Midian Unmade

by Joseph Nassise

  So, he had sent the Mongrel to make good on his promises of damnation for transgressors. But talk was cheap, and as always, the real work, work that was not so cheap, fell to the Mongrel.

  “What would your god say about our mission?” Button Face said. The Mongrel scowled and started the hard slog along the beach toward the trickling channel. The machete swung with each step, its blade near keen enough to part the moonbeams from their heavenly fountainhead.

  “The Holy Christ has no love for monsters,” Button Face said. “No love for you or I.”

  “I’m no monster. And you’re a sackcloth rag stuffed with a dead man’s breath.”

  “O cruel world, to put me under your dominion. Alas, alack.” More laughter. “Still, your choice of god is flawed. Why not be your own god?”

  “Like my father.”

  “These daddy issues. They’re growing old, Mongrel. I talk of God. You talk of your father. What would Dr. Decker have said about that, I wonder?”

  They had neared the channel, and around its mouth, where fresh water burbled through the berm under a glaze of moonlight, the Mongrel saw footprints. The footprints weren’t human. They were too large, too deep, and divots marked the placement of talons. The Mongrel didn’t spare them further study. He would meet the owner soon enough, of that he was sure.

  He lowered the case and cracked the lid. From inside came a rich, ambrosial stink and the clacking noise of Button Face smacking his zipper lips. “Follow the estuary, Mongrel. Tarry not. The Baptizer’s flesh pulls me west, further back behind the sand.”

  The Mongrel hefted the metal case and the machete, and ventured away from the open beach, back into the shuttered gloom behind the tree line, following the sandy edge of the tributary that wended back into the scrub.

  “Stop!” Button Face commanded after they had hiked a short way. “Read the sign,” he said.

  Too involved in his own thoughts, the Mongrel had missed it. The sign was stenciled sheet metal and had the official look of government signage. That was to say there was small print at the bottom warning of fines and penalties and litigation.

  The sign’s header read:

  WHALE GRAVEYARD.

  Do not disturb.

  Button Face felt the need to explain about the process by which beached whales were ofttimes bulldozed into shallow graves behind the dunes. What else to do with a fifty-ton corpse? Button Face, he knew all about corpses and disposing of corpses. As he put it, his former owner was a “practitioner of the art.”

  The Mongrel looked for gouged earth, excavated soil, the belly-drag scars of towed leviathans. Despite what the sign cautioned against, he didn’t see much that he could disturb except banksia shrubs and nesting emu-wrens.

  As he stood there, still and silent, he noticed the little girl. She was a ways into the scrubland, her mop of dark hair shading in with the shadows. It was her skin that gave her away. It was stark white; skin never kissed by sunlight.

  She was Breed. Odds were she was a new convert. Children took easiest to the change, the trading of skins, day for night, light for dark, life for death. The Mongrel felt the rawhide straps of the machete’s handle scratching against his callused palm.

  She had to be a lookout, a “cockatoo” in the native lingo of this southern hamlet. She’d seen him now, would raise the alarm if given a chance. He cut across the stream, hooked sharply into the scrub. He moved fast, a loping run. His blood was up, the Breed in him boiling to the surface. The girl watched him, unmoving.

  His heightened hearing discerned Button Face’s breaths grow quick in anticipation. Soon, very soon, Button Face would start clamoring to be let out so he could watch. He’d ask the Mongrel to daub fresh blood against his zippered mouth. He’d ask … for many things.

  The Mongrel dropped the case and continued running. Behind him, Button Face screamed his outrage. But this girl, she wasn’t destined to feed Button Face’s fantasies. The Mongrel would give her the mercy of a clean death. He was almost upon her, the machete raised horizontally, ready to begin a flat arc toward the girl’s throat. That was where he was staring—her throat. Fixing the cutting point, measuring his angles, judging the tensile strength of her cartilage and bone. It was only for that reason that he saw the crucifix, and even then only because it caught the moonlight at just the right moment, silver on silver.

  The girl just stared at him as his feet stuttered and halted. The heat went out of him. He knelt in the sandy ground. “They let you wear that?” he said.

  “Wear what?”

