He inhaled, his will making flesh smoke, which his lungs drew back into his body. It was a process as strange in its ease as its nature. How quickly he’d become accustomed to what he’d once have called miraculous.
But he was no wonder; not compared with this woman. The fact that she’d enough faith to come looking for him with death on her heels was more than any natural man could hope for; and, for one such as himself, the true miracle.
Her humanity made him proud: of what he’d been, and could still pretend to be.
So it was in human form he picked her up, and tenderly carried her underground.
XIII
The Prophetic Child
Lori listened to the fury of the voices.
‘You cheated us!’
The first was Lylesburg.
‘I had no choice!’
The second, Boone.
‘So Midian’s put at risk for your finer feelings?’
‘Decker won’t tell anyone,’ Boone responded. ‘What’s he going to say? That he tried to kill a girl and a dead man stopped him? Talk sense.’
‘So suddenly you’re the expert. A few days here and you’re re-writing the law. Well do it somewhere else, Boone. Take the woman and leave.’
Lori wanted to open her eyes and go to Boone; calm him before his anger made him say or do something stupid. But her body was numb. Even the muscles of her face wouldn’t respond to instruction. All she could do was lie still, and listen as the argument raged.
‘I belong here,’ Boone said. ‘I’m Nightbreed now.’
‘Not any longer.’
‘I can’t live out there.’
‘We did. For generations we took our chances in the natural world, and it nearly extinguished us. Now you come along and damn near destroy our one hope of surviving. If Midian’s unearthed, you and the woman will be responsible. Think of that on your travels.’
There was a long silence. Then Boone said:
‘Let me make amends.’
‘Too late. The law makes no exceptions. The other one goes too.’
‘Narcisse? No. You’ll break his heart. He spent half his life waiting to come here.’
‘The decision’s made.’
‘Who by? You? Or Baphomet?’
At the sound of that name Lori felt a chill. The word meant nothing to her, but clearly it did to others nearby. She heard whispers echoing around her; repeated phrases like words of worship.
‘I demand to speak with it,’ Boone said.
‘Out of the question.’
‘What are you afraid of! Losing your grip on your tribe! I want to see Baphomet. If you want to try and stop me, do it now.’
As Boone threw the challenge down, Lori’s eyes opened. There was a vaulted roof above her, where last there’d been sky. It was painted with stars; however, more fireworks than celestial bodies; Catherine wheels, throwing off sparks as they rolled across the stone heavens.
She inclined her head a little. She was in a crypt. There were sealed coffins on every side of her, upended against the walls. To her left a profusion of squat candles, their wax grimy, their flame as weak as she. To her right, Babette, sitting cross-legged on the floor, watching her intently. The child was dressed completely in black, her eyes catching the candlelight and steadying its flicker. She was not pretty. Her face was too solemn for prettiness. Even in the smile she offered Lori, seeing her wake, couldn’t mellow the sadness in her features. Lori did her best to return the welcoming look, but wasn’t certain her muscles were yet obeying her.
‘It was a bad hurt he did us,’ Babette said.
Lori assumed she meant Boone. But the child’s next words put her right.
‘Rachel made it clean. Now it doesn’t sting.’
She raised her right hand. It was bandaged with dark linen, around thumb and forefinger.
‘Nor you either.’
Mustering her will, Lori raised her own right hand from her side. It was bandaged identically.
‘Where … is Rachel?’ Lori asked, her voice barely audible to herself. Babette heard the question clearly however.
‘Somewhere near,’ she said.
‘Could you get her for me?’
Babette’s perpetual frown deepened.
‘Are you here forever?’ she asked.
‘No,’ came the reply, not from Lori but from Rachel, who had appeared at the door, ‘no she’s not. She’s going to be away very soon.’
‘Why?’ said Babette.
‘I heard Lylesburg,’ Lori murmured.
‘Mister Lylesburg,’ Rachel said, crossing to where Lori lay. ‘Boone broke his word going overground to fetch you. He’s put us all in danger.’
