Waiting for Mister Cool

by Gerard Houarner

  His thoughts shifted, leapt, slid away from the comfort of killing and death. Instead, they dragged him down into the pool of his memories of the twins, which the pressure of the instant of now compressed into a diamond-ice bullet that turned on him, tearing through the simplicity of the life he thought he knew.

  He’d been taking care of the twins all the time they’d been together. But Kueur and Alioune had been haunting him from the moment he found them. It was the bits and pieces of their past the twins had chosen to reveal, hints of hiding in the innocence of childhood to survive the predators of their youth, that had stirred in Max, over time, dim specters of his Calcutta youth. Random in their manifestation, and irritating, he’d never tried to separate those faint memories of running, brutality, and spikes of fear, from the mist of other early experiences, sensing only the trap of weakness in dwelling on the past. But the inescapable presence of that past, which no amount of murder and torture had ever been able to burn away, had come to resonate with the fragments of pain the twins’ chose to expose.

  He’d heard the song of their suffering, but had ignored it, choosing instead to listen to the roar of their hungers. That much, he understood. That much, at least, did not hurt him. But in gazing into the electronic mirror with its flickering video images of atrocity, Max was stricken by the revelation that the twins had noted the faint glimmer of his recognition of their suffering, and had discovered in his resonance the kind of pain they knew only too well.

  Neither he nor the twins had ever been innocent. But Kueur and Alioune had never let their capacity to feel another’s pain atrophy. That power of perception was in fact, as he’d observed in the games they played, a crucial aspect of the pleasure they took in consuming their prey. But it was also through that malleable instrument, Max struggled to grasp, that they’d also found a means to insure their survival.

  Wood cracked under Max’s grip as his he tried desperately to slow the surge of thoughts entangling him in too-human emotion. Again, the hallucinogenic effects of the thorns and leaves, and the smoke of their burning, had to be playing a part in the corruption of his mind. Or perhaps he’d fallen under the influence of an experimental gas that had leaked from its container and lay trapped in the tunnels.

  He reached for the Beast, tried to pull it out of its confusion, but the demon writhed and roared in a corner of his mind, as if wounded by the nature of Max’s insights.

  Fear touched him. He was losing control. Like in the nightmares –

  He’d blamed the Beast’s play in his sleeping mind for nightmares of becoming a victim to himself, a torturer to the helpless street waif that had become his sharpest memory of what he’d been as a child. He’d thought he was suffering from the teeth of the Beast’s jealousy gnawing at his dreams, because of his fascination with the twins.

  Kueur and Alioune, waking him one night from his screaming, had calmly explained that he was only afraid of hurting them. And he was afraid of hurting them because he loved them. It was one of the lessons they’d learned in their classes at the exclusive lycée they attended, a beguiling part of the mask they were constructing. It was the kind of sensitivity he’d spent a lot of money cultivating, the kind that would allow them into places he could never reach, except through broken windows or skylights.

  He’d laughed at their earnest reasoning, sure they were only playing with him. Love was the weakness of prey, and he knew both he and the twins were not prey but predators. He’d even taken their challenge and satisfied himself by searching for, and finding no trace of, the love they claimed he harbored. Though he had to admit to the twins that the nightmares had started only after he’d committed himself to them, and he’d only assumed, without evidence, that the Beast was responsible for them.

  But in examining himself, he’d also discovered a change, something new sprouting in the terrain of his raging inner life, nurtured by Kueur’s and Alioune’s companionship. The fruit of their affiliation was more than the casual bond of hunters. It was a living link as strong as the one he shared with the Beast, but not based solely on, or fed by, blood and pain.

  Love had nothing to do with what kept them together, he’d decided. Kueur and Alioune had only learned about the emotion in their classes through inevitable discussions of art, music, poetry, and the meaning of the lies characters told one another in stories. He couldn’t imagine that they’d actually experienced love, except perhaps during the final, fleeting moments when prey died in the grip of the hunter, and the joy of life’s surrender could be mistaken for love by the inexperienced.

  Maybe a shared loneliness was the hard bone, the tough connective tendon and ligament, beneath the spectacular flesh of their mutual appetites. Or perhaps their youthful need for guidance had meshed with his desire, usually forgotten or even extinguished by old killers like him, to pass something of what he’d become on to a future he’d never see. And though he tried, Max hadn’t been able to rule out a vestigial drive for family lurking like minor flaws in the deathly purity of what he knew both he and the twins were. He was a perfect killer, as they were, but they were all imperfect in many other ways.

  Of course, the concept of family belonged to the world of prey, along with love. In the end, Max had reconciled himself to the possibility that the twins had awakened a latent instinct common to hunters and killers: running with a pack – a kind of family for the blooded. He’d fended off the efforts of other killers to bond with him in the past, always preferring his own company. The possibility that he’d finally succumbed to the allure of one day killing in tandem with other killers had given him comfort whenever he worried about ties to the twins making him weak, turning him into quarry. And thinking of them all as a pack, huddled over fresh kill, also gave him secret pleasure. Though the nightmares remained, less frequent, but still potent.

