Cabal (12 page)

She could barely see the avenues in front of her for the bursts of light in her head. She was like a blind woman, sobbing as she stumbled; no longer even certain if Decker was behind her or in front. Any moment he would despatch her. One bullet, and her charmed life would end.

In the ground below, the Breed heard her arrival, their senses attuned to panic and despair. They knew the hunter’s tread too; they’d heard it behind them all too often. Now they waited, pitying the woman in her last moments but too covetous of their refuge to put it at risk. There were few enough hiding places left where the monstrous might find peace. They’d not endanger their hermitage for a human life.

Still it pained them, hearing her pleas and her calls. And for one of their number the sound was almost beyond endurance.

‘Let me go to her.’

‘You can’t. You know you can’t.’

‘I can kill him. Who’s to know he was ever here?’

‘He won’t be alone. There’ll be others waiting outside the walls. Remember how they came for you.’

‘I can’t let her die.’

‘Boone! Please God –’

It was worse than anything he’d suffered, hearing her calling him, and knowing Midian’s law wouldn’t let him answer.

‘Listen to her, for god’s sake!’
he said.
‘Listen.’

‘You made promises when we took you in,’
Lylesburg reminded him.

‘I know. I understand.’

‘I wonder if you do. They weren’t demanded lightly, Boone. Break them and you belong nowhere. Not with us. Not with them.’

‘You’re asking me to listen to her die.’

‘So block your ears. It’ll soon be over.’

She could no longer find the breath to call his name. No matter. He wasn’t here. Or if he was, he was dead in the earth, and corrupted. Beyond help, in the giving or the taking.

She was alone, and the man with the gun was closing on her.

Decker took the mask from his pocket; the button mask he felt so safe behind. Oh, the number of times, in those tiresome days with Boone, teaching him the dates and the places of the murders he was inheriting, when Decker’s pride had almost brimmed over and he’d itched to claim the crimes back. But he needed the scapegoat more than the quick thrill of confession, to keep suspicion at bay. Boone’s admitting to the crimes wouldn’t have been an end to it all of course. In time the Mask would start speaking to its owner again, demanding to be bloodied, and the killings would have to begin afresh. But not until Decker had found himself another name, and another city to set up his store in. Boone had spoiled those well-laid plans, but he’d get no chance to tell what he knew. Ol’ Button Face would see to that.

Decker pulled the mask on. It smelt of his excitement. As soon as he breathed in he got a hard. Not the little sex-hard, but the death-hard; the murder-hard. It sniffed the air for him, even through the thickness of his trousers and underwear. It smelt the victim that ran ahead of him. The Mask didn’t care that his prey was female; he got the murder-hard for anyone. In his time he’d had a heat for old men, pissing their pants as they went down in front of him; for girls, sometimes; sometimes women; even children. Ol’ Button Face looked with the same cross-threaded eyes on the whole of humanity.

This one, this woman in the dark up ahead, meant no more to the Mask than any of the others. Once they started to panic and bleed, they were all the same. He followed her with steady step; that was one of Button Head’s trade marks, the executioner’s tread. And she fled before him, her pleas deteriorating into snot and gasps. Though she hadn’t got breath to call for her hero, no doubt she prayed he’d still come for her. Poor bitch. Didn’t she know they never showed? He’d heard them all called upon in his time, begged for, bargained with, the Holy Fathers and Mothers, the champions, the interceders; none of them ever showed.

But her agony would be over soon. A shot through the back of the head to bring her down, and then he’d take the big knife, the heavy knife, to her face, the way he did with all of them. Criss cross, criss cross, like the threads in his eye, till there was nothing left to look at but meat.

Ah! She was falling. Too tired to run any further.

He opened Ol’ Button Head’s steel mouth, and spoke to the fallen girl –

‘Be still,’ he said.

‘It’s quicker that way.’

She tried to get up one final time, but her legs had given out completely, and the wash of whiteness was practically all consuming. Giddily, she turned her head in the direction of Decker’s voice, and in a trough between the white waves, she saw that he’d put his mask back on. Its face was a death’s head.

He raised the gun –

In the ground beneath her, she felt tremors. Was it the sound of a shot, perhaps? She couldn’t see the gun any longer, or even Decker. One final wave had washed him from sight. But her body felt the earth rock, and through the whine in her head she heard somebody calling the name of the man she’d hoped to find here.

Boone!

She didn’t hear an answer – perhaps there wasn’t one – but the call came again, as if summoning him back into the earth.

Before she could muster the last of her power to counter the call her good arm gave out beneath her and she was face down on the ground.

Button Head walked towards his quarry, disappointed that the woman would not be conscious to hear his final benediction. He liked to offer a few words of insight at the penultimate moment; words he never planned but that came like poetry from the zipper mouth. On occasion they’d laughed at his sermon, and that had made him cruel. But if they cried, and they often did, then he took it in good part, and made certain the last moment, the
very
last, was swift and painless.

He kicked the woman over onto her back, to see if he could raise her from her sleep. And yes, her eyes flickered open slightly.

‘Good,’ he said, pointing the gun at her face.

As he felt wisdom coming to his lips he heard the growl. It drew his gaze off the woman for a moment. A soundless wind had risen from somewhere, and was shaking the trees. There was complaint in the ground beneath his feet.

The Mask was untouched. Wandering in tomb yards didn’t raise a hair on his neck. He was the New Death, tomorrow’s face today: what harm could dust do him?

He laughed at the melodrama of it. Threw back his head and laughed.

At his feet the woman started moaning. Time to shut her up. He took aim at her open mouth.

As he recognized the word she was shaping the dark ahead of him divided, and that word stepped out of hiding.