Lori understood only a fraction of Midian’s story, but enough to know that the maxim she’d first heard from Lylesburg’s lips – ‘what’s below remains below’ was not some idle catchphrase. It was a law the inhabitants of Midian had sworn to live by or else forfeit their place here.
‘Can you help me?’ she asked. She felt vulnerable lying on the floor.
It wasn’t Rachel who came to her aid, however, but Babette, by laying her small, bandaged hand on Lori’s stomach. Her system responded instantly to the child’s touch, all trace of numbness leaving her body at once. She remembered the same sensation, or its like, from her last encounter with the girl: that feeling of transferred power that had moved through her when the beast had dissolved in her arms.
‘She’s formed quite a bond with you,’ Rachel said.
‘So it seems.’ Lori sat up. ‘Is she hurt?’
‘Why don’t you ask me?’ Babette said. ‘I’m here too.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Lori said, chastened. ‘Did you get cut too?’
‘No. But I felt your hurt.’
‘She’s empathic,’ Rachel said. ‘She feels what others feel; particularly if she has some emotional connection with them.’
‘I knew you were coming here,’ Babette said. ‘I saw through your eyes. And you can see through mine.’
‘Is that true?’ Lori asked Rachel.
‘Believe her,’ came the reply.
Lori wasn’t quite certain she was ready to get to her feet yet, but she decided to put her body to the test. It was easier than she’d expected. She stood up readily, her limbs strong, her head clear.
‘Will you take me to Boone?’ she requested.
‘If that’s what you want.’
‘He was here all along, wasn’t he?’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘Who brought him?’
‘Brought him?’
‘To Midian.’
‘Nobody.’
‘He was almost dead,’ Lori said. ‘Somebody must have got him out of the mortuary.’
‘You still don’t understand, do you?’ said Rachel grimly.
‘About Midian? No; not really.’
‘Not just Midian. About Boone, and why he is here.’
‘He thinks he’s Nightbreed,’ Lori said.
‘He was, until he broke his word.’
‘So we’ll go,’ Lori replied. ‘That’s what Lylesburg wants, isn’t it? And I’ve got no wish to stay.’
‘Where will you go?’ Rachel asked.
‘I don’t know. Maybe back to Calgary. It shouldn’t be so hard to prove Decker’s the guilty man. Then we can start over.’
Rachel shook her head.
‘That won’t be possible,’ she said.
‘Why not? Have you got some prior claim on him?’
‘He came here because he’s one of us.’
‘Us. Meaning what?’ Lori replied sharply. She was tired of evasion and innuendo. ‘Who are you? Sick people living in the dark. Boone isn’t sick. He’s a sane man. A sane, healthy man.’
‘I suggest you ask him how healthy he feels,’ was Rachel’s retort.
‘Oh I will, when the time comes.’
Babette was not untouched by this exchange of contempt.
‘You mustn’t go,’ she said to Lori.
‘I have to.’
‘Not into the light.’ She took fierce hold of Lori’s sleeve. ‘I can’t come with you there.’
‘She has to go,’ Rachel said, reaching over to prise her child loose. ‘She doesn’t belong with us.’
Babette held fast.
‘You can,’ she said, looking up at Lori. ‘It’s easy.’
‘She doesn’t want to,’ Rachel said.
Babette looked up at Lori.
‘Is that true?’ she asked.
‘Tell her,’ Rachel said, taking plain satisfaction in Lori’s discomfort. ‘Tell her she’s one of the sick people.’
‘But we live forever,’ Babette said. She glanced at her mother, ‘Don’t we?’
‘Some of us.’
‘All of us. If we want to live for ever and ever. And one day, when the sun goes out –’
‘Enough!’ said Rachel.
But Babette had more to say.
‘– when the sun goes out and there’s only night, we’ll live on the earth. It’ll be ours.’
Now it was Rachel’s turn to be ill at ease.
