to the ground, long and bulky like the body of a pig. A rodent face emerged from its awkward bulk, whiskered, with small ears and teeth so long they propped the mouth partially open. The thing seemed the utter opposite of the Pariah’s perfect other half.
Hemmel remembered the legend, the ratlike thing that had so enraged Baphomet that He had split the hapless creature into a thousand fragments of itself.
The Pariah’s lover.
The hairy creature cozened up to the godlike androgyne, snuffling in evident delight. And the androgyne wrapped its male and female arms around it in frantic passion. The hog-sized thing, with its ratlike face, suckled madly at the female breast, nibbled the areola with its ludicrous long teeth. The male Janus face nuzzled the hoglike thing’s furry neck, while the female face moaned in rising ecstasy. The Janus’s male organ penetrated its lover as the creature reciprocated, entering the androgyne’s female sex. As the two halves of the Pariah’s body stroked one another, writhing desperately, approaching a single climax, Hemmel sensed he was witness to an oft-repeated dance. Tears streaked the androgyne’s two faces, and its rodent counterpart whimpered in distress.
How many times had this happened over the centuries as the creature agonized in its oubliette? Perpetually isolated, the Pariah’s sole comfort lay in its own illusions. Only its own cursed touch could grant it release. Yet this could never truly satisfy. For even in the gifted multiplicity of its form, the Pariah remained alone.
At last, Hemmel understood. The Pariah did not wish to bring death. As it had in times beyond, it sought love. But it could only offer a love that utterly destroyed the object of its desire.
And any second now, Hemmel realized, he would be next.
He had nothing more to lose—no shelter, no safe hunting ground. Worst of all, his companions, his kin, the only friends he would ever have on the earth or under it, had either died or abandoned him.
And the Pariah—what did it have to live for? He’d be doing it a favor to end its miserable existence. It would not be merely revenge—it would be a mercy killing. But how? Strong as the others had been, they had proved no match for the Pariah’s power.
The Sickle stirred, reminding Hemmel of its presence. Of course! Even shape-shifters had hearts. If Hemmel could find it, the Sickle would take care of the rest.
Hemmel felt the Pariah’s attention turn to him. The faultless Janus and the glorified rodent dissolved as the Pariah, once again, molded itself into Hemmel’s own likeness.
It had to be now. Unleashing a primal yell, Hemmel charged forward with all the speed his ungainly body could muster. For a split second the nauseous smell and the overwhelming urge to flee nearly overpowered him. Then the Sickle plunged directly into the false Hemmel’s chest, its proboscis probing for the heart of the monster.
Instantly the Pariah’s form softened and expanded, engulfing Hemmel completely. Hemmel panicked. He felt as if he were drowning, being smothered, being drenched in wretched muck. The Sickle, usually infallible in seeking specific organs, foundered. The Pariah’s anatomy was unlike any Hemmel had encountered. Its innards melted and flowed and reconstituted themselves in new configurations, easily avoiding the Sickle’s prongs.
Hemmel no longer cared about killing the cursed being. Whatever the cost, he had to escape.
At the same time he sensed that escape would be impossible. Already he could feel hands and tongues on his body, a rain of kisses and caresses that made him want to die. Withdrawing the Sickle from its fruitless quest, he turned the cutting tip toward his own chest. Better to end it now, himself, than die as the others had. The Sickle hesitated, then plunged into his chest. The pain made Hemmel cry out, but at the same time he could only feel relief at the thought of ending his proximity to the Pariah.
“Never even know it’s gone,” he gasped as the three-pronged claw cleanly severed his arteries. Hemmel felt his heart beat its last as it liquefied.
But the expected oblivion did not come.
Instead, a viscous clamminess seeped like bilgewater through the incision the Sickle had made and filled the empty cavity in his chest. Hemmel felt the substance congeal within him, knitting itself to his aorta. A moment later, it began to beat.
He looked down at his chest and saw that a network of stringy veins now fanned out from the sealed wound, gently pulsing as they circulated blood from him to the Pariah and back again. The monster had replaced Hemmel’s heart with its own, entwining them forever.
* * *
Burdock stared out at the night, the eyes on the sides of his head straining to catch the slightest movement outside the abandoned warehouse where he and the other refugees of the Enclave had fled. He hadn’t been able to rest in the intervening days since the Pariah had driven them out of the Elysian.
If his eyes had had lids, Burdock would have shut them. He was so weary.
Determined to fulfill his self-imposed duty as sentry, he sat on the floor beneath the window and leaned back against the wall, hoping at least to ease the tension in his body. Almost as soon as he reclined, however, he shot bolt upright again.
There was a scent in the air … a whiff of pungent, flesh-freezing coldness, as of steaming liquid nitrogen.
“Don’t be stupid,” he muttered to himself. To his shame, he often imagined he smelled the Pariah’s vile odor.
