The altar’s Kali statue moved. Blue skin shimmering in the flickering light, skull necklace swinging, skirt of severed arms exposing her thighs, the statue sidestepped through the clutter of baby and animal dolls dressed in homemade patchwork clothing. With each step, the statue grew, until it stood as tall as Max atop the altar. Looking down on Max, Kali smiled, flicked her tongue out at him. In her eyes, Max saw the sign on the wall he had touched.
The cracked wall behind the altar burst apart. A tall, naked, muscular black man pushed through the wreckage, a body under each arm. The ruined eyes and chest hole of the corpse the stranger carried under one arm declared its undead loyalty to Rithisak. The twitching, bleeding Asian man under the stranger’s other arm wailed and pleaded in the Khmer tongue Max had heard earlier in the evening.
He did not need a translator to understand the dying man’s plea.
Max brought the shotgun up. The Beast screamed. Max fired twice, peppering the walls and altar with shot. The Kali figure twirled, hissed, eyes blazing. The tall man, his body untouched by the pellet spray, threw the corpses down at Kali’s feet, distracting her.
“You are at a crossroads,” the man said, embracing Kali from behind as she scooped out Rithisak’s compound from the corpse’s eyes and chest hole and consumed it. “Choose carefully.” Kali picked up the freshly dead man, tore the head off, raised the body overhead, and let the blood pour over her.
The figures coupled under the blood shower as Max backed away. The Beast urged him to join the pair. They both looked at Max as if hearing the Beast, sensing Max’s temptation. The man nodded, laughing. Kali opened her mouth wide, ready to consume him. Max raised the shotgun to fire again. His erection pointed like a dowsing stick at the pair, distracting him. He tripped, fell backward through a doorway. The gun went off again, blowing a hole through the ceiling and sending down a blizzard of dust and debris. Sitting up, Max checked the altar room. The two figures were gone, though the small fires scattered through the shaken collection of relics and offerings had spread. Wood crackled, plastic popped. A burnt chemical smell made him cough. His own gun smoke stung his nostrils.
Something moved under his legs. The dead boy, still bound, squirmed underneath him. It twisted, bit his calf. Pain enraged the Beast and shocked Max into action. He blasted the dead thing’s head apart, then shoved the barrel into its chest and excavated its torso with another shot. The Beast roared with joy. Wiping blood from his leg and splatter from his skin with the dead boy’ s shredded clothing, he traced the corpse’s crawl path back to the stairs. From the broad trail on the steps, Max saw it had already gone downstairs. Blast marks scarred the floorboards and walls. Wisps of smoke blew up the stairs on the breeze blowing in through the open door and the Nowhere House warping veil.
The boy and, if the altar scene had not been a hallucination, two more dead agents lost to Rithisak. How many more of the corpse puppets had survived the alley, he wondered, and how many living agents?
It did not matter.
Max stood at the top of the stairs, shotgun at the ready, daring Rithisak to show himself. The Beast reveled in his nakedness, eager to bathe in the blood and guts of its enemies. Max drew upon the shadows and ghosts in his head to distract and contain the Beast, and managed to keep the Beast from driving him down to the first floor and tearing it apart in a sweep for Rithisak. He listened to the creak of wood as he shifted his balance, the rasp of his breathing, his own heartbeat. And when they were a part of him, invisible, he listened for anything else. The altar fire, spreading slowly, sputtering, choking on objects of spiritual importance before finding mundane fuel, rustled in the background. Rats scurried behind the walls. The madness of an alien entity screamed between the layers of reality shifting through the building. Max listened for the slide of metal on metal, the whisper of a bullet being readied to fire.
He waited, feeling Rithisak seethe in the darkness beyond the string of red lights. His cock grew hard once again at the thought.
The bulbs went out, casting the safe house in darkness. Max knew only of the light switch by the door. He was certain there was another upstairs, in Omari’s den. But going for the lights meant giving ground, letting Rithisak closer to Mani. Max kept to his post, weathering the Beast’s frenzy to attack.
No living men shot at him, no dead men lunged for his throat. Rithisak’s agents were gone. Max understood guns were not the sorcerer’s weapons, and waited for more tricks to manifest themselves.
