Midian Unmade

by Joseph Nassise

  She cried aloud for joy, and as I stood under the caress of the night, I heard her footsteps drum. She leapt, and the sound of featherbrush wings filled the clearing. Behind me, the house exhaled its stink of rot. I’d have to go back in there and scavenge for anything useful.

  Now, though, I opened my eyes and watched while she climbed.

  “New Midian,” I murmured. We could look for it anywhere, anywhere at all. Seraphine, bloated and terrible as she was, had the inkling of a useful idea.

  If all else failed, we could make Midian ourselves.

  THE FARMHOUSE

  Christopher Monfette

  1

  On the wind, a word of plenty; in the water, a warning.

  There had never been a time in the history of the tribes when the prophecies had been so competing. You will be blessed, they seemed to say—or others still, in darker moments, cursed. It mattered little, largely because they had known both. Blessed with curses or cursed with blessings—the bones rolled either way—but there was little denying that the future held room for an equal measure of suffering and celebration. Let either come; the difference was little. Such had been their history.

  On the second week of their flight from Midian, the small democracy of Nightbreed which had, strictly by design of the season’s breeze, chosen west as their bearing, stumbled upon a small patch of earth which told them politely to rest. They’d carved an existence out of listening to every grass blade and tree root, and few things proved less vital to understanding the language of the ground than living beneath it.

  Their great fortune along the way, of course, had been Allyaphasia—with her weave of living tattoos, the shades and lines of which were never quite entirely still. Their vague patterns formed the outline of beasts across her skin—mammalian constellations—some of which, until their sudden journey away from Midian, she had yet to discover. She had conjured dogs from those tattoos—and weasels and rats—animals suited to a life in the muck, but never a creature so much belonging to the sky.

  And so when, on the third day, an unfamiliar pulling along her spine and shoulders began to stretch out across her skin, she was perhaps the most shocked to witness the eagle emerge from the ink. Its talons came first—a sharp pain, not without blood—followed by wings that descended from her shoulders, and by the time the creature had pulled away and solidified its form, Allyaphasia had begun to weep. They were the tears of a mother discovering some secret child—an expression of great joy in the aftermath of an equally powerful loss.

  Of all the Breed, Allyaphasia alone had the most right to sorrow. The destruction of Midian had afflicted many with the loss of a home—others, still, of wives and husbands—but none among them had gone away absent a child. Prior to the attack on Midian, Allyaphasia had confessed to never having encountered a human; nor had she known of bullets before one pierced the eye of her firstborn, or the heart of her second. Even Xxyzx—the most cynical and ill-tempered among them—afforded her the right to mourn, but of her love for the eagle would commonly roll his eyes in protest.

  It was not, he insisted, her child.

  “What is it then?” many of the splintered tribe inquired of its first appearance—if only for the sad truth of never having seen one before—at which point the faux-feathered beast tested its wings, cawing with a shriek, and took to the air, away into the blue-tinted evening. That Allyaphasia could pass her vision to the creature’s eyes—smelling the air, sensing the wind—had made her the group’s de facto scout—which, despite her reluctance, was perhaps the only thing that kept her alive. While they walked beneath the moonlight, safe from the sun, the eagle pressed on ahead, searching for their next day’s refuge, ensuring that daylight would never come without the promise of shelter from it.

  And so it was, from the height of the sky, that the low-dwellers first discovered the barn.

  2

  At night, there were the death-dreams, or so he called them—but never to his mother, who rarely remembered them in the morning. From his bedroom down the hall, the muttered panic of the wasting woman, who tossed and turned in a kind of ghostly pantomime, woke the boy often and always with the same hopeless thought pounding in the space between his head and his pillow.

  Finally, my mother is dead.

  His ears had long since tuned themselves to the first signs of trouble, and some nights, lying awake in the darkness, he wondered if they would eventually discern the final push of breath responsible for sending the spirit of Elizabeth Adler once again out into the universe. He had heard the stories of slumbering loved ones who dreamed some final good-bye, waking in the morning to find themselves, by some degree, more alone in the world, and he secretly hoped that such might be the case. It would be better, he thought, to say good-bye to the woman he always remembered—fresh-faced and smiling, rosy cheeks alight with life—than the still-beating skeleton he tended to now.