‘She doesn’t know what she’s saying,’ the woman muttered.
‘I think she knows very well,’ Lori replied.
The proximity of Babette, and the thought that she had some bond with the child, suddenly chilled her. What little peace her rational mind had made with Midian was rapidly crumbling. She wanted more than anything to be away from here, from children who talked of the end of the world, from candles and coffins and the life of the tomb.
‘Where’s Boone?’ she said to Rachel.
‘Gone to the Tabernacle. To Baphomet.’
‘Who or what is Baphomet?’
Rachel made a ritualistic gesture at mention of Baphomet, touching her forefinger to tongue and heart. It was so familiar to her, and so often performed, Lori doubted she even knew she’d done it.
‘Baphomet is the Baptiser,’ she said. ‘Who Made Midian. Who called us here.’
Finger touched tongue and heart again.
‘Will you take me to the Tabernacle?’ Lori asked.
Rachel’s reply was a plain and simple: ‘No.’
‘Direct me at least.’
‘I’ll take you,’ Babette volunteered.
‘No you won’t,’ Rachel said, this time snatching the child’s hand from Lori’s sleeve with such speed Babette had no chance to resist.
‘I’ve paid my debt to you,’ Rachel said, ‘healing the wound. We’ve no more business together.’
She took hold of Babette, and lifted the child up into her arms. Babette squirmed in her mother’s embrace so as to look back at Lori.
‘I want you to see beautiful things for me.’
‘Be quiet,’ Rachel chided.
‘What you see I’ll see.’
Lori nodded.
‘Yes?’ Babette said.
‘Yes.’
Before her child could utter another mournful word Rachel had carried her out of the room, leaving Lori to the company of the coffins.
She threw her head back and exhaled slowly. Calm, she thought; be calm. It’ll be over soon.
The painted stars cavorted overhead, seeming to turn as she watched. Was their riot just the artist’s fancy, she wondered, or was this the way the sky looked to the Breed, when they stepped out of their mausoleums at night to take the air?
Better not to know. It was bad enough that these creatures had children and art; that they might also have vision was too dangerous a thought to entertain.
When first she’d encountered them, halfway down the stairs into this underworld, she’d feared for her life. She still did, in some hushed corner of herself. Not that it would be taken away, but that it would be changed; that somehow they’d taint her with their rites and visions, so she’d not be able to scrub them from her mind.
The sooner she was out of here, with Boone beside her, the sooner she’d be back in Calgary. The street lights were bright there. They tamed the stars.
Reassured by the thought, she went in search of the Baptiser.
XIV
Tabernacle
This was the true Midian. Not the empty town on the hill; not even the necropolis above her; but this network of tunnels and chambers which presumably spread beneath the entire cemetery. Some of the tombs were occupied only by the undisturbed dead; their caskets laid on shelves to moulder. Were these the first occupants of the cemetery, laid to rest here before the Nightbreed had taken possession? Or were they Breed who had died from their half-life, caught in the sun, perhaps, or withered by longing? Whichever, they were in the minority. Most of the chambers were tenanted by more vital souls, their quarters lit by lamps or candles, or on occasion by the occupant itself: a being that burned with its own light.
Only once did she glimpse such an entity, supine on a mattress in the corner of its boudoir. It was naked, corpulent and sexless, its sagging body a motley of dark oily skin and larval eruptions which seeped phosphorescence, soaking its simple bed. It seemed every other doorway let on to some fragment as mysterious, her response to them problematic as the tableaux that inspired it. Was it simply disgust that made her stomach flip, seeing the stigmatic in full flood, with sharp-toothed adherents sucking noisily at her wounds; or excitement, confronting the legend of the vampire in the flesh? And what was she to make of the man whose body broke into birds when he saw her watching, or the dog-headed painter who turned from his fresco and beckoned her to join his apprentice mixing paint? Or the machine beasts running up the walls on caliper legs? After a dozen corridors she no longer knew horror from fascination. Perhaps she’d never known.
