Midian Unmade

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  For all those who have felt that sense of unbelonging so characteristic of the Nightbreed—never forget that you are not alone.

  Joseph Nassise

  For Clive Barker—your kindness, talent, and influence will last with me for the rest of my life … and maybe beyond.

  Del Howison

  PREFACE

  In late 1992 I picked up the Pocket Books paperback edition of a new novel by a writer I’d never read before, Clive Barker. The book in question was called Cabal, and I remember the cover quite clearly, for it featured a dark, looming face superimposed on the night sky with the tagline “At last, the night has a hero” situated beneath the bright red letters of the main title.

  Within the pages of that slim volume I was introduced to both an amazing world and an amazing writer. The tale of Boone and Midian and the creatures known as the Nightbreed instantly captivated me, drawing me into their dark embrace and never letting go. Cabal engaged my love of the dark fantastic in a way that few books before it ever had, turning me into a lifelong fan of Clive and his work.

  Just a few months after I had picked up that book, in the spring of 1993, I had the pleasure of attending the first public solo showing of Clive’s art at the Bess Cutler Gallery in New York City. Paintings and drawings with names like Cenobite and Books of Blood and Frank hung on the walls, places and characters and worlds that are familiar to any fan of Clive’s work but about which, at the time, I was just learning. I bought a print of one of the pieces (Books of Blood: Volume 1) and was pleased to have a few moments to speak with Clive as he signed it for me. It was a short but memorable conversation because we discussed the life of a writer and what it meant to be able to bring one’s visions to life on the page for others to experience.

  Fast-forward eighteen years to the fall of 2012. My own writing career had taken off at this point, with more than a dozen novels to my credit, and I was casting about for a new project to begin when I came upon a battered copy of that original print edition of Cabal in a used bookstore. Wouldn’t it be fun to play in that world? I thought to myself. I imagined picking up where Clive had left off, with the tribes of the moon scattered to the four corners of the globe, waiting for their savior, Cabal, to restore their sanctuary and call them all home again. What would their lives be like? What beauty and wonder and misery and madness would they have found, tossed out into the world like so much flotsam and jetsam, at the mercy of the monsters known as mankind? In that moment Midian Unmade: Tales of Clive Barker’s Nightbreed was born.

  It took another three years and the help of many people—my coeditor Del Howison (owner of the world’s best horror bookstore, Dark Delicacies), editors Jim Frenkel and Melissa Singer at Tor Books, the twenty-three writers who penned the stories that appear herein, and, of course, Clive Barker himself—to turn that dream into a reality.

  You hold in your hands the fruits of that effort, the physical embodiment of fantasy made flesh and blood, and within its pages you will find the Nightbreed in all their glory as they dance and sing and feast and yearn and hope and dream under the light of the moon.

  I hope you find them as intriguing as I have.

  JOSEPH NASSISE

  INTRODUCTION

  (Reprinted from The Nightbreed Chronicles, 1990)

  Our lives are scattered throughout with periods of unbelonging; in childhood, of course, and adolescence; but in adulthood too, when sudden loss (or gain) forces us to reassess things we believe immutable.

  At such times we all become like changeling children, at odds with our friends and peers, looking to distant horizons for fresh comprehension of ourselves.

  The fiction of the fantastic brims with metaphors for this condition: tales of people whose cells are protean and souls migrant, people called by mysterious forces to a place they’ve visited in other lives or states; a place never understood—at least until the moment of crisis—as their real home.

  There, perhaps, they may enjoy the company of their own tribe.

  Welcome, then, to the people I feel particularly at home with: the Nightbreed. They are a colony rather than a family. A collection of survivors of what were once small nomadic nations: werewolves, vampires, demons, shape-shifters …

  In conventional Western mythology these are the villains; creatures who possess little more than an appetite for destruction and evil. But in cultures less brutalized by dualism these dream nations are as much celebrated as feared; they are the spirits of our darker natures which healthier theologies don’t seek to repress.

  CLIVE BARKER

  Pinewood Studios, England

  September 1989

  RETURN TO MIDIAN

  Midian—the name means a place of refuge, a legendary city where all sins are forgiven.

  —Clive Barker’s The Nightbreed Chronicles

  Twenty-five years ago, Clive Barker was the tour guide for our journey into Midian, a place he described as a “labyrinthine necropolis” occupied by “an ancient race of mythological creatures.” During this sojourn, he challenged our perceptions and prejudices when he declared that “evil hides behind a human mask and even monsters have souls.”

  Barker’s “grotesques and freaks, noble beasts and exquisite transformers” were both apart from and a part of the world. Whether the sense of isolation sprang from an uncommon visage or, like Narcisse, a knowing from deep within, Midian called out to each of them.

