Midian Unmade (32 page)

Driving on the left had never agreed with him at the best of times, not to mention he'd embarrassed himself at the car-rental yard by hopping into the shotgun seat before remembering the steering column was on the other side. Admittedly, Rome had been far worse. At least in Australia there weren't mad Italians shedding blood for a hair's width of lane.

He hit the anchors and threw a hard right, watching the high beams sweep across close-packed eucalypts and then knife down the dark throat of the trailhead's parking lot. The shimmying Toyota chewed across the scrim of wood chips and leaf litter laid atop the lot's graded dirt. Then the wheels straightened and the Mongrel was riding moonbeams and a funnel of dust to a split-log parking bumper. His final stamp on the brakes caused the metal case on the passenger seat to slide toward the footwell, and the Mongrel arrested its momentum with a light touch, like a man stopping a child from crossing a busy street.

Be still, be still partner. We're here.

The moment he clicked the engine off he heard the ocean. When he got out, a sea breeze raised gooseflesh along his arms.

From inside the metal case came screams of hilarity. The Mongrel ignored them and hid the car key behind the back tire and laid his copy of the New Testament onto the car roof alongside his machete. He turned his pockets inside out. There was nothing else.

Carved into the bedrock, stairs fell off the edge of the ridgeline to the west, winding down through eucalypts and semitropical ferns toward the tarnished plate-metal of the Pacific. A timber signage board held a map under a pane of Perspex. According to the posted blurb, the Bouddhi National Park was the eager naturalist's go-to locale for reef egrets, peregrine falcons, and marsupial rodents. Some people had too much free time.

The Mongrel sniffed the breeze. Salt. Eucalyptus oil. The fearful musk of native animals—just as advertised. And beneath those scents, the rank taint of his quarry, the Jesuit. A stench robed in spoiling offal and bloody stool, steeped in the territorial piss-stink of Midian.

The Mongrel had never known Midian. He didn't feel the pull of old vows and ancient rituals. He was of the new order—a child of that yet to come, not that which had been. He'd heard tales, of course, but who hadn't?
There are truths, and there are lies, and then there is Midian.
So he owed Midian's memory nothing at all. Yet here he was. What a farce.

The steel suitcase rattled. The Mongrel went to it and bent his ear to the cold metal.
“We're close, aren't we?”
a voice said from inside. It was muffled by the velvet padding and scratchy where Button Face's zipper clicked and clacked with the bruised exhortations of a stolen larynx.

“Yes,” the Mongrel said. He inhaled. His lungs bloated themselves with the moist night air, became fat and pregnant in his rib cage, and then he exhaled, expelling the night shroud between his skinned-back lips, swaddling himself in the unholy. His sinews thickened, his jaw crafted itself anew. His anatomy reshaped itself as a bastard hybrid of the ichthyic and the reptilian, evolution toward, rather than away from, the primordial broth. A transformation he both craved and abhorred.

When he was done, the tatters of his mortal clothing shucked, he went back and collected the machete, the keys, and the Bible.
Forgive me Father, for I have sinned.

He opened the steel case and placed them inside, next to Button Face. Button Face snickered at the Bible. “Don't let your real father catch you at that blasphemy.”

Conceived in a jail cell, the rotten fruit of the dead fucking the living—his very existence was blasphemy. Half the man and twice the monster was the Mongrel's private, self-deprecating joke.

To hell with his father, Boone, or Cabal, or whatever appellation was today's fancy.

The Mongrel shut the lid on his leering detractor and the worn Bible and descended the stairs. “My father is half a world away. If Aaron has a problem sending me to the corners of the earth to solve his problems, he's never said so before. The least he can do is let me worship my own god.”

“Stubborn fucker, aren't you,” Button Face said.

The Mongrel imagined swinging the case into a sandstone cutting, silencing the mockery. But he did no such thing. Like the faithful lapdog he was, he even let the elasticity of his muscles smooth the jolts as he descended to the accompaniment of the meekly shifting leaves and the seething ocean.

*   *   *

Baphomet, holiest of holies, vivisected relic of Old Midian's mythic splendor. At the outset of this job, Aaron gave—gifted, the lordly one would have called it—the Mongrel with a tender cut of the prophet: tongue and voice box cleaved from the revered flesh.