He was about to relax when the locked warehouse door nearest him burst inward, swinging with the force of whatever had rammed it. Burdock jumped to his feet and snatched his cell phone from the pocket of his jacket, ready to alert the others. But something about the shuffling footsteps he heard next made him stop. He recognized that shambling gait as if it were his own, but at the same time it seemed totally alien.
> The biting stench became unbearable as a misshapen silhouette clumped through the door and approached him.
“Who are you?” With his phone still ready in one hand, Burdock pulled out his flashlight with the other and flicked its beam over the intruder.
The circle of light darted from one cameo of abomination to another. Here, a pair of hands—one masculine, one feminine—fondled sagging male buttocks. There, male and female faces on a single head took turns languidly fellating the proboscis that jutted from an obese abdomen. Higher up, a chittering rodent nipped at the nipple of a pendulous male mammary. And, above this horrid mishmash of forms, the miserable image of Hemmel, blubbering in desperation.
“Burdock! You have to help me.” The lumpy, misbegotten figure tottered toward him.
Burdock stumbled backward. He had loved Hemmel, but now he couldn’t stand the sight or smell of the thing his friend had become. “Don’t you touch me! Don’t you come near me!”
Hemmel wept as he reached out to Burdock. “Please! Don’t leave me alone with—with—this!”
It was no use. Burdock ran to the nether parts of the warehouse, stammering warnings into his cell phone.
Hemmel collapsed to the floor, sobbing in resignation. United to him by love and loathing, his new companion snuggled within him like a conjoined twin.
Amorphous, yet formed.
Shunned, but no longer alone.
Together, they were, and would always be, the Pariah.
THE JESUIT’S MASK
Durand Sheng Welsh
The trailhead wasn’t signposted, was just a clot of shadow off the road’s crumbled shoulder. The Mongrel almost missed it, even with the headlights on high beam. The lack of streetlamps or houselights—he’d passed nothing but bushland for the last two miles—didn’t help, nor did the fact that the map on his phone had lost its connection during his low-gear ascent up what amounted to an asphalted goat track.
Driving on the left had never agreed with him at the best of times, not to mention he’d embarrassed himself at the car-rental yard by hopping into the shotgun seat before remembering the steering column was on the other side. Admittedly, Rome had been far worse. At least in Australia there weren’t mad Italians shedding blood for a hair’s width of lane.
He hit the anchors and threw a hard right, watching the high beams sweep across close-packed eucalypts and then knife down the dark throat of the trailhead’s parking lot. The shimmying Toyota chewed across the scrim of wood chips and leaf litter laid atop the lot’s graded dirt. Then the wheels straightened and the Mongrel was riding moonbeams and a funnel of dust to a split-log parking bumper. His final stamp on the brakes caused the metal case on the passenger seat to slide toward the footwell, and the Mongrel arrested its momentum with a light touch, like a man stopping a child from crossing a busy street.
Be still, be still partner. We’re here.
The moment he clicked the engine off he heard the ocean. When he got out, a sea breeze raised gooseflesh along his arms.
From inside the metal case came screams of hilarity. The Mongrel ignored them and hid the car key behind the back tire and laid his copy of the New Testament onto the car roof alongside his machete. He turned his pockets inside out. There was nothing else.
Carved into the bedrock, stairs fell off the edge of the ridgeline to the west, winding down through eucalypts and semitropical ferns toward the tarnished plate-metal of the Pacific. A timber signage board held a map under a pane of Perspex. According to the posted blurb, the Bouddhi National Park was the eager naturalist’s go-to locale for reef egrets, peregrine falcons, and marsupial rodents. Some people had too much free time.
The Mongrel sniffed the breeze. Salt. Eucalyptus oil. The fearful musk of native animals—just as advertised. And beneath those scents, the rank taint of his quarry, the Jesuit. A stench robed in spoiling offal and bloody stool, steeped in the territorial piss-stink of Midian.
The Mongrel had never known Midian. He didn’t feel the pull of old vows and ancient rituals. He was of the new order—a child of that yet to come, not that which had been. He’d heard tales, of course, but who hadn’t? There are truths, and there are lies, and then there is Midian. So he owed Midian’s memory nothing at all. Yet here he was. What a farce.
The steel suitcase rattled. The Mongrel went to it and bent his ear to the cold metal. “We’re close, aren’t we?” a voice said from inside. It was muffled by the velvet padding and scratchy where Button Face’s zipper clicked and clacked with the bruised exhortations of a stolen larynx.
“Yes,” the Mongrel said. He inhaled. His lungs bloated themselves with the moist night air, became fat and pregnant in his rib cage, and then he exhaled, expelling the night shroud between his skinned-back lips, swaddling himself in the unholy. His sinews thickened, his jaw crafted itself anew. His anatomy reshaped itself as a bastard hybrid of the ichthyic and the reptilian, evolution toward, rather than away from, the primordial broth. A transformation he both craved and abhorred.
When he was done, the tatters of his mortal clothing shucked, he went back and collected the machete, the keys, and the Bible. Forgive me Father, for I have sinned.
