Midian Unmade

by Joseph Nassise

  “Perhaps you’ll get your wish,” the Mongrel said, and pulled Ol’ Button Face down over his head. The sackcloth stank of blood and sour breath. He took the Jesuit’s robes and donned them.

  He hid the bodies inside the gullets of the whales.

  Resplendent in the entitlements of his new office, he returned to his congregation, his tribe. He hid his wounded wrists within his sleeves. At the base of the driftwood cross he stooped low and collected his Bible. He ordered the cross torn down. He told his people that their first task would be the construction of a simple church. They would have to work swiftly. Their enemies were legion. Had they heard of Old Midian and a charlatan named Aaron Boone? The zipper was cold against his lips as he spoke. The metal tasted of Baphomet, of the Jesuit’s blood, of Dr. Decker’s spittle, of the ashes of dead Midian.

  “Imagine the look on your father’s face when we return,” Button Face said with the Mongrel’s voice. The Mongrel raised his hand, and drew the zipper slowly closed.

  ROOK

  Rob Salem

  And he sent forth a raven, which went forth to and fro, until the waters were dried up from off the earth.

  —Genesis 8:7

  Monsters.

  Monsters everywhere.

  But not like him.

  As far as his eyes could see—and those eyes could see beyond the horizons of this world and into other, not so distant realms—there were monsters everywhere. Not that they considered themselves as such, he mused, not even the ones who knew and embraced their own inner darkness. Down there, running around in the labyrinth of the city living their lives, most were content to believe that the towering glass-and-steel structures they had created were symbols of their greatness and mastery over the world and the laws of the universe. It occurred to very few of them that there might be “something more” out there in the darkness, watching, waiting, but even they couldn’t really grasp the truth of it all, even if they wanted to. No matter. In the end, they were all the same.…

  Meat.

  Rook loved the city. The sights. The sounds. The smells. The hustle and bustle of a constantly “on” world, where much of daytime life carried on into the night, appealed to him in a way that most of the Breed didn’t understand. He was one of the few that truly missed the sun, not just for its warmth and splendor, but for the hope of life that it offered, a life that would never be his again. Looking up, he could see the waxing moon, her usually silver face glowing a sickly yellow-orange through the haze of the city lights and smog, offering only the small comfort of a pale reflection of the sun, a dim reminder that it was still there. For a moment he envied her for the view she must have of the sun, and of the world, a view that made his own supernatural vision seem human by comparison. He wondered what she saw down there that even he couldn’t.

  For as much as he loved the sun and missed its golden rays, he also loved the moon and the night. How could he not? He was Nightbreed, of the tribes of the moon, and one of her children. Her blessings had been bountiful to him; bountiful enough that the loss of the sun, while sad, was worthwhile, and no part of his swearing his oath to the Baptizer was regrettable. Lylesburg and the others had welcomed him in, and Baphomet had named him the Sentinel, charging him to keep careful watch over Midian.

  Then came Cabal, He Who Unmade Midian. Rook had seen his coming, of course, sharing a touch of the Baptizer’s foresight. During the conflagration that destroyed the Nightbreed’s sanctuary, He Who Made Midian had spoken again to Rook, changing him from Sentinel to Seeker, tasking him with helping Cabal find a new home, a new Midian, and reuniting the scattered tribes of the moon. So many nights he’d flown over the black-cloaked landscape of the world, soaring here and there following faint echoes in his senses of Baphomet’s visions, eventually finding himself in Chicago. What it was that drew him here, he wasn’t sure, but he knew better than to ignore the subtle guidance to his intuition.

  A scream echoed off the walls of the alley below him. It trailed off into the hum of the city night, but not before pulling him from his ponderings. There, in the shadows, Rook could see a woman slumped against the wall. Even up here he could smell the blood. A man stood over her, undoing his pants.

  She was aware that her heart had only a moment ago been pounding furiously in her chest, but now its once familiar and comfortable rhythm was diminishing, and on the edge of consciousness she knew that she was dying; her only thought—a prayer, perhaps?—was the hope that she would be dead or unconscious and thus spared the experience of what came next.

