Midian Unmade

Christopher Monfette

On the wind, a word of plenty; in the water, a warning.

There had never been a time in the history of the tribes when the prophecies had been so competing. You will be blessed, they seemed to say—or others still, in darker moments, cursed. It mattered little, largely because they had known both. Blessed with curses or cursed with blessings—the bones rolled either way—but there was little denying that the future held room for an equal measure of suffering and celebration. Let either come; the difference was little. Such had been their history.

On the second week of their flight from Midian, the small democracy of Nightbreed which had, strictly by design of the season’s breeze, chosen west as their bearing, stumbled upon a small patch of earth which told them politely to rest. They’d carved an existence out of listening to every grass blade and tree root, and few things proved less vital to understanding the language of the ground than living beneath it.

Their great fortune along the way, of course, had been Allyaphasia—with her weave of living tattoos, the shades and lines of which were never quite entirely still. Their vague patterns formed the outline of beasts across her skin—mammalian constellations—some of which, until their sudden journey away from Midian, she had yet to discover. She had conjured dogs from those tattoos—and weasels and rats—animals suited to a life in the muck, but never a creature so much belonging to the sky.

And so when, on the third day, an unfamiliar pulling along her spine and shoulders began to stretch out across her skin, she was perhaps the most shocked to witness the eagle emerge from the ink. Its talons came first—a sharp pain, not without blood—followed by wings that descended from her shoulders, and by the time the creature had pulled away and solidified its form, Allyaphasia had begun to weep. They were the tears of a mother discovering some secret child—an expression of great joy in the aftermath of an equally powerful loss.

Of all the Breed, Allyaphasia alone had the most right to sorrow. The destruction of Midian had afflicted many with the loss of a home—others, still, of wives and husbands—but none among them had gone away absent a child. Prior to the attack on Midian, Allyaphasia had confessed to never having encountered a human; nor had she known of bullets before one pierced the eye of her firstborn, or the heart of her second. Even Xxyzx—the most cynical and ill-tempered among them—afforded her the right to mourn, but of her love for the eagle would commonly roll his eyes in protest.

It was not, he insisted, her child.

“What is it then?” many of the splintered tribe inquired of its first appearance—if only for the sad truth of never having seen one before—at which point the faux-feathered beast tested its wings, cawing with a shriek, and took to the air, away into the blue-tinted evening. That Allyaphasia could pass her vision to the creature’s eyes—smelling the air, sensing the wind—had made her the group’s de facto scout—which, despite her reluctance, was perhaps the only thing that kept her alive. While they walked beneath the moonlight, safe from the sun, the eagle pressed on ahead, searching for their next day’s refuge, ensuring that daylight would never come without the promise of shelter from it.

And so it was, from the height of the sky, that the low-dwellers first discovered the barn.

At night, there were the death-dreams, or so he called them—but never to his mother, who rarely remembered them in the morning. From his bedroom down the hall, the muttered panic of the wasting woman, who tossed and turned in a kind of ghostly pantomime, woke the boy often and always with the same hopeless thought pounding in the space between his head and his pillow.

Finally, my mother is dead.

His ears had long since tuned themselves to the first signs of trouble, and some nights, lying awake in the darkness, he wondered if they would eventually discern the final push of breath responsible for sending the spirit of Elizabeth Adler once again out into the universe. He had heard the stories of slumbering loved ones who dreamed some final good-bye, waking in the morning to find themselves, by some degree, more alone in the world, and he secretly hoped that such might be the case. It would be better, he thought, to say good-bye to the woman he always remembered—fresh-faced and smiling, rosy cheeks alight with life—than the still-beating skeleton he tended to now.

He awoke the same tonight, setting his small, five-foot frame onto the cold, wooden floor, and pushed through the remnants of the old, familiar fear:

Finally, my mother …

It was the “finally,” for all its implied relief, that disturbed him the most, and despite the stirrings of his mother beyond the doorway, it was that small sense of hope—for his peace, for hers—that grew like a tumor of its own, beneath his skin, grown fat on memory and guilt and sorrow and despair. It was never lost on him that his mother’s cancer would kill more than simply her.

Jonathan navigated the second-story hallway, trying desperately not to wake the useless bulk of his otherwise well-meaning uncle in the room next door. Albert had traveled from his home in Minneapolis—more out of sympathy, the boy suspected, or obligation, than any real desire to help—and despite Jon’s relative youth, he was old enough to know that the clumsy, half-bald stranger who had visited only once every Christmas was here now to audition for the eventual role of father.

The boy didn’t have the heart to confess to his dying mother his intention to flee after her passing. He’d grown up among the fields and farms, tending their own slice of earth—just the two of them, until the sickness came—and he had no desire to be packed away like so much luggage, crammed into the old man’s station wagon and carted off to some American Midwest metropolis. No, he thought. He’d run—however long, however far—and take up with whomever might have him. He’d be a gypsy and learn the part as he went.

Jonathan pushed through his mother’s door, unworried that the creaking of the old wood might wake her, and stood among the discarded blankets and amber pill bottles which guarded her bedside like the Easter Island statues he’d once read about in school.

