Cabal

  Boone agreed to study the photographs.

  There was nothing in them that jogged his memory. Much of the detail of the rooms had been washed out by the flash of the camera; what remained was commonplace. The only sight that might have won a response from him – the faces of the victims – had been erased by the killer, hacked beyond recognition; the most expert of morticians would not be able to piece those shattered façades together again. So it was all down to the petty details of where Boone had been on this night or that; with whom; doing what. He had never kept a diary so verifying the facts was difficult, but most of the time – barring the hours he spent with Lori or Decker, none of which seemed to coincide with murder nights – he was alone, and without alibi. By the end of the fourth day the case against him began to look very persuasive.

  ‘Enough,’ he told Decker. ‘We’ve done enough.’

  ‘I’d like to go over it all one more time.’

  ‘What’s the use?’ Boone said. ‘I want to get it all finished with.’

  In the past days – and nights – many of the old symptoms, the signs of the sickness he thought he’d been so close to throwing off forever, had returned. He could sleep for no more than minutes at a time before appalling visions threw him into befuddled wakefulness; he couldn’t eat properly; he was trembling from his gut outwards, every minute of the day. He wanted an end to this; wanted to spill the story and be punished.

  ‘Give me a little more time,’ Decker said. ‘If we go to the police now they’ll take you out of my hands. They probably won’t even allow me access to you. You’ll be alone.’

  ‘I already am,’ Boone replied. Since he’d first seen the photographs he’d cut himself off from every contact, even with Lori, fearing his capacity to do harm.

  ‘I’m a monster,’ he said. ‘We both of us know that. We’ve got all the evidence we need.’

  ‘It’s not just a question of evidence.’

  ‘What then?’

  Decker leaned against the window frame, his bulk a burden to him of late.

  ‘I don’t understand you, Boone,’ he said.

  Boone’s gaze moved off from man to sky. There was a wind from the south-east today; scraps of cloud hurried before it. A good life, Boone thought, to be up there, lighter than air. Here everything was heavy; flesh and guilt cracking your spine.

  ‘I’ve spent four years trying to understand your illness, hoping I could cure it. And I thought I was succeeding. Thought there was a chance it would all come clear …’

  He fell silent, in the pit of his failure. Boone was not so immersed in his own agonies he couldn’t see how profoundly the man suffered. But he could do nothing to mitigate that hurt. He just watched the clouds pass, up there in the light, and knew there were only dark times ahead.

  ‘When the police take you …’ Decker murmured, ‘it won’t just be you who’s alone, Boone. I’ll be alone too. You’ll be somebody else’s patient: some criminal psychologist. I won’t have access to you any longer. That’s why I’m asking … Give me a little more time. Let me understand as much as I can before it’s over between us.’

  He’s talking like a lover, Boone vaguely thought; like what’s between us is his life.

  ‘I know you’re in pain,’ Decker went on. ‘So I’ve got medication for you. Pills, to keep the worst of it at bay. Just till we’ve finished –’

  ‘I don’t trust myself,’ Boone said. ‘I could hurt somebody.’

  ‘You won’t,’ Decker replied, with welcome certainty. ‘The drugs’ll keep you subdued through the night. The rest of the time you’ll be with me. You’ll be safe with me.’

  ‘How much longer do you want?’

  ‘A few days, at the most. That’s not so much to ask, is it? I need to know why we failed.’

  The thought of re-treading that bloodied ground was abhorrent, but there was a debt here to be paid. With Decker’s help he’d had a glimpse of new possibilities; he owed the doctor the chance to snatch something from the ruins of that vision.

  ‘Make it quick,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you,’ Decker said. ‘This means a lot to me.’

  ‘And I’ll need the pills.’

  2

  The pills he had. Decker made sure of that. Pills so strong he wasn’t sure he could have named himself correctly once he’d taken them. Pills that made sleep easy, and waking a visit to a half-life he was happy to escape from again. Pills that, within twenty-four hours, he was addicted to.

