Stephen Woodworth and Kelly Dunn
“It’s Vagamel, all right,” Burdock declared. “Or it was, at any rate.” He peered at the scattered ash first with his right eye, then with the left. Placed on opposite sides of his head, the lidless eyes permitted Burdock a constant, 360-degree view, but they could never see the same thing simultaneously.
Hemmel scratched at his flabby chest, the ropelike curve of the Sickle coiling beneath his grubby shirt. He was scared, and that made him hungry. It didn’t help that, since he was one of the few Nightbreed among them who could withstand daylight, they’d made him stand guard over the remains until they could convene an inquest after dusk. He hadn’t fed all day.
Only one shaggy leg of Vagamel remained intact, from cloven hoof to heavy haunch. He had come to this dismal flophouse the previous night to feed on the homeless and drug addicts who sheltered there. Yet, for reasons unclear, he had stayed there past dawn, thereby dooming himself. Sunlight had streamed in through the flophouse window and severed his hind limb right at the crotch, leaving the enormous furred genitals unharmed.
Hung like a horse even in death, Hemmel thought.
Amalek crouched on all fours, his elongated snout sniffing the cracked linoleum of the floor. “I don’t get it,” he said. “There’s no blood. No restraints to hold him down. How did the Naturals—”
Gisella leaned up against the peeling wallpaper, filing her talons between the spikes of her pointed teeth. “The Naturals had nothing to do with this.”
“Vagamel wouldn’t go without a fight,” Amalek insisted. “He could easily have crawled into the shadows.”
“He did not fight.” The glossy sheen of Gisella’s nude body shifted from indigo to maroon to ocher as she brooded. “And he didn’t crawl into the shadows. He crawled out of them.”
“She’s right.” Burdock pointed to five-fingered gouges in the tiles where Vagamel must have sunk his claws into the floor, holding himself in the searing sunshine as he convulsed in agony until he finally, mercifully exploded.
Amalek cocked his jackal’s head in puzzlement. “Why would he burn himself?”
“For the same reason Jenya impaled herself, or Dandridge cut his own head off, or that Natural threw himself onto the Metro tracks.” Gisella’s skin turned to polished obsidian, but her eyes blazed orange. “Because that found them.”
Hemmel abruptly lost his appetite. The Nightbreed used the usual pronouns to refer to one another with mutual respect: he or she or even it, for those among them who possessed no identifiable gender. Only one creature, however, merited the loathsome pejorative that.
The Pariah.
* * *
Every race has its legends, and the Nightbreed were no exception. All of them had heard the story of the Pariah, though they seldom repeated it, except to frighten their children into obedience to the laws of Baphomet. That was how each of them had learned the tale—through fear.
Down at the lowest depth of Midian—below the graves of the dead and the warrens of the undead, beneath the chambers where the Berserkers had been confined—lay a solitary oubliette, home and prison to a creature both pitiful and abhorrent. Its true name, if it had one, had long been forgotten, and no one but the Dark God knew what it looked like, for any who encountered it either lost all reason or spiraled to self-annihilation. Whatever the beast’s nature, it engendered nightmares in the Children of Nightmare, drove even the inhabitants of insanity to madness.
It was not always so. In times distant, when the Immortals were young, an entity existed that could change its form with more divine skill than any Nightbreed before or since. It molded and reshaped itself into incarnations of such extraordinary art and beauty that one day it achieved a perfection that inflamed the lust of the great Lord Baphomet Himself.
He appeared to the shape-shifter as a thunderhead with eyes of lightning. “You are favored above every creature that walks or crawls or flies,” He announced in a voice that resounded like planets colliding. “For I have chosen you to be My consort.”
“Great Lord,” the shape-shifter replied, “I am humbled by Your honor. But I cannot give myself to You, for I love another.” And with that, it turned into air and fled.