‘Boone,’ she’d said.

It was
.

He emerged from the shadow of the shaking trees, dressed just as the Mask remembered, in dirty tee shirt and jeans. But there was a brightness in his eyes the Mask did not remember; and he walked – despite the bullets he’d taken – like a man who’d never known an ache in his life.

Mystery enough. But there was more. Even as he stepped into view he began to
change
, breathing out a veil of smoke that took his flesh for fantasy.

This was the scapegoat; yet not. So much
not
.

The Mask looked down at the woman to confirm that they shared this vision but she had fallen into unconsciousness. He had to trust what the cross-sewn eyes told him, and they told him terrors.

The sinews of Boone’s arms and neck were rippling with light and darkness; his fingers were growing larger; his face, behind the smoke he exhaled, seemed to be running with dazzling filaments that described a hidden form within his head which muscle and bone were conforming to.

And out of the confusion, a voice. It was not the voice the Mask remembered. No scapegoat’s voice, hushed with guilt. It was a yell of fury.

‘You’re a dead man, Decker
!’ the monster cried.

The Mask hated that name; that
Decker
. The man was just some old flame he’d fucked once in a while. In a heat like this, with the murder-hard so strong, Ol’ Button Head could barely remember whether Dr Decker was alive or dead.

Still the monster called him by that name.

‘You hear me,
Decker
?’ he said.

Bastard thing, the Mask thought. Mis-begotten, half-aborted bastard thing. He pointed a gun at its heart. It had finished breathing transformations, and stood before its enemy complete, if a thing born on a butcher’s slab could ever be called complete. Mothered by a she-wolf, fathered by a clown, it was ridiculous to a fault. There’d be no benediction for this one, the Mask decided. Only phlegm on its hybrid face when it was dead on the ground.

Without further thought he fired. The bullet opened a hole in the centre of Boone’s tee shirt and in the changed flesh beneath but the creature only grinned.

‘You tried that already, Decker,’ Boone said. ‘Don’t you ever learn?’

‘I’m not Decker,’
the Mask replied, and fired again. Another hole opened up beside the first but there was no blood from either.

Boone had begun to advance on the gun. No last, faltering step but a steady approach which the Mask recognized as his own executioner’s tread. He could smell the filth of the beast, even through the linen across his face. It was bitter-sweet, and sickened him to the stomach.

‘Be still,’ the monster said.

‘It’s quicker that way.’

The stolen step was insult enough, but to hear the purity of his own words from that unnatural throat drove the Mask to distraction. He shrieked against the cloth, and aimed the gun at Boone’s mouth. But before he could blow out the offending tongue Boone’s swollen hands reached and took hold of the gun. Even as it was snatched from him the Mask pulled the trigger, firing against Boone’s hand. The bullets blew off his smallest finger. The expression on his face darkened with displeasure. He dragged the gun out of the Mask’s hands and flung it away. Then he reached for his mutilator and drew him close.

Faced with imminent extinction, the Mask and its wearer divided. Ol’ Button Head did not believe he could ever die. Decker did. His teeth grated against the cage across his mouth, as he began to beg.

‘Boone … you don’t know what you’re doing.’

He felt the mask tighten over his head in fury at this cowardice but he talked on, trying to find that even tone he remembered calming this man with, once upon a time.

‘You’re diseased, Boone.’

Don’t beg, he heard the Mask saying: don’t you
dare
beg.

‘And you can heal me, can you?’ the monster said.

‘Oh yes,’ Decker replied. ‘Oh certainly. Just give me a little time.’

Boone’s wounded hand stroked the mask.

‘Why do you hide behind this thing?’ he asked.

‘It
makes
me hide. I don’t want to, but it makes me.’

The Mask’s fury knew no bounds. It shrieked in Decker’s head, hearing him betray his master. If he survived tonight it would demand the vilest compensation for these lies. He’d pay it gladly, tomorrow. But he had to outwit the beast to live that long.

‘You must feel the same as me,’ he said. ‘Behind that skin you have to wear.’

‘The same?’ said Boone.

‘Trapped. Made to spill blood. You don’t want to spill blood any more than I do.’

‘You don’t understand,’ Boone said. ‘I’m not
behind
this face. I
am
this face.’

Decker shook his head.

‘I don’t think so. I think that somewhere you’re still Boone.’

‘Boone is dead. Boone was shot down in front of you. Remember? You put bullets in him yourself.’

‘But you survived.’

‘Not alive.’

Decker’s bulk had been trembling. Now it stopped. Every muscle in his body became rigid, as the explanation for these mysteries came clear.

‘You drove me into the hands of monsters, Decker. And I became one. Not your kind of monster. Not the soulless kind.’ He drew Decker very close, his face inches from the mask. ‘I’m dead, Decker. Your bullets mean nothing to me. I’ve got Midian in my veins. That means I’ll heal myself over and over. But you –’

The hand stroking the mask now gripped the fabric.

‘– you, Decker … when you die, you die. And I want to see your face when it happens.’

Boone pulled at the mask. It was tied on securely and wouldn’t come. He had to get his claws into the warp and weft to tear it open and uncover the sweaty facts beneath. How many hours had he spent watching this face, hanging on its every flicker of approbation? So much wasted time. This was the healer’s true condition: lost and weak and weeping.

‘I was afraid,’ Decker said. ‘You understand that, don’t you? They were going to find me, punish me. I needed someone to blame.’

‘You chose the wrong man.’

‘Man?’
said a soft voice from the darkness. ‘You call yourself a man?’

Boone stood corrected.

‘Monster,’ he said.

Laughter followed. Then:

‘Well are you going to kill him or not?’