  Decker’s word was good. When he asked for more they were supplied, and under their soporific influence they went back to the business of the evidence, as the doctor went over, and over again, the details of Boone’s crimes, in the hope of comprehending them. But nothing came clear. All Boone’s increasingly passive mind could recover from these sessions were slurred images of doors he’d slipped through and stairs he’d climbed in the performance of murder. He was less and less aware of Decker, still fighting to salvage something of worth from his patient’s closed mind. All Boone knew now was sleep, and guilt, and the hope, increasingly cherished, of an end to both.

  Only Lori, or rather memories of her, pricked the drugs’ regime. He could hear her voice sometimes, in his inner ear, clear as a bell, repeating words she’d spoken to him in some casual conversation, which he was dredging up from the past. There was nothing of consequence in these phrases; they were perhaps associated with a look he’d treasured, or a touch. Now he could remember neither look nor touch – the drugs had removed so much of his capacity to imagine. All he was left with were these dislocated lines, distressing him not simply because they were spoken as if by somebody at his shoulder, but because they had no context that he could recall. And worse than either, their sound reminded him of the woman he’d loved and would not see again, unless across a courtroom. A woman to whom he had made a promise he’d broken within weeks of his making it. In his wretchedness, his thoughts barely cogent, that broken promise was as monstrous as the crimes in the photographs. It fitted him for Hell.

  Or death. Better death. He was not entirely sure how long had passed since he’d done the deal with Decker exchanging this stupor for a few more days of investigation, but he was certain he had kept his side of the bargain. He was talked out. There was nothing left to say, nor hear. All that remained was to take himself to the law, and confess his crimes, or to do what the state no longer had the power to do, and kill the monster.

  He didn’t dare alert Decker to this plan; he knew the doctor would do all in his power to prevent his patient’s suicide. So he went on playing the quiescent subject one day more. Then, promising Decker he’d be at the office the following morning, he returned home and prepared to kill himself.

  There was another letter from Lori awaiting him, the fourth since he’d absented himself, demanding to know what was wrong. He read it as best his befuddled thoughts would allow, and attempted a reply, but couldn’t make sense of the words he was trying to write. Instead, pocketing the appeal she’d sent to him, he went out into the dusk to look for death.

  3

  The truck he threw himself in front of was unkind. It knocked the breath from him but not the life. Bruised, and bleeding from scrapes and cuts, he was scooped up and taken to hospital. Later, he’d come to understand how all of this was in the scheme of things, and that he’d been denied his death beneath the truck wheels for a purpose. But sitting in the hospital, waiting in a white room till people worse off than he had been attended to, all he could do was curse his bad fortune. Other lives he could take with terrible ease; his own resisted him. Even in this he was divided against himself.

  But that room – though he didn’t know it when he was ushered in – held a promise its plain walls belied. In it he’d hear a name that would with time make a new man of him. At its call he’d go like the monster he was, by night, and meet with the miraculous.

  That name was Midian.

  It and he had much in common, not least that they shared the power to make promises.
But while his avowals of eternal love had proved hollow in a matter of weeks, Midian made promises – midnight, like his own, deepest midnight – that even death could not break.

  III

  The Rhapsodist

  In the years of his illness, in and out of mental wards and hospices, Boone had met very few fellow sufferers who didn’t cleave to some talisman, some sign or keepsake to stand guard at the gates of their heads and hearts. He’d learned quickly not to despise such charms. Whatever gets you through the night was an axiom he understood from hard experience. Most of these safeguards against chaos were personal to those that wielded them. Trinkets, keys, books and photographs: mementoes of good times treasured as defence against the bad. But some belonged to the collective mind. They were words he would hear more than once: nonsense rhymes whose rhythm kept the pain at bay; names of Gods.

  Amongst them, Midian.