But one cannot hide from Baphomet, Who sees all. The Dark God followed the shape-shifter to its lover. To an amorphous being, all forms are equal, and so the shape-shifter did not have the prejudice of beauty. Its beloved turned out to be a hog-sized, ratlike thing, and Baphomet became enraged that His chosen one had spurned Him for such an inferior being. Although the shape-shifter attempted to shield its beloved from the Dark God’s wrath, Baphomet struck the rat thing with a beam of blinding radiance that shattered the creature into a thousand fragments, a horde of tiny, pathetic rodent replicas that immediately scattered in terror.
Baphomet turned His baleful gaze upon the shape-shifter. “Since you have denied Me,” He said, “you shall have no one. You who have rejected your god shall be rejected by all, yea, even the lowliest of the low. Shunned by the shunned, loathed by the loathed, you shall endure alone forever. So have I spoken.”
And with that, Baphomet cursed the once-enticing shape-shifter, changed it in some unimaginable way that made it repulsive to Natural and Nightbreed alike. Or so the story went.
“A bunch of hogwash, you ask me.” Burdock scowled at Gisella, the brow of the eye at his right temple slanting downward severely. “The Pariah is a myth, a bugaboo for toddlers and fools!”
Gisella flushed crimson. “I tell you, that has escaped! When Midian crumbled, that got out, and now it’s come after us to claim its vengeance.”
“Nonsense!”
“Then what do you think drove Vagamel to this? Or Jenya and the others?”
Burdock had no ready answer. “Some mischief from the Naturals, you ask me. Maybe they’re on to us.”
Gisella gave an arch smile. “Then let us catch the thing that did this and see who is right.”
The others all looked at one another, each waiting for someone else to object. Even Burdock paled and seemed less sure of himself. “I don’t see how that’s necessary.…”
“So we let that take us, one by one? Or let it slay so many Naturals that they come hunting for all of us?”
Amalek drew himself up to his full seven-foot height, tattooed hieroglyphs undulating as he puffed out his chest. “No! Natural or Nightbreed—we find it and kill it.”
“There is no need to seek it. It will come to us. For us. And I will be waiting.” Gisella grinned, the pointed teeth interlocking in a jigsaw of ivory. In the wan illumination of Burdock’s flashlight, she seemed to disappear, for her skin altered its pigment again until it exactly mimicked the faded floral wallpaper behind her.
Hemmel licked sweat from his upper lip, fidgeting with the Sickle beneath his shirt. “Wh-what if it is the Pariah? Baphomet cursed it. If we kill it, won’t He be mad?”
Only Gisella’s orange eyes remained visible. The glare they gave Hemmel made him wish he hadn’t spoken.
Burdock seized on the argument. “He has a point. If this Pariah does exist, it’s still Nightbreed. To kill it for being what it is makes us no better than the Naturals.”
“Then we shall try to capture it,” Gisella replied. “And if that fails, we kill. Either way, it shall be Baphomet’s will. Now let us return to the Enclave and prepare.”
She shut her eyes and vanished.
* * *
As they departed the flophouse, Amalek took Vagamel’s singed hindquarter and slunk down the nearest manhole to seek the secluded passageways of the sewers. That left Burdock and Hemmel to meander back to the Enclave at street level.
“D-do you really think it’s the Pariah?” Hemmel stammered when they were alone, waddling to keep up with his companion. “What if it does to us what it did to the others?”
Burdock snorted and put on the dark glasses he used to hide the smooth, featureless brow above his nose. “Don’t be such a dullard. You ask me, some blasted Natural is at the bottom of this, and we’ll make him suffer for it.”
He pulled on his shabby stocking cap and adjusted it so that his eyes could peek out through the holes cut in the sides. In the night-drenched streets of Skid Row, the cap’s snowflake pattern camouflaged the staring orbs.
Hemmel sighed and trudged along in silence past shops that had rolled their steel doors down at sunset. Hardly any streetlights illuminated this part of town, so he navigated as much by smell as by sight. A pleasant background reek of rotting garbage from the burst trash bags that slouched on the sidewalk mingled with the pervasive undertone of human urine and feces that saturated the pavement. And here and there, the delectable scent of Meat whenever they neared a comatose vagrant slumped in a doorway. More than once, Hemmel had to restrain the squirming Sickle beneath his shirt. It wanted to feed.
