The building he wanted faced the water. He broke in through a boarded window, crept along the wall surrounding raw, unlit space, following the echoes of a fight and the cries of Alioune and Kueur up a flight of stairs.
Five fires burning in punctured drums arranged in a wide circle illuminated the second floor, its barren expanse broken by the occasional piece of ruined machinery and ancient office furniture. Sparks sputtered on the concrete floor, smoke swirled under the fifteen-foot ceiling before being whisked out by the breeze through breaks in the boarded windows. Max stepped into the circle of flickering light behind the twins.
“Who’s this?” asked the black man standing at the center of the circle atop a fallen file cabinet, hands on hips, shirt and pants ripped, face scratched, eyes torn from his face. Max recognized him from the security tapes: the face was the same, though his black leather jacket was a shredded heap by one of the light drums, and his blue jeans and gray sweatshirt were dirty and torn.
“Tonton!” Kueur cried out, maintaining her stance and guard facing the man.
“Be careful,” Alioune warned, “it’s not human.”
“Tonton? An uncle?” The man cocked his head in Max’s direction. “I didn’t know I had a brother.” He turned to Kueur. “Or is he your mother’s brother? I’m having trouble tracing the lineage.” He sniffed the air, turned again toward Max. “Looks like a white man to me, but smells, well, mixed. Or is the confusion just in his mind?” The man laughed, jumped down from the cabinet, feinted toward Alioune, dipped, drew out a drawer, and hurled it at Kueur with unnatural strength and speed.
Kueur ducked and rolled as the drawer spun past her and crashed into a lathe. The clatter of metal echoed through the building. Alioune jumped forward, lunging high with her fist, then with a roundhouse kick, forcing the man to hunch low. She pivoted when her kicking foot landed, thrust her other leg straight out, landed a smashing blow to the man’s head.
He was hurled backward by the kick. Kueur screamed in rage as she charged, bringing a steel tool half her size over her head with every step until she swung it over just as she reached the fallen man. The metal bit into his skull and drove his face into the concrete. Kueur kept running, jumping over what Max took to be random flailing of his arms and legs. The twins circled to the other side of the informal ring. Max watched them, noting the scratches on their skin, the puffiness of their faces, bruised knuckles, scraped elbows and knees peeking through the loose, gauzy one-piece outfits they frequently wore when relaxing at home during the evening. Their feet were bleeding from cuts suffered walking barefoot on a floor littered with pieces of metal, wood, and glass. Max was surprised the man had gotten the twins this far, and had punished them as even he had never been able to manage during their sparring sessions.
The sound of the steel tool crunching into concrete brought Max’s attention back to the stranger, who had tossed aside Kueur’s weapon and was getting to his feet. His deformed skull righted itself, as did the position of the skull on the neck.
The man turned to Max, grinned. “We’ve been at this for hours, Tonton. My daughters are very inventive in their foreplay.” He pointed to his eyes. “For instance, I never knew I could not grow back a human’s eyes until they forced me to try. Now I make my way in the world with only a god’s senses. Though fine for the spirit world, they lend the material realm a certain air of mystery. But what better way to bring excitement and pleasure to what must be done?”
“It says it’s our father,” Kueur shouted from across the way. “It wants to rape us—”
“I want my sister!” the stranger screamed. His expression transformed suddenly as the pits of his eyes grew deeper, wider; his skull elongated; his nose and mouth elongated into a poor mimicry of a snout while his cheeks and chin receded. The air crackled around him, and the flames in the drums leapt and hissed.
“What is it?” Max asked, circling until he felt a fire’s heat warming his back. He focused on the man, searching for weakness while reining in the Beast’s urge to attack. The Beast’s roaring was a dull, insistent headache behind his eyes.
Alioune wiped blood from her forehead as she spoke up. “Some kind of mad monster. It surprised us, broke into the loft, threw powder over Kueur as I was preparing dinner. I tried to fight it, but the powder it blew into my face put me to sleep. We woke up here, with this thing ranting about seed and wombs, a damned twin—”
“Don’t speak of her,” the stranger said, glancing at Kueur and Alioune. He returned his attention to Max. “Children. They have no respect.”
“If you’re their father, I can see where they got it from.”
The man’s visage returned to normal. The play of fire-light did not penetrate into the darkness of his eyeholes. “Why are you here?”
“I’m taking them back. They are my charges.”
“They’re your lovers.”
Max hesitated, nodded his head in acknowledgment. “They have become that, yes.”
“A fine choice, for all concerned. Any children?” Startled, Max answered too loudly, “No.”
“Too bad. A little girl from their blood might have been enough.”
“For what?”