  “Yeah, bitch. You may not enjoy this, but I’m sure gonna!” the man grunted as he fumbled with his belt and zipper. His erection was straining against the material of his dirty jeans.

  “Damn it!” he, or maybe it, swore in frustration.

  Finally free of its denim prison, his hard-on demanded attention now. Kicking her legs apart before dropping to his knees and pushing her skirt up, he found himself stopped short at the sight of a long shadow suddenly cast against the wall he was facing. He turned, erection in hand, to see who was standing behind him. He immediately went flaccid at the sight of a pair of giant black wings framing a slender but wiry human frame. One hand holding on to his pants, the other digging in his coat pocket for his still bloody knife, he struggled to his feet.

  “You—You gotta problem, man?” he said with no small amount of disbelief.

  Rook smiled, a jagged glimmer of silver-white in the darkness, the sight of his mouth full of fangs catching the man’s balls in his throat.

  “In fact, I do. I’m homeless and hungry. Spare some food?”

  Talonlike claws launched out of the shadow, ripping open flesh and sinew. The man blinked and gurgled before slumping to the ground. His head was left attached to his body only by his spinal column. Rook crouched down over the bloody mess, turning its head face up to look at him.

  “Now, let’s see what you’ve seen.…”

  Working his thumbs delicately into the man’s eye sockets, he popped out first one eyeball, then the other, taking care not to damage them as he did so. After severing the optical nerve, he held the first eye up in the faint orange glow being cast by the alley’s single light and studied it for a moment before popping it in his mouth. He bit down hard, feeling the rubbery surface cave and give way with a pop that flooded his mouth with gelatinous fluid. It was sticky sweet and chewy, but he missed all that as a wave of images flooded his mind.

  Rook witnessed the man’s life as he had seen it, from street rat in the ghetto to would-be gangbangin’ rapist, right up until the moment the lights went out not even sixty seconds ago. Rook always found it interesting to see himself through someone else’s eyes. Among the flood of memories were petty crimes, various acts of theft, vandalism, and some minor violence in the form of assaults; apparently this was the man’s first and last attempt at rape and/or murder. Nope, he thought, not really a monster. Nothing even that interesting. Just common filth.

  Mindlessly chewing the eyeball, Rook had forgotten about the woman. She had drifted into unconsciousness right before Rook killed the man, but came to just in time to watch through swollen eyes as he thoughtlessly popped an eyeball into his mouth. This had elicited a startled gasp from her blood-spattered lips.

  The sight before her was frightening and unnatural: the man with big black wings hunching over a bloody and nearly decapitated corpse now turned to his attention to her. If she hadn’t seen him eat the eyeball she might have entertained a momentary notion that this was an angel come to take her to Heaven, but instead she realized this must instead be a demon from Hell. Now her thoughts were of salvation and redemption through Jesus Christ, someone she hadn’t thought much of since graduating from Catholic school several years earlier. The words of the Lord’s Prayer formed on her lips as she watched her demon exhale a heavy vapor that surrounded and permeated him, changing him before her very eyes. A moment ago there was a demon in front of her, but now there was a man. She coughed before lapsing into unconscious
ness.

  Rook turned and studied her. He gently brushed aside golden strands of hair plastered to her cheek and forehead by a mortar of blood and sweat, allowing him a better look at her. She was somehow strangely familiar to him. Through the blood, the bruising, and the swelling he could see that she was pretty, with features softened in just the right places. He allowed his fingers to trace the outline of her jaw and up and over her lips. Instinctively, his fingers traced his own lips, and he licked her blood off his fingertips. It was sweet, laced with adrenaline and fear.… It was also innocent and pure. And it too was familiar.

