It made him dangerous. He struck quickly, with no signal of his intention. The thin blade ran straight through Boone’s neck.
To disarm the enemy Boone simply stepped away from him. The knife slid through Decker’s fingers, still caught in Boone’s flesh. The doctor made no attempt to claim it back. Instead he took a two-handed grip on the skull splitter. Now there was some sound from him: a low moan that broke into gasps as he threw himself forward to despatch his victim.
Boone ducked the slicing blow, and the blade embedded itself in the tunnel wall. Earth spattered them both as Decker pulled it free. Then he swung again, this time missing his target’s face by a finger length.
Caught off balance, Boone almost fell, and his downcast eyes chanced on Decker’s trophy. He couldn’t mistake that maimed face. Narcisse; cut up and dead in the dirt.
‘You bastard!’ he roared.
Decker paused for a moment, and watched Boone. Then he spoke. Not with his own voice, but with someone else’s; a grinning whine of a voice.
‘You can die,’ it said.
As he spoke he swung the blade back and forth, not attempting to touch Boone, merely to demonstrate his authority. The blade whined like the voice; the music of a fly in a coffin, to and fro between the walls.
Boone retreated before the display, with mortal terror in his gut. Decker was right. The dead could die.
He drew breath, through mouth and punctured throat. He’d made a near fatal error, staying human in the presence of the Mask. And why? From some absurd idea that this final confrontation should be man to man; that they’d trade words as they fought, and he’d undo the doctor’s ego before he undid his life.
It wouldn’t be that way. This wasn’t a patient’s revenge on his corrupted healer: this was a beast and a butcher, tooth to knife.
He exhaled, and the truth in his cells came forth like honey. His nerves ran with bliss; his body throbbed as it swelled. In life he’d never felt so alive as he did at these moments, stripping off his humanity and dressing for the night.
‘No more …’ he said, and let the beast come from him everywhere.
Decker raised his machete to undo the enemy before the change had been completed. But Boone didn’t wait. Still transforming, he tore at the butcher’s face, taking off the mask – buttons, zipper and all – to uncover the infirmities beneath.
Decker howled at being revealed, putting his hand up to his face to half cover it against the beast’s stare.
Boone snatched the mask up from the ground, and began to tear it apart, his claws shredding the linen. Decker’s howls mounted. Dropping his hand from his face he began to swipe at Boone with insane abandon. The blade caught Boone’s chest, slicing it open, but as it returned for a second cut Boone dropped the rags and blocked the blow, carrying Decker’s arm against the wall with such force he broke the bones. The machete fell to the ground, and Boone reached out for Decker’s face.
The steep howl stopped as the claws came at him. The mouth closed. The features slackened. For an instant Boone was looking at a face he’d studied for hours, hanging on its every word. At that thought his hand went from face to neck and he seized Decker’s windpipe, which had funded so many lies. He closed his fist, his claws piercing the meat of Decker’s throat. Then he pulled. The machinery came out in a wash of blood. Decker’s eyes widened, fixed on his silencer. Boone pulled again, and again. The eyes glazed. The body jerked, and jerked, then started to sag.
Boone didn’t let it drop. He held it as in a dance, and undid the flesh and bone as he’d undone the mask, clots of Decker’s body striking the walls. There was only the dimmest memory of Decker’s crimes against him in his head now. He tore with a Breed’s zeal, taking monstrous satisfaction in a monstrous act. When he’d done his worst he dropped the wreckage to the earth, and finished the dance with his partner underfoot.
There’d be no rising from the grave for this body. No hope of earthly resurrection. Even in the full flood of his attack Boone had withheld the bite that would have passed life after death into Decker’s system. His flesh belonged only to the flies, and their children; his reputation to the vagaries of those who chose to tell his story. Boone didn’t care. If he never shrugged off the crimes Decker had hung around his neck it scarcely mattered now. He was no longer innocent. With this slaughter he became the killer Decker had persuaded him he was. In murdering the prophet he made the prophecy true.
