Cabal

THE TRUTH

Of all the rash and midnight promises made in the name of love none, Boone now knew, was more certain to be broken than: I’ll never leave you.

What time didn’t steal from under your nose, circumstance did. It was useless to hope otherwise; useless to dream that the world somehow meant you good. Everything of value, everything you clung to for your sanity would rot or be snatched in the long run, and the abyss would gape beneath you, as it gaped for Boone now, and suddenly, without so much as a breath of explanation, you were gone. Gone to hell or worse, professions of love and all.

His outlook hadn’t always been so pessimistic. There’d been a time—not all that long ago—when he’d felt the burden of his mental anguish lifting. There’d been fewer psychotic episodes, fewer days when he felt like slitting his wrists rather than enduring the hours till his next medication. There’d seemed to be a chance for happiness.

It was that prospect that had won the declaration of love from him, that “I’ll never leave you,” whispered in Lori’s ear as they lay in the narrow bed he’d never dared hope would hold two. The words had not come in the throes of high passion. Their love life, like so much else between them, was fraught with problems. But where other women had given up on him, unforgiving of his failure, she’d persevered: told him there was plenty of time to get it right, all the time in the world. I’m with you for as long as you want me to be, patience had seemed to say.

Nobody had ever offered such a commitment, and he wanted to offer one in return. Those words—“I’ll never leave you”—were it.

The memory of them, and of her skin almost luminous in the murk of his room, and of the sound of breathing when she finally fell asleep beside him—all of it still had the power to catch his heart, and squeeze it till it hurt.

He longed to be free of both the memory and words, now that circumstance had taken any hope their fulfilment out of his hands. But they wouldn’t be forgotten. They lingered on to torment him with frailty. His meagre comfort was that she—knowing what she must now know about him—would working to erase her memory; and that with time she’d succeed. He only hoped she’d understand his ignorance of himself when he’d voiced that promise. He’d never have risked this pain if he’d doubted health was finally within his grasp.

Dream on!

Decker had brought an abrupt end to those delusions, the day he’d locked the office door, drawn the blinds on the Alberta spring sunshine, and said, in a voice barely louder than a whisper:

“Boone, I think we’re in terrible trouble, you and I.”

He was trembling, Boone saw, a fact not easily concealed in a body so big. Decker had the physique of a man who sweated out the day’s angst in a gym. Even his tailored suits, always charcoal, couldn’t tame his bulk. It had made Boone edgy at the start of their work together; he’d felt intimidated by the doctor’s physical and mental authority. Now it was the fallibility of that strength he feared. Decker was a Rock; he was Reason; he was Calm. This anxiety ran counter to all he knew about the man.

“What’s wrong?” Boone asked.

“Sit, will you? Sit and I’ll tell you.”

Boone did as he was told. In this office, Decker was lord. The doctor leaned back in the leather chair and inhaled through his nose, his mouth sealed in a downward curve.

“Tell me…” Boone said.

“Where to start.”

“Anywhere.”

“I thought you were getting better,” Decker said. “I really did. We both did.”

“I still am,” Boone said.

Decker made a small shake of his head. He was a man of considerable intellect, but little of it showed on his tightly packed features, except perhaps in his eyes, which at the moment were not watching the patient, but were fixed on the table between them.

“You’ve started to talk in your sessions,” Decker said, “about crimes you think you’ve committed. Do you remember any of that?”

“You know I don’t.” The trances Decker put him in were too profound. “I only remember when you play the tape back.”

“I won’t be playing any of these,” Decker said. “I wiped them.”

“Why?”

“Because… I’m afraid, Boone. For you.” He paused. “Maybe for both of us.”

The crack in the Rock was opening and there was nothing Decker could do to conceal it.

“What are these crimes?” Boone asked, his words tentative.

“Murders. You talk about them obsessively. At first I thought they were dream crimes. You always had a violent streak in you.”

“And now?”

“Now I’m afraid you may have actually committed them.”

There was a long silence, while Boone studied Decker, more in puzzlement than anger. The blinds had not been pulled all the way down. A slice of sunlight fell across him, and on to the table between them. On the glass surface was a bottle, of still water, two tumblers, and a large envelope. Decker leaned forward and picked it up.

“What I’m doing now is probably a crime in itself,” he told Boone. “Patient confidentiality is one thing; protecting a killer is another. But part of me is still hoping to God it isn’t true. I want to believe I’ve succeeded. We’ve succeeded. Together. I want to believe you’re well.”

“I am well.”

In lieu of reply Decker tore open the envelope.

“I’d like you to look at these for me,” he said, sliding his hand inside and bringing a sheaf of photographs out to meet the light.

“I warn you, they’re not pleasant.”

He laid them on his reflection, turned for Boone’s perusal. His warning had been well advised. The picture on the top of the pile was like a physical assault. Faced with it a fear rose in him he’d not felt since being in Decker’s care: that the image might possess him. He’d built walls against that superstition, brick by brick, but they shook now, and threatened to fall.

“It’s just a picture.”

“That’s right,” Decker replied. “It’s just a picture. What do you see?”

“A dead man.”

“A murdered man.”