  A wave of compassion washed over him. Odd, he thought. He’d been Breed long enough that he generally didn’t feel compassion for victims, whether his or someone else’s. But something about this woman caused his chest to tighten and flood with a long-forgotten warmth. That she was familiar unsettled him and made him uncomfortable. Letting his gaze wander downward he caught the shimmer of streetlight on her exposed black satin panties between her splayed legs. The thought crossed his mind—it had been a long time, after all.

  No. He stopped himself. She was an innocent, and though he was a monster, he wasn’t that kind of monster. He might have just nearly ripped a man’s head off and then eaten his eyes, but he was not a defiler of the innocent. “Fuck,” he muttered, as he found himself rifling through her purse looking for some kind of ID or other indication of her name and residence. That’s when he noticed the knife wound in her side, and the pool of blood beneath her.

  * * *

  Sarah’s eyes fluttered open. Her head was pounding, and even the dim light of her apartment exacerbated the pain, the light lancing through her eyes like searing rays of the sun. She squinted, trying to get her bearings.

  “Welcome back.”

  The voice was a velvet whisper, but rang in her ears like church bells, causing a groan to escape her cracked lips.

  “You’ve had quite a night, Sarah,” came the voice again.

  Sarah’s blurred vision began to clear, and she could make out the form of the eyeball-eating man from the alley. Struggling to sit up, she felt a strong but gentle grip on her shoulder and back assist her.

  “Here, drink this. It’ll help with the pain.” She found herself cupping a coffee mug with both hands, instinctively raising it to her swollen lips. They were dry and readily welcomed the first sip of warm liquid spilling over them. It was bitter, some sort of tea, with an iron aftertaste. It was just the taste of the blood in her mouth, she assumed.

  “Who—” Her question was cut short by a dry cough. “Who are you?”

  “Eh … call me Rook.”

  She suddenly remembered the last sight she had of him and pulled away.

  “Don’t worry, I’m a friend.” He pondered that statement as soon as it left his mouth. Friends. He didn’t have any, other than among the Breed, and even those weren’t much more than loose friendships. Rook was a loner, which suited him fine. He was flighty, tending to keep on the move and taking little more than passing interest in most people before being distracted by the next shiny new thing.

  He realized then that his eyes were locked on hers. She was bruised and there was swelling, but even so a light seemed to emanate from the brilliant blue eyes holding him captive. Somewhere in there, he thought he could see the sun, warm and inviting.

  “You … you killed that man.…”

  Rook closed his eyes as he came back to the present moment, hesitating before responding. “Yeah.… He was about to do some bad things to you.”

  “Why did you help me?”

  That was a good question. He still wasn’t sure. Had it been compassion? Initially it wasn’t, though it became that … and then something more. He shrugged it off.

  “It was the right thing to do.”

  “But you ate his eyes!” There was obvious revulsion in her face, matching the tone of her voice.

  He studied her a moment. After bringing her back to her apartment he’d cleaned her up and treated her injuries. Then, because his curious nature wouldn’t let him do anything else, he snooped around her apartment, though he hadn’t been invasive. It seemed she was a student, apparently studying theology, judging by the books strewn about her table and lining her bookshelf. The apartment wasn’t messy or dirty, but it was obvious that she was a person with more important things to do than organize and declutter.

  “You believe in God, don’t you, Sarah?”

  His redirect caught her off guard. Yes, she believed in God … in a way. Her faith had evolved and changed as she had immersed herself in the study of various theologies and world religions. Regardless of how eclectic her personal “religion” had become, she maintained belief in a Divine Creator. But what did that have to do with anything, she wondered? Then she remembered.… wings. Maybe he was an angel? Or a demon?

  Rook picked up a book off the table, turned it so he could read its spine, looking down over the bridge of his beaked nose. A History of the Knights Templar, it read. He let it fall open and lazily thumbed the pages. He didn’t wait for her to answer. He knew the answer.

  “You love the sun, don’t you, Sarah?”

  She missed the play on words. “Uh … I don’t doubt that Jesus lived, but I’m not sure about the ‘Son of God’ thing.”