He let the body lie, and went to seek Lori. There was only one place she could have gone: down the slope into Baphomet’s chamber. There was pattern in this, he saw. The Baptiser had brought her here, unknitting the ground beneath her feet so as to bring Boone after.
The flame its divided body occupied threw a cold glamour up into his face. He started down the slope towards it, dressed in the blood of his enemy.
XXIV
Cabal
1
Lost in the wasteland, Ashbery was found by a light, flickering up from between the fractured paving stones. Its beams were bitterly cold, and sticky in a way light had no right to be, adhering to his sleeve and hand before fading away. Intrigued, he tracked its source from one eruption to another, each point brighter than the one before.
A scholar in his youth, he would have known the name Baphomet had somebody whispered it to him, and understood why the light, springing from the deity’s flame, exercised such a claim upon him. He would have known the deity as god and goddess in one body. Would have known too how its worshippers had suffered for their idol, burned as heretics, or for crimes against nature. He might have feared a power that demanded such homage; and wisely.
But there was nobody to tell him. There was only the light, drawing him on.
2
The Baptiser was not alone in its chamber, Boone found. He counted eleven members of the Breed around the walls, kneeling blindfolded with their backs to the flame. Amongst them, Mister Lylesburg and Rachel.
On the ground to the right of the door lay Lori. There was blood on her arm, and on her face, and her eyes were closed. But even as he went to her aid the thing in the flame set its eyes on him, turning him round with an icy touch. It had business with him, which it was not about to postpone.
‘Approach,’ it said. ‘Of your own free will.’
He was afraid. The flame from the ground was twice the size it had been when last he’d entered, battering the roof of the chamber. Fragments of earth, turned to either ice or ash, fell in a glittering rain and littered the floor. Standing a dozen yards from the flame the assault of its energies was brutal. Yet Baphomet invited him closer.
‘You’re safe,’ it said. ‘You came in the blood of your enemy. It’ll keep you warm.’
He took a step towards the fire. Though he’d suffered bullet and blade in his life since death, and felt none of them, he felt the chill from Baphomet’s flame plainly enough. It pricked his nakedness; made frost patterns on his eyes. But Baphomet’s words were no empty promise. The blood he wore grew hot as the air around him grew colder. He took comfort from it, and braved the last few steps.
The weapon, Baphomet said. Discard it.
He’d forgotten the knife in his neck. He drew it out of his flesh and threw it aside.
Closer still, the Baptiser said.
The flame’s fury concealed all but glimpses of its freight, but enough to confirm what his first encounter with Baphomet had taught him: that if this deity had made creatures in its own image then he’d never set eyes on them. Even in dreams, nothing that approached the Baptiser. It was one of one.
Suddenly some part of it reached for him, out of the flame. Whether limb, or organ, or both he had no chance to see. It snatched at his neck and hair and pulled him towards the fire. Decker’s blood didn’t shield him now; the ice scorched his face. Yet there was no fighting free. It immersed his head in the flame, holding him fast. He knew what this was the instant the fire closed around his head: Baptism.
And to confirm that belief, Baphomet’s voice in his head.
br />
You are Cabal, it said.
The pain was mellowing. Boone opened his mouth to draw breath, and the fire coursed down his throat and into his belly and lungs, then through his whole system. It carried his new name with it, baptizing him inside out.
He was no longer Boone. He was Cabal. An alliance of many.
From this cleansing on he would be capable of heat and blood and making children: that was in Baphomet’s gift, and the deity gave it. But he would be frail too, or frailer. Not just because he bled, but because he was charged with purpose.
I must be hidden tonight, Baphomet said. We all have enemies, but mine have lived longer and learned more cruelty than most. I will be taken from here and hidden from them.
Now the presence of the Breed made sense. They’d remained behind to take a fraction of the Baptiser with them and conceal it from whatever forces came in pursuit.
This is your doing, Cabal, Baphomet said. I don’t accuse you. It was bound to happen. No refuge is forever. But I charge you –
‘Yes?’ he said. ‘Tell me.’