  He awoke the same tonight, setting his small, five-foot frame onto the cold, wooden floor, and pushed through the remnants of the old, familiar fear:

  Finally, my mother …

  It was the “finally,” for all its implied relief, that disturbed him the most, and despite the stirrings of his mother beyond the doorway, it was that small sense of hope—for his peace, for hers—that grew like a tumor of its own, beneath his skin, grown fat on memory and guilt and sorrow and despair. It was never lost on him that his mother’s cancer would kill more than simply her.

  Jonathan navigated the second-story hallway, trying desperately not to wake the useless bulk of his otherwise well-meaning uncle in the room next door. Albert had traveled from his home in Minneapolis—more out of sympathy, the boy suspected, or obligation, than any real desire to help—and despite Jon’s relative youth, he was old enough to know that the clumsy, half-bald stranger who had visited only once every Christmas was here now to audition for the eventual role of father.

  The boy didn’t have the heart to confess to his dying mother his intention to flee after her passing. He’d grown up among the fields and farms, tending their own slice of earth—just the two of them, until the sickness came—and he had no desire to be packed away like so much luggage, crammed into the old man’s station wagon and carted off to some American Midwest metropolis. No, he thought. He’d run—however long, however far—and take up with whomever might have him. He’d be a gypsy and learn the part as he went.

  Jonathan pushed through his mother’s door, unworried that the creaking of the old wood might wake her, and stood among the discarded blankets and amber pill bottles which guarded her bedside like the Easter Island statues he’d once read about in school.

  “No,” she muttered to the thing in her dreams. “Please. Don’t hurt me.…”

  Tonight, it seemed, the figure was a demon—other nights, it was an angel—and the only true detail she’d ever remembered or chosen, at least, to share with him was that the dream was of a figure, washed in fog, motioning her forward and calling her name. Jonathan had surmised on his own, in moments like these—watching her privately as she smiled or screamed—that the face of the thing was unknowable, some nights terrifying, other nights beautiful.

  Jonathan chose to believe that it was God, calling her home, and her fear was in the going, but the distance between the two was shortening, that much he knew. Whatever it was, it would find her, or she it and he knew with as much sadness as a ten-year-old boy could manage that it was a meeting not far off.

  She muttered as the wind blew in from the window, curtains tossing like gossamer fingers, like breath in the air. Albert, he thought. Stupid Albert. Who else could have left them open?

  He crossed the room and parted the curtains, looking down at the shape of the barn outside as he reached for the latch. Lord, how he loved that place—from rafters to basement, a paradise for pretending. The bank, of course, had already come around sniffing, before his mother had lost the strength to fend them off. She had joked once to Albert that her worst fear in dying was that she might e
ventually meet the figure in the light only to find him an employee of the bank.

  “Heartless bastards,” Albert had offered. “God, the Devil. Repo men, all of ’em.”

  Jon fumbled about the sill, feeling his way along, thinking that for all the brightness of the sky outside, it might as well have been day, when suddenly a shadow cut the evening, silhouetting itself against the moon and then vanishing. He strained his eyes against the night and after several moments, caught the shape again. It was massive, nearly his own size—beak to tail, wing to wing, a bird as big as any he might have imagined. And when, for an instant, it turned to catch the light, he noticed that what he had mistaken for feathers weren’t feathers at all.

  They didn’t flutter; they didn’t flap.

  They were painted. Tattooed.

  And then the creature turned, spun, arched around the spire of the barn and down. It dove for the tallgrass below, a collision almost inevitable, until a second shadow split from the dim walls of the building’s frame. The figure—a woman, perhaps—floated several feet out into the field, extending an arm into the evening, and just as Jon expected the eagle to land there—as he’d seen in films—it seemed somehow to mold itself into the darkness, one shadow absorbing the other until the bird had vanished completely, and its owner had followed.