He fired a warning blast into the darkness and waited. The blast rang with satisfying harshness in his ears.
Hungry spirits howled in his mind. Mani’s shadow self stirred.
“Mani,” a voice called from the darkness.
“No,” Mani shouted from above. “Stop.”
Max turned to tell her to shut up, stopped as a mental wave of thoughts and emotions slammed into him. Their bond opened as Mani reached for the strength to resist her old lover. His chest constricted as her grip on him tightened. He felt the weight of all her fears like an anchor pinning him to the spot. Desire and dread flooded him. Something cold brushed the inside of his skin.
A gentle rapping dragged Max back into the real world, and he fired another shot. The flash showed no one on the stairs. Max sat on his haunches and went back to waiting, the Beast and Mani both heavy on his mind. Mani’s memory of beisac spirits filled the back of his head like a glacier, its weight bearing down on his thoughts and nearly crushing them.
Four loud raps from the bottom of the stairs startled Max, and he fired again.
No, he thought he heard Mani say. He’s using us. He’s with us, in our minds, through my old bond with him.
“What?” Max asked. The house remained silent.
But in his head he heard Mani say, He’s using your own power against you. Watch--
Or was it Mrs. Chan trying to teach him her way of defeating an enemy with his own strength. But Mrs. Chan was not here. Mani was not using her voice to speak to him. There was no one else close by in the darkness. Ghosts and magic did not really exist.
The Beast’s roar was edged with panic. Death muffled its voice, suffocated its explosive energy, reflecting the horror the Beast delivered to others. In death, the Beast feared it might never be satiated again.
Light drew Max’s attention from the psychotic war of voices, memories, and feelings being waged in him. Gratefully, he stared down the stairs at the fuzzy column of light growing, expanding, solidifying out of darkness into a woman. She glowed, illuminating herself but not the blackness around her, like a star in the depths of space. Dressed in an open robe that slowly lifted and snapped in a breeze Max could not feel, she struck a familiar pose. Plump thighs and wide, heavy hips led to a rounded potbelly and full waist. The wide aureoles of her breasts focused attention like flowers to her erect nipples, which she pinched and stroked with small, thick-fingered hands. A faint smile creased her smooth, round face as her half-closed eyelids fluttered with the dream of an imaginary lover. The cascade of her auburn hair fell over cheeks and ears to land in a riotous pool across her shoulders.
The Beast remembered her. Max had raped and killed her weeks ago. She was one of his victims, an unconscious and unwitting offering seen through an apartment window and taken by himself and the Beast to satisfy their appetites.
Her eyes opened. She looked up. Max felt her gaze pass through him, fix on a sight that teased a wider smile from her lips. She nodded.
Max went down the stairs.
Machinery started up in the distance. Elevator, Max told himself. Danger. He knew there was danger, but did not understand how he should react. The Beast focused on the woman before them, anticipating the taste of resurrected prey. Go back up the stairs, he told himself. Go back to Mani. A plan unfolded in his head on a chessboard design of the Nowhere House: a threat to the flank, forcing him to react and retreat back up the stairs to protect Mani from Rithisak on the elevator. But it was a feint. Rithisak was here, on the ground floor. Max smelled
him on the shining woman. He felt the man’s jealous breath on his neck.
The woman cocked her head to the side, floated away from the stairs. Max followed.
He hunted, the Beast casting its sensory net wide for Rithisak. It reared, withdrew, confused by the emptiness. Max pushed on, chasing the woman by sight through the ground-floor warren of rooms and apartments. She disappeared around corners, appearing farther off as soon as he made the same turn, lengthening her lead. Her flight challenged him, and he taunted the Beast, which no longer begged him to give chase but instead circled restlessly, lost, hungry, sullen. He broke into a run, reveling in the lead he was taking over the Beast in the hunt, showing his inner doppelganger that he was still strong, he could provide for them even if the Beast failed. He did not need its rage; he had enough of his own.
The woman vanished. Max stumbled over a beam, crashed into a wall. The shotgun went off, its sudden discharge shocking him. He fell, disoriented, stabbing pain shooting through his ears into his head. Old wounds opened, new ones stung as he rolled naked over bricks, concrete, wood, glass, nails.