At last, they arrived at the entrance to a dilapidated movie palace that dated to the Roaring Twenties. THE ELYSIAN, its marquee announced, every bulb in its curling script either blown or broken. Skewed letters promised that the theater was only CLOSED F R REMOD LING. Burdock strode beyond the boarded-up ticket booth and rapped on the cinema’s double doors: four quick knocks, three slow.
Hemmel jumped as a voice spoke from the vacant foyer behind them.
“Took you long enough,” it said.
Gisella rippled into visibility like a mirage.
Burdock harrumphed. “Let’s see how quick you are after a couple more centuries.”
He and Hemmel followed her into the lobby, where Amalek squatted, solemnly devouring Vagamel’s severed flank as if it were an enormous joint of raw mutton. Among some Nightbreed, consuming one’s dead kin was considered far more respectful than burying them. They became part of you—remained one with you forever.
Another set of double doors led into the auditorium itself, current lair of the Enclave, one of the wandering tribes of the Midian diaspora. The theater was perversely apropos to house the Nightbreed: gilt-edged glamour gone to seed. Faux Egyptian pharaohs flanked the proscenium arch. A stage that had once hosted vaudeville performers now stood deserted except for an enormous torn film screen. Pigeons roosted in the dying galaxies of disintegrating chandeliers, and the atmosphere sagged with the musty stink of their droppings. If Midian had been a cemetery for the dead, the Elysian was a mausoleum for dreams.
The Enclave had adapted the interior to suit their needs. Sconces that once sprouted electric candles now held burning torches. Rows of folding seats had been ripped out and rearranged around cooking fires and card tables. In the cleared spaces, velvet draperies had been refashioned into Bedouin-style tents on the gum-encrusted carpet of the theater floor. For a brief time, this place had become their home.
But now, the tents were being dismantled. Even as the tiny community’s children still chased each other up and down the center aisle—some on two legs, some on all fours—their parents grimly packed up their makeshift shelters.
“We need this area cleared,” Gisella explained. “For the trap.”
Having finished his meal, Amalek strode up to Gisella, eyes gleaming in anticipation. “Tell us.”
As the other Nightbreed completed their preparations, they too gathered around. Gisella held out her clawed fingers to indicate that all of them would be included in her instructions. “I’ve had Calay take the children away to hide them. The rest of us shall stay here, together. When that comes, we follow the plan.” Gisella snapped her fingers in the direction of a velvet curtain that had been tossed in a corner. “Crocus.”
The curtain undulated, rippled, and flipped back like a hood to reveal what appeared to be a girl in her late teens. “I’m here.”
Crocus had a moon-shaped face and white hair. As she stood up, freeing herself of the curtain, a roll of fat around her belly flopped over her hips, hanging downward to midthigh like a miniskirt of flesh. Under the fat roll peeked Crocus’s extra leg, which grew out of her groin, its foot planted forward between the girl’s two normal legs.
Gisella indicated the auditorium doors. “We will leave the center door open. Crocus, you will stand just in front of those doors. When the Pariah comes in, that monster will see you. The second it does, what will you do?”
“I’ll jump!” Crocus’s extra foot snapped to the floor as if spring-loaded, vaulting her whole body upward in an arc as if shot by a catapult. For a second, Hemmel lost sight of her. Then he spotted her standing on the other end of the theater.
“Good.” Gisella nodded in satisfaction. “Go straight down the center aisle, and then off into the wings with you.” She gestured to a decorative arch near the right of the stage. “The fastest you’ve ever gone.”
Crocus’s luminescent paleness paled still more, a mixture of fear and determination. “That thing won’t catch me.”
“No, it won’t.” Gisella moved to the arch and faded into it as her skin matched its color. “I will be here in case. And Franchesco will know what to do. Franchesco! Are you prepared?”
A voice from overhead whooped, “You bet I am!”
Hemmel craned his neck toward the sound, which came from one of the decrepit chandeliers near the stage. The crystals clattered together musically as Franchesco shifted a little from his perch on top of the chandelier. He had the stocky build and broad shoulders of a bodybuilder, but a down of vestigial feathers plumed the skin in brilliant shades of tropical green and iridescent red. His nose dipped, sharply and cruelly, into a beaklike bend, giving him the visage of a bird of prey.
