One dry night two men with drip-wax skin sat atop a squat platform, playing traditional guitar amongst the cacophonous murmurs and hollering touts that let you know that the anonymous Juarez market square was turning over, beating away beneath the night sky. This was the killing floor, penned in with multi-colour tarp that slow danced in the breeze and the tacky display stalls crammed with gaudy lighters and chintzy shit with casting marks. Merchants hocked and touted cock fights, high buy-in card games and flesh markets: everything El Hombre Palido had his gnarled claws in.


El Hombre Palido went by Liar Moses when he’d first revealed himself to Anton. The white Haunt watched the guitarists from the balcony of the claustrophobic apartment where he sometimes took his tribute. The Liar was large and imposing - a bear stuffed into a dark, dusty suit - built from barrels and lashed together with wound-tight sinews. His pallor made him look bigger. Lesions and nodules crowded one side of his face in a scuffed up crescent moon, carving through one side of a black beard. This was his little slice of the city, and when he looked down on it all, he saw an ecology he could read like gospel. He was foreman here, looking down on no less than twelve different operations, whirring along at his beck and call; red rent, rigged games and teenage meat.


Anton stood at the balcony above Moses. His eyes flitted chaotically over the below. He saw something completely different to Moses as he triangulated the paths of the men the Prisoner Prince had given him - the men who were going to making all of it burn. That had been his idea. Anton wanted to leave a mark on this place, even if he failed tonight. As he took out his knife and cut another line of his own Gospel into his arms, his own mal ojo, ciphered into the Beast's Tongue. It all amounted to a murky ethos which swam about his skin like an ever-shifting roadmap of belief, twisted and wavering.


Little resemblance existed between the two. Moses was the white rhino; nearly a head on Anton and dead on one hundred pounds. He sat on the Throne of Smokeless Fire, immaculate but for his deformity. Next to the Liar, Anton was a carved-wood serf who walked between raindrops - looking like a man who'd wandered from a dust-storm out in some nameless desert. Someone who'd met God and seen fit to paint what'd happened into his flesh with a chipped razor since words were cold, fragile things.


He closed his eyes as the old men put down their instruments and turned away. He heard the smash of glass, the *fwoom* of fire spreading. Down below, the people scattered as he descended the staircase to Moses' apartment. First they fled the growing inferno; then from the staccato of gunfire as thralls of El Hombre Palido traded bullets through the greedy flames.


Moses left a teenager bleeding out onto silk sheets when he succumbed to the red fear, and when he burst through the front door, Anton’s blade awaited him, his chest compressed on impact over empty lungs, breastbone all but cracked in two as he ran into the blade hard enough that it scraped the rotten ladder of his spine. He juddered out of Rottschrek on the end of the weapon, raking into Anton’s throat with claws that seemed to melt out of his hands like wax melting into bone monstrosities. He kicked out at the smaller Haunt, driving him back, blade still stuck in his big chest.


Collecting himself to his feet, Anton became a flagellant, carving zig-zag notches into his arm that resembled crude teeth. He bit his own tongue in half. He punched himself hard enough that his head stayed on crooked and bone chips bit into an eyeball. Methodically, he beat the Beast out into the flesh and blood world you could bite and drink. He felt its alien fury billow out, like something growing all wrong inside a meat cocoon, becoming stronger as it swallowed up fractured pieces of the man it'd started out with, back when Anton had been Abel.


Everything pulsed black as he became a semi-conscious passenger inside his own flesh. In him existed the dimmest awareness that he'd spat out his tongue at the Liar and lost most of his nose. Clarity stabbed at him when the Beast gained the advantage. A throat torn out with his teeth. An eye made into pulp with his thumb. He saw himself wrench Moses' clawed hand out of its socket, crudely disembowelling him with it. Control returned all too painfully.


Moments later, he held the already-disintegrating carcass of the Liar, collecting his thoughts as he prepared to face the flames. He felt the body become lighter and lighter as he reflected, cold ash scattering to his feet. One fact marred his victory like the burnt out eye of a beauty queen; after all the searching and preparation - alliances forged and sins committed - in the end he hadn’t had the ingredients to end the Liar on his terms. He'd gone to the babbling, sucking maw inside of him and asked for its help. Eyes closed, he stepped out onto the balcony. For the first time in a very long time, Anton breathed deliberately, sucking in fumes and rising ash as he dropped the carcass into the inferno that had been Moses' oasis.