“No,” she muttered to the thing in her dreams. “Please. Don’t hurt me.…”

Tonight, it seemed, the figure was a demon—other nights, it was an angel—and the only true detail she’d ever remembered or chosen, at least, to share with him was that the dream was of a figure, washed in fog, motioning her forward and calling her name. Jonathan had surmised on his own, in moments like these—watching her privately as she smiled or screamed—that the face of the thing was unknowable, some nights terrifying, other nights beautiful.

Jonathan chose to believe that it was God, calling her home, and her fear was in the going, but the distance between the two was shortening, that much he knew. Whatever it was, it would find her, or she it and he knew with as much sadness as a ten-year-old boy could manage that it was a meeting not far off.

She muttered as the wind blew in from the window, curtains tossing like gossamer fingers, like breath in the air. Albert, he thought. Stupid Albert. Who else could have left them open?

He crossed the room and parted the curtains, looking down at the shape of the barn outside as he reached for the latch. Lord, how he loved that place—from rafters to basement, a paradise for pretending. The bank, of course, had already come around sniffing, before his mother had lost the strength to fend them off. She had joked once to Albert that her worst fear in dying was that she might eventually meet the figure in the light only to find him an employee of the bank.

“Heartless bastards,” Albert had offered. “God, the Devil. Repo men, all of ’em.”

Jon fumbled about the sill, feeling his way along, thinking that for all the brightness of the sky outside, it might as well have been day, when suddenly a shadow cut the evening, silhouetting itself against the moon and then vanishing. He strained his eyes against the night and after several moments, caught the shape again. It was massive, nearly his own size—beak to tail, wing to wing, a bird as big as any he might have imagined. And when, for an instant, it turned to catch the light, he noticed that what he had mistaken for feathers weren’t feathers at all.

They didn’t flutter; they didn’t flap.

They were painted. Tattooed.

And then the creature turned, spun, arched around the spire of the barn and down. It dove for the tallgrass below, a collision almost inevitable, until a second shadow split from the dim walls of the building’s frame. The figure—a woman, perhaps—floated several feet out into the field, extending an arm into the evening, and just as Jon expected the eagle to land there—as he’d seen in films—it seemed somehow to mold itself into the darkness, one shadow absorbing the other until the bird had vanished completely, and its owner had followed.

The field was empty, the night still.

Jon glanced in disbelief, his heart racing—not with fear, but exhilaration.

Quietly, he latched the window, deciding even before he turned that this was a mystery that demanded some investigation. So determined, he tiptoed across his mother’s bedroom, moving quietly so as not to wake her. In the time that he’d been at the window, she’d drifted back to sleep. She breathed quietly, peacefully, every breath like some traded currency, but for the moment, at least, her protests against the dream-demon had stopped.

She would still be alive tomorrow, he decided. And he would have a story to tell her when she woke.

In the basement, by lamplight, the Nightbreed argued.

“What do you mean no shelter?” Xxyzx insisted angrily. He hobbled across the dirt floor, trailing minuscule droplets of blood in a line toward Allyaphasia.

“You’re dripping,” said the guide, her voice at once both soft and hollow. Like a satin glove with no hand inside.

“Remind me again and it’ll be your blood on the floor,” the creature growled. “Love you though I do.”

To human eyes, Xxyzx might easily have been the most sapiens among them—tall and slender, commonly built. He could have walked for an evening in the cities or towns—unnoticed were it not for his black eyes and ruby-red fangs. But his appearance had made him feel eternally different, and over a decade, he withdrew further from the race into which he’d been born. He’d chosen to live in books, scavenging human pages wherever he might find them—classics and porn magazines, pamphlets and maps (from which he’d renamed himself). His hatred for a species to which he felt somehow connected made for a bitter temperament, and seldom could he hold his tongue when given the opportunity to unleash it. He ranted frequently—fancied himself a self-tortured intellect—and blasphemed often on the subject of Baphomet.

He was an open book.

So Lylesburg had cursed him—a punishment given without trial, which was uncommon among the Breed, though in this instance nobody objected, nobody cared. The curse was thus—that every negative emotion, every terrible thought, would write itself across the creature’s skin, in all tongues and languages. Every ember of anger would scribble itself in razor-thin lines across his flesh—the scripting eloquent, the bloodletting slight. Lylesburg had hoped that the pain might force Xxyzx to reconsider himself, to negotiate some pleasure from his own existence, and for a while it had worked. He had calmed.

But the humans had come with their torches and guns and Lylesburg was dead, having never lifted the curse. And Xxyzx, like all the Breed, bore his anger openly. Cast out and homeless with neither direction nor hope of salvation …

He bled frequently these days.

“Again,” he insisted. “What do you mean no shelter?”

Allyaphasia contorted her neck and shoulders to facilitate the knitting of form and flesh. The eagle had nearly retaken its place across her back.

“In all directions,” she said. “Only wilderness. We cannot make shelter by daybreak. We can only go back.”

The crowd murmured in protest.

“Certainly, there must be—”

“Nothing,” the mother insisted. “Roads. Fields. But no place to hide.”

“We can’t return,” said Neptune. “Can’t go back.”

“Then what of here?” asked Jonas, picking cobwebs from between his horns. When he spoke, his lips failed to move, his mouth hung open in a dark, empty oval to allow the thing that lived in his throat—the puppeteer, the real Jonas—to speak in its shrill hiss.