  He’d heard the name of that place spoken maybe half a dozen times by people he’d met on the way through, usually those whose strength was all burned up. When they called on Midian it was as a place of refuge; a place to be carried away to. And more: a place where whatever sins they’d committed – real or imagined – would be forgiven them. Boone didn’t know the origins of this mythology; nor had he ever been interested enough to enquire. He had not been in need of forgiveness, or so he thought. Now he knew better. He had plenty to seek cleansing of; obscenities his mind had kept from him until Decker had brought them to light, which no agency he knew could lift from him. He had joined another class of creature.

  Midian called.

  Locked up in his misery, he’d not been aware that someone else now shared the white room with him until he heard the rasping voice.

  ‘Midian …’

  He thought at first it was another voice from the past, like Lori’s. But when it came again it was not at his shoulder, as hers had been, but from across the room. He opened his eyes, the left lid gummy with blood from a cut on his temple, and looked towards the speaker. Another of the night’s walking wounded, apparently, brought in for mending and left to fend for himself until some patchwork could be done. He was sitting in the corner of the room furthest from the door, on which his wild eyes were fixed as though at any moment his saviour would step into view. It was virtually impossible to guess anything of his age or true appearance: dirt and caked blood concealed both. I must look as bad or worse, Boone thought. He didn’t much mind; people were always staring at him. In their present state he and the man in the corner were the kind folks crossed the street to avoid.

  But whereas he, in his jeans and his scuffed boots and black teeshirt, was just another nobody, there were some signs about the other man that marked him out. The long coat he wore had a monkish severity to it; his grey hair pulled back tight on his scalp, hung to the middle of his back in a plaited pony tail. There was jewellery at his neck, almost hidden by his high collar, and on his thumbs two artificial nails that looked to be silver, curled into hooks.

  Finally, there was that name, rising from the man again.

  ‘… Will you take me?’ he asked softly. ‘Take me to Midian?’

  His eyes had not left the door for an instant. It seemed he was oblivious of Boone, until without warning. he turned his wounded head and spat across the room. The blood-marbled phlegm hit the floor at Boone’s feet.

  ‘Get the fuck out of here!’ he said. ‘You’re keeping them from me. They won’t come while you’re here.’

  Boone was too weary to argue, and too bruised to get up. He let the man rant.

  ‘Get out!’ he said again. ‘They won’t show themselves to the likes of you. Don’t you see that?’

  Boone put his head back and tried to keep the man’s pain from invading him.

  ‘Shit!’ the other said. ‘I’ve missed them. I’ve missed them!’

  He stood up and crossed to the window. Outside there was solid darkness.

  ‘They passed by,’ he murmured, suddenly plaintive. The next moment he was a yard from Boone, grinning through the dirt.

  ‘Got anything for the pain?’ he wanted to know.

  ‘The nurse gave me something,’ Boone replied.

  The man spat again; not at Boone this time, but at the floor.

  ‘Drink, man …’ he said. ‘Have you got a drink?’

  ‘No.’

  The grin evaporated instantly, and the face began to crumple up as tears overtook him. He turned away from Boone, sobbing, his litany beginning again.

  ‘Why won’t they take me? Why won’t they come for me?’

  ‘Maybe they’ll come later,’ Boone said. ‘When I’ve gone.’

  The man looked back at him.

  ‘What do you know?’ he said.

  Very little was the answer; but Boone kept that fact to himself. There were enough fragments of Midian’s mythology in his head to have him eager for more. Wasn’t it a place where those who had run out of refuges could find a home? And wasn’t that his condition now? He had no source of comfort left. Not Decker, not Lori, not even Death. Even though Midian was just another talisman, he wanted to hear its story recited.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said.

  ‘I asked you what you know,’ the other man replied, catching the flesh beneath his unshaven chin with the hook of his left hand.

  ‘I know it takes away the pain,’ Boone replied.

  ‘And?’

  ‘I know it turns nobody away.’

  ‘Not true,’ came the response.

  ‘No?’