  He opened his mouth, and slowly, so as not to alarm her, he sucked back the night shroud from his face and torso. It was a peculiar talent of his, this duality. He laid the machete on the ground. The girl smiled and held up the crucifix. “This?”

  Under the laws of Old Midian, she was holding up her own death sentence. She didn’t know that, though. She didn’t know Midian or the old laws. How the Mongrel envied her.

  “Everyone wears one,” she said. She gave him a funny look. “Except you. Who are you? Why haven’t I seen you before?”

  “I’m no one,” he said, and then the ground slid out from under his bent knees, tons of dirt collapsing down into the cavernous earth. The little girl, standing at the edge of the pit, watched his descent with pale, curious eyes.

  The trap sprung, the Mongrel could do nothing but ride the serpent, down into the bone-breaking abyss.

  * * *

  The Mongrel could hold his breath for half an hour. His heart beat but a handful of beats in a minute. Still, at some stage during the descent he passed out.

  The Mongrel awoke to the hammering of nails. The rhythmic beat rattled his teeth, caused a flagrant booming in his skull. He tried to squeeze the heels of his palms against his temples and found he couldn’t move his arms.

  Above him, ossified bones girdled the ceiling, gave the Mongrel the curious impression that he was looking up a whalebone corset. Torches guttered in the walls. The air was syrupy with burning oil and the muck of the grave. Ill omens to wake to, he thought, and tried again to shift his arms. Turning his head he saw why they weren’t responding to his summons.

  Crouched low at either side, corpulent humanoids, stripped to breechcloths and rich with the sweat of their labor, pounded steel spikes into his wrist joints. The beasts had shark-tooth mouths at the crowns of their hairless skulls. Their flesh had the gray consistency of potter’s clay, and wormy things wriggled in and out of burrows in their backs.

  The grievous injury being occasioned, that workmanlike nail-driving, was curiously painless.

  Was he doped? Suffering a delusion?

  The nails were affixing him to a driftwood cross. He lay naked. His night shroud had deserted him, and when he tried to regurgitate it he brought up nothing but dusty air and red spackle. His assailants tapped the nails in the final few inches and then withdrew themselves.

  “Easy friend,” a man said. He leaned over the Mongrel, face hidden in the cowl of a hessian robe. The robe’s fabric billowed and bulged as if something writhed in ecstasy inside of it. “Hush.” He held a veiny finger to the black oval of the cowl. “You know me by that ridiculous title, the Jesuit. My true name is of no consequence, so for now I concede that the lie will serve. I have already tested the limits of my mercy by giving you a nostrum to nullify the pain. But the crowd, oh the crowd, like the Romans of old, they demand a spectacle, so a spectacle we best give them.”

  The Jesuit took a step back and whirled his arm. “Raise him up.”

  The cross was raised. The Mongrel milled his feet as his weight depended down from the two pinion points at his wrists.

  From his newfound vantage, the Mongrel saw a subterranean lake, and before the lake a congregation of Breed. These were new converts, reveling still in the novelty of their dead skins, eager to flex raw flesh and supple limbs, vent roars and show needle teeth, caper and rut. The Jesuit had raided every larder for his army: whorehouses and churches, day-care centers and infirmaries, business
schools and asylums.

  The Mongrel met their accusing looks with his flat stare. He saw that the rabble’s constituents all wore the holy cross. Just as the girl had said.

  “Are you surprised that we worship the Lord here?” the Jesuit said. “That is why your father cast me out. You think he needed greater reason than that?”

  “He had greater reason than that.” The Jesuit had put their secrecy at risk. Guilt over Midian’s destruction, no doubt, had compounded Aaron’s fury. Never again was something of a mantra for the old man.

  “You still believe Cabal’s lies,” the Jesuit said from the breathy void of the cowl. His words smelled of wine and garlic. “Poor lamb. I warn you, we’re more the Old Testament than the New down here. Think on that before you answer my next question.”

  “You’re a mass murderer,” the Mongrel said. “There’s your answer to whatever question you have.”

  “These people are reborn, not murdered. Now and then some of my followers may have become … unruly. But can they be blamed? Fresh converts … you remember what it was like, don’t you? The urges. The confusion. Your father cares not for the deaths of mortals, only for the ripples those deaths create.”

