The Nightbreed Chronicles: Clive Barker's Nightbreed Characters

Annastasjia	One of the great beauties of silent movies, Annastasjia's career came to an abrupt end in 1921, with a botched attempt at skin grafting to cover a scar she had acquired in a Los Angeles bar during a fist-fight over a girl she had fallen for. The donor of the skin was a man called Nasim, who proceeded to grow upon his host, manifesting himself merely as a blemish at first; then as a mouth; finally as a mouth and eye. With his will the equal of her own, all Annastasjia's attempts to destroy Nasim were nipped in the bud. She was obliged to give up Hollywood in favour of Midian, where she nightly replays scenes from her favourite vehicles for the delectation of scorpions and less venomous critics.
Ashberry	'A monster lies in wait in me, A stew of wounds and misery; But fiercer still, in life and limb, The me that lies in wait in him.' Thus wrote Filmore (Pacific) Bell in his first volume The Breath Beneath the Pillow: the Poetry of Murder. Ashberry knows the feeling. He became a minister to save himself from demons, only to find his fantasies of damnation fanned by the heat of Ezekiel and Deuteronomy. Now he awaits the transforming Apocalypse, when man and monster become twin energies in a single loop of revelation.
Babette	Child transformers like Babette are rare. More often than not the transformative impulse begins to move in the system at adolescence, the wounding consequence of two warring principles; the ethereal and the carnal. Babette's mother, Rachel, is also a shape-shifter, but her elected other is a smoke self. The quasi-canine creature Babette becomes is derived not from Rachel's line, but from her father, Toledo (a man-beast much revered by Cocteau who remarked on his death-bed that he had licked as many palms as he cared to, and was ready to sit beneath God's table). At the autopsy, sixteen silver bullets were found in Toledo's torso, fired by unbelievers and thus not fatal. Syphilis killed him.
Baphomet	The origins of Midian's founding God, Baphomet, the spirit in stone, are shrouded in so much confusion that any assessment of his true nature is impossible. This is not, indisputably, the same Baphomet for the adoration of which the Knights Templar were persecuted. Many of the Breed believe he is related to the entity the Naturals call the Devil. In essence, it is the assumption of this faction that Baphomet is a fallen pretender to some celestial throne, and that under the guise of gathering the Breed together, the God is in fact assembling an army for storming the citadel he was exiled from. The God's silence on this and every other matter is perfect proof of his power.
Beloit Motto	The pronounciation of Beloit (Bel-oy) Motto (Mo-toe)'s name has been a murdering matter fourteen times in his long life. He would much prefer to be remembered for his skills as a singer (his repertoire includes calls to prayer, lullabies and Puccini) but it's the bitter truth that his acts of aggression against those who innocently called him Bellowit or Mootoo will be remembered long after the last echoes of his arias have died. He makes no apology for his sensitivity on the issue of pronunciation. In this he has drawn his lesson from the grand operas, swelling the significance of tiny events so that they become vast. 'I would die,' he says, 'only for music or my name.'
The Beserkers	Towards the end of the Great War, with both sides exhausted, a force appeared on the battlefields of Europe that was witnessed by many but reported by few. The Wilding, or Beserker, was developed by German occult scientists as a warrior class designed to exterminate the enemy, but they comprehended little (and cared less) for the niceties of battle-lines. Within a month of their release (during which time their brutal, nightly assaults acheived the status of legend), the German High Command ordered their dispatch, as they were massacring at least as many German battalions as British. Several Beserkers were indeed killed, but a handful - under the hypnotic influence of a bastard son of Queen Catherine of All the Russias - found their way to Midian, where they are kept in the deepest regions of the underworld, their appetite for massacre stoked by deprivation.
Boone/Cabal	Easy for the day to have a hero; a champion of light and breath and purity. Easy to hymn the virtuous and the virginal; the soul that knows no doubt, no ambiguity. But the night needs heroes and heroines too; needs its saviours. Six such saviours have preceded Boone to Midian. Men and women in whom the Breed saw a glimpse of deliverance. All of them failed in their endeavours; all died violently from their new life. Their spirits occupy the profoundest depths of the Midian Core, in the thunder of the chamber sacred to Baphomet. The seventh saviour will become a vessel for these spirits; for their lunacies and their visions; a trampler and a transformer; a scapegoat and a monster. A hero for the night.
