Midian Unmade

by Joseph Nassise

  He turned.

  “Maybe this was a mistake. I should go.”

  She stepped in front of him, blocking his path to the door.

  “No … please stay. I think this is important. I think I can help you.”

  His effort to navigate around her ceased.

  “Help me? You don’t know anything about me. For all you know, I could have come back here to finish the job that guy in the alley started.” His words were cold and sharp, and sent a shiver up Sarah’s spine, but she stood her ground.

  “No. I know more than you think, and if you were going to hurt me, you would have done it already.”

  He stared at the door, refusing to look at her.

  “I know what you are. I know about the Nightbreed.”

  His head snapped over, confirming her assertion, and their eyes locked. In the crystal blue of her gaze he could see symbols and images, glyphs that he had only ever seen in Midian; he could also see the sun. In the ebony depths of his she saw a burning city, the conflagration giving way to the first rays of dawn. She could also see the questions in his eyes, and knew she would have to answer them in order to gain his trust; he already had hers.

  The question was, what would he do with it? She knew what the Breed were. Her long years of studious immersion in religion, folklore, and the occult had made the Nightbreed no secret to her. But he was the first she’d ever encountered. She couldn’t help but consider it more than blind coincidence.

  “I know about Midian.…” Her words trailed off, and though she offered them as a sort of comfort, he found none in them.

  Somehow, while he’d been caught off guard by the fact that she was aware of what he was, he was unsurprised. Baphomet had told him that he would find guideposts in his journeys. Rook just hadn’t expected them to come in the form of mortals.

  “I can help,” she offered again.

  He turned his head away. Her hand, soft and warm, gently rested on his cheek and turned him back to her. Their eyes met again. This time, he saw hope. Warmth washed over him, a warmth he hadn’t felt since he’d last stood in the sun, so long ago.

  He believed her.

  * * *

  The last rays of the day beamed through the skyscrapers, reflecting off the mirrored windows and setting the city ablaze with twilight fire. Rook stood at the window. Behind him, Sarah was still sleeping in the bed they’d shared since that morning. The colors of dusk, filtered through the city’s haze, filled the room with soft yellows, oranges, and reds, reminding Rook of the night Midian fell.

  Sarah stirred in the bed. Turning to look at her, Rook took in the sight. Something in him stirred, and it was more than just the curves of her body or her milky skin; it was something deep, something … old?

  “Hey…” The word was almost a whisper on her lips, and it was offered with a slight smile. She reached out for his hand.

  “I need to know,” he said.

  “I know.”

  Sarah got up, grabbing the bathrobe that was draped over the back of a chair and putting it on. Going into the closet, she pulled a cardboard box from the top shelf, then sat on the edge of the bed.

  “It’s in here,” she said, digging through the contents of the box. He watched her silently, working actively to restrain his innate curiosity. After a moment, she produced an object wrapped in cloth. “Here it is. I found this in Saudi Arabia a few years ago on dig I did with school. There was more, but it disappeared before we could catalogue it and get photos or anything.”

  Unwrapping the object, she handed it to him. It was a piece of stone, obviously broken off of a larger piece, rough on the back side, but it was the smooth front that caught Rook’s attention. Carved into the face was a set of glyphs, glyphs that he’d seen before: in Midian, when he’d spoken to Baphomet.

  “I’m sorry there’s not more,” she said. “I got a look at the rest of the pieces before they disappeared, but not enough of one to remember what the other pictographs were.”

  Rook knew he needed to see the rest of the symbols. He knew how to read them, or rather, that Baphomet would be able to read them through him, but there was only one way he was going to be able to see what Sarah saw.…

  The last rays of sunset illuminated her face. He suddenly felt guilty. She was innocent. But she was also beautiful, and familiar. But now he knew why she was familiar—he’d seen her in the visions Baphomet had shared with him. His heart sank as he remembered the Baptizer’s words to him. “You must do what must be done to find the path,” Baphomet had said.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered, brushing his hand along her cheek.

  The room slipped into darkness as Rook leaned in to kiss Sarah one last time.

