Cabal Read Free Page B

taken to hospital. Later, he’d come to understand how all of this was in the scheme of things, and that he’d been denied his death beneath the truck wheels for a purpose. But sitting in the hospital, waiting in a white room till people worse off than he had been attended to, all he could do was curse his bad fortune. Other lives he could take with terrible ease; his own resisted him. Even in this he was divided against himself.
    But that room – though he didn’t know it when he was ushered in – held a promise its plain walls belied. In it he’d hear a name that would with time make a new man of him. At its call he’d go like the monster he was, by night, and meet with the miraculous.
    That name was Midian.
    It and he had much in common, not least that they shared the power to make promises. But while his avowals of eternal love had proved hollow in a matter of weeks, Midian made promises – midnight, like his own, deepest midnight – that even death could not break.

III

The Rhapsodist
    I n the years of his illness, in and out of mental wards and hospices, Boone had met very few fellow sufferers who didn’t cleave to some talisman, some sign or keepsake to stand guard at the gates of their heads and hearts. He’d learned quickly not to despise such charms.
Whatever gets you through the night
was an axiom he understood from hard experience. Most of these safeguards against chaos were personal to those that wielded them. Trinkets, keys, books and photographs: mementoes of good times treasured as defence against the bad. But some belonged to the collective mind. They were words he would hear more than once: nonsense rhymes whose rhythm kept the pain at bay; names of Gods.
    Amongst them, Midian.
    He’d heard the name of that place spoken maybe half a dozen times by people he’d met on the way through, usually those whose strength was all burned up. When they called on Midian it was as a place of refuge; a place to be carried away to. And more: a place where whatever sins they’d committed – real or imagined – would be forgiven them. Boone didn’t know the origins of this mythology; nor had he ever been interested enough to enquire. He had not been in need of forgiveness, or so he thought. Now he knew better. He had plenty to seek cleansing of; obscenities his mind had kept from him until Decker had brought them to light, which no agency he knew could lift from him. He had joined another class of creature.
    Midian called.
    Locked up in his misery, he’d not been aware that someone else now shared the white room with him until he heard the rasping voice.
    ‘Midian …’
    He thought at first it was another voice from the past, like Lori’s. But when it came again it was not at his shoulder, as hers had been, but from across the room. He opened his eyes, the left lid gummy with blood from a cut on his temple, and looked towards the speaker. Another of the night’s walking wounded, apparently, brought in for mending and left to fend for himself until some patchwork could be done. He was sitting in the corner of the room furthest from the door, on which his wild eyes were fixed as though at any moment his saviour would step into view. It was virtually impossible to guess anything of his age or true appearance: dirt and caked blood concealed both. I must look as bad or worse, Boone thought. He didn’t much mind; people were always staring at him. In their present state he and the man in the corner were the kind folks crossed the street to avoid.
    But whereas he, in his jeans and his scuffed boots and black teeshirt, was just another nobody, there were some signs about the other man that marked him out. The long coat he wore had a monkish severity to it; his grey hair pulled back tight on his scalp, hung to the middle of his back in a plaited pony tail. There was jewellery at his neck, almost hidden by his high collar, and on his thumbs two artificial nails that looked to be silver, curled into