Chocolat	The discovery of five enormous eggs in a nest of priest's clothes began the story that drove Chocolat to Midian. Taken for examination by the Turin authorities, three of the clutch hatched the day after, and Chocolat's exquisite children saw the light of day. She came for them the following night, engaging in a bloody battle in her desire to be reunited with her offspring. The confrontation might have ended in the destruction of both sides, had one of the babies not begun to recite the Lord's Prayer at teh top of its voice. Chocolat escaped with two of her three children, who have never matured beyond infancy. The third, the reciter, now resides in the Vatican.
Decker	It is the first principle of reason that it is a condition quite opposed to disorder. From such naiveties, psychosis blooms. In Doctor Decker, said psychosis takes the form of hatred for all discrepancies, freaks, oddities: in fact, for everything other than himself. If he could, he would remake the world in his own image. Given that he cannot, he must cleanse his arena of as many breeding things as he can; a war waged against variegation in the name of a monstrous singularity. In an earlier age, he would undoubtedly have been a priest.
(Devil) Lude	Asked his father's name Lude will say 'Papa'. Asked again if perhaps a Devil had a hand in his creation, he will say 'Yes, and a dick too.' He sees no shame in being the offspring of one of the Old Gods; only the theology that has attempted the destruction of the Breed thinks of Lude's tribe as personifications of Evil. He is the child of a satyr-god and a woman called Andrea Pate, who disowned him on sight and became a nun. Lude survived being left on a mountain to perish (the means - involving a nest of snakes, a lost Muslim and the scent of oleander - is a tale unto itself) and after five years of searching found his mother, tricking her into breaking her vow of silence with a laugh that he claims cracked the bell in the convent tower. He lived with her until she died the following spring; her secret child. He is still that child, decades later, and hopes to grow foetal in old age.
Eigerman	William Eigerman has been having the same nightmare several times a week since adolescence. He finds himself in the middle of a zombie movie, cast as the cleansing hero, whose task is to eradicate the enemy with bullets and fire. This he's manfully doing until his trigger finger crumbles and falls off, followed by the rest of his digits, which in turn initiates the degeneration of his whole body. Somehow, the recognition that he's, in fact, one of the living dead himself is still a shock to him every time he dreams this dream. Though none of his men have ever had the courage to question why, at the sound of something dropping to the floor, Eigerman will discreetly count his fingers.
Frick	Frick's malformation is, he claims, the consequence of a most particular encounter. Let him tell it himself: 'In an alley behind my father's abattoir in Hamburg, there was a hole, hanging in the middle of the air. I'd known about it since I was a child, and never dared to ask what it was. Maybe I was afraid of the answer. I left Hamburg when I was sixteen and didn't come back until my sister's wedding. The day after the ceremony, I went wandering and the hole was still there. It hadn't changed; I had. I put my head in the hole to see what was on the other side. Whatever it was, pulled. My skull-bone was soft in that other place; when I wrenched myself free, my face was twice its length. I didn't go back to my sister's house. She didn't much like me anyhow. She thought I was a liar.' She was right.
Giblin & Veale	In the secret world of Lists, there are few more inaccessible to the general public than the Master List of Those Transformed By Meteorites, with the possible exception of the List of Answered Prayers, and the List of Those On No List. Giblin and Veale (these are not their true names, which they refuse to tell anyone, in order to protect their children) are on that former list. The meteor that wreaked such havoc with their cells fell on their pig-farm in the autumn of 1969, its baleful influence making them over in the course of a single night. What it did to the pigs is not on record, though on occasion Giblin makes his way overground and watches the night sky for flying farrow.
Kinski	It was Saint-Victor's Dissolution (a cure for the psychosis of appearance) that transformed Leon Kinski from Natural to Breed. In pursuit of a woman who rejected his looks, Kinski used Saint-Victor's compound which - so rumour went - allowed the user to reconfigure his features as imagination willed. In the fugue state the drug induced, however, he wandered out to gaze at the crescent moon, and it was that image his softening features took as inspiration. He attempted suicide by throwing himself into the Seine. He claims he drowned there, and rose to the surface the following night, when the moon rose. This is most likely nonsense. The Seine simply washed him up alive. He was thereafter cleansed of all desire, except for the moon, in the faces of which, he will say, he can see all his lusts made chilly perfection.