  The field was empty, the night still.

  Jon glanced in disbelief, his heart racing—not with fear, but exhilaration.

  Quietly, he latched the window, deciding even before he turned that this was a mystery that demanded some investigation. So determined, he tiptoed across his mother’s bedroom, moving quietly so as not to wake her. In the time that he’d been at the window, she’d drifted back to sleep. She breathed quietly, peacefully, every breath like some traded currency, but for the moment, at least, her protests against the dream-demon had stopped.

  She would still be alive tomorrow, he decided. And he would have a story to tell her when she woke.

  3

  In the basement, by lamplight, the Nightbreed argued.

  “What do you mean no shelter?” Xxyzx insisted angrily. He hobbled across the dirt floor, trailing minuscule droplets of blood in a line toward Allyaphasia.

  “You’re dripping,” said the guide, her voice at once both soft and hollow. Like a satin glove with no hand inside.

  “Remind me again and it’ll be your blood on the floor,” the creature growled. “Love you though I do.”

  To human eyes, Xxyzx might easily have been the most sapiens among them—tall and slender, commonly built. He could have walked for an evening in the cities or towns—unnoticed were it not for his black eyes and ruby-red fangs. But his appearance had made him feel eternally different, and over a decade, he withdrew further from the race into which he’d been born. He’d chosen to live in books, scavenging human pages wherever he might find them—classics and porn magazines, pamphlets and maps (from which he’d renamed himself). His hatred for a species to which he felt somehow connected made for a bitter temperament, and seldom could he hold his tongue when given the opportunity to unleash it. He ranted frequently—fancied himself a self-tortured intellect—and blasphemed often on the subject of Baphomet.

  He was an open book.

  So Lylesburg had cursed him—a punishment given without trial, which was uncommon among the Breed, though in this instance nobody objected, nobody cared. The curse was thus—that every negative emotion, every terrible thought, would write itself across the creature’s skin, in all tongues and languages. Every ember of anger would scribble itself in razor-thin lines across his flesh—the scripting eloquent, the bloodletting slight. Lylesburg had hoped that the pain might force Xxyzx to reconsider himself, to negotiate some pleasure from his own existence, and for a while it had worked. He had calmed.

  But the humans had come with their torches and guns and Lylesburg was dead, having never lifted the curse. And Xxyzx, like all the Breed, bore his anger openly. Cast out and homeless with neither direction nor hope of salvation …

  He bled frequently these days.

  “Again,” he insisted. “What do you mean no shelter?”

  Allyaphasia contorted her neck and shoulders to facilitate the knitting of form and flesh. The eagle had nearly retaken its place across her back.

  “In all directions,” she said. “Only wilderness. We cannot make shelter by daybreak. We can only go back.”

  The crowd murmured in protest.

  “Certainly, there must be—”

  “Nothing,” the mother insisted. “Roads. Fields. But no place to hide.”

  “We can’t return,” said Neptune. “Can’t go back.”

  “Then what of here?” asked Jonas, picking cobwebs from between his horns. When he spoke, his lips failed to move, his mouth hung open in a dark, empty oval to allow the thing that lived in his throat—the puppeteer, the real Jonas—to speak in its shrill hiss.

  Xxyzx scoffed loudly. “What of it?”

  “We can all smell it,” he said. “The death. From the house across the way.”

  Xxyzx winced as another few lines carved across his cheek. The German word for “idiot,” the Arabic for “fool.”

  “Others will come,” he responded. “For them, death is just an empty space. They can’t stand the silence, the stillness. It’s what they do, the humans—they find the empty and fill it.”

  “Well, we can’t wait forever,” grumbled another. “Or drift forever, too.”

  “And you’d have us do what?” demanded Xxyzx. “Dig? Rebuild?”

  “Perhaps,” said a voice. Not one, but many.

  “On the backs of us broken few? Here, in this place, dare to do what Baphomet did, for all his power? To create a new home?”