Xxyzx scoffed loudly. “What of it?”

“We can all smell it,” he said. “The death. From the house across the way.”

Xxyzx winced as another few lines carved across his cheek. The German word for “idiot,” the Arabic for “fool.”

“Others will come,” he responded. “For them, death is just an empty space. They can’t stand the silence, the stillness. It’s what they do, the humans—they find the empty and fill it.”

“Well, we can’t wait forever,” grumbled another. “Or drift forever, too.”

“And you’d have us do what?” demanded Xxyzx. “Dig? Rebuild?”

“Perhaps,” said a voice. Not one, but many.

“On the backs of us broken few? Here, in this place, dare to do what Baphomet did, for all his power? To create a new home?”

The room fell silent at the prospect. Allyaphasia put a hand on his bloody shoulder, feigning her smile from memory.

“I’ll try again tomorrow,” she comforted. “One last time. And then we’ll go.”

Xxyzx turned, his brow an architecture of lines. “To where?” he asked, his voice trembling as the word “despair” cut slowly across his chest.

“To where?”

Jonas pushed suddenly to the front of the crowd, his nose held high in the air. “Xxyzx, Allyaphasia…” he began. “I smell something.”

The old monster rolled its eyes. “Yes, yes, death. We all smell it, Jonas, we all—”

“Not death,” interrupted the creature. “Something worse, I think. Life.”

Even as he uttered the phrase, the woodwork creaked loudly overhead, the double-hatched doorway to the cellar pulled open and—

—there were monsters in the basement.

Standing atop the stairway, Jonathan tried to scream, but the terror caught dryly in his throat. He’d made his way across the field, ducking between a section of half-broken boards and quietly into the darkened barn. The smell of hay and damp cedar wafted into the night, masking another scent—musty and strange—which he’d never before encountered among the farm’s earthy perfume. And beneath that odor, a noise—the chatter of whispered voices, half raised in argument.

He should have turned then—turned and run back to the house, rousing Albert toward the shotgun that his father had left behind. But he pressed forward, silently across the floorboards, between which small slivers of lamplight projected themselves like stars against the ceiling. With all the foolishness of youth, he cast open the cellar door—

And there were monsters in the basement … a group of them, looking slack-jawed and surprised, meeting his frightened glance with a fear of their own. Together, they seemed like some crudely sewn patchwork—a half-human quilt of magnificent colors and forms. Purple skin and mossy scales; wet, gelatinous masses and fully-fleshed forms. Some had horns, others tentacles. A few had neither. A few were … worse.

Finally, Jonathan gasped, a gesture that broke the frozen moment between them. He turned, terrified, rushing back up the stairway in small ten-year-old steps. Below him, his feet went thunk-thunk-thunk against the dusty plywood, masking a sound that he failed to hear until it was too late. Behind every thunk, a click, a spark—the claws of a creature against the damp cellar walls. It entered his periphery, demanding a glance, and he turned to find it not beside him, but crawling across the surface to his left, spider-walking in spite of gravity. A second, smaller set of arms had somehow torn themselves free from the hollow structure of the first, and the monster—all six hands clutching the walls—scurried along the concrete and in front of him, slamming the door with a thundering echo.

He was trapped, surely dead. He dropped his head in anticipation of the bite, or the blow, but none came. Instead, only—

“Stop!”

It was a voice of complete command, strong yet distinctly feminine, though not without a slight, shaking vibrato.

“I forbid this!” it called. “Not another child dead before my eyes!”

“Allyaphasia,” hissed one of the creatures. Its mouth dangled open, teeth glinting, but despite the high-pitched voice, its lips didn’t move.

“Neptune, bring him here,” said another, this one far more like a human than any of the rest. He turned to the others, some of whom snarled, some of whom whimpered. “It was bound to happen. Hiding in basements and barns. Be thankful it was only a boy.”

The creature behind him—Neptune, they’d called her—whispered quietly into his ear—“Don’t scream, darling”—and before he could even consider doing so, she’d wrapped four of her arms around his chest, lifted him off the upmost step, and carried him down into the midst of the monsters.

“He’s trembling,” she said, half laughing into the room. “Fancy that. First time in my life I’ve ever been found imposing.”

It was at that moment that Jonathan decided that he was dreaming. Whether it was the casual, lightly spoken manner of whatever thing had just moved him across the room, or the way in which the freakish assembly failed to meet a young boy’s definition of “monster,” Jon felt little immediate threat of being devoured or torn to pieces. And since such creatures did not, of course, exist—monstrous or otherwise—he felt, as one occasionally does in dreams, that however terrifying this might become, he would wake eventually. And so he spoke bravely in an attempt to hide his lie.

“I’m trembling because I’m cold, thank you,” he said politely, a quip to which a few of the group laughed.

“And not out of fear?” said the half-human one, and from this distance, Jon could discern the strange pattern of cuts across his body. “We’re monsters, after all.”

