Cabal Read Online Free

hooks.
    Finally, there was that name, rising from the man again.
    ‘… Will you take me?’ he asked softly. ‘Take me to Midian?’
    His eyes had not left the door for an instant. It seemed he was oblivious of Boone, until without warning. he turned his wounded head and spat across the room. The blood-marbled phlegm hit the floor at Boone’s feet.
    ‘Get the fuck out of here!’ he said. ‘You’re keeping them from me. They won’t come while you’re here.’
    Boone was too weary to argue, and too bruised to get up. He let the man rant.
    ‘Get out!’ he said again. ‘They won’t show themselves to the likes of you. Don’t you see that?’
    Boone put his head back and tried to keep the man’s pain from invading him.
    ‘Shit!’ the other said. ‘I’ve missed them.
I’ve missed them!’
    He stood up and crossed to the window. Outside there was solid darkness.
    ‘They passed by,’ he murmured, suddenly plaintive. The next moment he was a yard from Boone, grinning through the dirt.
    ‘Got anything for the pain?’ he wanted to know.
    ‘The nurse gave me something,’ Boone replied.
    The man spat again; not at Boone this time, but at the floor.
    ‘Drink
, man …’ he said. ‘Have you got a drink?’
    ‘No.’
    The grin evaporated instantly, and the face began to crumple up as tears overtook him. He turned away from Boone, sobbing, his litany beginning again.
    ‘Why won’t they take me? Why won’t they come for me?’
    ‘Maybe they’ll come later,’ Boone said. ‘When I’ve gone.’
    The man looked back at him.
    ‘What do you know?’ he said.
    Very little was the answer; but Boone kept that fact to himself. There were enough fragments of Midian’s mythology in his head to have him eager for more. Wasn’t it a place where those who had run out of refuges could find a home? And wasn’t that
his
condition now? He had no source of comfort left. Not Decker, not Lori, not even Death. Even though Midian was just another talisman, he wanted to hear its story recited.
    ‘Tell me,’ he said.
    ‘I asked you what you know,’ the other man replied, catching the flesh beneath his unshaven chin with the hook of his left hand.
    ‘I know it takes away the pain,’ Boone replied.
    ‘And?’
    ‘I know it turns nobody away.’
    ‘Not true,’ came the response.
    ‘No?’
    ‘If it turned nobody away you think I wouldn’t be there already? You think it wouldn’t be the biggest city on earth? Of course it turns people away …’
    The man’s tear-brightened eyes were fixed on Boone. Does he realize I know nothing? Boone wondered. It seemed not. The man talked on, content to debate the secret. Or more particularly, his fear of it.
    ‘I don’t go because I may not be worthy,’ he said. ‘And they don’t forgive that easily. They don’t forgive at all. You know what they do … to those who aren’t worthy?’
    Boone was less interested in Midian’s rites of passage than in the man’s certainty that it existed at all. He didn’t speak of Midian as a lunatic’s Shangri-la, but as a place to be found, and entered, and made peace with.
    ‘Do you know how to get there?’ he asked.
    The man looked away. As he broke eye-contact a surge of panic rose in Boone: fearing that the bastard was going to keep the rest of the story to himself.
    ‘I need to know,’ Boone said.
    The other man looked up again.
    ‘I can see that,’ he said, and there was a twist in his voice that suggested the spectacle of Boone’s despair entertained him.
    ‘It’s north-west of Athabasca,’ the man replied.
    ‘Yes?’
    That’s what I heard.’
    ‘That’s empty country,’ Boone replied. ‘You could wander forever, less you’ve got a map.’
    ‘Midian’s on no map,’ the man said. ‘You look east of Peace River; near Shere Neck; north of Dwyer.’
    There was no taint of doubt in this recitation of directions. He believed in Midian’s existence as much as, perhaps more than, the four walls he was bound