  He chuckled. “No, Sarah, I meant the sun. You know, the big yellow ball in the sky during the day?”

  She felt her face flush. She was so consumed with her studies that she filtered almost everything through a religious lens, often overlooking the obvious and the literal. Metaphor and mythology was the language of her existence, and because of that sometimes she lost sight of reality. Gently rubbing her bruised eyes she realized her headache was gone; she almost felt good now.

  “I’m sorry,” she started. “I—”

  “Don’t be. Each of us sees the world as we want to, not always as it is. Ten people could be looking at the same thing, and each of them will see it in a way that the others don’t. Words are no different.”

  She watched as he set the book down, leaving it open, his fingers lingering on the page a moment. He was strangely handsome, his sharp features softly illuminated by the single lamp lighting her apartment. She wondered why he hadn’t turned more lights on. He turned away from her, going over to the bookshelf, and she strained to see if there were in fact wings on his back; all that was there was a long black trench coat of heavy wool.

  Rook’s fingers traced the spines of the various books lining the shelves, an eclectic yet homogenous mix of theological treatises, occult tomes, histories, and more. They stopped on one, a thick brown tome with silver lettering on the spine. He raised his head slightly and took a sharp breath as if to speak; it seemed as if he was going to pull it off the shelf, but left it pulled just slightly out before turning back to Sarah.

  “I think you’ll be okay, Sarah. I should be going now.” Rook turned and opened the apartment door, then stopped and turned to look back over his shoulder. Standing there, the pale white light of the hallway behind him, he cast an imposing shadow over the room. “I’d avoid those alleys if I were you.”

  The door closed behind him. Sarah was left there, uncertain of what had just happened. She didn’t even know how long it had been since the assault. She leaned forward and pulled the open book from the table to her lap. On the page before her was an illustration of an androgynous devil-like figure. The caption read “Baphomet.”

  * * *

  Rook strolled lazily through the city, his hands in his pockets, his eyes cast to the pavement. The temperature had dropped sharply in the few hours since his encounter in the alley, and a frozen wind cut through the night. But he didn’t notice, lost in his thoughts as he was. He didn’t pay much attention to where he was going, letting his feet carry him forward without any intended destination. It wasn’t until he stopped and looked up that he realized he’d walked completely around the block and was standing in front of Sarah’s building again.

  Something was obviously pu
lling him to her. His thoughts had never left her, and he couldn’t really figure out why. She was pretty, and he was certainly attracted to her, but this—she—was different. The book with the picture of Baphomet. The book on the shelf that had “spoken” to him and flashed an image of Midian in his head. Those things, along with the images he’d seen in her eyes …

  * * *

  Sarah got up and went over to the bookshelf, reaching for the book the stranger had started to pull out. Her fingers danced hesitantly on the spine for moment. Encyclopedia of the Old Testament, the spine read. She pulled it out and allowed it to fall open in her hands, the yellowed pages giving off a slightly musty scent. A piece of paper near the middle of the book apparently serving as a bookmark allowed the pages to part near the middle of this sea of information, opening somewhere in the “M” entries. At the top of the page was the word “Midian.”

  * * *

  The door swung open as Rook raised his hand to knock. Sarah stood on the other side, the encyclopedia in her hand, a slight look of shock on her face at seeing him standing there. They both started speaking at the same time.

  “I don’t mean to bother you—” he apologized.

  “I was just getting ready to come after you—” She moved aside to allow him inside. As he entered he caught a glimpse of the encyclopedia’s open page. He went over to the window, pulling the curtain aside to look outside.

  “Nice view.” He could see her reflection in the dark glass.

  Sarah closed the door, set the book on the table on top of the Templar history so that the entry for Midian and the image of Baphomet were both visible, and moved up behind Rook. Her hand rested gently between his shoulder blades. He stiffened at her touch.

  “I—” she faltered. “I didn’t say thank you.” He shrugged. “Those books. Those pages. That wasn’t an accident. And I don’t think you saving me was an accident, either,” she said.