  COLLECTOR

  David J. Schow

  WHAT CAME BEFORE

  The colorful logo emblazoned upon the can fascinated her. Pabst Blue Ribbon, it read. At least she could read. It resembled a medal, a commemoration of some kind in white and red and brilliant blue, a blue that evoked her own special eyes, which were a metallic cyan hue, nearly chromium. They did special things to the light messages they captured. She could see in total darkness, as indeed she was scanning the beer can now. The container itself smelled faintly poisonous, the reek of a lost soul lingering there. The truncated memory stored itself—it was an incomplete story, begging additional input that was unavailable.

  Another incomplete story. She crushed the can, stomped on it with her beast foot, which designation was a misnomer because her left leg featured nothing that could be called a foot, merely an almost rectangular plinth of solid flesh from knee to ground, largely nerve-dead, an unwieldy tool that crippled her stride to a halting lurch, gimpy, giving unknowns another excuse to avert their gaze, which was a good thing.

  She consigned the compacted can to her shopping cart with its load of plastic bags, castoffs, recyclables, satellite bags pendulant from port and starboard, the weight of the load anchoring the defrocked basket firmly to the earth, impossible to tip over. It was the latest of several such carts, never without at least one bumpy wheel, the sheer heft of its cargo making curbs a threat. The cart was additional reason unknowns rarely looked at her or engaged her eyes directly, also a good thing.

  For another, her garb—also cargo, of a sort. A stratification of layers; sweaters, old hoodies, torn discards that muted her shape to that of a hunched, tiny monk, her unique eyes cowled in shadows, hidden and safe from inquiry. Sunlight had the power to raise ugly brown welts on her alabaster skin. She kept to the nightside, moving in darkness, good shelter a priority for sleeping sunlessly.

  Recycling centers stayed open late, another good thing.

  No biography, and few memories, one of the most prevalent being her brief time on the limelight as “Missus Humpty Dumpty,” before the rural carny shows were hustled toward politically correct extinction. Her hairless white head, indeed egg-shaped, had gotten her the job a long while back. Her special eyes burned hotly from the center of that head. Two punctures for a nose, a rude down-turned rip of a lipless mouth. People had paid to look at her, and some to touch her, and when they did, she collected their stories until the accumulated sadness was too much to bear.

  Now, there was only sustenance. A life of continuing, little more, without strategy or goal, because the world in which she moved was not her world. She was the intruder here, the outsider, and she kept that knowledge as a shield. This was the land of the Upworlders, the reivers, the monsters who had destroyed Midian long ago, way back in the before-times. The “Naturals.”

  This much she did know: Sired of Avo, born of Matilda. They were merely blank names to her now, forever wanting a nurturing that never came because of the bad thing called the fall of Midian. A young life of running and hiding; learning the art of concealment in plain sight among the denizens of the Upworld. Running? Hardly, not with her special leg.

  Years elapsed.

  The larger cities beckoned with their anonymity.

  Counting years was pointless, be
cause the stars she could see at night had no cognizance of time. Upworlders had little concept of how fluid and malleable the human conceit of “time” could be. What mattered was perception, survival, safety. She had not been schooled in her own hereditary mythology, and carried no religious bias as a result. The crucible of her personal rules was experiential. There was a lingering feeling, more akin to stolen and truncated memory, that between human beings and her own kind, one of them was not meant to be on this planet. The few books through which she had labored without guidelines only offered conflict and confusion.

  That all changed when she was gang-raped and set on fire.

  * * *

  “Dare ya to fuck it,” said Dane, his scratchy voice slurred by vodka. Fulton dealt the bag lady another wallop with a steel-toed boot. She—it—absorbed the kick and contracted like a hedgehog, making not a sound. “Stinks,” said Brad, leery. The trio were predictable to the point of cliché. Surly, pissed off, too drunk, too young to matter.

  “Pussy,” Fulton shot back at Brad. “Virgin pussy. You’ve gotta lose your cherry, bust that nut, pop it or drop it, chickenshit.”