Kolcathreeflies	Also called the Noy, Kolca Threeflies is of the tribe of Christians (who can lay claim to that name ten thousand years previous to the birth of Jesus, living as they did on the island of Christi, which drowned in the same cataclysm as overwhelmed Atlantis). Among the children of Midian she is also called 'Miss Stench', having not washed since the last of her tribe perished twenty years ago. Their cells, she believes, still live on her flesh where she pressed herself against their dying bodies. She is therefore the carrier of her tribe's future, believing that when she finally finds a place of power those lost loved ones will flower from their residue. She touches no-one, for fear of dislodging the fragments she plays host to; nor will she even take a step from the place where she's stood for two decades. Despite her name and her smell, flies come nowhere near her. She is, she says, already too much crawled upon.
Kushnir Day (Drummer)	When the Drum stops, life is over. So Kushnir tells the children who come to watch him beating out his rhythms on the rock walls of Midian. All his tribe, the Gogakex, have skills as drummers, born out of simple necessity. They are, Kushnir, proudly boasts, the ugliest people in either the known or unknown world; so foul of face that they have only been able to domesticate blind sub-species of dog, cat and horse, and are even unable to stand the proximity of each other without vomiting. Hence the drumming; a means of communicating with each other while avoiding the horrors of face to face contact. Kushir, his 'kex blood much diluted by interbreeding with Naturals aroused by malformation, wishes he were uglier. Thus lonlier. Thus a better drummer.
Leroy Gomm	Throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the Family Gomm travelled Europe, welcomed by princes and potentates alike as the greatest clown troupe of their age. In order to preserve the purity of their comic genius, the Patriarch Gomm insisted the family procreate within their own ranks, a process which finally dragged their genius into insanity and physical infirmity. There were, however, a few surprises along the way, and Leroy ('just call me King') Gomm was the strangest of them. By the time he was born, the Patriarch was extremely frail, but he passed a few tricks of the trade down ot Leroy in his failing hours. Indeed, he was teaching the young clown the venerable art of eel-juggling when he died. Leroy brought his father's body to Midian to bury in the Necropolis. He visits it regularly, pleased to see his father's smile spreading with every corrupting day.
Lizzie B	As they have travelled the world, most of the Breed have accrued alternative names, given to cover their forbidden selves. With each name there is invariably a story. Lizzie B has half a dozen. Brainpan Betty; Jolene; the Gully-Mistress; Hard Sarah; the Saffron Tickler; Patti Kennedy, the baby snatcher; and Miss Sheer 1944. She says she is none of these; not even Lizzie B. She is, she says, aspiring transparency.
Lori	'Keep sweetness from me - the gurgling babe; the simpering miss; all birds; all swoons and ballads; only talk of the everlasting. Bring me monsters, spitting venom into cribs; then will I sleep easy!' The words are the inscription of Pappishoo's tomb, which - until its desecration by fundamentalists - was a Mecca for his acolytes. He would have enjoyed the company of Lori: obsessed by a dead man, drawn into the darkness of Midian by that obsession; and finally lost to it.
Lylesburg	Law above life. This is Lylesburg's philosophy. Being one of the architects of Midian, and the last surviving member of the Holy Freighters who brought Baphomet's divided body to the safety of the necropolis, he is the Breed's self-elected law-giver. When there is a breath of dissension, he quotes the explorer/philosopher Baltazar Seem, whose last words - as he lowered himself into a hole in the Gobi Desert which he believed to be the eye-socket of a titanic demon felled on the day Christ was born - were: 'I go in search of law; for surely monsters are the originators of order and honour, beauty being its own morality.' He did not emerge.
Mater Q	The cult of Mater Q began in the caves of Ephyra, where she practised necromancy, only prophesying by means of contact with dead children. She was seldom seen, choosing to issue her predictions in the form of small statuettes made of guano. During the earthquake of '46, however, her residence was thrown to the surface, and the horror of her condition was revealed. Far from being an ageless beauty as had been believed, she had taken on many of the physical characteristics of the bats with which she had shared the caves down the decades. She was smuggled away through the 'quake region by her acolytes, who left her at the gates of Midian and then buried themselves alive as a final act of worship.