  Thoughts that had dragged him through the past suddenly curled and flexed, refusing to be contained by any particular moment. The bullet of his memories burst, and cohesive thought struck off in every direction, so that past and present, Max and the Beast, the pair of them and the twins, were all here now. Time itself stretched in his mind, the outside world froze, and without the logic of thought he was left drowning in memories, without a place and purpose in reality.

  In the haunted instant of now, flailing in the flooded landscape of everything he’d believed he knew and understood, with the night’s odd phenomena floating like strange stars in an unknown sky and images of hollowed-out desire and pleasure flickering in his eyes as he stood, face-to-face, with a manifestation of his own nature, Max discovered another face to the reality he’d grown accustomed to living with.

  That face was a sound, a song of pain and suffering. He heard it coming from the silent television, from the mouths of the images on the screen. It was the cry he’d heard from the twins but denied. It was the howl that echoed without end in himself. A truth beneath a killer’s mask.

  The song rallied thought, restored the ranks of logic and perception, brought him back to himself under the banner of the single truth he’d always known and understood. The song’s pain and suffering were all that truly belonged to him.

  And with the piercing clarity of the blind receiving the miracle of sight, the song delivered the haunting’s message, it was the twins who had found him on that night in the Bois de Boulogne, and not the other way around. They had carved the space for themselves in him with their savagery, sparked his need with their own cruelty, and deliberately planted the seeds of the bonds that would keep them together by showing him they could be as terrible as he, and yet vulnerable.

  They’d heard his pain when he couldn’t. And, they’d worked patiently and with subtlety over the years to try to change him so he could hear their song of suffering, as well as his own. And perhaps, one day, love.

  They’d always taken care of him, as much, if not more, than he’d cared for them.

  Max’s stomach convulsed, and he heaved the burning dregs from his guts onto the floor. The Beast was
a cold thing coiled tightly at the base of his skull.

  For that instant in the tomb of his appetites, his crazed thoughts parted and left just enough space in his panicked mind to accept that he might feel something for them beyond the narrow range of possibilities he’d allowed for himself. He had the span of that moment to want more than blood, to need to sing from the pain that burned inside him like an exploding sun, and release the wild and frantic howl of his agony on which the Beast had fed for so long when it had nothing else to sustain it.

  It was the soft instrument of their empathy, as well as their bloody appetites, that had reshaped the landscape of his inner world. How else could he have grown to trust the harmony he experienced with them, and to demand, with a desperation equal to the Beast’s unreasoning rage, that alignment of feelings and needs he felt in their presence, a connection that, in that instant of now, he could see running deeper and stronger than any simple loneliness, hunting urge, even lust for blood and pain, they night have shared.

  Rage sparked, and for another instant he wanted to kill the twins for all they had done to him, for every flaw and weakness they had exposed and cultivated. Who were they to try to make him love? The Beast rose, hearing the call it had been waiting for.

  But in the video, a child, whether boy or girl was difficult to tell because of all the blood, wailed silently on the television screen, eyes shut against the violence the laughing men were administering on innocent flesh.

  His rage whirled and spun, a formless thing searching for fuel, with the Beast chasing after it like a dog trying to shepherd fog.

  For all the madness and masks, illusions and truths, songs and silent figures on a television screen, there remained a clear and simple feeling inside Max. He missed Kueur and Alioune. Ached for them.

  The space the instant of now had cleaved in his mind ballooned like a pus-filled cyst. The poison of frustration killed what that instant had contained: the moment of his understanding.

  Max’s rage caught on frustration’s fuel and burst into action. He stood, picked up the chair and used it to smash the screen. Then he tore the cable from the wall, the door from the frame, and the electronic guts from the television set. He ripped cable from the wall, and tried manically to dig his way through concrete and steel to the video’s source, until his fingers were raw and bloody.

  The Beast rode his anger and didn’t fight Max’s rampage through the rest of the passage. It waited for victims to appear, eager to protect their belongings, as Max tore through more sparsely furnished rooms, some with stained mattresses on the floor, others with rags of clothing, filthy dolls, faded picture books. While he smashed and ripped life’s litter, destroyed every piece of furniture and equipment, tore at pipes, smashed fists against the steel of the locked hatch as if the sheer power of what boiled inside him could break metal, the Beast searched for any sign of living meat. Max felt its hunger and thought it was his own.

  Max did stop before breaking his hands. Both the Beast and he had that much sense. He still had use for them, and shattering his fists uselessly would have left him vulnerable. Prey. He could never be prey.

  Max turned back at the dead end of a locked hatch, rage seething, nearly blind with the need to kill. He retreated, his entire body trembling with a junkie’s hunger, to the hall of mirrors both warped and broken, picking up the weapons and bags of ammunition he’d dropped in his rampage. The Beast, unable to believe no one had come to defend the territory, collapsed into a tantrum of hunger.

  Max waited until the Beast relented in its overwhelming demand for blood and death, until it faced the reality that there was no prey to consume. He took deep breaths, staring at rounded or elongated reflections of himself holding a flashlight in the mirrors. He was alone in the mirrors.

  There were no more children. The mad storm of ideas had died, consumed by the fires that always blazed within him. The instant of now passed, and everything it had contained lay scattered across concrete floors, broken. Lost.