Voices called to him. Women’s voices, strained by terror and pain and anguish. Gagging, coughing, choking, spitting out fluids and teeth, they spoke his name. Max started to get up, but their voices drove him back to the ground where he covered his head to shield himself from the invisible flurry of his own name beating him down. And when they were done calling, they laughed. Cackled.
Like a shower of broken glass, their voices cut him.
Beside him on the floor, a figure grew out of darkness, bone and sinew and muscle blackened to a radiant absolute deeper than night, brighter than the shine of polished ebony. The thing had no face, and the holes for its eyes, nose, and mouth were warped out of true shape and locale. It whimpered, on the edge of death but undying. Beyond it, a tiny, undernourished boy sat at the center of a crossroads, filthy, weeping, alone. Himself again, with some version of the Beast either from the past or the future in the foreground.
A scream sounded, the faint recapitulation of theme in the symphonic chorus of laughter. Max listened closely, realized it was his own.
Another scream erupted, faint, dissonant, a minor variation of pain he dismissed at first as something of his. But the voice persisted, growling louder, taking its place in the cackling. The edge of its pain was sharper than anything Max had ever experienced or inspired. The voice had suffered its torment for a long time, but it seemed to him that it had only just found a shape for the scream of its release. Or perhaps the voice always knew the shape of pain and had been held in check by limitations of flesh and mind. Perhaps, by encountering Max, the voice had finally crossed a threshold beyond which it was free to express its inner self. Max was certain only that the scream inside his head was not his.
The scream grew louder, a pure and intense note, rushing through a private pipeline from its source to him, until its intoxicating pitch became a line, a road, a boundary, and a gate. The Beast awakened from its stupor, sensing a return to appetite and its fulfillment. Max focused beyond the moment and its cutting-glass laughter, inspired by the promise of a route out of his paralysis. The scream stretched out, its path through him weaving laughter and pain into one, bringing order out of the chaos, introducing the clarity of vision beyond his suffering.
And in that moment of clarity, Max remembered Mani. Upstairs. The sound of the elevator working. Rithisak.
The spell broke. In its shattered pieces, Max recognized Rithisak’s hand corrupting the link he shared with Mani and seeding his mind with the poisons of doubt, guilt, fear.
He stood and ran.
Mani’s scream was real, shattering the safe house’s silence. It guided him back up the stairs, floor, ladder, to Omari’s technological aerie.
The red bulbs were on, illuminating a cleared space among the racks of equipment and supplies where Mani moved.
Danced.
Mouth open, eyes wide, the scream a ceaseless river of sound gushing from her throat like blood, like the Beast’s roar, like the pain and pleasure of living, Mani danced to the accompaniment of her own droning voice. Muscles twitched beneath red-tinged skin as her arms and hands snaked through the air, fashioning invisible signs, warning and inviting at the same time. Hips and shoulders rolling, thighs glistening with sweat, she stepped lightly across the small space of her stage, delicate and graceful, untouchable and powerless: like mist in moonlight.
And at the mouth of a corridor between two rows of packed shelves, a thin, bald, Asian man stood in a baggy set of casual clothes that made him appear much younger than the lines on his forehead and the corners of his eyes declared him to be.
“Rithisak!” Max shouted, closing the distance between them.
Words pummeled Max from the inside out, forcing him to stop, bend over, and absorb the blows: Do not stand in the way of our love, unless you wish to be consumed by it.
“Fuck you,” Max muttered.
The Beast rose to Rithisak’s challenge, overcome by the flesh-and-bone promise of true prey. Max stood, lurched toward Rithisak. His hands reached forward, fingers curled into claws.
You challenge an `ap thm`op, naked and unarmed? The question came riding the crest of voiceless laughter, though not the cutting kind Max had just escaped. The wave crashed, blinding Max in a maddening jumble of perspectives, voices, thoughts, feelings. He saw himself through Rithisak’s eyes: nude, scarred, wild-eyed and dangerous, flailing now as if fighting off a storm of wasps. He saw himself through Mani’s eyes: wounded, vulnerable, enticing. And he saw himself through the death-cursed creature Mani carried, though the meaning of the infant entity’s psychic perceptions eluded him while leaving a residue of nausea.