“The monstruo’ll be chasing Crocus, right? But my friends will drive him back, just where we want him.” Franchesco let out a high, piercing cry. Suddenly the air filled with feathers: not only the pigeons that had claimed the theater before the Nightbreed had, but also crows, parrots, and even a seagull or two. Quickly falling into formation, the birds formed an arc, diving toward the arch and turning abruptly toward the orchestra pit. Franchesco gave out another cry, and the birds scattered, disappearing with such dispatch they seemed to melt into the air. “The asesino will fall right in!”
Burdock snorted. “And if it doesn’t?”
“And if it doesn’t…” From the far side of the orchestra pit, Lantana stepped forward, an ancient pixie, freakishly thin, her nightshade-purple hair spiking around her wrinkled face. “And if that doesn’t, we might just cloud the issue, so to speak.”
Lantana heaved, then vomited billows of an opaque violet mist into the auditorium. Hemmel suddenly felt off-balance, no longer sure of his footing. He took a shaky step forward, then another, and another. He couldn’t see anything now but the hues of the mist: tints of sunset and the promise of fine hunting in the darkest hour of night. Voices seemed to float to him from several directions at once. “Gisella? Burdock?” he called uncertainly.
His head abruptly cleared as Lantana’s rough laugh pealed out and the mist evaporated like a popping soap bubble. Hemmel realized that he had unwittingly advanced to the lip of the pit. One more step, and he would tumble down into it. He saw that all the other Nightbreed stood on the orchestra pit’s edge, too.
Lantana smiled wickedly. “If I can entrance you to step forth to the pit, I can lure that, too.”
Hemmel considered. “Okay, you get the thing in the hole. Then what?”
From deep below him, a smooth, deep voice replied, “What happens next, my friend, is also what happens last.”
Hemmel looked into the blackness of the pit. Something shuffled into better view, and Hemmel gasped in surprise. “Desai?”
“None other.”
Desai rarely showed himself. In fact, Hemmel had only met him once before. Desai preferred to live below the stage, where a decayed warren of dressing rooms, long since half buried in dust, provided the dark, cool hiding place he craved. Dozens of hands sprouted like cilia from the sides of his unclothed body, extending and retracting at will. Six of Desai’s hands were out at the moment, reaching around on stubby, rubbery arms to frame his back as he slowly did a pirouette for the Enclave’s benefit. He had many hands, but only two feet, and these supported him awkwardly.
“You see, my friends, I am fit as ever where it matters the most.” As he turned, the hands, deft as a game-show model’s, pointed to the hard ridges running down Desai’s spine. At the small of his back, a jointed tail whipped upward, its sharp stinger dangling just above Desai’s head. “When our tormentor falls in here, I will give him a taste of my Sleep.”
“You’re going to stun the Pariah?” Burdock asked.
“If possible. Keep in mind, I may have to use all my poison, and then I cannot guarantee that creature’’s safety.”
Hemmel felt absurdly touched. Desai’s mother had used all her poison in the fight at Midian, and it had killed her. Yet Desai was willing to risk his own life for other Nightbreed, with whom he seldom interacted.
Gisella flicked out her talons. “We understand. The Dark God’s will be done. We appreciate your sacrifice.”
She surveyed the semicircle of Nightbreed. “Everyone, get to your places. Someone must keep watch and warn us when that is near.”
Burdock squinted at Hemmel. “That would be you, of course. You’re practically a Natural.”
“Yeah?” Hemmel raised his shirt and let the Sickle coil forth in all its hunger.
Burdock was unimpressed. “You look a whole lot more Natural than any of the rest of us.”
Hemmel glanced around. He couldn’t argue with that one. “Fine.”
“You got your cell phone?” Burdock asked.
“Of course.” Hemmel absently felt the lump in the breast pocket of his overcoat to be sure. Since leaving Midian, the Nightbreed had adopted many of the Naturals’ technological conveniences.
“And you remembered to charge it this time?”
