Cabal (14 page)

‘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.

T
his 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.

Her tears had cleared the dust from her eyes now. She had no excuse but cowardice to remain where she stood. She began down the slope. It was a descent of thirty yards, but she’d covered no more than a third of it when a familiar figure staggered into view at the bottom.

The last time she’d seen Boone had been overground, as he emerged to confront Decker. In the seconds before she’d passed out she’d seen him as never before: like a man who’d forgotten pain and defeat entirely. Not so now. He could barely hold himself upright.

She whispered his name, the word gathering weight as it tumbled towards him.

He heard, and raised his head towards her. Even in his worst times, when she’d rocked him and held him to keep the terrors at bay, she’d not seen such grief on his face as she saw now. Tears coming and coming, his features so crumpled with sorrow they were like a baby’s.

She began the descent again, every sound her feet made, every tiny breath she took, multiplied by the acoustics of the slope.

Seeing her approach he left off holding himself up to wave her away, but in doing so lost his only means of support and fell heavily. She picked up her pace, careless now of the noise she was making. Whatever power occupied the pit at the bottom it knew she was there. Most likely it knew her history. In a way she hoped it did. She wasn’t afraid of its judgement. She had loving reason for her trespass; she came weaponless, and alone. If Baphomet was indeed the architect of Midian then it understood vulnerability, and would not act against her. She was within five yards of Boone by now. He was attempting to roll himself onto his back.

‘Wait!’ she said, distressed by his desperation.

He didn’t look her way, however. It was Baphomet his eyes went to, once he got onto his back. Her gaze went with his, into a room with walls of frozen earth, and a floor the same, the latter split from corner to corner, and a fissure opened in it from which a flame column rose four or five times the size of a man. There was bitter cold off it rather than heat, and no reassuring flicker in its heart. Instead its innards churned upon themselves, turning over and over some freight of stuff which she failed to recognize at first, but her appalled stare rapidly interpreted.

There was a
body
in the fire, hacked limb from limb, human enough that she recognized it as flesh, but no more than that. Baphomet’s doing presumably; some torment visited on a transgressor.

Boone said the Baptiser’s name even now, and she readied herself for sight of its face. She had it too, but from
inside
the flame, as the creature there – not dead, but alive; not Midian’s subject, but its creator – rolled its head over in the turmoil of flame and looked her way.

This was
Baphomet
. This diced and divided thing. Seeing its face, she screamed. No story or movie screen, no desolation, no bliss had prepared her for the maker of Midian. Sacred it must be, as anything so extreme must be sacred. A thing beyond things. Beyond love or hatred, or their sum; beyond the beautiful or the monstrous, or
their
sum. Beyond, finally, her mind’s power to comprehend or catalogue. In the instant she looked away from it she had already blanked every fraction of the sight from conscious memory and locked it where no torment or entreaty would ever make her look again.

She hadn’t known her own strength till the frenzy to be out of its presence had her hauling Boone to his feet and dragging him up the slope. He could do little to help her. The time he’d spent in the Baptiser’s presence had driven all but the rags of power from his muscles. It seemed to Lori that it took an age staggering up to the head of the slope, the flame’s icy light throwing their shadows before them like prophecies.