The last located relics, Aaron had called them. “A weighty trust, my son. They shall light your way to the heretic's lair.”

Then his father had unveiled his second entrustment: a patchwork mask of blackened sackcloth. The mask displayed buttons for eyes, a zippered slit for a mouth. The zipper was crooked where the cloth had been restitched around its steel-toothed line.

Ol' Button Face himself, reclaimed from the fired graveyard earth, from ashes heaped upon ashes, a burned scrap salted with the sweat, the toxins, the heat-liquefied fat of its former wearer, Dr. Decker. The mask's torn fragments had been passed from shadowed hand to shadowed hand along the trafficking night lanes, back to that same hand that had destroyed it. Then that same hand had rebirthed the monster.
Needle and thread, balm and blood.

Aaron, though, had wanted the Mongrel present for the final act of reconciliation. While the Mongrel watched, Aaron himself stitched the vocal apparatus of the prophet into the mask. Ol' Button Face was sewn around the Baptizer's larynx, lips, and tongue. This new relic, this freshly whelped child, junction of primeval power and modern terror, seared in the baptismal flames, anointed in Decker's blood and Boone's seed, was appointed the Mongrel's overseer.

Button Face had been curiously passive since they touched down at the northern tip of Australia, that prehistoric, baked slab of rock sundered loose millennia ago from the tectonic ridge of Gondwanaland. In fairness, though, the Mask had steered them true enough as they cut for sign along the northern provinces, had uncovered the first clues that turned them south through the rain forests of Cairns and motel rooms become abattoirs, then farther south, through gutted railroad towns and carcass-filled whorehouses.

The Jesuit has his appetites, that he does.

Now, on the temperate eastern seaboard, at the bottom of a bushland staircase, the trail was near its terminus.

The Mongrel stepped off the stairs and out into the moonlight. Against the sand beat the mighty Pacific. Its tempo was as slow and steady as the Mongrel's own heartbeat.

Button Face laughed using the Baptizer's vocal cords. “Hurry, hurry.”

A boat bobbed in the bay, lightless, sail unfurled from the mast and flapping around the moon like a willful scarf. If the Jesuit was here, then there was no hope for the boat's occupants. They were already converts or dead.

“I smell him,” Button Face said.

The Mongrel found himself wishing for the sun, the bronzing splendor of daybreak, and again he wondered if he was the right person for the task. He was tired of toiling for his father's dreams.

“Follow the estuary,” Button Face said. “Even locked in this case I sense its fetid water. It is polluted with the ablutions of the Jesuit and his Breed.”

“Ablutions?” the Mongrel said. “You spent too much time with that psychiatrist. A dictionary is a tool, not a calling.”

“Fuck you.”

“Not even if we find the Baptizer's stolen cock amongst these rebels.”

“Graft his majestic thews onto me, would you, Mongrel? Wouldn't Daddy love that?”

“There are nights I get weary of your madness. Where's this estuary?” he said, but he already smelled it. The beach was a scimitar of yellow sand, encapsulated by a tree-wreathed bluff. Halfway along the beach, the bluff fell back from the beach a ways, and all that fronted the tree line there was a berm of sand. The berm was cut through by a channel of water that trickled from a font hidden behind the tree line.

The Jesuit had broken the truce, had the hubris to think of making a dark Eden here in the south. Button Face and the Mongrel had trailed his boot prints through scores of riven towns and desolated rest stops. Whole municipalities given to the midnight power of the balm. A plague, an epidemic. Already the day world was stirring. Mutterings and chatterings in the synagogues, the churches, the mosques, in the city halls, the tiers of Parliament. The gluttonous armature of the establishment was rousing itself, and Aaron Boone was worried.

So, he had sent the Mongrel to make good on his promises of damnation for transgressors. But talk was cheap, and as always, the real work, work that was not so cheap, fell to the Mongrel.

“What would your god say about our mission?” Button Face said. The Mongrel scowled and started the hard slog along the beach toward the trickling channel. The machete swung with each step, its blade near keen enough to part the moonbeams from their heavenly fountainhead.