  Dane, the oldest (according to his fake ID), busily peeled back layers of clothing from the ragbag. “Jesus, this looks like some kinda freak! Holy shit, check out the stump!”

  “Circus freak,” said Fulton. “Still, better than fucking a clown.” He kept dancing in to kick their victim again with macho certitude.

  “No fucking way,” said Brad. He searched his mind, his history, for a better counterargument, but all that came out of his pale and disbelieving face was a mumbled mantra of no fucking way, over and over, like the babble of, well, a crazy person.

  Fulton chugged the dregs of flask bourbon and shattered the curved bottle as punctuation. “Tonight’s the night, Brad-lad!”

  “No fucking way,” Brad said again, with anything but conviction.

  “Tell ya what,” said Dane. “We’ll all take her.”

  “Yeah, we got your back, bro.”

  That was how it started. The particulars of the violence were not new or important to note, for in a violent world it was just one more incident no one would record, or so she thought as it happened, Dane first, then Brad, then Fulton, amid much cackling and bonding that served the purpose, for them, of both display and power ritual. Semen ejaculated and nasty verve thus temporarily muted, their embarrassment and potential future humiliation prompted the next event of the evening. It was Fulton who produced the squeeze bottle of lighter fluid, Brad who lit the book of matches, and all three who backed nervously away when the cooking smells first struck them. They fled while she smoldered.

  It was only right; the goddamned thing wasn’t even human. It was a monster, and they all knew what needed to happen to monsters.

  She awoke exposed to the sun, which wreaked damage on her sensitive flesh she knew would take over a month to heal fully. Six months later she expelled a glob of tissue that had a single, brilliant blue eye, like her own. Her issue died before it could draw its first breath.

  A world away, in China, a boy was born with similarly special eyes. As he matured it was discovered that he could see clearly in the dark—as in reading clearly in a complete absence of light. There came much speculation about the tapetum lucidum, “eyeshine,” retroreflectors and ocular albinism, as assorted experts attempted to debunk what was clearly a mutation. Human beings, in their entrenched prejudices, still automatically adjudged mutation as a bad thing no matter what the benefits or portent. Human beings tended to ignore or dismiss the signposts of their own evolutionary process, as if they had always been the same and always would be. It was the fundament of us versus them, all the way back to cave dwellers. Human beings were so obsessive about their enforced sameness that they even managed to circumvent natural selection for what they callowly called a greater good.

  But now, post trauma, she discovered a new irritant, a hard, black, oblong nodule, beneath her skin on each inner arm. She worried briefly that she might be calcifying, turning to stone for some indescribable sin. As far as transgression went, she lacked a moral compass. What was right? What was wrong?

  None of these ruminations mattered on the street, in the shadows she crawled back to. She knew the darkness loved and would not judge her.

  The next time a human being touched her, she would be ready with the blade. It was not special either—merely a worn Buck lockback knife with a dicey hinge, scratched and scored by its passage out of the world of practical everyday use and into her possession. She had scavenged it from a landfill, and its disinterment held the allure of treasure. This was a practical tool. She used it many times daily but when she was attacked, the knife was out of reach, tucked safely in winds of clothing so it could not be lost. Hinge or no hinge, she had honed the edge to surgical sharpness and practiced how to deploy the blade one-handedly. Without knowing why she had also given it a name: Alevan.

  * * *

  If she entered a fast-food restaurant at the right time of night, when the Moon was smiling upon her, and once the minimum-wage earners had dismissed her as a threat (tempered by their reflex need to get her out, as soon as calmly possible), they would never really see her with their eyes, which was a boon since she enjoyed cheeseburgers. She was careful to keep on the move and not repeat venues too many times; the trick, as always, was invisibility in plain sight.

  She was blindsided in the parking lot between the Dumpster and the more luridly stinky cache bin for cooking oil, which was recycled for rendering into “yellow grease” for livestock feed and biofuel use. The stranger simply appeared; not there one second and there the next, without tripping any of her usual skin alarms or her proximity sense. She lashed forward with the knife, Alevan, and hooked an extended pale palm, bringing bright red blood on the cut.

