Cabal

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Or death. Better death. He was not entirely sure how long had passed since he’d done the deal with Decker exchanging this stupor for a few more days of investigation, but he was certain he had kept his side of the bargain. He was talked out. There was nothing left to say, nor hear. All that remained was to take himself to the law, and confess his crimes, or to do what the state no longer had the power to do, and kill the monster.

He didn’t dare alert Decker to this plan; he knew the doctor would do all in his power to prevent his patient’s suicide. So he went on playing the quiescent subject one day more. Then, promising Decker he’d be at the office the following morning, he returned home and prepared to kill himself.

There was another letter from Lori awaiting him, the fourth since he’d absented himself, demanding to know what was wrong. He read it as best his befuddled thoughts would allow, and attempted a reply, but couldn’t make sense of the words he was trying to write. Instead, pocketing the appeal she’d sent to him, he went out into the dusk to look for death.

3

The truck he threw himself in front of was unkind. It knocked the breath from him but not the life. Bruised, and bleeding from scrapes and cuts, he was scooped up and 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.