“Yeah! Yeah! I’m not stupid.” In fact, Hemmel had recently walked over a mile to an all-night doughnut shop to find a working outlet where he could hook up the damned phone.
“All right then. Be ready for further orders.” Burdock pivoted his head to glower at Hemmel through the hole in his stocking cap. “And keep an eye out!”
Hemmel grunted acknowledgment, and reluctantly left the auditorium to take up his post outside the theater.
Standing alone beneath the Elysian’s marquee, he shifted from foot to foot and pulled his coat more tightly around himself even though he didn’t feel cold. Beneath his shirt, the Sickle hissed like an asp. In all the fuss over the Pariah, everyone seemed to have forgotten about food. Everyone but Hemmel. He’d actually been tempted to ask Amalek for a bite of Vagamel’s leg but thought that might be rude.
He sniffed the chill air. There was Meat nearby, no doubt about it. Hemmel glanced up and down the desolate thoroughfare until he spotted her—a plump, solitary bag lady, shambling in distraction along the opposite sidewalk.
Hemmel’s mouth twisted in hesitation. She was just across the street. He could still watch the front of the theater from there, and it would only take a minute.…
The Sickle would not be denied. Hemmel unbuttoned his shirt as he moved to intercept her.
The old hag must have been demented or delirious or both. She tore at her gray hair, waggling her head, peppering the air with frantic mutters. “No, no! I can’t—it mustn’t. Horrible, horrible.”
Hemmel opened wide his arms. “No need to fret, Granny. You won’t feel a thing.”
The Sickle sprang forth from his exposed abdomen. He pulled her against him, and the cartilaginous point of the arced proboscis pierced her threadbare clothing and penetrated her midriff. The appendage oozed a numbing, coagulant pus as the three-pronged point opened inside her, questing for an organ to harvest.
The bag lady slackened in Hemmel’s embrace as she succumbed to the narcotic effect of the ooze. A casual observer would have thought they were hugging. He patted her back. “That’s it. Just relax.”
There was a time when Hemmel might have treated himself to a brain or a heart or a lung. Now that he was forced to coexist with Naturals, though, he found it better to use more discretion when selecting his snacks. An appendix for an appetizer. The bonbon of a gall bladder. Half a liver—no more! Or in this case, one of a pair of nice, juicy kidneys.
“Never even know it’s gone,” he whispered, as the prongs of the Sickle closed around the chosen meal. The proboscis pumped in stomach acid to digest the kidney inside the bag lady, then sucked the dissolved organ into Hemmel like soda through a straw. The coagulant would seal her wounds and keep her from bleeding to death.
Before he could finish, however, a new agitation seized the bag lady, so strong it overcame the sedation of Hemmel’s pus. She flailed in his grasp, shrieking. “Oh, God! Oh, God! That is here! Stop that! Stop that!”
Her odd use of the pronoun chilled Hemmel. She was a Natural. She couldn’t possibly know about …
He loosened his grip, and she wrenched loose from the Sickle’s impalement. In the struggle, the proboscis ripped wide the wound instead of sealing it. Entrails bulged from the red maw, blood speckling the pavement as she stumbled away in a haphazard delirium.
As if forgetting to zip his fly, Hemmel stood there, dumbfounded, with the blood-smeared Sickle hanging out in plain sight. He glanced over his shoulder in the direction the old lady had gaped—toward the theater. No hideous monstrosity there. The only thing moving was a haggard-looking black man in an Army-surplus jacket limping along the sidewalk.
Yet when the man looked at him with his sorrowful eyes, Hemmel sickened with an overwhelming revulsion. A revulsion that metastasized into terror when the man turned and entered the Elysian.
Hemmel fumbled the cell phone out of his pocket, fought to steady his finger long enough to push the right contact number.
“Burdock!” he babbled before the other even had a chance to speak. “The Pariah—it is a shape-shifter!” He grimaced at the stunning obviousness of the statement. “The black guy that just came in—”
“Hemmel?” Burdock interrupted. “But you just came in. Great Baphomet—what is that smell?”