  The Jesuit reached into the folds of his robe, and his hand came forth bearing a familiar book. The Mongrel’s copy of the New Testament. He laid the book beneath the Mongrel’s suspended feet. “Join me and this, everything within it, shall be yours. No more skulking out into the sun to thumb through the Gospels during stolen daylight hours.”

  The Mongrel thought of the metal case and Button Face, and didn’t dare tempt fate by asking the circumstances under which the Jesuit had found the Bible.

  “I’m more partial to Revelation,” the Mongrel said. “Revenge. Damnation. Divine retribution.”

  “Be careful what you wish for, Mongrel. All you need to tell me, to prove yourself, is where the Baptizer’s relic is. I know you brought a piece of his holiness with you. A way to track me, your father would have said. As indeed it is. Like has an affinity for like. He didn’t tell you how that is, did he? Didn’t trust you enough, perhaps. You are ignorant of my rightful appropriation of all the prophet’s parts. My flesh, my soul, my very essence gestates the prophet’s rebirth. Now where is the final relic, so I might give voice to the prophet’s words?” He leaned close. Whispered: “Scream a little for the peasants. Our discourse is too civil for their liking, and we need both play our parts if you expect to come through unscathed. I can only pacify the flock so much.”

  The Mongrel grunted. But in that moment, he took the measure of the crowd, and beheld his fellow assassin, Button Face, among the sea of faces, zippered mouth glinting, button eyes mirthful.

  I’ll be damned, thought the Mongrel. Button Face was wearing a new body, had shorn it of its original head, a bait-and-switch bordering on high art. The cuckolded body stood unnoticed among the menagerie of freaks. With the methodical single-mindedness that was Button Face’s nature, he began to work his way toward the head of the crowd. The Mongrel’s machete trailed tip-down from one gloved hand.

  “I know the piece is near,” the Jesuit said, hot breath lathing the Mongrel’s cheek. “I can feel it.” Another heavy breath. “I’m offering a place by my side. A chance to worship your god without persecution. To belong. Turn the last piece of the Baptizer over to me. Subsume the old within the new. Cannibalize. As religions do.”

  The Mongrel watched Button Face approach. The cords of his pilfered neck were etched bloody where they’d been grafted onto his new body. His path took him by the girl the Mongrel had earlier encountered aboveground. As Button Face passed her by, he casually drew the machete across the back of her neck; her curious expression melding with puzzlement, she toppled, a rag-boned doll, sprawled behind her murderer.

  He’s done no less than what I had earlier intended, the Mongrel told himself in hollow justification.

  “Where is it?” the Jesuit insisted. “Tell me!”

  “I…” What could he say? Perhaps, ironically, if his hands had not been so securely fixed, he would have chosen to point just then at the approaching form of Button Face. But as it was, all he did was gasp a little, flop and roll his tongue, and make the most exhausted of utterances.

  Button Face pushed aside the twisted limbs and grotesque torsos that barred his way; stooped once to adjust some monstrous failure in his new anatomy—a vestigial third arm that protruded from beneath his undershirt—and then he was standing by the Jesuit’s side. The Mongrel hissed air between his teeth. Waited. Button Face cocked his head, tapped the soft earth with the tip of the machete.

  The Jesuit turned to face the interloper.

  “Jesuit,” Button Face said, “I’m here to offer you a deal.”

  “Traitor,” the Mongrel said, but Button Face only laughed at him. “The Baptizer wants to be whole again. He told me so. Me and Baphomet, lip-locked as starry lovers, closer than the bloodiest of blood kin. So stop your prattle, mutt. You think you’re the only one worthy of negotiation.”

  “You’d betray us?” the Mongrel said. The Jesuit held his hand up for silence. Hoots and whistles erupted from the congregation. They sensed the play of great forces, the momentum of history being made.

  Button Face’s crooked zipper-mouth twitched. “Us? What us? Whom exactly do you speak for, mutt? Your father’s fractured tribe? Now you wish to claim them as your own? A fine time for that.”

  The Mongrel fell silent. What response could he mount to that truth?