  More than a literary locale, the “hidden city” represented a liminal space familiar to anyone who felt that he or she did not belong; simultaneously a safe haven and a precarious dwelling where self-destruction, annihilation, or even transcendence was possible.

  While no two Nightbreed looked alike, their sins were in essence singular; they were the Other. As such, they were feared and hated, for as Julia Kristeva posited in Powers of Horror: “The abject has only one quality of the object—that of being opposed to I.”

  Even though sympathetic creatures populated other works, they often appeared as loners forced to the dark edges of society. If more than one type of monster inhabited the same landscape, they were enemies. Battle lines drawn, man’s oft-repeated history of “us versus them” was allowed to play out, neither questioned nor challenged.

  Cabal was a tale written for the readers of its day but also in anticipation of the future. Like Rachel and Babette, the Other was and is a shape-shifter, transforming at the behest of a time, a people, or a nation. The constant? A seemingly insatiable need by humans for this space to be, at all times, occupied.

  Although Barker engineered Midian’s destruction, he also left among the ruins pieces of hope. Fo
r the Nightbreed came together as one, not because they were the same, but because they were different.

  LISA MAJEWSKI

  THE MOON INSIDE

  Seanan McGuire

  Once, Midian. Once, the caves carved from the living rock, the warrens and rabbit-runs like veins through the flesh of the earth. Once, a world lived in constant descent, down, down, ever down, until it seemed that one day in their expansion they would strike the hot molten core of the world, where magma flowed like the blood of Baphomet. Once, safety. Once, home.

  Now, Seattle. Now, the cold, cruel cities of the Naturals, which rise towering above their foundations like they would deny the very stone that birthed them. They bloom like grotesque flowers, these misshapen cities of the sun, spreading their petals to greedily block the sky from those they have left behind them on the ground. There is no safety here.

  Babette curls in her room—a corner of attic in a warehouse whose ownership has become tangled over the years, bills of sale disappearing and deeds being mysteriously lost—and watches the rain patter on her small and fiercely guarded window. Some of the others consider her strange for coveting this slice of the outside; she’s too fragile to risk the sun the way she does, she should be more careful, she should move deeper into the communal room, forsaking privacy for safety. But her visions are their only connection to Lori (who came to them in skin and left in leather, wings against the moon, oh Lori, see how she flies), and hence, to Cabal. If she demands the window, and the sweet-faced moon beyond, she’ll be indulged.

  Seattle is a good city, as Natural cities go. The sun shines more often than the tourist brochures they once stole from a travel agent’s office promised them it would, but it vanishes often enough that the braver and stronger of them can go abroad in the daylight, hoods pulled over heads, parasols shielding skins from an unexpected break in the clouds. They mingle with the Naturals that way, making their faces known among the community. They won’t be caught unprepared if another Decker rises, another human monster with a vendetta to pursue. Even Babette has seen the streets by daylight, thanks to heavy cloud cover and well-placed awnings. She could be happy here, if this were home …

  But this is not home. This will never be home. Cabal is moving through the world, and his woman moves through the world with him, and together they will find a new Midian, a strong, secure place driven deep into the rock, and the tribes of the moon will come together once more, living and dead alike, in the place where the monsters go.

  The sun is setting and the sky outside the window is the bruised color of week-dead man flesh. Babette stills, listening to the sounds around her. Breed move through the shared spaces, whisper in corners, copulate in the rafters … but none of them are paying any attention to her, not even Rachel, who is her mother in all but flesh. Satisfied, Babette reaches out with clever fingers and undoes the latch, sliding the window open.

  It is a teenage girl who braces the glass with a piece of masonry, keeping it from closing before she comes home, and a teenage girl who drops the bag of clothing to the street below. It is a creature like no other ever seen on this earth that slides through the open frame, dexterous paws finding the soft places between bricks and gripping tight, so tight that no force in this world could pry it loose. Its coat is the gray of a misty sky, stippled with darker spots, like eyes. It blends into the city, blends into the twilight, and it slips away without a sound.

  * * *

  The difficulty of being a teenage monster in a human city is the absolute lack of things to do on a Friday night. She could go to the movies, watch some Natural fever dream of terror or romance play out upon the screen, but she did that last week, and the amusement value wears thin after a while. She could buy a cup of coffee with the money she’s bartered from the more daylight-safe members of the tribe, sip it slow and bitter while she sits at an outside table and watches the world go by—but what difference is that from her window, really? She still has no connection to the people who pass her. They’re just closer, the blood in their veins like sugar candy and communion wine.