Rebuild what you’ve destroyed.
‘A new Midian?’
No.
‘What then?’
You must discover for us in the human world.
‘Help me,’ he said.
I can’t. From here on, it’s you must help me. You’ve undone the world. Now you must re-make it.
There were shudders in the flame. The Rites of Baptism were almost over.
‘How do I begin?’ Cabal said.
Heal me, Baphomet replied. Find me, and heal me. Save me from my enemies.
The voice that had first addressed him had changed its nature utterly. All trace of demand had gone from it. There was only this prayer to be healed, and kept from harm, delivered softly at his ear. Even the leash on his head had been slipped, leaving him free to look left and right. A call he hadn’t heard had summoned Baphomet’s attendants from the wall. Despite their blindfolds they walked with steady steps to the edge of the flame, which had lost much of its ferocity. They’d raised their arms, over which shrouds were draped, and the flame wall broke as pieces of Baphomet’s body were dropped into the travellers’ waiting arms, to be wrapped up instantly and put from sight.
This parting of piece from piece was agonizing. Cabal felt the pain as his own, filling him up until it was almost beyond enduring. To escape it he began to retreat from the flame.
But as he did so the one piece yet to be claimed tumbled into view in front of his face. Baphomet’s head. It turned to him, vast and white, its symmetry fabulous. His entire body rose to it: gaze, spittle and prick. His heart began to beat, healing its damaged wing with its first throb. His congealed blood liquefied like a saint’s relics, and began to run. His testicles tightened; sperm ran up his cock. He ejaculated into the flame, pearls of semen carried up past his eyes to touch the Baptiser’s face.
Then the rendezvous was over. He stumbled out of the fire as Lylesburg – the last of the adherents in the chamber – received the head from the flames and wrapped it up.
Its tenants departed, the flame’s ferocity redoubled. Cabal stumbled back as it unleashed itself with terrifying vigour –
On the ground above, Ashbery felt the force build, and tried to retreat from it, but his mind was full of what he’d spied upon, and its weight slowed him. The fire caught him, sweeping him up as it hurtled heavenward. He shrieked at its touch, and at the aftertaste of Baphomet that flooded his system. His many masks were burned away. The robes first, then the lace he’d not been able to pass a day of his adult life without wearing. Next the sexual anatomy he’d never much enjoyed. And finally, his flesh, scrubbing him clean. He fell back to earth more naked than he’d been in his mother’s womb, and blind. The impact smashed his legs and arms beyond repair.
Below, Cabal shook himself from the daze of revelation. The fire had blown a hole in the roof of the chamber, and was spreading from it in all directions. It would consume flesh as easily as earth or stone. They had to be out of here before it found them. Lori was awake. From the suspicion in her eyes as he approached it was plain she’d seen the Baptism, and feared him.
‘It’s me,’ he told her. ‘It’s still me.’
He offered her a hand. She took it, and he pulled her to her feet.
‘I’ll carry you,’ he said.
She shook her head. Her eyes had gone from him to something on the floor behind him. He followed her gaze. Decker’s blade lay close to the fissure, where the man he’d been before the Baptism had cast it aside.
‘You want it?’ he said.
‘Yes.’
Shielding his head from the debris he retraced his steps and picked it up.
‘Is he dead?’ she asked, as he came back to her.
‘He’s dead.’
There was no sign of the corpse to verify his claim. The tunnel, collapsing on itself, had already buried him, as it was burying all of Midian. A tomb for the tombs.
With so much already levelled it wasn’t difficult to find their way out to the main gates. They saw no sign of Midian’s inhabitants on their way. Either the fire had consumed their remains, or rubble and earth covered them.