The man took a step toward Max, then one to the side, another toward Max. He walked slowly, with no trace of martial preparation or stealth. He sniffed the air again. “I smell Chiao on you. But you’re no relation to her. Has she spoken to you?”
“Warned me. Told me where you’d taken them.” To the twins, who had exchanged puzzled looks, Max said, “Your mother.”
They exchanged looks, lips parted in surprise.
The stranger ignored them, stared at Max. “Indeed. But she didn’t come, herself. Didn’t even offer you any help. Do you hear, daughters?” he asked, turning suddenly back to them and taking a few steps in their direction. “Your mother has abandoned you again. Left you to me. So you see, you have no choices in the matter. It’s what we both want. Your mother always knew how important it was for me to get what I want.” By the time the man had stopped talking, he had come around back to Max, two steps closer than when he had started.
“You haven’t answered my questions,” said Max. “Who are you, and what do you want with the twins?”
“Oh, I haven’t answered you?” The man tore off his sweatshirt and tossed it at Max, who knocked it down. “A god hasn’t answered a mortal’s questions?” Boots came off, flung quickly at Max’s head. He hopped as he took off his jeans, circling around, forcing Max to turn, until the man stood between the fire and Max. “Perhaps the god being questioned is fortunate to be speaking at all, considering his maker stole his shape and voice, his name and nature, turned him from Ogo to Pale Fox, for the sins of eagerness and appetite. For wanting to live beyond the bounds of a universe full of rules and petty order.” The jeans snapped through the air as the stranger threw them at Max.
Max caught the jeans, held them in one hand. His heart raced, and the Beast paused in its roaring.
“But as you see,” the twins’ father shouted, slipping out of a pair of boxer shorts, holding up his arms, spinning in place twice, rolling his shoulders and hips provocatively so that his genitals bounced, “I’ve a shape I can speak through again for a short while. And for as long as I don’t forget my new self. Do you like it?” He stared at himself, played with his penis, looked up at Max. “Terrible thing, this circumcision. Did you know my own brother bit off my foreskin as part of my punishment?”
Max whipped the jeans out toward the man once, as a warning. His gut churned, alerting him to the danger of distraction, the need to strike back in order to ward off the stranger and buy a few more moments to find a way to truly hurt him.
Max gazed into the man’s empty eye sockets, forced himself to stare past the torn skin and blood, the viscous fluid and muscle sticking to the rims, through the ruined gates that, in humans, led to a soul. He dove through the darkness he found, straight and hard and fast, ignoring random waves of pain and pleasure, the wail of a
trapped mortal spirit, and a ravenous burst of hunger that nearly overwhelmed him with its intensity. The Beast cried out, trying to answer the hunger with its own, but the Beast was dead and the burst of appetite came from something ancient but living. A god, Max understood, not stopping at the realization. Afraid to be pulled into the same seductive trap of belief that had caught the man’s soul and allowed the god to sink roots into his soul and take his body. Max pushed on, until he thought he could see a seed bursting in a vast emptiness, an egg growing out of the energies contained in that seed. Max burrowed deeper, seeing growing figures in the egg: two couples on either side. The Beast howled, sensing the vulnerability of something young and true. Max did not flinch, did not back out of the nightmare dreamscape of an alien mind, though he wanted to vomit, and cry, and forget what he was experiencing as if he had lived that moment of creation. One of the figures moved. Struggled. Tore at the egg’s fragile membrane before the imprint of the universe had been written on its walls.
The stranger shook his head, and Max lost contact. He tumbled back into Bayonne, landing in the warehouse’s reality. Smoke scratched at his lungs. The twins hung on to balance and defensive postures. And the naked black man who had already changed shape once, taken more punishment than an old-fashioned cartoon character and who was more than he appeared, much more than seemed reasonable, or acceptable to a modern Western mind, remained at the center of Max’s small, focused world.
Max stood firm and exhaled slowly. A part of him felt kinship with the creature before him. The rest of him wanted to destroy whatever threatened the twins.
A smile teased the man’s lips, faded. He sniffed at Max, then said, “As arrogant as their mother. As full of himself, and as ignorant of the world, as that dragon dream floating in a demented woman’s head.”
Smoke from one of the other drums drifted between them, making Max’s eyes tear. The stranger waved his hand in front of his face, coughed. “There’s more than Chiao’s smell to you. But don’t think that because you carry a god’s touch, you’re a match for me. You’re not, no more than they are. Children is all you are. I am a god. Ogo once, then yurugu. Pale Fox. Do you see me inside this pathetic form? Even the gods are afraid of this. Even the gods.”