“Xxyzx, please,” said the woman who’d halted Neptune’s attack. It took Jonathan a moment to realize that the creature before him was naked, clothed rather in an odd assortment of drawings across her skin. Her breasts were full; her body was slender. The dark lines of her tattoos curved across her frame, drawing his eye and allowing it to linger perhaps a moment longer than was proper. The shapes traced down along her midsection, folding into the crevice just above her thighs, and continued to her feet. It was the first time that Jonathan had ever seen a woman in a state of such nakedness, at least in the flesh.

“He’s staring,” chuckled Neptune.

“I am not,” insisted Jon, using the exchange as an excuse to turn his attention away. “Or if I am, it’s because I’ve never dreamt about monsters before.”

“Dreamt?” asked Xxyzx. “You think this is a dream?”

“I may be ten,” said Jon, “but even I know that monsters aren’t real.”

Jonas threw up his hands in a mockery of worship. “Praise Baphomet! Our suffering is diminished! If only because we don’t exist!”

The tattooed woman turned. “Jonas, please. A month ago, there were things that even we might not have believed.”

“Bite him, then,” said Neptune. “Turn him into one of us. Make him immortal, make him strong—unsick and forever. Let a few centuries pass and see if he wonders when he’ll wake.”

“That’s enough,” said the woman. She kneeled slowly to Jon’s level, putting her hands softly onto his shoulders. “What’s your name, child?”

“Jonathan,” he replied.

She smiled sweetly. “My name is Allyaphasia, Jonathan. I had a son your age, and another slightly older.”

“Monsters have children?” he asked, suddenly aware of his own naïveté. “Can I see them, please?”

An emotion flickered across the woman’s face, one he’d seen a number of times before, on the face of his mother, which was not so dissimilar. It was the expression she wore in her most somber of moments, when she allowed herself to be weak and honest and weep in his presence. It was the face that followed the words “I’ll never see you marry, or your children be born.”

“They died,” said Allyaphasia.

“If this is a dream,” began Jonathan, “then maybe I can dream them back. You can do that in dreams.”

“Would you trust me if I asked you to close your eyes?” she inquired, and to his own surprise, he did. She put a hand to his forehead, delicate and soft, and he felt the creature’s nails trail their way lightly across his skin, down over his eyelids and above his warm, rosy cheeks. It was a sensation at once both calming and real, as honest a touch as any he’d ever received in waking life, and when he opened his eyes a moment later he said, as if to himself—

“This isn’t a dream.”

An hour passed in the company of the one they called Allyaphasia. It was an hour filled with a child’s questions, and with the patience of one who used to be a mother, she answered them as best she could. In the space behind them, where they sat gingerly on a damp bale of hay, the others paced nervously in the shadows.

She told him of Midian, the underground city—of its immense, cavernous walls and magnificent chambers. She told him of its birth, of Baphomet and their history, of their tragedy and their wanderings. She spoke of Boone and his becoming with neither judgment nor scorn. She told him the story of the Nightbreed as one might tell it to a man, and when he pointed this out to her, she said only, “Having seen what you’ve seen, you cannot help but become one, as I, seeing you, am a child once again.”

He told her of his mother and of Albert. He spoke of his plans to run away after her passing—for which he said he’d prepared himself, though Allyaphasia didn’t have the heart to say just how impossible that truly was. He stopped at one point in the evening and said excitedly, “You could stay here, or I could go with you,” to which Allyaphasia simply laughed and turned the topic to some story of Midian.

And after an hour of conversation, the pacing Xxyzx finally broke free from the crowd and pulled her away to a quiet corner, saying, “Quit this, damn you. Quit this now!”

“I know what you’re thinking,” she began.

“And I you. Playing mother to incur our sympathies, as if the sight of you and the boy were some rite of protection.” He paused, sighing, and leaned in closer. “They want to kill him, you know. Here in the barn. Then across the field for the sleeping mother and uncle. And then move on…”

“I won’t allow that.”

“You can’t stop it!” He pressed his fist into the rafters behind her head. “If he proves too convincing, or brings them here, we’re through. If we let them live, they’ll invite more. The humans bring death, Allyaphasia—intended or otherwise.”

“I can’t let you kill him, Xxyzx,” she said plainly. “Because if we do—if we slaughter a boy and his family—then we are, indeed, just as he claims. We’re monsters.”

Xxyzx growled heavily, an element of his nature of which he’d never quite disposed. “What then do you suggest?”

“Not me,” she said, and in that moment, Jonathan appeared at her side, his face alight with words unspoken, calling her ears to the question she’d been waiting for him to ask.

“Will you turn my mother?”

The room erupted in whispered argument, for he’d addressed the question to them all, but Jonathan wavered not a bit. His mind had been turning in the time that Allyaphasia and Xxyzx had spoken, poring over the story of Boone, but mostly over the words that Neptune had uttered earlier.

“Make him immortal—unsick and forever.”

“You can do this,” he shouted into the deafening crowd. “You can help her. Why won’t you help her?”

Allyaphasia moved to stand before him, putting herself between the child and the rabble. “Calm yourselves!” she cried.

“That last human we turned,” began Jonas, motioning to the darkness of the room around them. “This is the result of that.”

“Kill him!” cried some. “Kill them all!”

Jonathan, frightened but stalwart, clung to the woman’s wrist. “Make them understand,” he whispered, uncertain if she’d heard him.

“No killing,” cried Xxyzx into the room. “There’s been enough of that.”