Just outside the gate, left where they could not fail to find it, was a reminder for Lori of one whom she prayed had escaped unharmed. Babette’s doll – woven from grasses, and crowned with spring flowers – lay in a small ring of stones. As Lori’s fingers made contact with the toy it seemed she saw one final time through the child’s eyes – a landscape moving by as somebody speeded her away to safety. The glimpse was all too brief. She had no time to pass a prayer for good fortune along to the child before the vision was startled from her by a noise at her back. She turned to see that the pillars which had supported Midian’s gates were beginning to topple. Cabal snatched her arm as the two stone slabs struck each other, teetered head to head like matched wrestlers, then fell sideways to hit the ground where moments before Lori and Cabal had stood.
3
Though he had no watch to read the hour, Cabal had a clear sense – Baphomet’s gift, perhaps – of how long they had until daybreak. In his mind’s eye he could see the planet, like a clock face decorated with seas, the magical divide of night from day creeping around it.
He had no fear of the sun’s appearance on the horizon. His Baptism had given him a strength denied his brothers and sisters. The sun wouldn’t kill him. This he knew without question. Undoubtedly it would be a discomfort to him. Moonrise would always be a more welcome sight than daybreak. But his work wouldn’t be confined to the night hours. He wouldn’t need to hide his head from the sun the way his fellow Breed were obliged to. Even now they’d be looking for a place of refuge before morning broke.
He imagined them in the sky over America, or running beside its highways, groups dividing when some amongst them grew tired, or found a likely haven: the rest moving on, more desperate by the moment. Silently he wished them safe journeys and secure harbour.
More: he promised he would find them again with time. Gather them up and unite them as Midian had done. Unwittingly, he’d harmed them. Now, he had to heal that harm, however long it took.
‘I have to start tonight,’ he told Lori. ‘Or their trails will be cold. Then I’ll never find them.’
‘You’re not going without me, Boone.’
‘I’m not Boone any longer,’ he told her.
‘Why?’
They sat on the hill overlooking the necropolis, and he recited to her all he’d learned at the Baptism. Hard lessons, which he had too few words to communicate. She was weary, and shivering, but she wouldn’t let him stop.
‘Go on …’ she’d kept saying, when he’d faltered. ‘Tell me everything.’
She knew most of it. She’d been Baphomet’s instrument as much as he, or more. Part of the prophecy. Without her he’d never have returned to Midian to save it, and to fail. The consequence of that return and that failure was the task before him.
Yet she
revolted.
‘You can’t leave me,’ she said. ‘Not after all that’s happened.’
She put her hand on his leg.
‘Remember the cell …’ she murmured.
He looked at her.
‘You told me to forgive myself. And it was good advice. But it doesn’t mean I can turn my back on what happened here. Baphomet; Lylesburg; all of them … I destroyed the only home they ever had.’
‘You didn’t destroy it.’
‘If I’d never come here, it’d still be standing,’ he replied. ‘I have to undo that damage.’
‘So take me with you,’ she said. ‘We’ll go together.’
‘It can’t be that way. You’re alive, Lori. I’m not. You’re still human. I’m not.’
‘You can change that.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘You can make me the same as you. It’s not difficult. One bite and Peloquin changed you forever. So change me.’
‘I can’t.’
‘You won’t you mean.’
She turned the point of Decker’s blade in the dirt.
‘You don’t want to be with me. Simple as that, isn’t it?’ She made a small, tight-lipped smile. ‘Haven’t you got the guts to say it?’
‘When I’ve finished my work …,’ he answered. ‘Maybe then.’
‘Oh, in a hundred years or so?’ she murmured, tears beginning. ‘You’ll come back for me then will you? Dig me up. Kiss me all over. Tell me you would have come sooner, but the days just kept slipping by.’
‘Lori.’
‘Shut up,’ she said. ‘Don’t give me any more excuses. They’re just insults.’ She studied the blade, not him. ‘You’ve got your reasons. I think they stink, but you keep hold of them. You’re going to need something to cling to.’
He didn’t move.
‘What are you waiting for? I’m not going to tell you it’s all right. Just go. I never want to set eyes on you again.’
He stood up. Her anger hurt, but it was easier than tears. He backed away three or four paces, then – understanding that she wouldn’t grant him a smile or even a look – he turned from her.