  It’s rude to eat the people in your neighborhood. Worse, it attracts attention, and attention is a thing to be avoided. It was attention that drove their splinter tribe of Breed from Columbus, where the corn grew high as heaven in the fields, and from Anaheim, where the sun was unforgiving but the nights were bitter cold and oh, so long. They can’t afford another move, not right now, not with two of the women and one of the men of the tribe gravid with Nightbreed yet to be. Pregnancy is hard enough on the dead without adding the strain of another flight to the process.

  In the end, Babette settles for breathing her beast back into her belly, where it curls like a predatory fawn, dangerous and waiting for an opportunity to pounce. She collects the bag of clothing from the shadow where it fell and pulls each piece on with a rebel’s reverence: the denim trousers, the loose linen shirt, the heavy down jacket that blurs her body’s lines almost as effectively as a change of shape. She has come to see clothing as a form of shape-shifting; it lets people hide their true selves behind masks, distorting and remaking their own images. So tonight she will be a child of this city, this obscene flower of a city, and not of Midian; she will walk among them unseen, and she will see.

  I see this for you, Lori, she thinks, and receives the barest trace of beating wings and a frozen, distant sky for her troubles, skating across her mind’s eye like the shadow of a dream. They are still out there, still searching, still running. Babette aches to run with them but no, no, that is not her lot in death; hers is to wait and watch, to hide and hear the things some would rather have unheard. She did not choose this, but she carries it with her as she slouches out of the alley and into the world of man.

  They are everywhere, the Naturals, stinking and prolific, swarming the streets like rats despite the growing darkness, despite the falling rain. There was a time (before her time, so many years before her eyes were opened) when none of them would have dared the dark like this. They would have been too afraid of the tribes of the moon, who walked freely under the stars and took what meat they needed from those too unwise to bar their doors at night. Babette remembers that with every shoulder that brushes hers and every body that shoves her aside, a tiny bit of almost-human flotsam bobbing through their hectic sea. Once, they would have feared her. Once, they would have run at the merest flash of her small white teeth.

  And once, they would have followed her home with fire and with bellies full of terror, which is like coal: press it down hard enough and it hardens into a form of courage, diamond-hard and impossible to break. It’s better not to be feared. She knows that, but oh, she wishes they would not touch her.

  The tidal pull of humanity carries her down one street and onto the next, where she turns and swims against their current, heading for the one place that requires no human money and asks few human questions of a teenage girl who appears homeless to adult eyes. (And she is homeless, she is, because once was Midian and now is Seattle, and Lori and Cabal and the reunion of the tribes are so far away.)

  The doors of the Seattle Public Library are unlocked, and quiet as a whisper, Babette slips inside.

  * * *

  The existence of human libraries was a discovery Babette first made in Columbus, on a hot summer night when there was nothing else to do besides sit in the hayloft of their borrowed barn and watch the corn growing in the fields. Within these walls is everything the tribes of man have learned, and everything they have stolen from the tribes of the moon.

  “Know thy enemy” is a saying known to Natural and Nightbreed alike, and Babette is hungry for knowledge. She already knew how to read, thanks to the gravestones in Midian. She learned her letters from the names of dead men, prizing their secrets from the granite and marble one syllable at a time. The difference between an epigraph and an encyclopedia is merely one of scale. Both preserve the accomplishments of the lost.

  The librarians barely glance up as she ghosts past them, a familiar figure in her m
ismatched clothes and her oversized jacket. She doesn’t shout or throw things or disturb the other patrons; like most of the city’s itinerant youth, she is utterly polite while she is inside the library walls, and so she is allowed to come and go unhindered. It is a small and sacred contract, and one that has served all involved well in the months since the Breed have come to Seattle. The librarians do not know there is a monster in their midst, and the monster, unthreatened, sees no cause to reveal herself.

  Luck is with her; there is an open space in the bank of computers at the back of the New Media room. Babette slips into a seat and presses the button to log herself on, marveling only a little as the machine swiftly responds to her command. Most of the Nightbreed have never touched a computer. The world is changing—the world is always changing—and this change is among the most dangerous of all, because she knows one day it will reveal them. Too many people are seeing too many things, and posting them to the Internet, where they wait like snares for someone to stumble into them and start seeing the patterns.

  She brings up a search engine, drags the mouse to the box at the top of the screen, and types a single word:

  MIDIAN

  Rachel would call it dangerous foolishness, but Rachel does not go out in the world as much as Babette does; she is older, and wiser, and has learned to mistrust too much freedom. Babette is learning different lessons. Thanks to the oh-so-public slaughter at the necropolis, Midian is urban legend and modern myth now, indelibly etched into the stories of the Naturals. They take her for another human teenager made curious by tales of monsters—and maybe a little bit wistful. What was it Peloquin said once, in Lori’s hearing (and hence Babette’s, for they have shared so many things since those dark days of fire and fear)? “Oz is over the rainbow and Midian is where the monsters go.”