The little man jumped forward, producing a small wax figure from his pocket. Ducking under Max’s grasp, Rithisak rubbed the figure against his body, catching blood and sweat and bits of skin. He backed away, drew out a pin, stuck it into the figure while whispering to it. Pain shot through Max’s ribs, burst in his stomach, in correspondence to the area on the doll pricked by the sorcerer.
Too late, Rithisak told him in a gloating thought before returning his attention to Mani.
Too late, Mani said. Our time together has passed.
Max was not certain if she spoke to him or to Rithisak. Pain lanced him again, this time from the side of his neck to his hip. He kept moving, pain fueling rage, his own and the Beast’s; rage fueling motion, in the physical world, and in the mad universe trapped in the meat of his brain. Mani slid out of his way as her scream wore on, passing so close to him he heard her cycling her breath to sustain the note.
Do you love her as I do? Rithisak asked.
“Never,” Max answered, using the word to strike Rithisak in place of his hands.
The scream stopped. Max staggered, as if its absence had knocked out a vital underpinning to his balance. Someone grunted.
A tiny wail answered.
“No….” A man’s wavering voice. Rithisak’s true voice, escaping the weathered husk of his body.
Max’s head and vision cleared as the flood coursing through the bond he shared with Mani subsided. Rithisak stood a few feet away, and Max rushed forward, striking the doll from the man’s hands. The wax figure fell headfirst to the floor. A blow to Max’s head stunned him, dropped him to his knees. The Beast urged him back to his feet.
Rithisak moved away, leaving the doll behind. The sorcerer’s mouth hung open. Tears streaked his face. A high-pitched whine escaped from his quirked lips. He ignored his danger, the fallen doll, transfixed instead by something out of Max’s peripheral vision. Max turned.
Mani held the blood-drenched placental tissue and minuscule, twisted corpse of her expelled fetus in her hands, which she held out in offering to Rithisak as she fell to the floor.
Max moved to her. The Beast rebelled, pushed him to Rithisak. Max went for the sorcerer, intercepted him as he dove for the child. Max caught Rithisak by the shoulders, whirled him around. Where are yo
ur tricks now? he wanted to say. Instead, he scooped one of Rithisak’s eyes out, then the other, in mocking mimicry of the ritual defilement the sorcerer had performed to animate his corpse agents. The Beast roared with pleasure at the irony, and made Max pop both morsels into his mouth. Max rejoiced in the spiced flavorings in Rithisak’s blood, the sweet milk of his eyeball fluids, the stringy meat of torn flesh and ligament. The song of Rithisak’s agony made his heart race, made the Beast convulse with pleasure.
Something wrenched free inside Max. The trickle of foreign thoughts and emotions stopped. Max nearly let go of the sagging Rithisak. Where once he and the Beast had been more than enough to fill him, it seemed to Max that they were alone in vast and silent cavern. The Beast, oblivious in the heat of its passion, pressed for more blood.
Farewell, an echo of Mani whispered to one of them, any of them, none of them. A final breeze of her thoughts passed through Max, like a dying exhalation. He caught the hunger of beisac spirits, and loneliness, and terror of abandonment. Their passage resonated within him, made his flesh crawl. And he caught a last word, pray, and an image, a ghostly woman and child, taken too soon from life, filled with hatred for the living. He recoiled from the image even as the thought passed.
On the floor, Mani’s shoulders sagged. The fetus fell from her hands, landed wetly on the floor. Her eyes closed. A rattling escaped her lungs.
Cold darkness blanked Max’s vision for a moment. The sparse shadow self nestled in him disintegrated into a brief twinge of anxiety, and the burden of their bond dissipated, leaving a hollow still warm from her presence.
Rithisak screeched, Mani’s death propelling the sorcerer into new realms of torment. Anguish carved a carnival of terrible expressions on Rithisak’s face. Max watched, the Beast consumed. When the physical pain of his absent eyes regained ascendancy in the hierarchy of suffering, Max threw Rithisak to the floor. He grabbed an antique bayonet from a stack of edged weapons on a shelf, carved Rithisak’s chest open with savage thrusts and manic rips backed by his body weight, and pushed his hand into the gash he made in the sorcerer’s torso.
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