Cabal (9 page)

The resilience of the branches defied any further approach. Rather than attempting to bend them aside she began to break them in order to get to the failing creature. They were living wood, and fought back. Halfway through the thicket a particularly truculent branch snapped back in her face with such stinging force it brought a shout of pain from her. She put her hand to her cheek. The skin to the right of her mouth was broken. Dabbing the blood away she attacked the branch with fresh vigour, at last coming within reach of the animal. It was almost beyond responding to her touch, its eyes momentarily fluttering open as she stroked its flank, then closing again. There was no sign that she could see of a wound, but the body beneath her hand was feverish and full of tremors.

As she struggled to pick the animal up it began to urinate, wetting her hands and blouse, but she drew it to her nevertheless, a dead weight in her arms. Beyond the spasms that ran through its nervous system there was no power left in its muscles. Its limbs hung limply, its head the same. Only the smell she’d first encountered had any strength, intensifying as the creature’s final moments approached.

Something like a sob reached her ears. She froze.

Again, the sound. Off to her left, some way, and barely suppressed. She stepped back, out of the shadow of the evergreen, bringing the dying animal with her. As the sunlight fell on the creature it responded with a violence utterly belied by its apparent frailty, its limbs jerking madly. She stepped back into the shade, instinct rather than analysis telling her the brightness was responsible. Only then did she look again in the direction from which the sob had come.

The door of one of the mausoleums further down the avenue – a massive structure of cracked marble – stood ajar, and in the column of darkness beyond she could vaguely make out a human figure. Vaguely, because it was dressed in black, and seemed to be veiled.

She could make no sense of this scenario. The dying animal, tormented by light; the sobbing woman – surely a woman – in the doorway, dressed for mourning. What was the association?

‘Who are you?’ she called out.

The mourner seemed to shrink back into the shadows as she was addressed, then regretted the move and approached the open door again, but so very tentatively the connection between animal and woman became clear.

She’s afraid of the sun
too
, Lori thought. They belonged together, animal and mourner, the woman sobbing for the creature Lori had in her arms.

She looked at the pavement that lay between where she stood and the mausoleum. Could she get to the door of the tomb without having to step back into the sun, and so hasten the creature’s demise? Perhaps, with care. Planning her route before she moved, she started to cross towards the mausoleum, using the shadows like stepping stones. She didn’t look up at the door – her attention was wholly focused on keeping the animal from the light – but she could feel the mourner’s presence, willing her on. Once the woman gave voice; not with a word but with a soft sound, a cradle-side sound, addressed not to Lori but to the dying animal.

With the mausoleum door three or four yards from her, Lori dared to look up. The woman in the door could be patient no longer. She reached out from her refuge, her arms bared as the garment she wore rode back, her flesh exposed to the sunlight. The skin was white – as ice, as paper – but only for an instant. As the fingers stretched to relieve Lori of her burden they darkened and swelled as though instantly bruised. The mourner made a cry of pain, and almost fell back into the tomb as she withdrew her arms, but not before the skin broke and trails of dust – yellowish, like pollen – burst from her fingers and fell through the sunlight on to the patio.

Seconds later, Lori was at the door; then through it into the safety of the darkness beyond. The room was no more than an antechamber. Two doors led out of it: one into a chapel of some sort, the other below ground. The woman in mourning was standing at this second door, which was open, as far from the wounding light as she could get. In her haste, her veil had fallen. The face beneath was fine-boned, and thin almost to the point of being wasted, which lent additional force to her eyes, which caught, even in the darkest corner of the room, some trace of light from through the open door, so that they seemed almost to glow.

Lori felt no trace of fear. It was the other woman who trembled as she nursed her sunstruck hands, her gaze moving from Lori’s bewildered face to the animal.

‘I’m afraid it’s dead,’ Lori said, not knowing what disease afflicted this woman, but recognizing her grief from all too recent memory.

‘No,’ the woman said with quiet conviction. ‘She can’t die.’

Her words were statement not entreaty, but the stillness in Lori’s arms contradicted such certainty. If the creature wasn’t yet dead it was surely beyond recall.

‘Will you bring her to me?’ the woman asked.

Lori hesitated. Though the weight of the body was making her arms ache, and she wanted the duty done, she didn’t want to cross the chamber.

‘Please,’ the woman said, reaching out with wounded hands.

Relenting, Lori left the comfort of the door and the sunlit patio beyond. She’d taken two or three steps, however, when she heard the sound of whispering. There could only be one source: the stairs. There were people in the crypt. She stopped walking, childhood superstitions rising up in her. Fear of tombs; fear of stairs
descending;
fear of the Underworld.

‘It’s nobody,’ the woman said, her face pained. ‘Please, bring me Babette.’

As if to further reassure Lori she took a step away from the stairs, murmuring to the animal she’d called Babette. Either the words, or the woman’s proximity, or perhaps the cool darkness of the chamber, won a response from the creature: a tremor that ran down its spine like an electric charge, so strong Lori almost lost hold of it. The woman’s murmurs grew louder, as if she were chiding the dying thing, her anxiety to claim it suddenly urgent. But there was an impasse. Lori was no more willing to approach the entrance to the crypt than the woman to come another step towards the outer door, and in the seconds of stasis the animal found new life. One of its claws seized Lori’s breast as it began to writhe in her embrace.

The chiding became a shout –

‘Babette!’

– but if the creature heard, it didn’t care to listen. Its motion became more violent: a mingling of fit and sensuality. One moment it shuddered as though tortured; the next it moved like a snake sloughing off its skin.

‘Don’t look, don’t look!’
she heard the woman say, but Lori wasn’t about to take her eyes off this horrendous dance. Nor could she give the creature over to the woman’s charge, while the claw gripped her so tightly any attempt to separate them would draw blood.