“Yes. A murdered man.”

Not simply murdered: butchered. The life slashed from him in a fury of slices and stabs, his blood flung on the blade that had taken out his neck, taken off his face, on to the wall behind him. He wore only his shorts, so the wounds on his body could be easily counted, despite the blood. Boone did just that now, to keep the horror from overcoming him. Even here, in this room where the doctor had chiselled another self from the block of his patient’s condition, Boone had never choked on terror as he choked now. He tasted his breakfast in the back of his throat, or the meal the night before, rising from his bowels against nature. Shit in his mouth, like the dirt of this deed.

Count the wounds, he told himself, pretend they’re beads on an abacus. Three, four, five in the abdomen and chest: one in particular ragged, more like a tear than a wound, gaping so wide the man’s innards poked out. On the shoulder, two more. And then the face, unmade with cuts. So many their numbers could not be calculated, even by the most detached of observers. They left the victim beyond recognition: eyes dug out, lips slit off, nose in ribbons.

“Enough?” Decker said, as if the question needed asking.

“Yes.”

“There’s a lot more to see.”

He uncovered the second, laying the first beside the pile. This one was of a woman, sprawled on a sofa, her upper body and her lower twisted in a fashion life would have forbidden. Though she was presumably not a relation of the first victim, the butcher had created a vile resemblance. Here was the same liplessness, the same eyelessness. Born from different parents, they were siblings in death, destroyed by the same hand.

And am I their father? Boone found himself thinking.

“No,” was his gut’s response. “I didn’t do this.”

But two things prevented him from voicing his denial. First, he knew that Decker would not be endangering his patient’s equilibrium this way unless he had good reason for it. Second, denial was valueless when both of them knew how easily Boone’s mind had deceived itself in the past. If he was responsible for these atrocities there was no certainty he’d know it.

Instead he kept his silence, not daring to look up at Decker for fear he’d see the Rock shattered.

“Another?” Decker said.

“If we must.”

“We must.”

He uncovered a third photograph, and a fourth, laying the pictures out on the table like cards at Tarot reading, except that every one was Death. In a kitchen, lying at the open door of the refrigerator, the bedroom, beside the lamp and the alarm. At the top of the stairs; at the window. The victims were every age and colour; men, women and children. Whatever fiend was responsible he cared to make no distinction. He simply erased life wherever he found it. Not quickly, not efficiently. The rooms in which these people had died bore plain testament to how the killer, in his humour, had toyed with them. Furniture had been overturned as they stumbled to avoid the coup de grace, their blood prints left on walls and paintwork. One had lost his fingers to the blade, snatching at it? perhaps, most had lost their eyes. But none had escaped, however brave their resistance. They’d all fallen at last, tangled in their underwear, or seeking: refuge behind a curtain. Fallen sobbing; fallen retching.

There were eleven photographs in all. Every one was different: rooms large and small, victims naked and dressed. But each also the same: all pictures of a madness performed, taken with the actor already departed.

God almighty, was he that man?

Not having an answer for himself, he asked the question of the Rock, speaking without looking up from the shining cards.

“Did I do this?” he said.

He heard Decker sigh, but there was no answer forthcoming, so he chanced a glance at his accuser. As the photographs had been laid out before him he’d felt the man’s scrutiny like a crawling ache in his scalp. But now he once more found that gaze averted.

“Please tell me,” he said. “Did I do this?”

Decker wiped the moist purses of skin beneath his grey eyes. He was not trembling any longer.

“I hope not,” he said.

The response seemed ludicrously mild. This was not some minor infringement of the law they were debating. It was death times eleven; and how many more might there be; out of sight, out of mind?

“Tell me what I talked about,” he said. “Tell me the words.”

“It was ramblings mostly.”

“So what makes you think I’m responsible? You must have reasons.”

“It took time,” Decker said, “for me to piece the whole thing together.” He looked down at the mortuary on the table, aligning a photograph that was a little askew with his middle finger.

“I have to make a quarterly report on our progress. You know that. So I play all the tapes of our previous sessions sequentially, to get some sense of how we’re doing…” He spoke slowly; wearily. “… and I noticed the same phrases coming up in your responses. Buried most of the time, in other material, but there. It was as if you were confessing to something; but something so abhorrent to you even in a trance state you couldn’t quite bring yourself to say it. Instead it was coming out in this… code.”

Boone knew codes. He’d heard them everywhere during the bad times. Messages from the imagined enemy in the noise between stations on the radio; or in the murmur of traffic before dawn. That he might have learned the art himself came as no surprise.

“I made a few casual enquiries,” Decker continued, “amongst police officers I’ve treated. Nothing specific. And they told me about the killings. I’d heard some of the details, of course, from the press. Seems they’ve been going on for two and a half years. Several here in Calgary; the rest within an hour’s drive. The work of one man.”

“I don’t know,” Decker said, finally looking up Boone. “If I was certain, I’d have reported it all.”

“But you’re not.”

“I don’t want to believe this anymore than you do. It doesn’t cover me in glory if this turns out to be true. There was anger in him, not well concealed. That’s why I waited. Hoping you’d be with me when the next one happened.”