She might have spent days lost and seeing the sights, but luck or instinct brought her close enough to Boone that further progress was blocked. It was Lylesburg’s shadow that appeared before her, seeming to step from the solid wall.
‘You may go no further.’
‘I intend to find Boone,’ she told him.
‘You’re not to blame in this,’ Lylesburg said. ‘That’s completely understood. But you must in turn understand: what Boone did has put us all in danger –’
‘Then let me speak to it. We’ll get out of here together.’
‘That might have been possible, a little while ago,’ Lylesburg said, the voice emerging from his shadow-coat as measured and authoritative as ever.
‘And now?’
‘He’s beyond my recall. And yours too. He’s made appeal to another force entirely.’
Even as he spoke there was noise from further down the catacomb; a din the like of which Lori had never heard. For an instant she felt certain an earthquake was at its source, the sound seemed to be in and of the earth around them. But as the second wave began she heard something animal in it: a moan of pain, perhaps; or of ecstasy … Surely this was Baphomet – Who Made Midian, Rachel had said. What other voice could shake the very fabric of the place?
Lylesburg confirmed the belief.
‘That is what Boone has gone to parley with,’ he said. ‘Or so he thinks.’
‘Let me go to him.’
‘It’s already devoured him,’ Lylesburg said. ‘Taken him into the flame.’
‘I want to see for myself,’ Lori demanded.
Unwilling to delay a moment longer she pushed past Lylesburg, expecting resistance. But her hands sank into the darkness he wore and touched the wall behind him. He had no substance. He couldn’t keep her from going anywhere.
‘It will kill you too,’ she heard him warn, as she ran in pursuit of the sound. Though it was all around her, she sensed its source. Every step she took it got louder, and more complex, layers of raw sound each of which touched a different part of her: head, heart, groin.
A quick backward glance confirmed what she’d already guessed: that Lylesburg had made no attempt to follow. She turned a corner, and another, the undercurrents in the voice still multiplying, until she was walking against them as if in a high wind, head down, shoulders hunched.
There were
no chambers now along the passageway; and consequently no lights. There was a glow up ahead however – fitful and cold, but bright enough to illuminate both the ground she stumbled over, which was bare earth, and the silvery frost on the walls.
‘Boone?’ she shouted. ‘Are you there? Boone?’
After what Lylesburg had said she didn’t hope too hard for an answer, but she got one. His voice came to meet her from the core of light and sound ahead. But all she heard through the din was:
‘Don’t –’
Don’t what? she wondered.
Don’t come any further? Don’t leave me here?
She slowed her pace, and called again, but the noise the Baptiser was making virtually drowned out the sound of her own voice, never mind a reply. Having come so far, she had to go forward, not knowing if his call had been a warning or not.
Ahead, the passageway became a slope – a steep slope. She halted at the top, and squinted into the brightness. This was Baphomet’s hole, no doubt of that. The din it was making eroded the walls of the slope and carried the dust up into her face. Tears began to fill her eyes to wash the grit away, but it kept coming. Deafened by voice, blinded by dust, she teetered on the lip of the slope, unable to go forward or back.
Suddenly, the Baptiser fell silent, the layers of sound all dying at once, and completely.
The hush that followed was more alarming than the din that had preceded it. Had it shut its mouth because it knew it had a trespasser in its midst? She held her breath, afraid to utter a sound.
At the bottom of the slope was a sacred place, she had not the slightest doubt of that. Standing in the great cathedrals of Europe with her mother, years before, gazing at the windows and the altars, she’d felt nothing approaching the surge of recognition she felt now. Nor, in all her life – dreaming or awake – had such contradictory impulses run in her. She wanted to flee the place with a passion – wanted to forsake it and forget it; and yet it summoned. It was not Boone’s presence there that called her, but the pull of the holy, or the unholy, or the two in one; and it wouldn’t be resisted.