  “Wait! Don’t! Stop!” hissed the intruder.

  There followed that uncomfortable combat beat of exploded time, in which they regarded each other. It was the stranger’s burden to provide fast illumination, to avoid further injury, or a death struggle at worst.

  “I am Jexelle,” the figure said, fisting its wounded hand so the blood flow was stanched. “I’m a Collector, like you. You are Aurora.”

  No words in her entire history could have hit her with more impact. Someone like her, dressed like her. Someone who claimed an actual spoken name. Someone who claimed to know her name, which she had never known herself. She reeled back, abruptly thieved of breath, her vision spotting.

  Aurora reeled back.

  There is a dance to steel and thorn; edge must answer edge, and Jexelle’s own blade was already extended in a holding display that Aurora could not recognize, but knew down deeper on the level of instinct. She had never seen the draw. The blade was onyx, ornate, sunk in silver abraded so as not to reflect as much ambient light.

  But it was Jexelle’s wounded hand that urged Aurora’s attention. Now it was held open, in offering, closer to Aurora than the mineral blade. The meaning was clear. Responding by sheer gut feeling, Aurora impaled her own free palm on Jexelle’s blade, flowed her own blood, and clasped Jexelle’s encrimsoned hand in communion.

  To her shock and surprise, the first news she realized was that Jexelle’s blade was named Viloriun.

  JEXELLE’S TALE

  I am not going to tell you a human fable.

  You are not the chosen one, the hidden redeemer, or the secret savior. Our culture has never worked that way; messiah conceits based on completely unfounded optimism.

  To begin at the beginning: Your name is Aurora, born of Avo and Matilda.

  I have traveled two thousand miles and six years to find you, for you are a Collector, like me.

  We have a history, of course—heroes, villains, betrayal and redemption.

  But very little of it is supernatural. In fact, most of the Nightbreed’s unique capabilities are defensive, no more unusual than fangs on a serpent, or talons on raptor. As in the human world, there are exceptions, and those excepti
ons form the stories that have always threatened us with genocide. As for humans themselves, they are silly and trivial, deluded and crazy, filled with hate and hallucination. If their idea of a god actually existed, he, she, it, or they would actively hate them. If they did not outnumber us, we could almost pity them.

  For some of them have learned that we are the nightside dwellers, the ones who come next—after them.

  We have legends, too, and prophecies, but we have learned to ignore speculation until it yields fact. We know the difference between fiction and reality. We are painfully reminded of it every waking hour. We squandered time with oaths and oracles; we squandered dignity waiting for the tribes of the moon to be judged by never-seen deities. We sanctioned the delusions of a self-appointed leader and paid the price for believing in Baphomet. Neither leadership nor belief saved us. Midian was lost as foretold, but the truer thing is that no home is forever.

  Godless now, we are stronger.

  Your aura, too, was quite strong. It repelled most who came near. In that way, it hampered us from finding you. You had no way of knowing what you were broadcasting; to you it was always a matter of shield and defend, which is practical and logical. Even those who move about the city streets as you do, in the big urban areas where detection is diminished, could not approach you, nor could they have known what to do with you.

  It takes another Collector, like myself.

  You have come into contact with others and tasted their stories, drawn them into yourself. All those stories will forever be at your beck. That is what Collectors do—we are the repository of the history of our kind. There is no dark library, there are no musty tomes of arcana or forbidden spellbooks of sorcery, there is no record of artifact except what the Upworlders confect about us in their fear and ignorance. There are only the Collectors.

  This is what you have not been told, because Midian was ripped away from us. To the generation that followed the fall, Midian became as fanciful as Atlantis. Another danger—and this is one we never share with outsiders—is the hazardous length of time it takes many of us to mature, fully twice the number of years of the humans whom we outclass, but do not outnumber. You, Aurora, are still an adolescent. Your forearms have not yet even sprouted. You feel the difference in your flesh, but there was no way to know that you are entering puberty only now.