“You mean some of these people died while you knew?”

“Yes,” Decker said flatly.

“Jesus!”

The thought propelled Boone from the chair, his leg catching the table. The murder scenes flew. “Keep your voice down,” Decker demanded.

“People died, and you waited?”

“I took that risk for you, Boone. You’ll respect that.”

Boone turned from the man. There was a chill of sweat on his spine.

“Sit down,” said Decker. “Please sit down and tell me what these photographs mean to you.”

Involuntarily Boone had put his hand over the lower half of his face. He knew from Decker’s instruction what that particular piece of body language signified. His mind was using his body to muffle some disclosure; or silence it completely.

“Boone. I need answers.”

“They mean nothing,” Boone said, not turning.

“At all?”

“At all.”

“Look at them again.”

“No,” Boone insisted. “I can’t.”

He heard the doctor inhale, and half expected a demand that he face the horrors afresh. But instead Decker’s tone was placatory.

“It’s all right, Aaron,” he said. “It’s all right. I’ll put them away.”

Boone pressed the heels of his hands against his closed eyes. His sockets were hot, and wet.

“They’re gone,” Aaron Decker said.

“No, they’re not.”

They were with him still, perfectly remembered. Eleven rooms and eleven bodies, fixed in his mind’s eye, beyond exorcism. The wall Decker had taken five years to build had been brought down in as many minutes, and by its architect. Boone was at the mercy of his madness again. He heard it whine in his head, coming from eleven slit windpipes from eleven punctured bellies. Breath and bowel gas, singing the old mad songs.

Why had his defences tumbled so easily, after so much labour? His eyes knew the answer, spilling tears to admit what his tongue couldn’t. He was guilty. Why else? Hands he was even now wiping dry on his trousers had tortured and slaughtered. If he pretended otherwise he’d only tempt them to further crime. Better that he confessed, though he remembered nothing, than offer them another unguarded moment. He turned and faced Decker. The photographs had been gathered up and laid face down on the table.

“You remember something?” the doctor said, reading the change on Boone’s face.

“Yes,” he replied.

“What?”

“I did it,” Boone said simply. “I did it all.”

ACADEMY

Decker was the most benign prosecutor any accused man could ask for. The hours he spent with Boone after that first day were filled with carefully plied questions as murder by murder they examined together the evidence for Boone’s secret life. Despite the patient’s insistence that the crimes were his, Decker counselled caution. Admissions of culpability were not hard evidence. They had to be certain that confession wasn’t simply Boone’s self-destructive tendencies at work, admitting to the crime out of hunger for the punishment.

Boone was in no position to argue. Decker knew him better than he knew himself. Nor had he forgotten Decker’s observation that if the worst was proved true, the doctor’s reputation as a healer would be thrown to the dogs: they could neither of them afford to be wrong. The only way to be sure was to run through the details of the killings dates, names and locations in the hope that Boone would be prompted into remembering. Or else that they’d discover a killing that had occurred when he was indisputably in the company of others.

The only part of the process Boone balked at was re-examining the photographs. He resisted Decker’s gentle pressure for forty-eight hours, only conceding when the gentility faltered and Decker rounded on him, accusing him of cowardice and deceit. Was all this just a game, Decker demanded; an exercise in self-mortification that would end with them both none the wiser? If so, Boone could get the hell out of his office now and bleed on somebody else’s time.

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 by the flash of the camera; what remained was commonplace. The only sight that might have won response from him the faces of the victims been erased by the killer, hacked beyond recognition the most expert of morticians would not be able piece those shattered facades 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, 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 finished with.”

In the past days and nights many of the 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, 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.”

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 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 write. Instead, pocketing the appeal she’d sent to him he went out into the dusk to look for death.

The truck he threw himself in front of was unkind, knocked the breath from him but not the life. Bruises and bleeding from scrapes and cuts, he was scooped and taken to hospital. Later, he’d come to understand how all of this was in the scheme of things, and he’d been denied his death beneath the truck wheel for a purpose. But sitting in the hospital, waiting in the white room till people worse off than he had 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.

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 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 past, like Lori’s. But when it came again it was not at his shoulder, as hers had been, but from across room. He opened his eyes, the left lid gummy with blood from a cut on his temple, and looked toward the speaker. Another of the night’s walking wound 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 door, on which his wild eyes were fixed as though 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 what 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 and black tee shirt was just another nobody, there we 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 a 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. He seemed not. The man talked on, content to debate theft 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, you’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 dregs of Decker’s supply. “Do you want those?”

“Anything you got.”

Boone was content to be relieved of them. The 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 need the pills to get to Midian. He’d need strength, 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 off 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.

“You said there were pills!” Narcisse yelled.

“They’ve been taken!”

Narcisse snatched the jacket from Boone’s hands, and began to tear at it.

“Where?” he yelled. “Where?”

His face was once more crumpling up as he realized he was not going to get a fix of peace. He dropped the jacket and backed away from Boone, his tears beginning again, but sliding down his face to meet a broad smile.