“What other option is there?” shouted Neptune.

Allyaphasia stepped forward, leading the boy with every step.

“Ours is a history of running,” she insisted. “And too often of fighting—but never of helping. Never a gesture of kindness for fear of being vulnerable. Never a moment of forgiveness. We cannot expect from them what we are unable to give ourselves.”

“We’re broken, Allyaphasia!” cried Jonas.

“Then this is how we mend,” she insisted. “By fixing ourselves.”

She would have said more had Jonathan not stepped out from behind her, dropping a hand that reached back out for his own, and moved cautiously into the center of the room. Never before had he felt so small, so afraid, but if courage was the price, he would find it to pay.

“My mom is dying,” he said, tears spilling from his eyes. “You can help her; you can do that. Whatever you are, you all were born. I’m just a kid with a sick mom and a dumb uncle and no hope except for you. And whatever you think we’ll do, we won’t, I swear, because she’ll be one of you. And that doesn’t matter to me as long as she’s okay.” He paused, weeping and embarrassed. “Your god left you, and I’m pretty sure that mine left me, too. So if all we have left is each other, then whatever we are, that’s better than being alone, right?”

The room was silent. The world had fallen into a deep and lulling hush.

“She’s dying,” he concluded. “Please.”

The silence lingered for a long, lasting moment until Neptune finally spoke.

“That’s a smart fucking kid,” she said. “I call for council.”

“Council’s dead,” grumbled Jonas. “Council was a relic of Midian.”

“We are Midian,” replied Xxyzx. “And I second the call.”

Reluctantly, the creatures began to assemble in the center of the room as Allyaphasia turned to Jon.

“You must go now,” she said. “This will be a long process.”

“Will they help?” he asked, but she didn’t answer.

“Go now, back to your mother. Give her your love and return here tomorrow. We’ll be waiting.”

In the darkness before dawn, Allyaphasia stood in the cool, rustling grass of the field, gazing upward at the stars. She knew of their patterns and portents, understood the workings of far-off worlds on her own. She was an old mystic, last in a long line of sky-gazing fortune-tellers, but tonight, for all their power to be more so, she wished them only to be what they were—pinpricks in the darkness.

She heard Xxyzx before she saw him, and when the shadows parted to reveal his face, he looked exhausted.

“We’ve been at this for hours,” he said. “With hours more to go.”

“Jonas can smell it,” she said. “We all can. There aren’t many hours left.”

A cricket sang its one-note song from somewhere in the darkness, and it took Xxyzx a moment to realize that it was doing so from the palm of Allyaphasia’s hand. The creature was her own, molded from a slice of flesh across her forearm, and it chirped quietly into the night. The two friends stood there, together in the tallgrass, listening to its music.

“We’re only ever saved by the mercy we show to others,” said Allyaphasia after a time. “Lylesburg told me as much.”

Xxyzx groaned at the name of the man who’d set him to bleed, but his skin remained unmarked. Nothing new had scrawled itself there. Rather, he only laughed—guttural and deep. “Lylesburg and his lessons,” he muttered. “When did he spin you that fiction?”

“The day before the taking of Midian.” She paused. “The day before he’d decided to remove your curse.” She let the revelation hang delicately in the moonlight, and for a moment, there was only silence, save for the chirping of insects.

If Xxyzx reacted, Allyaphasia couldn’t tell. “He said it to me after Boone arrived,” she continued, “before the fire followed. He confessed that he’d been wrong to curse you. Admitted that peace isn’t something to be forced, but discovered; that we have to come to it in our own way, in our own time. He would have healed you, Xxyzx. He was a good man.”

She’d given him an opportunity to lament, she understood—to despair at the loss of a truth refused him. Instead, he simply said, “One day, love, you’ll find your peace,” words which led her to suspect that somehow, by chance, he’d begun to find his own.

“I believe now that I will,” she replied after a while. “It’s why I’ve decided to help the boy. Whatever the verdict.”

Before she could speak, Xxyzx sighed mournfully into the evening chill. “Ally, please—”

“Oh, be still,” she chided. “Do what you must, I’ll understand. But if we are, the lot of us, more than just a tribe, greater than a simple pack of bickering drifters—if we are, by fate or family, bound—you’ll allow me this, Xxyzx. All of you.”

“It won’t bring them back,” the creature said plainly. “The dead stay dead.… But you already know that.”

Allyaphasia turned and touched his cheek. For the first time in a long time, her hand came away bloodless.

“I’m a mother denied her children. I haven’t the right to deny a child his mother.”

She smiled, thin-lipped but honest, and the expression she wore was one of resolution. She had finished wandering, it was clear—finished mourning, finished apologizing for her tears. She had decided, and there were no requests left in her. Seemingly unchanged, the world had somehow remade itself, and in that moment, he knew that she was no longer Nightbreed. She was singular; she was her own.

“When?” he asked. “I’ll be there with you.”

“Tomorrow,” replied Allyaphasia. “After nightfall.”

Elizabeth Adler died the following morning.

Died, but not died. Half died.

Jonathan awoke to the sound of the dream-demon—not in his mother’s head, however, but in his own. “It’s time,” said the shadow, vague against the light, a vision that Jonathan might have forgotten had it not carried him back into wakefulness.