Mexico	Vying with Peloquin as the Don Juan of Midian, Mexico has no way with words; if more than a sentence passes his lips in a week this is a sign of agitation. But his hands express what his lips neglect, in seductive movements that have garnered him countless lovers over the years. He has many children, but none of them have been born with his extraordinary collar of hands; at least none that have survived. It is rumoured that one of his mistresses did bear him a boy with such attributes, but that she smothered it. When thus accused, she shrugs; and shrugs; and shrugs.
Narcisse	The hero's best friend is not always his horse, although Narcisse will, upon request, imitate any number of farmyard animals. It's a skill he picked up during his years as an actor (he was the Othello of his generation, he'll say; and the Ophelia, but that was only at private parties). Years of staring at a make-up mirror induced the suspicion that there was another identity - a glamorous monster - itching to get out from beneath his face. It took the arrival of a hero to inspire his greatest performance, which was to be the unveiling of that splendour.
Ohnaka	When asked about the tattoos on his body, Ohnaka - the hundred-year-old boy - claims he was born with them. The angels, he says, drew pictures on him for their entertainment, then afraid their misdemeanour would be seen by the Creator, made him so sensitive to light that he would never be able to stand in the sun, and so display their handiwork. He takes their joke in good part, though he is regularly visited by a sublime nightmare: that the angels are coming back, with feathers plucked from their own wings to inscribe him with, and that this time they intend to tattoo him inside as well as out.
Otis & Clay	Railing against 'A fiction of profligacy, that seeks to drown the reader in purposeless invention,' the critic Nicholas Clay took as his special target the novels of magic realist Otis Upmann. The writer responded with his masterpiece, The Cycle (1955), in which a reductionistic critic is killed and reincarnated six times, each life more banal than the previous one, until he's finally reborn as a full stop at the end of a book called The Cycle. The novel's final full stop is, of course, missing. Seeking to confront writer and critic, an intrepid researcher from the BBC discovered these warring identities occupied the same body, a revelation which drove Otis and Clay into hiding in Midian.
Peloquin	Known in certain quarters as the Great Virility, Peloquin has little time for anything but adventuring and the pursuit of the female. He makes no excuses for the breadth of his taste. It is the idea of the female he claims he is obsessed with; to make too nice a distinction between species is in defiance of one of Midian's fundamental principles: that Breed can be part animal, vegetable or mineral. If a rock is possessed of a cleft, he says, then it demands his affections. He has no children, however. The only way he can lay claim to a family is with his bite. Even though expressly forbidden by the laws of Midian, he regularly ventures into the Natural world and swells the number of his tribe, the Qualm, by passing their attributes into innocent blood. Though he should have been exiled for these transgressions years ago, he is one of Midian's most powerful creatures; a rebel whose crimes are countenanced because the spirit of the Breed life burns so brightly in him.
Pessoa The Pale	'I was loved,' Pessoa will say, 'by great men and women.' He mourns the loss of their affections; one of the few in Midian who years for a return to the life he had before he joined the Breed. His is an apparently small defection from the norm; nothing that could warrant exhiling himself from the company of Naturals. But that higher mouth of his has opened twice in the time Pessoa has lived in Midian, and on each occasion issued dire prophecies that proved true within a day. 'I was loved,' he says, 'until I spoke the truth; then the kisses stopped.' Still, in his sleep, Pessoa makes love to lost admirers, so ardently that spending a night outside his chamber has proved an effective aphrodisiac for more than one Breed whose ardour has been cooled by darkness.
Rachel	According to Burr's Anatomy of Transformation (1926; trans. Martinelli) there are, broadly speaking, three kinds of shapeshifters. Those whose transformation state is bestial; those whose transformed state is what would be conventionally thought of as non-living matter (the aqueous and gaseous transformers); and those who become spirit. Rachel belongs in the middle group, her body capable of becoming a smoke of such subtlety it can pass into and through solid matter. Little else, other than her birthplace, Hungary, is known about her, but it is perhaps worth noting that her facial perfection is regarded by many Breed as pitiful. Behind her back they call her 'The Hostage', though whether this is to love or symmetry, no-one will say.