“I know what you’re doing,” he said, pointing at Boone. Laughter and sobs were coming in equal measure. “Midian sent you. To see if I’m worthy. You came to see if I was one of you or not!” He offered Boone no chance to contradict, his elation spiralling into hysteria.

“I’m sitting here praying for someone to come, begging—and you’re here all the time, watching me shit myself. Watching me shit!” He laughed hard. Then, deadly serious: “I never doubted. Never once. I always knew somebody’d come. But I was expecting a face I recognized. Marvin maybe. I should have known they’d send someone new. Stands to reason. And you saw, right? You heard. I’m not ashamed. They never made me ashamed. You ask anyone. They tried. Over and over. They got in my fucking head and tried to take me apart, tried to take the Wild Ones out of me. But I held on. I knew you’d come sooner or later, and I wanted to be ready. That’s why I wear these.”

He thrust his thumbs up in front of his face. “So I could show you.”

He turned his head to right and left.

“Want to see?” he said.

He needed no reply. His hands were already up to either side of his face, the hooks touching the skin at the base of each ear. Boone watched, words of denial or appeal redundant. This was a moment Narcisse had rehearsed countless times; he was not about to be denied it. There was no sound as the hooks, razor sharp, slit his skin, but blood began to flow instantly, down his neck and arms. The expression on his face didn’t change, it merely intensified: a mask in which comic muse and tragic were united. Then, fingers spread to either side of his face, he steadily drew the razor hooks down the line of his jaw. He had surgeon’s precision. The wounds opened with symmetry, until the twin hooks met at his chin.

Only then did he drop one hand to his side, blood dripping from hook and wrist, the other moving at his face to seek the flap of skin his work had opened.

“You want to see?” he said again.

Boone murmured:

“Don’t.”

It went unheard. With a sharp, upward jerk Narcisse detached the mask of skin from the muscle beneath and began to tear, uncovering his true face.

From behind him, Boone heard somebody scream. The door had been opened, and one of the nursing staff stood on the threshold. He saw from the corner of his eye: her face whiter than her uniform, her mouth open wide; and beyond her the corridor, and freedom. But he couldn’t bring himself to look away from Narcisse while the blood filling the air between them kept revelation from view. He wanted to see the man’s secret face: the Wild One beneath the skin that made him fit for Midian’s ease. The red rain was dispersing. The air began to clear. He saw the face now a little but couldn’t make sense of its complexity. Was that, beast’s anatomy that knotted up and snarled in front of him, or human tissue agonized by self-mutilation? A moment more, and he’d know. Then, someone had hold of him, seizing his arms; and dragging him towards the door. He glimpsed Narcisse raising the weapons of his hands to keep his saviours at bay, then the uniforms were upon him, and he was eclipsed. In the rush of the moment Boone took his chance. He pushed the nurse from him, snatched up his leather jacket, and ran for the unguarded door. His bruised body was not prepared for violent action. He stumbled, nausea and darting pains in his bruised limbs vying for the honour of bringing him to his knees, but the sight of Narcisse surrounded and tethered was enough to give him strength. He was away down the hall before anyone had a chance to come after him.

As he headed for the door to the night he heard Narcisse’s voice raised in protest; a howl of rage that was pitifully human.

NECROPOLIS

Though the distance from Calgary to Athabasca has little more than three hundred miles the journey took a traveller to the borders of another world. North of here the highways were few, and the inhabitants fewer still, as the rich prairie lands of the province steadily gave way to forest, marshland and wilderness. It also marked the limits of Boone’s experience. A short stint as a truck driver, in his early twenties, had taken him as far as Bonnyville to the southeast, Barrhead to the southwest and Athabasca itself. But the territory beyond was unknown to him except as names on a map. Or more correctly, as an absence of names. There were great stretches of land here that were dotted only with small farming settlements; one of which bore the name Narcisse had used: Shere Neck.

The map which carried this information he found, along with enough change to buy himself a bottle of brandy, in five minutes of theft on the outskirts of Calgary. He rifled three vehicles left in an underground parking facility and was away, mapped and monied, before the source of the car alarms had been traced by security.

The rain washed his face, his bloodied tee-shirt he dumped, happy to have his beloved jacket next to his skin. Then he found himself a ride to Edmonton, and another which took him through Athabasca to Prairie. It was easy.

Easy? To go in search of a place he’d only heard rumours of amongst lunatics? Perhaps not easy. But it was necessary; even inevitable. From the moment the truck he’d chosen to die beneath had cast him aside, journey had been beckoning. Perhaps from long before that, only he’d never seen the invitation. The sense he had of its tightness might almost have made a fatalist of him. If Midian existed, and was willing to embrace him, then he was travelling to a place where he would finally find some self-comprehension and peace. If it existed only as a talisman for the frightened and the lost then that too was right, and he would meet whatever extinction awaited him searching for nowhere. Better that than the pills, better that than Decker’s fruitless pursuit of rhymes and reasons.

The doctor’s quest to root out the monster in Boone had been bound to fail. That much was clear as skies overhead. Boone the man and Boone the monster could not be divided. They were one, they travelled the same road in the same mind and body. And ever lay at the end of that road, death or glory, would be the fate of both.