  The room fell silent at the prospect. Allyaphasia put a hand on his bloody shoulder, feigning her smile from memory.

  “I’ll try again tomorrow,” she comforted. “One last time. And then we’ll go.”

  Xxyzx turned, his brow an architecture of lines. “To where?” he asked, his voice trembling as the word “despair” cut slowly across his chest.

  “To where?”

  Jonas pushed suddenly to the front of the crowd, his nose held high in the air. “Xxyzx, Allyaphasia…” he began. “I smell something.”

  The old monster rolled its eyes. “Yes, yes, death. We all smell it, Jonas, we all—”

  “Not death,” interrupted the creature. “Something worse, I think. Life.”

  Even as he uttered the phrase, the woodwork creaked loudly overhead, the double-hatched doorway to the cellar pulled open and—

  4

  —there were monsters in the basement.

  Standing atop the stairway, Jonathan tried to scream, but the terror caught dryly in his throat. He’d made his way across the field, ducking between a section of half-broken boards and quietly into the darkened barn. The smell of hay and damp cedar wafted into the night, masking another scent—musty and strange—which he’d never before encountered among the farm’s earthy perfume. And beneath that odor, a noise—the chatter of whispered voices, half raised in argument.

  He should have turned then—turned and run back to the house, rousing Albert toward the shotgun that his father had left behind. But he pressed forward, silently across the floorboards, between which small slivers of lamplight projected themselves like stars against the ceiling. With all the foolishness of youth, he cast open the cellar door—

  And there were monsters in the basement … a group of them, looking slack-jawed and surprised, meeting his frightened glance with a fear of their own. Together, they seemed like some crudely sewn patchwork—a half-human quilt of magnificent colors and forms. Purple skin and mossy scales; wet, gelatinous masses and fully-fleshed forms. Some had horns, others tentacles. A few had neither. A few were … worse.

  Finally, Jonathan gasped, a gesture that broke the frozen moment between them. He turned, terrified, rushing back up the stairway in small ten-year-old steps. Below him, his feet went thunk-thunk-
thunk against the dusty plywood, masking a sound that he failed to hear until it was too late. Behind every thunk, a click, a spark—the claws of a creature against the damp cellar walls. It entered his periphery, demanding a glance, and he turned to find it not beside him, but crawling across the surface to his left, spider-walking in spite of gravity. A second, smaller set of arms had somehow torn themselves free from the hollow structure of the first, and the monster—all six hands clutching the walls—scurried along the concrete and in front of him, slamming the door with a thundering echo.

  He was trapped, surely dead. He dropped his head in anticipation of the bite, or the blow, but none came. Instead, only—

  “Stop!”

  It was a voice of complete command, strong yet distinctly feminine, though not without a slight, shaking vibrato.

  “I forbid this!” it called. “Not another child dead before my eyes!”

  “Allyaphasia,” hissed one of the creatures. Its mouth dangled open, teeth glinting, but despite the high-pitched voice, its lips didn’t move.

  “Neptune, bring him here,” said another, this one far more like a human than any of the rest. He turned to the others, some of whom snarled, some of whom whimpered. “It was bound to happen. Hiding in basements and barns. Be thankful it was only a boy.”

  The creature behind him—Neptune, they’d called her—whispered quietly into his ear—“Don’t scream, darling”—and before he could even consider doing so, she’d wrapped four of her arms around his chest, lifted him off the upmost step, and carried him down into the midst of the monsters.

  “He’s trembling,” she said, half laughing into the room. “Fancy that. First time in my life I’ve ever been found imposing.”

  It was at that moment that Jonathan decided that he was dreaming. Whether it was the casual, lightly spoken manner of whatever thing had just moved him across the room, or the way in which the freakish assembly failed to meet a young boy’s definition of “monster,” Jon felt little immediate threat of being devoured or torn to pieces. And since such creatures did not, of course, exist—monstrous or otherwise—he felt, as one occasionally does in dreams, that however terrifying this might become, he would wake eventually. And so he spoke bravely in an attempt to hide his lie.