Shouts of alarm sounded in the background, and Hemmel snapped his phone shut to cut them off. His instinct was to run away, to let Gisella and the others deal with that. But he knew their plan was doomed, for they could never have anticipated what they were up against. They had never expected that the enemy could so easily masquerade as a friend. The Pariah was far worse than any of them had guessed.
Hemmel could have abandoned them, but for what? He had never been without Burdock and the others. A life without the Nightbreed was no life at all. Better to perish with them than survive alone.
He waddled back across to the theater, the Sickle bobbing in front of him. As he charged through the lobby, he nearly collided with Amalek, who lurched out of the auditorium with his arms wrapped around his head.
“It touched me! Oh, dear Vagamel, now I understand—that touched me!” Amalek flattened his ears back miserably and yowled, pawing at his snout with his man-hands like a dog that’s been sprayed by a skunk. He collapsed and writhed on the marble floor, whining.
And there was a smell. The odor hit Hemmel like an arctic draft as he advanced into the inner sanctum of the theater.
Few scents can appall creatures who regularly revel in the miasma of the swamp, the stench of the charnel house, the reek of the grave. But this one curdled Hemmel to his marrow. It smelled antiseptic and bitter—a gust of wind across the glacier left by a nuclear winter, tasting of nothing but ash and ice. It blew from a world in which there would be neither blood nor flesh, ever again. An absolute desolation unknown even to the dead that lay in Midian.
The citizens of the Enclave stood in a circle in the center of the theater. They had surrounded that. But Hemmel blanched as he saw, in the center of the circle, the mirror image of himself. The Pariah had duplicated him perfectly, even down to the slight bulge of the Sickle beneath his shirt. Hemmel’s gorge rose, and his skin broke out in a feverish sweat.
But he did not have to endure the sight of himself as Pariah for long.
It was apparent that Gisella’s meticulous battle plan had already unraveled. Caught off guard by the Pariah’s deception, Crocus had not jumped until the disguised intruder had come close enough to lay hands on her. The girl had since leapt to the far end of the theater and ran in circles there, gibbering hysterically, disordered by fright.
Now, while Hemmel watched, Franchesco marshaled his avian squadron against the enemy. As the flock swooped from the rafters, though, the birds seemed to hit an invisible barrier, an impenetrable bubble around the Pariah that sent them glancing off, fluttering and squawking, in every direction.
The attack only succeeded in drawing the intruder’s attention to Franchesco’s perch. The impostor Hemmel looked upward and shook itself. It lost shape for an instant, then shivered into feathers of gold and silver and bronze, coalescing into the most glorious bird of prey imaginable. The false phoenix took flight, soaring up to circle around Franchesco’s chandelier. When it dove toward him, Franchesco batted it away with disgust, flailing so much that he lost his balance and tumbled to the theater floor with a bone-breaking crack.
As he lay there, helpless and gasping, the majestic bird glided down to land beside him, craning its beak forward to bill Franchesco’s cheek and coo in his ear. Paralyzed from the fall, Franchesco could barely lift his head, yet he so dreaded the Pariah’s affection that he pounded the base of his cracked skull against the floor until it spilled grayish-blue cerebral jelly.
Before Franchesco’s body twitched to stillness, a vague blurriness, like heat vapor, darted from an archway and assaulted the bird creature from behind. As it flapped and shrieked, Gisella crimsoned to the color of war paint and dug her talons into its hide.
“We know what you are,” she shouted. Hemmel had never seen her tremble before. “How dare you violate our Enclave! Murdering your own kind! Accursed thing, now you will die!”
She snapped her wolf-trap jaws shut on its neck and clung to it as it began to change. It melted out of her clutches, then re-formed in front of her. It opened arms with taloned hands like Gisella’s own, enfolding her in its embrace.
Gisella screamed, a sound that made the chandelier crystals resound in an unbearably high frequency.
Heads formed with faces that were the male counterparts of Gisella’s own. Their many colors, which changed in exactly the way Gisella’s skin could change, pulsed around her as multiple mouths kissed, sucked, licked, seemingly on her everywhere at once in their ardor.
Gisella screamed again, her body convulsing, her skin rapidly losing its color until it turned a lifeless gray.