  ‘If it turned nobody away you think I wouldn’t be there already? You think it wouldn’t be the biggest city on earth? Of course it turns people away …’

  The man’s tear-brightened eyes were fixed on Boone. Does he realize I know nothing? Boone wondered. It seemed not. The man talked on, content to debate the secret. Or more particularly, his fear of it.

  ‘I don’t go because I may not be worthy,’ he said. ‘And they don’t forgive that easily. They don’t forgive at all. You know what they do … to those who aren’t worthy?’

  Boone was less interested in Midian’s rites of passage than in the man’s certainty that it existed at all. He didn’t speak of Midian as a lunatic’s Shangri-la, but as a place to be found, and entered, and made peace with.

  ‘Do you know how to get there?’ he asked.

  The man looked away. As he broke eye-contact a surge of panic rose in Boone: fearing that the bastard was going to keep the rest of the story to himself.

  ‘I need to know,’ Boone said.

  The other man looked up again.

  ‘I can see that,’ he said, and there was a twist in his voice that suggested the spectacle of Boone’s despair entertained him.

  ‘It’s north-west of Athabasca,’ the man replied.

  ‘Yes?’

  That’s what I heard.’

  ‘That’s empty country,’ Boone replied. ‘You could wander forever, less you’ve got a map.’

  ‘Midian’s on no map,’ the man said. ‘You look east of Peace River; near Shere Neck; north of Dwyer.’

  There was no taint of doubt in this recitation of directions. He believed in Midian’s existence as much as, perhaps more than, the four walls he was bound by.

  ‘What’s your name?’ Boone asked.

  The question seemed to flummox him. It had been a long time since anyone had cared to ask him his name.

  ‘Narcisse,’ he said finally. ‘You?’

  ‘Aaron Boone. Nobody ever calls me Aaron. Only Boone.’

  ‘Aaron,’ said the other. ‘Where d’you hear about Midian?’

  ‘Same place you did,’ Boone said. ‘Same place anyone hears. From others. People in pain.’

  ‘Monsters,’ said Narcisse.

  Boone hadn’t thought of them as such, but perhaps to dispassionate eyes they were; the ranters and the weepers, unable to keep their nightmares under lock and key.

  ‘They’re the only ones welcome in Midian,’ Narcisse explained. ‘If you’re not a beast, y
ou’re a victim. That’s true, isn’t it? You can only be one or the other. That’s why I don’t dare go unescorted. I wait for friends to come for me.’

  ‘People who went already?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Narcisse said. ‘Some of them alive. Some of them who died, and went after.’

  Boone wasn’t certain he was hearing this story correctly.

  ‘Went after?’ he said.

  ‘Don’t you have anything for the pain, man?’ Narcisse said, his tone veering again, this time to the wheedling.

  ‘I’ve got some pills,’ Boone said, remembering the dregs of Decker’s supply. ‘Do you want those?’

  ‘Anything you got.’

  Boone was content to be relieved of them. They’d kept his head in chains, driving him to the point where he didn’t care if he lived or died. Now he did. He had a place to go, where he might find someone at last who understood the horrors he was enduring. He would not need the pills to get to Midian. He’d need strength, and the will to be forgiven. The latter he had. The former his wounded body would have to find.

  ‘Where are they?’ said Narcisse, appetite igniting his features.

  Boone’s leather jacket had been peeled from his back when he’d first been admitted, for a cursory examination of the damage he’d done himself. It hung on the back of a chair, a twice discarded skin. He plunged his hand into the inside pocket but found to his shock that the familiar bottle was not there.

  ‘Someone’s been through my jacket.’

  He rummaged through the rest of the pockets. All of them were empty. Lori’s notes, his wallet, the pills: all gone. It took him seconds only to realize why they’d want evidence of who he was and the consequence of that. He’d attempted suicide; no doubt they thought him prepared to do the same again. In his wallet was Decker’s address. The doctor was probably already on his way, to collect his erring patient and deliver him to the police. Once in the hands of the law he’d never see Midian.