East of Peace River, Narcisse had said, near the town of Shere Neck; north of Dwyer.

He had to sleep rough in High Prairie, until the following morning when he found a ride to Peace River. The driver was a woman in her late fifties, proud of the region she’d known since childhood and happy to give him a quick geography lesson. He made no mention of Midian, but Dwyer and Shere Neck she knew the latter a town of five thousand souls away to the east of Highway 67. He’d have saved himself a good two hundred miles if he’d not travelled as far as High Prairie, he was told, but taken himself north earlier. No matter, she said; she knew a place in Peace River where the farmers stopped off to eat before heading back to their homesteads. He’d find a ride there, to take him where he wanted to go. Got people there? she asked. He said he had.

It was close to dusk by the time the last of his rides dropped him a mile or so shy of Dwyer. He watched the truck take a gravel road off into the deepening blue, then began to walk the short distance to the town. A night of sleeping rough, and travelling in farm vehicles on roads that had seen better days, had taken its toll on his already battered system. It took him an hour to come within sight of the outskirts of Dwyer, by which time night had fallen completely. Fate was once again on his side. Without the darkness he might not have seen the lights flashing ahead; not in welcome but in warning.

The police were here before him; three or four cars he judged. It was possible they were in pursuit of someone else entirely but he doubted it. More likely Narcisse, lost to himself, had told the law what he’d told Boone. In which case this was a reception committee. They were probably already searching for him, house to house. And if here, in Shere Neck too. He was expected.

Thankful for the cover of the night, he made his way off the road and into the middle of a rape seed field, where he could lie and think through his next move. There was certainly no wisdom in trying to go into Dwyer. Better he set off for Midian now, putting hunger and weariness aside and trusting to the stars and his instinct to give him directions.

He got up, smelling of earth, and headed off in what he judged to be a northerly direction. He knew very well he might miss his destination by miles with such rough bearings to travel by, or just as easily fail to see it in the darkness. No matter, he had no other choice which was a kind of comfort to him.

In his five minute spree as thief he’d not found watch to steal, so the only sense he had of time passing was the slow progression of the constellations overhead. The air became cold, then bitter, but he kept his painful pace, avoiding the roads wherever possible though they would have been easier to walk than ploughed and seeded ground. This caution proved well-founded at one point when two police vehicles, book-ending a black limousine, slid all but silently down the road he had a minute ago crossed. He had no evidence whatsoever for the feeling that seized him as they passed by, but he sensed more than strongly that the limo’s passenger was Decker, the good doctor, still in pursuit of understanding.

Then, Midian.

Out of nowhere, Midian. One moment the night ahead was featureless darkness, the next there was cluster of buildings on the horizon, their painted walls glimmering grey-blue in the starlight. Boone stood several minutes and studied the scene. There wasn’t light burning in any window, or on any porch. By now it was surely well after midnight, and the men at women of the town, with work to rise to the following morning, would be in bed. But not one single light! That struck him as strange. Small Midian might be forgotten by map-makers and signpost writers alike but did it not lay claim to one insomniac?; or a child who needed the comfort of a lamp burning through the night hours? More probably they were in wait for him—Decker and the law concealed in the shadows until he was foolish enough to step into the trap. The simplest solution would be to turn tail and leave them to their vigil, but he had little enough energy left. If he retreated now how long would he have to wait before attempting a return, every hour making recognition and arrest more likely?

He decided to skirt the edge of the town and get some sense of the lie of the land. If he could find no evidence of a police presence then he’d enter, and take the consequences. He hadn’t come all this way to turn back.

Midian revealed nothing of itself as he moved around its south eastern flank, except perhaps its emptiness. Not only could he see no sign of police vehicles in the streets, or secreted between the houses, he could see no automobile of any kind: no truck, no farm vehicle. He began to wonder if the town was one of those religious communities he’d read of, whose dogmas denied them electricity or the combustion engine.

But as he climbed toward the spine of a small hill on the summit of which Midian stood, a second and plainer explanation occurred. There was nobody in Midian. The thought stopped him in his tracks. He stared across at the houses, searching for some evidence of decay, but he could see none. The roofs were intact, as far as he could make out, there were no buildings that appeared on the verge of collapse. Yet, with the night so quiet he could hear the whoosh of falling stars overhead, he could hear nothing from the town. If somebody in Midian had moaned in their sleep the night would have brought the sound his way, but there was only silence.

Midian was a ghost town.

Never in his life had he felt such desolation, stood like a dog returned home to find its master gone, not knowing what his life now meant or would ever mean again.

It took him several minutes to uproot himself continue his circuit of the town. Twenty yards on from where he’d stood, however, the height of the hill gave him sight of a scene more mysterious even than vacant Midian.

On the far side of the town lay a cemetery, vantage point gave him an uninterrupted view despite the high walls that bounded the place. Presumably it had been built to serve the entire region, for was massively larger than a town Midian’s size could ever have required. Many of the mausoleums were impressive in scale, that much was clear even at a distance, the layout of avenues, trees and tombs lent the cemetery the appearance of a small city.