With their general dead, the rest of the troops fell into disarray. Even the great Desai had clambered out of the pit and was now skittering toward the nearest exit on all hands like a frightened roach.
“Retreat!” Lantana yelled. She exhaled gouts of purple smoke that clouded the entire room for nearly a minute. Under the cover Lantana had given them, Hemmel heard a stampede of feet and paws and hooves, and someone roughly shoved him against a wall in their haste to leave.
When the violet mist finally dissipated, Hemmel realized that, other than the bodies of Franchesco and Gisella, he was alone. The others had escaped, or else gone elsewhere to die of the Pariah’s darkness.
But the monster’s sickening miasma remained. Out of the air, the Pariah’s energy gathered up into one brutal mouth, its corners turned down as it opened in a hideous, pitiable, earsplitting wail. Even from a monster among monsters, the noise could not be mistaken. An anguished sob filled the abandoned auditorium, the sound of utter despair.
Desperately wanting to flee and yet unable to look away, Hemmel stood transfixed as the Pariah’s shape altered again. Out of one half materialized a shape Hemmel had never seen before. This new form had two faces looking Janus-like in opposite directions. The single body beneath possessed supernal symmetry, at the same time glowing with two separate facets like a jewel: on the left a male, its muscles rippling and sex organ thrusting in powerful display, and on the right a female, with soft curves and one lush ripe breast. Though every nerve in Hemmel shrieked and his stomach writhed in abhorrence, Hemmel could still gasp with awe at its beauty. Such a creature could certainly captivate Baphomet, could seduce the darkest of gods.
Yet as Hemmel marveled, the Pariah’s other half began to take on a very different shape. It shrank, forming a sort of hairy oblong close to the ground, long and bulky like the body of a pig. A rodent face emerged from its awkward bulk, whiskered, with small ears and teeth so long they propped the mouth partially open. The thing seemed the utter opposite of the Pariah’s perfect other half.
Hemmel remembered the legend, the ratlike thing that had so enraged Baphomet that He had split the hapless creature into a thousand fragments of itself.
The Pariah’s lover.
The hairy creature cozened up to the godlike androgyne, snuffling in evident delight. And the androgyne wrapped its male and female arms around it in frantic passion. The hog-sized thing, with its ratlike face, suckled madly at the female breast, nibbled the areola with its ludicrous long teeth. The male Janus face nuzzled the hoglike thing’s furry neck, while the female face moaned in rising ecstasy. The Janus’s male organ penetrated its lover as the creature reciprocated, entering the androgyne’s female sex. As the two halves of the Pariah’s body stroked one another, writhing desperately, approaching a single climax, Hemmel sensed he was witness to an oft-repeated dance. Tears streaked the androgyne’s two faces, and its rodent counterpart whimpered in distress.
How many times had this happened over the centuries as the creature agonized in its oubliette? Perpetually isolated, the Pariah’s sole comfort lay in its own illusions. Only its own cursed touch could grant it release. Yet this could never truly satisfy. For even in the gifted multiplicity of its form, the Pariah remained alone.
At last, Hemmel understood. The Pariah did not wish to bring death. As it had in times beyond, it sought love. But it could only offer a love that utterly destroyed the object of its desire.
And any second now, Hemmel realized, he would be next.
He had nothing more to lose—no shelter, no safe hunting ground. Worst of all, his companions, his kin, the only friends he would ever have on the earth or under it, had either died or abandoned him.
And the Pariah—what did it have to live for? He’d be doing it a favor to end its miserable existence. It would not be merely revenge—it would be a mercy killing. But how? Strong as the others had been, they had proved no match for the Pariah’s power.
The Sickle stirred, reminding Hemmel of its presence. Of course! Even shape-shifters had hearts. If Hemmel could find it, the Sickle would take care of the rest.
Hemmel felt the Pariah’s attention turn to him. The faultless Janus and the glorified rodent dissolved as the Pariah, once again, molded itself into Hemmel’s own likeness.
