The voice that had first addressed him had changed its nature utterly. All trace of demand had gone from it. There was only this prayer to be healed, and kept from harm, delivered softly at his ear. Even the leash on his head had been slipped, leaving him free to look left and right. A call he hadn’t heard had summoned Baphomet’s attendants from the wall. Despite their blindfolds they walked with steady steps to the edge of the flame, which had lost much of its ferocity. They’d raised their arms, over which shrouds were draped, and the flame wall broke as pieces of Baphomet’s body were dropped into the travellers’ waiting arms, to be wrapped up instantly and put from sight.
This parting of piece from piece was agonizing. Cabal felt the pain as his own, filling him up until it was almost beyond enduring. To escape it he began to retreat from the flame.
But as he did so the one piece yet to be claimed tumbled into view in front of his face. Baphomet’s head. It turned to him, vast and white, its symmetry fabulous. His entire body rose to it: gaze, spittle and prick. His heart began to beat, healing its damaged wing with its first throb. His congealed blood liquefied like a saint’s relics, and began to run. His testicles tightened; sperm ran up his cock. He ejaculated into the flame, pearls of semen carried up past his eyes to touch the Baptiser’s face.
Then the rendezvous was over. He stumbled out of the fire as Lylesburg—the last of the adherents in the chamber—received the head from the flames and wrapped it up.
Its tenants departed, the flame’s ferocity redoubled. Cabal stumbled back as it unleashed itself with terrifying vigour. On the ground above, Ashbery felt the force build, and tried to retreat from it, but his mind was full of what he’d spied upon, and its weight slowed him. The fire caught him, sweeping him up as it hurtled heavenward. He shrieked at its touch, and at the aftertaste of Baphomet that flooded his system. His many masks were burned away. The robes first, then the lace he’d not been able to pass a day of his adult life without wearing. Next the sexual anatomy he’d never much enjoyed. And finally, his flesh, scrubbing him clean. He fell back to earth more naked than he’d been in his mother’s womb, and blind. The impact smashed his legs and arms beyond repair.
Below, Cabal shook himself from the daze of revelation. The fire had blown a hole in the roof of the chamber, and was spreading from it in all directions. It would consume flesh as easily as earth or stone. They had to be out of here before it found them. Lori was awake. From the suspicion in her eyes as he approached it was plain she’d seen the Baptism, and feared him.
“It’s me,” he told her. “It’s still me.”
He offered her a hand. She took it, and he pulled her to her feet.
“I’ll carry you,” he said.
She shook her head. Her eyes had gone from him to something on the floor behind him. He followed her gaze. Decker’s blade lay close to the fissure, where the man he’d been before the Baptism had cast it aside.
“You want it?” he said.
“Yes.”
Shielding his head from the debris he retraced his steps and picked it up.
“Is he dead?” she asked, as he came back to her. “He’s dead.”
There was no sign of the corpse to verify his claim. The tunnel, collapsing on itself, had already buried him, as it was burying all of Midian. A tomb for the tombs.
With so much already levelled it wasn’t difficult to find their way out to the main gates. They saw no sign of Midian’s inhabitants on their way. Either the fire had consumed their remains, or rubble and earth covered them.
Just outside the gate, left where they could not fail to find it, was a reminder for Lori of one whom she prayed had escaped unharmed. Babette’s doll woven from grasses, and crowned with spring flowers lay in a small ring of stones. As Lori’s fingers made contact with the toy it seemed she saw one final time through the child’s eyes a landscape moving by as somebody speeded her away to safety. The glimpse was all too brief. She had no time to pass a prayer for good fortune along to the child before the vision was startled from her by a noise at her back. She turned to see that the pillars which had supported Midian’s gates were beginning to topple. Cabal snatched her arm as the two stone slabs struck each other, teetered head to head like matched wrestlers, then fell sideways to hit the ground where moments before Lori and Cabal had stood.
Though he had no watch to read the hour, Cabal had a clear sense Baphomet’s gift, perhaps of how long they had until daybreak. In his mind’s eye he could see the planet, like a clock face decorated with seas, the magical divide of night from day creeping around it.
He had no fear of the sun’s appearance on the horizon. His Baptism had given him a strength denied his brothers and sisters. The sun wouldn’t kill him. This he knew without question. Undoubtedly it would be a discomfort to him. Moonrise would always be a more welcome sight than daybreak. But his work wouldn’t be confined to the night hours. He wouldn’t need to hide his head from the sun the way his fellow Breed were obliged to. Even now they’d be looking for a place of refuge before morning broke.
He imagined them in the sky over America, or running beside its highways, groups dividing when some amongst them grew tired, or found a likely haven: the rest moving on, more desperate by the moment. Silently he wished them safe journeys and secure harbour.
More: he promised he would find them again with time. Gather them up and unite them as Midian had done. Unwittingly, he’d harmed them. Now, he had to heal that harm, however long it took.
“I have to start tonight,” he told Lori. “Or their trails will be cold. Then I’ll never find them.”
“You’re not going without me, Boone.”
“I’m not Boone any longer,” he told her.
“Why?”
They sat on the hill overlooking the necropolis, and he recited to her all he’d learned at the Baptism. Hard lessons, which he had too few words to communicate. She was weary, and shivering, but she wouldn’t let him stop.
“Go on…” she’d kept saying, when he’d faltered. “Tell me everything.”
She knew most of it. She’d been Baphomet’s instrument as much as he, or more. Part of the prophecy. Without her he’d never have returned to Midian to save it, and to fail. The consequence of that return and that failure was the task before him.
Yet she revolted.
“You can’t leave me,” she said. “Not after all that’s happened.”
She put her hand on his leg.
“Remember the cell…” she murmured.
He looked at her.
“You told me to forgive myself. And it was good advice. But it doesn’t mean I can turn my back on what happened here. Baphomet; Lylesburg; all of them… I destroyed the only home they ever had.”
“You didn’t destroy it.”
“If I’d never come here, it’d still be standing,” he replied. “I have to undo that damage.”
“So take me with you,” she said. “We’ll go together.”
“It can’t be that way. You’re alive, Lori. I’m not. You’re still human. I’m not.”
“You can change that.”
“What are you saying?”
“You can make me the same as you. It’s not difficult. One bite and Peloquin changed you forever. So change me.”
“I can’t.”
“You won’t you mean.”
She turned the point of Decker’s blade in the dirt.
“You don’t want to be with me. Simple as that, isn’t it?” She made a small, tight-lipped smile. “Haven’t you got the guts to say it?”
“When I’ve finished my work…” he answered. “Maybe then.”
“Oh, in a hundred years or so?” she murmured, tears beginning. “You’ll come back for me then will you? Dig me up. Kiss me all over. Tell me you would have come sooner, but the days just kept slipping by.”