Boone began down the slope of the hill towards his route still taking him well clear of the town itself. After the adrenalin rush of finding and approaching Midian he felt his reserves of strength failing fast; pain and exhaustion that expectation had numbed now returned with a vengeance. It could not be long, he knew, before his muscles gave out completely and collapsed. Perhaps behind the cemetery’s walls he’d be able to find a niche to conceal himself from his pursuers and rest his bones.

There were two means of access. A small gate in the side wall, and large double gates that faced towards the town. He chose the former. It was latched but not locked. He gently pushed it open, and stepped inside. The impression he’d had from the hill, of the cemetery as city, was here confirmed, the mausoleums rising house-high around him. Their scale, and, now that he could study them close up, their elaboration, puzzled him. What great families had occupied the town or it surrounds, moneyed enough to bury their dead in such splendour? The small communities of the prairie clung to the land as their sustenance, but it seldom made them rich; and on the few occasions when it did, with oil or gold, never in such numbers. Yet here were magnificent tombs, avenue upon avenue of them, built in all manner of styles from the classical to the baroque, and marked though he was not certain his fatigued senses were telling him the truth with motifs from warring theologies.

It was beyond him. He needed sleep. The tombs had been standing a century or more; the puzzle would still be there at dawn.

He found himself a bed out of sight between two graves and laid his head down. The spring growth of grass smelt sweet. He’d slept on far worse pillows, and would again.

A DIFFERENT APE

The sound of an animal woke him, its growls finding their way into floating dreams and calling him down to earth. He opened his eyes, and sat up. He couldn’t see the dog, but he heard it still. Was it behind him? The proximity of the tombs threw echoes back and forth. Very slowly, he turned to look over his shoulder. The darkness was deep, but did not quite conceal a large beast, its species impossible to read. There was no misinterpreting the threat from its throat however. It didn’t like his scrutiny, to judge by the tenor of its growls.

“Hey, boy…” he said softly, “it’s OK.”

Ligaments creaking, he started to stand up, knowing that if he stayed on the ground the animal had easy access to his throat. His limbs had stiffened lying on the cold ground; he moved like a geriatric. Perhaps it was this that kept the animal from attacking, for it simply watched him, the crescents of the whites of its eyes the only detail he could make out widening as its gaze followed him into a standing position. Once on his feet he turned to face the creature, which began to move towards him. There was something in its advance that made him think it was wounded. He could hear it dragging one of its limbs behind it; its head low, its stride ragged.

He had words of comfort on his lips when an arm hooked about his neck, taking breath and words away.

“Move and I gut you.”

With the threat a second arm slid around his body, the fingers digging into his belly with such force had no doubt the man would make the threat good with his bare hand.

Boone took a shallow breath. Even that minute motion brought a tightening of the death grip at knee and abdomen. He felt blood run down his belly into his jeans.

“Who the fuck are you?” the voice demanded.

He was a bad liar, the truth was safer.

“My name’s Boone. I came here… I came to find Midian.”

Did the hold on his belly relax a little when he named his purpose?

“Why?” a second voice now demanded. It took Boone no more than a heart beat to realize that the voice ha come from the shadows ahead of him, where the wounded beast stood. Indeed from the beast.

“My friend asked you a question,” said the voice at his ear. “Answer him.”

Boone, disoriented by the attack, fixed his gaze again on whatever occupied the shadows and found himself doubting his eyes. The head of his questioner was not solid; it seemed almost to be inhaling its redundant features, their substance darkening and flowing through socket and nostrils and mouth back into itself.

All thought of his jeopardy disappeared, what seize him now was elation. Narcisse had not lied. Here was the transforming truth of that.

“I came to be amongst you,” he said, answering the miracle’s question. “I came because I belong here.”

A question emerged from the soft laughter behind him.

“What does he look like, Peloquin?”

The thing had drunk its beast-face down. There were human features beneath, set on a body more reptile! than mammal. That limb he dragged behind him was a tail; his wounded lope the gait of a low-slung lizard.

That too was under review, as the tremor of change moved down its jutting spine.

“He looks like a Natural,” Peloquin replied. “Not that that means much.”

Why could his attacker not see for himself, Boone wondered.

He glanced down at the hand on his belly. It had six fingers, tipped not with nails but with claws, now buried half an inch in his muscle.

“Don’t kill me,” he said. “I’ve come a long way to be here.”

“Hear that, Jackie?” said Peloquin, thrusting from the ground with its four legs to stand upright in front of Boone. His eyes, now level with Boone’s, were bright blue. His breath was as hot as the blast from an open furnace.

“What kind of beast are you, then?” he wanted to know. The transformation was all but finished. The man beneath the monster was nothing remarkable. Forty, lean and sallow skinned.

“We should take him below,” said Jackie. “Lylesburg will want to see him.”

“Probably,” said Peloquin. “But I think we’d be wasting his time. This is a Natural, Jackie. I can smell ‘em.”

“I’ve spilled blood…” Boone murmured. “Killed eleven people.”

The blue eyes perused him. There was humour in them.

“I don’t think so,” Peloquin said.

“It’s not up to us,” Jackie put in. “You can’t judge him.”