  Kueur and Alioune. That much he couldn’t forget. They were gone. He was looking for them.

  Steadied by the simple, straightforward purpose, Max wiped bloody hands on his pants and entered the second passage.

  The space quickly shrank to a narrow, circular tunnel with smooth, glazed walls. The smell of machinery – burnt oil and greased metal – grew so thick he dry-heaved again, this time spitting up only a few drops of bile.

  In the distance, he heard a clicking, scuttling sound which reminded him of whatever he’d seen in the outdoor theater, and he was grateful he’d retrieved his weapons. Knife in one hand, Ruger in another, he pressed on. When the tunnel intersected a thick cluster of cables he couldn’t crawl around, he was forced to withdraw.

  But not before biting the thick plastic insulation around one of the cables, until his jaw ached and the roots of his teeth throbbed. It was another mad moment, one that was owed. The taste of plastic made his stomach convulse, but at least he’d given the Beast a chance to play at killing something.

  But play was not enough. Mood blackened, and the growing anxiety over the twins a metal cinch tightening around his skull, Max went through the last doorway. It opened onto a dark passage, with walls and ceiling supported by thick, planed tree trunks. The air, as earthy as a freshly dug grave, also had the taint of blood. He followed the passage, worry circling the threat to the twins like a hawk over rabbit dens.

  The passage turned at sharp angles, cut back like a mountain road, split and re-joined, until Max was ready to claw his way through the earth in his desperation to find the twins. Lacking even the remains of a rail system for a mining operation, he couldn’t imagine what purpose the tunnel had served, unless a long-dead general, based in the first of the three tunnels, had anticipated the first World War’s trench warfare by practicing his unit’s fortification skills. Or someone had been searching for a buried ruin, maybe even hunting a kind of lost, Loch Ness-type of monster that preferred to dig its way through the earth like a worm.

  What he’d seen in the sky came back to him, but he shook off the image, and the shock of its impact. The smell of blood, growing stronger, made him shiver.

  The Beast warmed him with its hunger, and stoked his frustration to feed a rage that simplified the world into two categories: what could be killed, and who had to be spared.

  Max found an air duct clustered with several pipes running under the ceiling, followed them, at last coming into a lit section of the crude tunnels. He checked for personal effects, weapons, sick or off-duty personnel in roughly-hewn dormitory-style halls with bunks, tables, latrines and showers, as well as in a mess hall. He found enough rumpled beds to account for the young men who had attacked Morris’s camp, and small trunks with two or three changes of clothing per bunk, but no evidence of medical supplies, arms lockers, or even letters, books, games, music, pornography, or any other entertainment that might have distracted so many teenagers from the dullness of their existence. In the mess hall’s simple kitchen of propane-fed stoves, huge tubs with working faucets, though no hot water, and large cooking pots, there were no traces of food stores, only a few leaves from the spiky hedgerow. All the propane tanks were missing.

  The fetor of decaying flesh mingled with blood in the air.

  He pushed a door, coughed at the cloud of dust that billowed into his face, and found plain pine coffins in a variety of sizes but all rotted, stacked inside. Worm-scoured skulls peered back into the bright cone of his light. Scratch marks decorated the inside wall of lids thrown open to examine, or perhaps even release, the coffins’ contents.

  Scouting further, he found a series of storerooms, some no larger than a broom closet, others big enough to have housed a small factory, each a particular type of peculiar content: cages, whose bars were rusted and fragile; shelves lined with jars containing fleshy masses he couldn’t identify; theater prop signs, booths, trunks, and other objects which stung his eyes if he looked at them too long; a library packed with rows of dust-caked h
ardcover books and magazines, the oldest with the words like “Spicey” and “Strange” on their covers, which crumbled as soon as he touched them; a pile of costumes, in bright colors beneath the grime, with an occasional bone protruding from a sleeve or a pant leg.

  He found the modern studio in which the child video had been made, and was still being broadcast through a private cable network controlled from a console and bundles of cables vanishing into the wall. The Beast, sensing a spike in his rage, urged him to use his grenades to destroy the place, but behind the aluminum walls he knew there were still old, poorly reinforced earthworks that could come crashing down on him. Instead, after putting in ear plugs from the ammo bags, he blasted the equipment with the shotgun. He took out the plugs and listened for the footsteps of approaching guards. But there was no response to the noise, and he left, disappointed.

  The blood scent grew stronger, as did the stench of decay, and for the first time, he caught a trace of Kueur and Alioune in the air, faint but distinct, mingling with the blood of others.

  Down another corridor, the sight of penned sheep milling stopped him short. The ramp behind the flock promised to lead him back to the surface. But only the smell of shit drifted from their direction. He ignored their shuffling and baaing, and quickened his pace.

  Darkness and blood scent drew him away from the lit corridor, through a ragged hole in the wall, its edges charred, and along an earthen passage which ended in a natural cavern. The roof arced above like a crystalline cathedral’s as rock reflected the beam from his flashlight. Long, spiky roots, possibly from the hedgerow, had broken through the ceiling and hung like lynching ropes whose corpses had fallen off long ago.