But that
Don’t Look!
had purpose. Now it was Lori’s turn to raise her voice in panic, as she realized that what was taking place in her arms defied all reason.

‘Jesus God!’

The animal was changing before her eyes. In the luxury of slough and spasm it was losing its bestiality, not by re-ordering its anatomy but by liquefying its whole self – through to the bone – until what had been solid was a tumble of matter. Here was the origin of the bitter-sweet scent she’d met beneath the tree: the stuff of the beast’s dissolution. In the moment it lost its coherence the matter was ready to be out of her grasp, but somehow the essence of the thing – its will, perhaps; perhaps its
soul
– drew it back for the business of re-making. The last part of the beast to melt was the claw, its disintegration sending a throb of pleasure through Lori’s body. It did not distract her from the fact that she was released. Horrified, she couldn’t get what she held from her embrace fast enough, tipping it into the mourner’s outstretched arms like so much excrement.

‘Jesus,’
she said, backing away.
‘Jesus. Jesus.’

There was no horror on the woman’s face however; only joy. Tears of welcome rolled down her pale cheeks, and fell into the melting pot she held. Lori looked away towards the sunlight. After the gloom of the interior it was blinding. She was momentarily disoriented, and closed her eyes to allow herself a reprieve from both tomb and light.

It was sobbing that made her open her eyes. Not the woman this time, but a child, a girl of four or five, lying naked where the muck of transformation had been.

‘Babette,’ the woman said.

Impossible, reason replied. This thin white child could not be the animal she’d rescued from beneath the tree. It was sleight of hand, or some idiot delusion she’d foisted upon herself. Impossible; all impossible.

‘She likes to play outside,’ the woman was saying, looking up from the child at Lori. ‘And I tell her: never, never in the sun. Never play in the sun. But she’s a child. She doesn’t understand.’

Impossible, reason repeated. But somewhere in her gut Lori had already given up trying to deny. The animal had been real. The transformation had been real. Now here was a living child, weeping in her mother’s arms. She too was real. Every moment she wasted saying No to what she
knew
, was a moment lost to comprehension. That her world-view couldn’t contain such a mystery without shattering was its liability, and a problem for another day. For now she simply wanted to be away; into the sunlight where she knew these shape-shifters feared to follow. Not daring to take her eyes off them until she was in the sun, she reached out to the wall to guide her tentative backward steps. But Babette’s mother wanted to hold her a while longer.

‘I owe you something …’ she said.

‘No,’ Lori replied. ‘I don’t … want anything … from you.’

She felt the urge to express her revulsion, but the scene of reunion before her – the child reaching up to touch her mother’s chin, its sobs passing – were so tender. Disgust became bewilderment; fear, confusion.

‘Let me help you,’ the woman said. ‘I know why you came here.’

‘I doubt it,’ Lori said.

‘Don’t waste your time here.’ the woman replied. ‘There’s nothing for you here, Midian’s a home for the Nightbreed. Only the Nightbreed.’

Her voice had dropped in volume; it was barely a whisper.

‘The Nightbreed?’ Lori said, more loudly.

The woman looked pained.

‘Shh …’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t be telling you this. But I owe you, this much at least.’

Lori had stopped her retreat to the door. Her instinct was telling her to wait.

‘Do you know a man called Boone?’ she said.

The woman opened her mouth to reply, her face a mass of contrary feelings. She wanted to answer, that much was clear; but fear prevented her from speaking. It didn’t matter. Her hesitation was answer enough. She
did
know Boone; or had.

‘Rachel.’

A voice rose from the door that led down into the earth. A man’s voice.

‘Come away,’ it demanded. ‘You’ve nothing to tell.’

The woman looked towards the stairs.

‘Mister Lylesburg,’ she said, her tone formal. ‘She saved Babette.’

‘We know,’ came the reply from the darkness, ‘We saw. Still, you must come away.’

We
, Lori thought. How many others were there below ground; how many more of the
Nightbreed?

Taking confidence from the proximity of the open door she challenged the voice that was attempting to silence her informant.

‘I saved the child,’ she said. ‘I think I deserve something for that.’

There was a silence from the darkness; then a point of heated ash brightened in its midst and Lori realized that Mister Lylesburg was standing almost at the top of the stairs, where the light from outside should have illuminated him, albeit poorly, but that somehow the shadows were clotted about him, leaving him invisible but for his cigarette.

‘The child has no life to save,’ he said to Lori, ‘but what she has is yours, if you want it.’ He paused. ‘Do you want it? If you do, take her. She belongs to you.’

The notion of this exchange horrified her.

‘What do you take me for?’ she said.

‘I don’t know,’ Lylesburg replied. ‘You were the one demanded recompense.’

‘I just want some questions answered,’ Lori protested. ‘I don’t want the child. I’m not a savage.’

‘No,’ the voice said softly. ‘No, you’re not. So go. You’ve no business here.’

He drew on the cigarette and by its tiny light Lori glimpsed the speaker’s features. She sensed that he willingly revealed himself in this moment, dropping the veil of shadow for a handful of instants to meet her gaze face to face. He, like Rachel, was wasted, his gauntness more acute because his bones were large, and made for solid cladding. Now, with his eyes sunk into their sockets, and the muscles of his face all too plain beneath papery skin, it was the sweep of his brow that dominated, furrowed and sickly.

‘This was never intended,’ he said. ‘You weren’t meant to see.’

‘I know that,’ Lori replied.

‘Then you also know that to speak of this will bring dire consequences.’

‘Don’t threaten me.’

‘Not for you,’ Lylesburg said. ‘For
us.’

She felt a twinge of shame at her misunderstanding. She wasn’t the vulnerable one; she who could walk in the sunlight.