Finally, my mother … he began to think, but stopped himself. He’d found the way to help, so long as they would agree.

He moved quickly from the bed, threw open his door, and saw Albert standing in the entrance to his mother’s room, face sullen. He feared for a moment that he was too late, but the voice of the demon—or was it an angel—persisted inside his skull. “It’s time” suggested somehow that there was time to be had, little though it might be, and it allowed precious few seconds for grief.

“She’s alive?” he asked, the space between them immense.

“I woke her for breakfast,” he stammered. “Oatmeal, the usual. But she won’t open her eyes. I think you should say your—”

“I’ve gotta get to the barn,” he said, bare feet rushing toward the stairwell.

“I don’t think you understand,” said his uncle.

“I can help,” cried Jon. “They can help!”

“Who, Jon? Who can help?”

“The Nightbreed,” he said, almost casually. “The monsters in the basement.”

Albert stopped at the top of the stairs as Jon looked back up. It was the first time that his uncle had ever worn a human face, he thought, and it was one of sorrow. Jon knew it well and pitied him for the fashion.

“She’s dying,” said Albert. “Jon, son, it’s time.”

“No,” said the boy by his place at the door. “Not quite yet.”

He ran across the field, ignoring his uncle’s calls, scrambled through the break in the barn wall and into the darkened cellar.

“She’s dying!” he called loudly into the room. “Please, help! Please!”

From the shadows, a lamplight began to glow—then another, and another. The monsters stirred from their sleep, rousing into the shadows of the midafternoon. A few lay on improvised beds of dirt and hay; others slept in crossed-legged meditation, while others still hung from the rafters overhead. As the lamplight brightened the vague shape of the cellar, they slowly began to assemble, eyes squinted against the darkness. Xxyzx was the first to speak.

“We said to come at night, boy!”

“She’s dying!” he cried. “Allyaphasia, she’s dying!”

There was some commotion among the crowd as Allyaphasia appeared, exchanging nervous glances with Xxyzx across the room. From the space above, the distant shouts of Albert crossing the field could be faintly discerned, but Jonas had already sensed the threat from its smell alone. He looked frantically up the stairs, then back toward Xxyzx at the center of the Breed.

“Fool!” cried the puppet. “Who have you brought?”

“It’s my uncle,” said Jon, crossing the room toward the tattooed woman. “I didn’t have time to wait. He’s harmless, I promise, but we have to go now.”

He took her hand, attempting to drag her forward, but she resisted, digging her feet into the earth below. “I can’t—” she began.

“Can’t what?” asked Jon. “Can’t why?”

Before she could answer, Albert’s voice sounded from the top of the stairs. His footsteps echoed off the creaking boards—one step, another—as he shouted down below.

“Dammit, Jon, this is serious. Your mother’s ill and you’re talking about monsters? It’s not time to be a child now!”

He might have said more had he not breached the lamplight, nearly collapsing to the bottom at the sight of their assembly. His footing faltered as he yelped a nervous, half-formed scream, caught in his throat by Jonas’s six-fingered hand. The creature rushed toward its victim, pinning him violently against the wall, yellow eyes against Albert’s dull, muddy brown.

From his mouth, a set of pincers revealed themselves—spit-covered and sharp—extending past the creature’s lips and hefting themselves against the meat of Jonas’s cheeks. Thick, viscous choking sounds gurgled from the back of his throat, contracting painfully as if something were making its way out. From between his teeth, the glistening curvature of the puppeteer’s head emerged into the light, soft and dark like so much mud, or shit. It was larger than it should have been, and oddly shaped, contorting itself impossibly into the open air. It had a mouth of its own—eyes and hands—like some cancerous newborn tearing bloody into the world, but rather than cry—or roar, as Albert might have expected—it trained its narrow slits on the terrified man and said simply—

“Boo.”

Albert fainted, an unintended gesture which Jon would later assume had saved his life. He was, for the moment, a threat averted. No need for a murder so late in the day.

Jonas’s face fell back like a hood, absent of muscle or bone, as the puppet adjusted itself upright. “Tell him,” it hissed to Xxyzx. “Tell him why his mother’s going to die.”

Jonathan looked back toward Allyaphasia. “What does he mean? I thought you would help. I needed you to help.”

Before she could speak, Xxyzx interrupted. “We would have,” he admitted. “We’d agreed.… But we can’t go just now. Later, perhaps—”

“There is no later,” he protested. “She’ll be dead later!”

“It’s why we’re here,” said Neptune from behind him. “Hiding in the dark. The sun can burn us. Kill us.”

Jonathan moaned—half in mourning, half in anguish. The world seemed determined that a life would be taken this afternoon, and who was he to fight against the world? Just a boy, after all. Certainly nothing more.

“We can’t cross until nightfall,” said Xxyzx, leaning in toward the child, touching his face for the very first time. It was as real a connection as he’d made in centuries, so much that he barely felt the word “sorrow” script itself across his chest.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Truly, I am. If she lives—”

“She won’t.” Jon sniffed, weeping openly now.