It had to be now. Unleashing a primal yell, Hemmel charged forward with all the speed his ungainly body could muster. For a split second the nauseous smell and the overwhelming urge to flee nearly overpowered him. Then the Sickle plunged directly into the false Hemmel’s chest, its proboscis probing for the heart of the monster.
Instantly the Pariah’s form softened and expanded, engulfing Hemmel completely. Hemmel panicked. He felt as if he were drowning, being smothered, being drenched in wretched muck. The Sickle, usually infallible in seeking specific organs, foundered. The Pariah’s anatomy was unlike any Hemmel had encountered. Its innards melted and flowed and reconstituted themselves in new configurations, easily avoiding the Sickle’s prongs.
Hemmel no longer cared about killing the cursed being. Whatever the cost, he had to escape.
At the same time he sensed that escape would be impossible. Already he could feel hands and tongues on his body, a rain of kisses and caresses that made him want to die. Withdrawing the Sickle from its fruitless quest, he turned the cutting tip toward his own chest. Better to end it now, himself, than die as the others had. The Sickle hesitated, then plunged into his chest. The pain made Hemmel cry out, but at the same time he could only feel relief at the thought of ending his proximity to the Pariah.
“Never even know it’s gone,” he gasped as the three-pronged claw cleanly severed his arteries. Hemmel felt his heart beat its last as it liquefied.
But the expected oblivion did not come.
Instead, a viscous clamminess seeped like bilgewater through the incision the Sickle had made and filled the empty cavity in his chest. Hemmel felt the substance congeal within him, knitting itself to his aorta. A moment later, it began to beat.
He looked down at his chest and saw that a network of stringy veins now fanned out from the sealed wound, gently pulsing as they circulated blood from him to the Pariah and back again. The monster had replaced Hemmel’s heart with its own, entwining them forever.
* * *
Burdock stared out at the night, the eyes on the sides of his head straining to catch the slightest movement outside the abandoned warehouse where he and the other refugees of the Enclave had fled. He hadn’t been able to rest in the intervening days since the Pariah had driven them out of the Elysian.
If his eyes had had lids, Burdock would have shut them. He was so weary.
Determined to fulfill his self-imposed duty as sentry, he sat on the floor beneath the window and leaned back against the wall, hoping at least to ease the tension in his body. Almost as soon as he reclined, however, he shot bolt upright again.
There was a scent in the air … a whiff of pungent, flesh-freezing coldness, as of steaming liquid nitrogen.
“Don’t be stupid,” he muttered to himself. To his shame, he often imagined he smelled the Pariah’s vile odor.
He was about to relax when the locked warehouse door nearest him burst inward, swinging with the force of whatever had rammed it. Burdock jumped to his feet and snatched his cell phone from the pocket of his jacket, ready to alert the others. But something about the shuffling footsteps he heard next made him stop. He recognized that shambling gait as if it were his own, but at the same time it seemed totally alien.
The biting stench became unbearable as a misshapen silhouette clumped through the door and approached him.
“Who are you?” With his phone still ready in one hand, Burdock pulled out his flashlight with the other and flicked its beam over the intruder.
The circle of light darted from one cameo of abomination to another. Here, a pair of hands—one masculine, one feminine—fondled sagging male buttocks. There, male and female faces on a single head took turns languidly fellating the proboscis that jutted from an obese abdomen. Higher up, a chittering rodent nipped at the nipple of a pendulous male mammary. And, above this horrid mishmash of forms, the miserable image of Hemmel, blubbering in desperation.
“Burdock! You have to help me.” The lumpy, misbegotten figure tottered toward him.
Burdock stumbled backward. He had loved Hemmel, but now he couldn’t stand the sight or smell of the thing his friend had become. “Don’t you touch me! Don’t you come near me!”
Hemmel wept as he reached out to Burdock. “Please! Don’t leave me alone with—with—this!”
It was no use. Burdock ran to the nether parts of the warehouse, stammering warnings into his cell phone.
Hemmel collapsed to the floor, sobbing in resignation. United to him by love and loathing, his new companion snuggled within him like a conjoined twin.
Amorphous, yet formed.
Shunned, but no longer alone.
Together, they were, and would always be, the Pariah.