“The Holy Christ has no love for monsters,” Button Face said. “No love for you or I.”

“I'm no monster. And you're a sackcloth rag stuffed with a dead man's breath.”

“O cruel world, to put me under your dominion. Alas, alack.” More laughter. “Still, your choice of god is flawed. Why not be your own god?”

“Like my father.”

“These daddy issues. They're growing old, Mongrel. I talk of God. You talk of your father. What would Dr. Decker have said about that, I wonder?”

They had neared the channel, and around its mouth, where fresh water burbled through the berm under a glaze of moonlight, the Mongrel saw footprints. The footprints weren't human. They were too large, too deep, and divots marked the placement of talons. The Mongrel didn't spare them further study. He would meet the owner soon enough, of that he was sure.

He lowered the case and cracked the lid. From inside came a rich, ambrosial stink and the clacking noise of Button Face smacking his zipper lips. “Follow the estuary, Mongrel. Tarry not. The Baptizer's flesh pulls me west, further back behind the sand.”

The Mongrel hefted the metal case and the machete, and ventured away from the open beach, back into the shuttered gloom behind the tree line, following the sandy edge of the tributary that wended back into the scrub.

“Stop!” Button Face commanded after they had hiked a short way. “Read the sign,” he said.

Too involved in his own thoughts, the Mongrel had missed it. The sign was stenciled sheet metal and had the official look of government signage. That was to say there was small print at the bottom warning of fines and penalties and litigation.

The sign's header read:

W
HALE
G
RAVEYARD.

Do not disturb.

Button Face felt the need to explain about the process by which beached whales were ofttimes bulldozed into shallow graves behind the dunes. What else to do with a fifty-ton corpse? Button Face, he knew all about corpses and disposing of corpses. As he put it, his former owner was a “practitioner of the art.”

The Mongrel looked for gouged earth, excavated soil, the belly-drag scars of towed leviathans. Despite what the sign cautioned against, he didn't see much that he could disturb except banksia shrubs and nesting emu-wrens.

As he stood there, still and silent, he noticed the little girl. She was a ways into the scrubland, her mop of dark hair shading in with the shadows. It was her skin that gave her away. It was stark white; skin never kissed by sunlight.

She was Breed. Odds were she was a new convert. Children took easiest to the change, the trading of skins, day for night, light for dark, life for death. The Mongrel felt the rawhide straps of the machete's handle scratching against his callused palm.

She had to be a lookout, a “cockatoo” in the native lingo of this southern hamlet. She'd seen him now, would raise the alarm if given a chance. He cut across the stream, hooked sharply into the scrub. He moved fast, a loping run. His blood was up, the Breed in him boiling to the surface. The girl watched him, unmoving.

His heightened hearing discerned Button Face's breaths grow quick in anticipation. Soon, very soon, Button Face would start clamoring to be let out so he could watch. He'd ask the Mongrel to daub fresh blood against his zippered mouth. He'd ask … for many things.

The Mongrel dropped the case and continued running. Behind him, Button Face screamed his outrage. But this girl, she wasn't destined to feed Button Face's fantasies. The Mongrel would give her the mercy of a clean death. He was almost upon her, the machete raised horizontally, ready to begin a flat arc toward the girl's throat. That was where he was staring—her throat. Fixing the cutting point, measuring his angles, judging the tensile strength of her cartilage and bone. It was only for that reason that he saw the crucifix, and even then only because it caught the moonlight at just the right moment, silver on silver.

The girl just stared at him as his feet stuttered and halted. The heat went out of him. He knelt in the sandy ground. “They let you wear that?” he said.

“Wear what?”

He opened his mouth, and slowly, so as not to alarm her, he sucked back the night shroud from his face and torso. It was a peculiar talent of his, this duality. He laid the machete on the ground. The girl smiled and held up the crucifix. “This?”

Under the laws of Old Midian, she was holding up her own death sentence. She didn't know that, though. She didn't know Midian or the old laws. How the Mongrel envied her.

“Everyone wears one,” she said. She gave him a funny look. “Except you. Who are you? Why haven't I seen you before?”