He opened the steel case and placed them inside, next to Button Face. Button Face snickered at the Bible. “Don’t let your real father catch you at that blasphemy.”
Conceived in a jail cell, the rotten fruit of the dead fucking the living—his very existence was blasphemy. Half the man and twice the monster was the Mongrel’s private, self-deprecating joke.
To hell with his father, Boone, or Cabal, or whatever appellation was today’s fancy.
The Mongrel shut the lid on his leering detractor and the worn Bible and descended the stairs. “My father is half a world away. If Aaron has a problem sending me to the corners of the earth to solve his problems, he’s never said so before. The least he can do is let me worship my own god.”
“Stubborn fucker, aren’t you,” Button Face said.
The Mongrel imagined swinging the case into a sandstone cutting, silencing the mockery. But he did no such thing. Like the faithful lapdog he was, he even let the elasticity of his muscles smooth the jolts as he descended to the accompaniment of the meekly shifting leaves and the seething ocean.
* * *
Baphomet, holiest of holies, vivisected relic of Old Midian’s mythic splendor. At the outset of this job, Aaron gave—gifted, the lordly one would have called it—the Mongrel with a tender cut of the prophet: tongue and voice box cleaved from the revered flesh.
The last located relics, Aaron had called them. “A weighty trust, my son. They shall light your way to the heretic’s lair.”
Then his father had unveiled his second entrustment: a patchwork mask of blackened sackcloth. The mask displayed buttons for eyes, a zippered slit for a mouth. The zipper was crooked where the cloth had been restitched around its steel-toothed line.
Ol’ Button Face himself, reclaimed from the fired graveyard earth, from ashes heaped upon ashes, a burned scrap salted with the sweat, the toxins, the heat-liquefied fat of its former wearer, Dr. Decker. The mask’s torn fragments had been passed from shadowed hand to shadowed hand along the trafficking night lanes, back to that same hand that had destroyed it. Then that same hand had rebirthed the monster. Needle and thread, balm and blood.
Aaron, though, had wanted the Mongrel present for the final act of reconciliation. While the Mongrel watched, Aaron himself stitched the vocal apparatus of the prophet into the mask. Ol’ Button Face was sewn around the Baptizer’s larynx, lips, and tongue. This new relic, this freshly whelped child, junction of primeval power and modern terror, seared in the baptismal flames, anointed in Decker’s blood and Boone’s seed, was appointed the Mongrel’s overseer.
Button Face had been curiously passive since they touched down at the northern tip of Australia, that prehistoric, baked slab of rock sundered loose millennia ago from the tectonic ridge of Gondwanaland. In fairness, though, the Mask had steered them true enough as th
ey cut for sign along the northern provinces, had uncovered the first clues that turned them south through the rain forests of Cairns and motel rooms become abattoirs, then farther south, through gutted railroad towns and carcass-filled whorehouses.
The Jesuit has his appetites, that he does.
Now, on the temperate eastern seaboard, at the bottom of a bushland staircase, the trail was near its terminus.
The Mongrel stepped off the stairs and out into the moonlight. Against the sand beat the mighty Pacific. Its tempo was as slow and steady as the Mongrel’s own heartbeat.
Button Face laughed using the Baptizer’s vocal cords. “Hurry, hurry.”
A boat bobbed in the bay, lightless, sail unfurled from the mast and flapping around the moon like a willful scarf. If the Jesuit was here, then there was no hope for the boat’s occupants. They were already converts or dead.
“I smell him,” Button Face said.
The Mongrel found himself wishing for the sun, the bronzing splendor of daybreak, and again he wondered if he was the right person for the task. He was tired of toiling for his father’s dreams.
“Follow the estuary,” Button Face said. “Even locked in this case I sense its fetid water. It is polluted with the ablutions of the Jesuit and his Breed.”
“Ablutions?” the Mongrel said. “You spent too much time with that psychiatrist. A dictionary is a tool, not a calling.”
“Fuck you.”
“Not even if we find the Baptizer’s stolen cock amongst these rebels.”
“Graft his majestic thews onto me, would you, Mongrel? Wouldn’t Daddy love that?”
“There are nights I get weary of your madness. Where’s this estuary?” he said, but he already smelled it. The beach was a scimitar of yellow sand, encapsulated by a tree-wreathed bluff. Halfway along the beach, the bluff fell back from the beach a ways, and all that fronted the tree line there was a berm of sand. The berm was cut through by a channel of water that trickled from a font hidden behind the tree line.
The Jesuit had broken the truce, had the hubris to think of making a dark Eden here in the south. Button Face and the Mongrel had trailed his boot prints through scores of riven towns and desolated rest stops. Whole municipalities given to the midnight power of the balm. A plague, an epidemic. Already the day world was stirring. Mutterings and chatterings in the synagogues, the churches, the mosques, in the city halls, the tiers of Parliament. The gluttonous armature of the establishment was rousing itself, and Aaron Boone was worried.
Midian Unmade Page 24