  The Jesuit regarded Button Face. His hands trembled. A palpable hunger seemed to billow from beneath his cowl.

  “A deal,” Button Face said. “The mask comes with the Baptizer’s vocal cords. A package deal, like a furnished apartment, my friend.”

  “What’s in it for you?” the Jesuit said to Button Face.

  “A slice of the future. You’ll wear me, yes, as you take this tribe out of the shadows and we pull down the sun itself and bring the earth into the folds of eternal night.”

  That melodramatic vision won the Jesuit over, and he traded pleasantries with his new pilgrim in the shadow of the Mongrel’s pinned and broken body. Hands were clasped, pacts sealed. The world turned. The Mongrel bled. The congregation roared.

  “We’ll feed him to the crowd,” the Jesuit said, tapping the Mongrel in the chest with a pointed fingernail.

  “First, the deal.”

  The Jesuit peeled the sackcloth mask from the walking corpse; the Baptizer’s vocal apparatus came loose from its insertion. The Jesuit clasped the whole reeking, dripping mess, held it high to the crowd, and then took it inside his hood to make congress with his hidden face.

  The crowd fell silent. The liquid sounds of Baptizer, Mask, and Jesuit all bonding filled the cavern. The Jesuit reached up slowly and peeled back his hood.

  “Oh, this is surely grand,” Button Face said from atop the Jesuit’s body. The robe fell open, revealing the jigsaw of grafts and joins where the Jesuit had remade Baphomet’s body from its fractionated pieces. Beneath the mask, the Baptizer’s imprisoned face contorted in orgasmic thrill, his body whole again.

  He approached the Mongrel, leaned in close. “I guess this is where we part ways. Any last wishes?”

  “I’d rather not die on the cross,” the Mongrel said. “I’m asking for that, at least.”

  Button Face stood motionless, then finally nodded. He ordered the hairless hammer men to take the Mongrel down, and they obeyed.

  “Some dignity, please,” the Mongrel said. “A private execution. No spectacle.”

  Again, Button Face took his time to respond, but again, after a pause, he acquiesced to the Mongrel’s request.

  The hammer men carried the Mongrel around the lake and behind the rude huts clustered at the shore. They laid him down and left him alone with Button Face.

  The place was a graveyard of sorts, but not for men or women, and not for the Breed, who left no mortal bones. This was where the whales had come to rest, their corpses perhap
s finding their way into this subterranean chamber via a similar route to the Mongrel’s. Was this a mockery of Midian’s necropolis? Or was there some nostalgic whimsy behind the choice? Either way, in his madness, the Jesuit had infected their rotten corpses with the balm. Around the Mongrel, the whales expelled deep sonorous breaths and aligned themselves to the invisible tides of the invisible moon. The Mongrel wet his lips, and clenched his hands in the mud. His fingers curled around something, a comb of broken baleen. Its edge was sharp and splintered.

  “Go,” Button Face said. “Or are you so dumbstruck by my largesse that you can’t think to save your own skin?”

  “You’re letting me go?”

  “Of course. You amuse me. Your hatred of your father amuses me. In that we are alike. In our hatred, I should say, not our amusement. We’ll meet again, at the end of days. Soon enough, then. Soon enough.” He turned his back on the Mongrel. “The way to the surface is behind you. There is a hidden door. Stairs leading to daylight. I know how you love the daylight, Mongrel.”

  The Mongrel tightened his grip on the baleen. He lifted it from its bedding of dirt. Button Face gave the ceiling a lonesome stare and sighed through his stolen vocal cords. “You always wanted to wear me, didn’t you, Mongrel? I would have let you, too, but you never asked. Go now, you fool.”

  The Mongrel struck. The baleen cudgel caught Button Face between the shoulder blades, embedded itself to the hilt. Button Face swooned, turned. The Mongrel and he held each other, clasped in a tense embrace, and then slowly, slowly, Button Face slid toward the earth.

  The whales breathed softly around them. Their undead eyes swiveled balefully. The Mongrel crouched down. He pulled free the length of baleen, and with savage cuts, excised Button Face from the Jesuit’s face and the Baptizer’s vocal cords.