“I’ve got eyes in my head, haven’t I?” said Peloquin. “I know a clean man when I see one.” He wagged his finger at Boone. “You’re not Nightbreed,” he said. “You’re meat. That’s what you are. Meat for the beast.”

The humour drained from his expression as he spoke, and hunger replaced it.

“We can’t do this,” the other creature protested.

“Who’ll know?” said Peloquin. “Who’ll ever know?”

“We’re breaking the law.”

Peloquin seemed indifferent to that. He bared teeth, dark smoke oozing from the gaps and rising over his face. Boone knew what was coming next. The man was breathing out what he’d moments inhaled: his lizard self. The proportions of his head were already altering subtly, as though his skull were dismantling and re-organizing himself beneath the hood of his flesh.

“You can’t kill me!” he said. “I belong with you.”

Was there a denial out of the smoke in front of him. If so it was lost in translation. There was to be no further debate. The beast intended to eat him. He felt a sharp pain in his belly, and glanced down to see the clawed hand detach itself from his flesh. The hold at his neck slipped, and the creature behind him said:

“Go.”

He needed no persuasion. Before Peloquin could complete his reconstruction Boone slid from Jackie’s embrace and ran. Any sense of direction he might have had was forfeited in the desperation of the moment, desperation fuelled by a roar of fury from the hungry beast, and the sound almost instant, it seemed of pursuit.

The necropolis was a maze. He ran blindly, ducking to right and left wherever an opening offered itself, but he didn’t need to look over his shoulder to know that the devourer was closing on him. He heard its accusation in his head as he ran: You’re not Nightbreed. You’re meat. Meat for the beast.

The words were an agony profounder than the ache in his legs or his lungs. Even here, amongst the monsters of Midian he did not belong. And if not here, where? He was running, as prey had always run when the hungry were on their heels, but it was a race he couldn’t win.

He stopped. He turned.

Peloquin was five or six yards behind him, his body still human, naked and vulnerable, but the head entirely bestial, the mouth wide and ringed with teeth like thorns. He too stopped running, perhaps expecting Boone to draw a weapon. When none was forthcoming, he raised his arms towards his victim. Behind him, Jackie stumbled into view, and Boone had his first glimpse of the man. Or was it men? There were two faces on his lumpen head, the features of both utterly distorted; eyes dislodged so they looked everywhere but ahead, mouths collided into a single gash, noses slits without bones. It was the face of a freak-show foetus.

Jackie tried one last appeal, but Peloquin’s outstretched arms were already transforming from fingertip to elbow, their delicacy giving way to formidable power.

Before the muscle was fixed he came at Boone, leaping to bring his victim down. Boone fell before him. It was too late now to regret his passivity. He felt the claws tear at his jacket to bare the good flesh of his chest. Peloquin raised his head and grinned, an expression this mouth was not made for; then he bit. The teeth were not long, but many. They hurt less than Boone had expected until Peloquin pulled back, tearing away a mouthful of muscle, taking skin and nipple with it.

The pain shocked Boone from resignation; he began to thrash beneath Peloquin’s weight. But the beast spat the morsel from its maw and came back for better, exhaling the smell of blood in its prey’s face. There was reason for the exhalation; on its next breath it would suck Boone’s heart and lungs from his chest. He cried out for help, and it came. Before the fatal breath could be drawn Jackie seized hold of Peloquin and dragged him from his sustenance. Boone felt the weight of the creature lifted, and through the blur of agony saw his champion wrestling with Peloquin, thrashing limbs intertwined. He didn’t wait to el the victor. Pressing his palm to the wound on his chest he got to his feet.

There was no safety for him here; Peloquin surely not the only occupant with a taste for human meat. He could feel others watching him as he staggered through the necropolis, waiting for him to fall and fall so they could take him with impunity.

Yet his system, traumatized as it was, didn’t fail. There was a vigour in his muscles he’d not felt he’d done violence to himself, a thought that repulsed him now as it had never before. Even the wound throbbing beneath his hand, had its life, and was celebrating it. The pain had gone, replaced not by numbness but by a sensitivity that was almost erotically tempting Boone to reach into his chest and stroke his heart. Entertained by such nonsenses he let instinct guide his feet and it brought him to the double gate. The latch defeated his blood-slicked hands so he climbed, scaling the gates with an ease that brought laughter to his throat. Then he was off up toward Midian, running not for fear of pursuit but for pleasure his limbs took in usage, and his senses in speed.

FEET OF CLAY

The town was indeed empty, as he’d known it must be. Though the houses had seemed in good shape at half a mile’s distance, closer scrutiny showed them to be much the worse for being left unoccupied for the cycle of seasons. Though the feeling of well-being still suffused him, he feared that the loss of blood would undo him in time. He needed something to bind his wound, however primitive. In search of a length of curtaining, or a piece of forsaken bed linen he opened the door of one of the houses and plunged into the darkness within.

He hadn’t been aware, until he was inside, how strangely attenuated his senses had become. His eyes pierced the gloom readily, discovering the pitiful debris the sometime tenants had left behind, all dusted by the dry earth years of prairie had borne in through broken window and the ill-fitting door. There was cloth to be found; a length of damp stained linen that he tore between teeth and right hand into strips while keeping his left upon the wound.