“If she lives,” assured Xxyzx. “We’ll go. We’ll invite her to be one of us.…”

He held open his arms to the boy, who sobbed into the comfort of the monster’s awkward embrace. The child’s body shook with its tears, pattering against his scarred flesh, trickling over words of sadness and scorn, melancholy and anger, and mixed with the blood there to trace soft, pink trails across the creature’s skin. And in no small way, they hurt him more than Lylesburg’s curse ever had.

“I could have helped,” Jon cried, his voice muffled. “I could have saved her.”

Xxyzx looked past the boy’s head—took in the clean, soapy smell of his hair—and met Allyaphasia’s eyes across the room. He was uncertain whether the glance had been one of permission, or whether she’d simply come to the decision on her own, but when she stepped forward and placed her hand on the boy’s cheek, he was hardly surprised at her response.

“And we will,” she said. “We’ll save her together.”

None of them tried to stop her; they knew it would be fruitless. None of them tried to argue that she was their guide and that without her they were lost. None of them made proclamations of love, or offered eulogies in her honor.

Rather, they followed her up the steps to the place where the sun split through the broken boards, pushing through the shadows that fell across the floor. They watched her turn for what they knew would be her final look, hoping against hope that it might be otherwise. They witnessed Xxyzx as he edged the shadows and embraced her tenderly.

“This is your peace?” he asked. She nodded without speaking, and he touched her face like a lover might. “And this has been mine.” He kissed her—neither brief, nor lingering—and delicately pushed her away toward the boy.

“Move quickly,” he said in lieu of “Good-bye.” “It takes but a moment.”

Jonathan offered his hand, looking back across the monsters in the barn, who seemed as certain as he that the world would take its death today.

“Ready?” he said.

Allyaphasia closed her eyes—conjured the faces of her children, whom she hoped to see again—and stepped into the sunlight.

When the Nightbreed would later speak of their history, storytellers would spin the crossing of Allyaphasia in the most romantic of ways. It was a tale designed for tears, after all, told and retold, made and remade. But it wasn’t the truth, of course—history never is—and those who’d been there to see it would have told you that the reality was much, much worse.

She burned from the very beginning, from her first moment out among the light. It was a terrible pain, and for all her mother’s bravery—for all her intended nobility—she screamed with every step. Her skin smoked and charred. Her hands; her feet. Her arms turned red in five simple paces—a deep, sunburn tan; brown in ten; and gray in twenty. She made the walk with her eyes closed, knowing that they would burn first, hoping that her lids would protect them long enough to cross the field. She relied on Jonathan to guide her, and despite her cries and frequent stumbles, he pulled her firmly, bravely, murmuring platitudes to keep her going.

By the halfway point, her hair had stiffened and cracked, falling to the ground like straw. Her exposed head sprouted red, pus-filled sores; her back gristled and hissed, and by the time they reached the dirt path toward the porch, her spine had become discernible beneath the half-cooked flesh.

“A few more feet,” pleaded Jonathan. “Just a few.”

They made it together, stumbling up the steps. Jonathan reached to pull open the screen door and turned to the creature beside him. Her right eye had blistered and burst, its juices leaking down her cheek.

He pulled her into the living room only half alive, but her strength was evident even in her weakened state.

“Which way?” she asked, and when he pointed to the stairs, she sighed.

Allyaphasia crawled to the top, step by step—half pulled, half dragged by Jon beside her—and down the hall into Elizabeth’s bedroom. Jonathan pulled the curtain closed to block the afternoon sun.

“We made it,” said Jonathan, following her to the side of his mother, and for the first time since stepping from the barn, he allowed himself to notice the tragedy that the sun had played upon Allyaphasia. Elizabeth lay there—eyes sunken, skin pale—and yet for all the damage wrought beneath her skin, she still, at least, looked human. There was nothing vaguely resembling Allyaphasia left of the creature across from him, and in that moment, Jonathan realized that he’d traded one loss for another.

He’d come to love this woman, this monster, and he wept for her now as much as his mother. He felt somehow as if they were the same.

As if to dispel the notion, Elizabeth muttered quietly.

“You,” she said softly to the dream-demon. “Your face…”

Allyaphasia looked up at those words, taking Elizabeth’s hand. “We’re not alone,” she said after a moment. “There are others here.”

“It’s just us,” said Jonathan, thinking perhaps that she’d lost her sight completely. “The room is empty.”

“One room is every room,” she said. “And all rooms are one room.”

Jonathan didn’t pretend to understand, nor did Allyaphasia attempt to teach him. She simply reached for the soft flesh of Elizabeth’s arm—of which there was little, for she’d wasted much—and asked of the boy, “Are you certain?”

He nodded, and Allyaphasia lowered her head, placing her lips over Elizabeth’s skin, and bit down as if her bite were a kiss. Two small rivulets of blood flowed down her pale, alabaster hands onto the quilted blanket that his grandmother had knitted before her passing. He wondered for the first time by how long his mother might now outlive him, or his children, or his children’s children—the missing of which had been her greatest dying regret.

“How long?” asked Jonathan, leaning over his mother’s frail façade, when suddenly her eyes opened, meeting his own with a fire he’d not seen in months.

“Not long at all,” laughed Allyaphasia as Elizabeth looked intently at her son.