Radinka	It is only memory Radinka sees. Her eyes record, but will not report, leaving her brain to synthesize the past and the present. For almost five years doctors around Europe attempted to cure her of this malady, until she revolted at their fascination and fled them, realizing they viewed her as an object of curiosity rather than a patient. Now she calls her condition the Conjunction. Her mind, which teetered on insanity for many years, is wholly attuned to the challenge of marrying the sights of the past to the sensations of the present, proving - if any proof were needed - that reality is more than a sum of its parts.
Saul	The last great work of Caspar V, The Air is a White Rainbow, published after its author's suicide in 1938, described in visionary detail an encounter with a frog-faced, one-eyed boy, named Saul, who gave the author a glimpse of a world V described as 'new as a midnight garden; ancient as sin; my consummation utterly. Nor will I go to Babylon by candlelight, nor Zion; but only ever into that place with him.' Three days later V was dead, having put out his own eyes. His last words were scrawled on the wall beside his corpse: 'Saul will not come again.' The one-eyed man who now severs the three white sisters of Midian says he is not the same boy Saul grown into adulthood. But when - after a period of such denials - people cease to ask, he drops the name Caspar V into conversation, lightly, as if to keep both doubt and memory alive.
Scorch	'My skin is my brand'. These are the last words of Jan de Mooy, who was executed for sedition in 1932. A week later de Mooy's private menagerie was discovered, and the full significance of these words revealed; for de Mooy had collected, and kept under lock and key, thirty-one creatures whose bodies bore the signs of their natures, amongst them the man known to his fellow Breed as scorch. He will not confess his true name, nor will he talk about his years as a prisoner, but he keeps de Mooy's masterpiece - Another Matter; or Man Remade - beside his pallet day and night. He wants, he says, to know it by heart by the time he meets de Mooy in Hell.
Shuna Sassi	Only the most select clients of Rutt's House, which for the decade before World War II was the most notorious bordello in Boston, were introduced to the charms of Shuna Sassi. Those who were, spoke in whispers of that carnal revelation; a literal courting of death. One misguided caress would undoubtedly result in a terribly demise, pricked by her poison quills. In 1943 she tired of the erotic terrors she induced, and killed a senator, whom she later described as too worshipful to live. His ghost, she claims, followed her on her journey into Midian, his presence in her chamber signalled by a guttering of candle-flames when he shudders at her proximity.
The Fabilu Family	Age is a paradoxical issue in Midian. There are children amongst the Breed who look like ancients, and dew-fresh women who escaped trial at Salem. But there are none quite so odd as the Fabilu family - Jubil�, Ladybread and Kow - whose life-cycles are running backwards, so that the adults are in fact the offspring of the child, Kow. His wife, Jubil� and Ladybread's mother, died of infancy a year after the family's arrival in Midian. Her remains, it is said, continued to simplify after her death, until they divided into two essences, and disappeared.
The Thrall	There are many Breed who would claim visionary powers, but only one - the Thrall - offers those visions for sale in consumable form. There are few drugs known to either Breed or Natural that the Thrall has not pushed. Not only pushed, but sampled. The only negative consequence of its experiments is its gender; or more accurately the absence of same. It was, it will relate, once a man, until a cocktail of Oriental drugs it mixed in Beirut took its mind so far out of its condition it did not return for several days. When it did, the body had almost forgotten itself; become a sexless semi-simian thing: the Thrall.
Yilly Katt	By no means all the Breed are afraid of light. There are many who miss the day, and value their memories of the world above. When those memories slip, Yilly Katt is a reminder, for he can change the colour of his skin at will, from the bluest noonday to golden afternoon, to smoky dusk. This ability to imitate colours is not limited to skies. When high on the weeds supplied by the Thrall, he will imitate the hides, coats, scales and fleeces of the occupants of the Ark at dazzling speed, though on occasion he loses control of his protean cells. Thus, as a cynical observer once remarked, he looks like the Breed remade in one body: 'everything and nothing; mess and pain and flesh gone mad.' Afterwards, he invariably claims he saw God. To which some wit usually replies: 'But did God see you? Did He Hell.'

Clive Barker's Nightbreed Character Descriptions Transcribed And Pictures Taken From The 1990 Publication The Nightbreed Chronicles