He was in that process when he heard the creak of boards on the stoop. He let the bandaging drop from his teeth. The door stood open. On the threshold a silhouetted man, whose name Boone knew though the face was all darkness. It was Decker’s cologne he smelt; Decker’s heartbeat he heard; Decker’s sweat he tasted in the air between them.

“So,” said the doctor. “Here you are.”

There were forces mustering in the starlit street.

With ears preternaturally sharp Boone caught sound of nervous whispers, and of wind-passed churning hotels, and of weapons cocked ready to hunt the lunatic down should he try to slip them.

“How did you find me?” he said.

“Narcisse, was it?” Decker said. “Your friend at hospital?”

“Is he dead?”

“I’m afraid so. He died fighting.”

Decker took a step into the house.

“You’re hurt,” he said. “What did you do to yourself?”

Something prevented Boone from replying. Was that the mysteries of Midian were so bizarre he’d be believed? Or that their nature was not Decker’s business? Not the latter surely. Decker’s commitment to comprehending the monstrous could not be doubt. Who better then to share the revelation with? Yet he hesitated.

“Tell me,” Decker said again. “How did you get your wound?”

“Later,” said Boone.

“There’ll be no later. I think you know that.”

“I’ll survive,” Boone said. “This isn’t as bad as it looks. At least it doesn’t feel bad.”

“I don’t mean the wound. I mean the police. They’ll be waiting for you.”

“I know.”

“And you’re not going to come quietly, are you?”

Boone was no longer sure. Decker’s voice reminded him so much of being safe, he almost believed it would be possible again, if the doctor wanted to make it so.

But there was no talk of safety from Decker now. Only of death.

“You’re a multiple murderer, Boone. Desperate. Dangerous. It was tough persuading them to let me see you.”

“I’m glad you did.”

“I’m glad too,” Decker replied. “I wanted a chance to say goodbye.”

“Why does it have to be this way?”

“You know why.”

He didn’t; not really. What he did know, more and more certainly, was that Peloquin had told the truth.

You’re not Nightbreed, he’d said.

Nor was he; he was innocent.

“I killed nobody,” he murmured.

“I know that,” Decker replied.

“That’s why I couldn’t remember any of the rooms. I was never there.”

“But you remember now,” Decker said.

“Only because…” Boone stopped, and stared at the man in the charcoal suit, “because you showed me.”

“Taught you,” Decker corrected him.

Boone kept staring, waiting for an explanation that wasn’t the one in his head. It couldn’t be Decker. Decker was Reason, Decker was Calm.

“There are two children dead in Westlock tonight,” the doctor was saying. “They’re blaming you.”

“I’ve never been to Westlock,” Boone protested.

“But I have,” Decker replied. “I made sure they saw the pictures; the men out there. Child murderers are the worst. It’d be better you died here than be turned over to them.”

“You?” Boone said. “You did it?”

“Yes.”

“All of them?”

“And more.”

“Why?”

Decker pondered on this a moment.

“Because I like it,” he said flatly.

He still looked so sane, in his well cut suit. Even his face, which Boone could see clearly now, bore no visible clue to the lunacy beneath. Who would have doubted, seeing the bloodied man and the clean, which was the lunatic and which his healer? But appearances deceived. It was only the monster, the child of Midian, who actually altered its flesh to parade its true face. The rest hid behind their calm, and plotted the death of children.

Decker drew a gun from the inside of his jacket.

“They armed me,” he said. “In case you lost control.”

His hand trembled, but at such a distance he could scarcely miss. In moments it would all be over, bullet would fly and he’d be dead, with so many mysteries unsolved. The wound; Midian; Decker, many questions that he’d never answer.

There was no other moment but now. Flinging cloth he still held at Decker, he threw himself aside behind it. Decker fired, the shot filling the room with sound and light. By the time the cloth hit the ground, Boone was at the door. As he came within a yard of the ??? gun’s light came again. And an instant after, sound. And with the sound a blow to Boone’s back threw him forward, out through the door and onto the stoop.

Decker’s shout came with him.

“He’s armed!”

Boone heard the shadows prepare to bring him down. He raised his arms in sign of surrender; opened mouth to protest his innocence.

The men gathered behind their cars saw only his bloodied hands, guilt enough. They fired.

Boone heard the bullets coming his way two from the left, three from the right, and one from straight ahead, aimed at his heart. He had time to wonder at how slow they were, and how musical. Then they struck him: upper thigh, groin, spleen, shoulder, cheek and heart. He stood upright for several seconds, then somebody fired again, and nervous trigger finger unleashed a second volley. Two of these shots went wide. The rest hit home: abdomen, knee, two to the chest, one to the temple. This time he fell.

As he hit the ground he felt the wound Peloquin had given him convulse like a second heart, its presence curiously comforting in his dwindling moments. Somewhere nearby he heard Decker’s voice and his footsteps approaching as he emerged from the house to peruse the body.

“Got the bastard,” somebody said.

“He’s dead,” Decker said.

“No I’m not,” Boone thought.

Then thought no more.