“Jon?” she said, the gauze of her sleep still shedding from her eyes. She touched his face, his neck, his hair—smiling, half giggling. “He sent me back,” she said. “The angel, he sent me back.”

He kissed her, surprised at the warmth that had already returned to her body. He wrapped his arms around her neck as she winced. “Slow there, tiger. One step, then another,” she said, but she only hugged him harder.

It wasn’t until they’d parted that her eyes fell to Allyaphasia, and before Jonathan could think to tell her not to scream—to say that there was an explanation, and then explain it—Elizabeth smiled. “He said you’d be here,” she whispered, tears welling, but not yet fallen. “That I’d know you by your eyes.”

They were kind eyes, indeed, thought Jonathan, who asked only, “What did you see?”

“I saw him,” said Elizabeth. “Clearly and for the very first time. The man in my dreams; the one who calls to me.” She paused, raising her hand to the marred, blackened flesh of Allyaphasia’s cheek. “He had a face like yours.”

“Like ours,” muttered the monster, her breathing labored, her dim eyes growing heavy. “Do you understand?”

Elizabeth nodded. “It was explained to me. And I accept.”

Even Allyaphasia, who knew more of the world-behind-the-world than Jonathan could ever hope to learn, seemed confused by her words, but if she desired to know more, she said nothing. Instead, she turned to Jonathan, who’d made no pretense to hide his tears, and smiled.

“Kindly, dear, would you open the window?” she asked, her tired glance full of knowing. “So that I might see my son.”

Jonathan hesitated, aware of the consequence, but Elizabeth simply nodded—a gentle, melancholy gesture—as if to give permission to them both. It was a moment between mothers, he understood, and not for him to share.

Elizabeth’s eyes met those of the tattooed woman—as if parting at the start of a long journey—and she pulled herself back into the room’s shade and shadows. In his corner, Jonathan reached for the curtains. A slice of light penetrated the narrow slit and fell across Allyaphasia’s face. She closed her eyes against the sting and gestured him forward.

He drew the curtains wider, enough to allow the sun to pour down onto the creature in the center of the room, and as it did so, she began slowly to unravel. The tattoos that marked her skin pulled away, peeling toward the sunlight and rising into the shape of animals. Jonathan spied a titmouse emerge from the woman’s skin, followed by a cat, followed by a snake.

The offspring weren’t immune to the soft diffusion of sun, and as they separated and formed, one by one, they came back together in an embrace of species. They nestled into one another—taking suckle, taking safety—as the light dissolved their newborn forms, floating like ash into the air.

Allyaphasia was almost gone now, as well, a hollow framework from which countless lives had come and gone, but she was not wholly unrecognizable. Her smile persisted to the end. Elizabeth stepped forward from the shadows, unafraid of what effect the light might have on her fading humanity, and cradled the soft, wet tissue of the disappearing woman.

“I saw him,” she repeated. “The man from my dreams. And he spoke to me of you.”

The Breed no longer had voice, but her mouth moved breathlessly in the pantomime of a question: What did he say?

And with her first breath as a member of the tribes, Elizabeth told her.

When it was safe—when the sun had set—Jonathan led his mother across the field to the barn where the remaining Nightbreed paced nervously in the shadows. He helped her across the threshold and down into the crudely dug cellar where the creatures waited impatiently. They looked up curiously, their eyes passing beyond the stranger in their midst in search of Allyaphasia behind them, which she was not.

“Our woman?” asked Xxyzx. “Did she not make it?”

Elizabeth scanned the room with greater confidence than she had ever possessed in her human life, and with the strange audience before her, simply shook her head.

“Such a fucking waste!” cried Jonas. “Trading her for you! We’re lost now!”

“Not entirely,” said Elizabeth to the room, a timbre in her voice which Jonathan had never before heard. “My son and his uncle will be our eyes in the daylight; find us places to rest beneath the moon. We’ll explain it to him when he wakes,” she said of Albert’s body slumped unconsciously in the corner.

Laughter spread among the crowd—tenuous and discordant. There were holes in their disbelief. She had put them there with only a scant few words.

“And what of it?” asked Xxyzx. “What of you?”

“Of me?” she asked, removing the veil from her head, revealing the shapes and mutations that Allyaphasia’s bite had conjured there. Her features had changed considerably. The bones beneath her skin had reworked themselves, re-formed, but not without regard to her femininity. In truth, strange as it may have seemed, Jonathan considered his mother to be more beautiful in that moment than ever.

“Of me,” she began, “I died. And in death I had a vision. A man, but not a man. Like me now, a half-breed. And in that vision he spoke, and in speaking asked me to address you thus.…”

The Nightbreed stilled, their attention rapt, and had Elizabeth known the long, suffering history of Xxyzx—upon whose skin the worst had been written—she might have been surprised to see the word “hope” appear there now.

On the stairs beside her, Jonathan took her hand.

“Tell them, Mom,” he whispered quietly. “Tell them what the man told you.”

Elizabeth smiled proudly at her son, running a hand through his delicate auburn hair, and turned to the roomful of unbelievers, prepared to make them less so. “My name is Boone,” she quoted. “And these are my children. You are chosen among them. You are Cabal. And you will lead them to me.”

And so it was that Elizabeth Adler—newest of the Nightbreed—having spoken the words, began to make them true.