The Beast was filled with shadows of Max’s fear and rage. It cried to be set loose. Max was not ready to release that part of himself.
“So you’re a god,” Max said. “You want your sister. What does that have to do with them?”
“What do you care? I could kill you, if I had time. But this flesh wastes quickly as I ride it, and when the flesh is gone I must go back to my world. Legba will not favor me again with entry into this land through his followers, and there are none of my own worshipers here to use. So I’ll let you live. Be grateful. Isn’t that enough? Isn’t that what you mortals care about? Living? Keeping these putrid, fragile, stinking bags of blood and bones and shit alive for another day?” Pale Fox spread his arms wide, spun around, took a few more steps to the side and one in toward Max. His penis swung heavily, partially engorged. He spat on the sweatshirt and briefs, slapped his naked chest for emphasis.
With the fire once again at his back, Max retreated a step, sank slightly at the knees, kept his arms loose and to the front in a low guard.
“I could keep you busy,” Max said. “Make you use up your precious time.”
“You could try.” Pale Fox feinted with a clumsy jab, laughed at Max’s overreaction. “I should have saved some of that zombie powder I used on my daughters. It wouldn’t have worked on you any more than it did on them, but at least it would have kept you quiet long enough to get rid of you.”
The twins glide-stepped forward, closing in on Pale Fox’s back. Max snapped a front kick, retreated quickly, whipped the jeans back and forth to create space between himself and Pale Fox. His heel kicked the fire drum. His back prickled from the heat.
“Why don’t you ask them for what you want,” Max said, letting a trace of desperation creep into his voice.
Pale Fox paused in his circling advance. He straightened, and his expression relaxed into a human mask of surprise. “Ask?”
“Explain what you want. Tell me, and we can come to an arrangement.”
Pale Fox regarded him suspiciously, shook his head, but said in a cautious tone: “The human way? Humans lie. Particularly you white men. If I had eyes, I would see your soul as you glimpsed mine, and know the truth of your bargain.”
Max moved to the side of the fire drum, unable to tolerate the closeness of the heat.
“Talk to the twins, then. They’re your daughters. Your blood. Use the bond between your spirits, instead of just taking whatever it is you want. Wouldn’t it be simpler?”
Pale Fox turned. Kueur and Alioune kept their guard but stopped closing in. They exchanged looks with Max, waited.
“Daughters?” Pale Fox began, turned partially toward them. “Daughters! Do you know how much I envy you? I understand the connection you share. I remember the purity, the feeling of completion, invulnerability. Because I had a twin once. Yasigui. We shared the same womb, the same sustenance. Her heart beat in rhythm to my own; her soul nestled in our womb next to mine We slept together for an age, growing, gathering strength for the task of creation. But in the long age of waiting, I became restless. I was eager for life, to shape the energies I felt all around me. I burst out of my mother’s womb, desperate to be born. The others said I raped her, but the gods will say anything against me. I thought my sister was with me as I made my way across the universe. And when I realized she was not, I called to her, searched the depths of this earth for her, pleaded for her to join me. When I couldn’t find Yasigui, I stole the Creator’s seed, thinking to make another sister to join me. But I was caught. Punished. Stripped of my place among the gods, my place in creation. My foreskin torn from me. Agony of mind, body, spirit. But the pain that tortures me is my sister’s absence. Yasigui, my other half.” Pale Fox hesitated, and for a moment the mortal host’s face started to change back to the spirit’s animal essence. Pale Fox gasped, snarled. “Can you understand my pain, my emptiness?” he asked the twins, then turned back to Max. “Half of me is missing. I must get it back.”
The god’s pain resonated in the place where the Beast had once lived in Max, bringing back memories of the emptiness he still felt on occasions when the Beast’s ghost was not enough to fill the void. Max fought off the seductive persuasion of Pale Fox’s voice and words. “How can we help you get Yasigui back?” he asked. He held the cuff of a pants leg in each hand. Wrapped them slowly around his wrists. Forearms.
“I need only to plant a spirit seed, through this body’s physical seed, in my daughters. My seed is a fragment of the original fonio, the seed of the world, which I took with me at the beginning of all things. The fonio will take root in their wombs, twins will grow, and from both sets of children I’ll choose my Yasigui and kill the rest. As the child grows, I’ll shape her into what I am not, make her my sister, and she will make me whole. I’ll be healed, and the curse of jealous gods, this yurugu, will not hold me any longer. I will be Ogo once again.”
“And what’s to happen with us?” Alioune asked, voice hard, eyes narrowed. “The same death that took our mother?”
“What do you know about your mother?” Pale Fox asked with contempt.
“No more than what we know about you, Father,” said Kueur. “Our Jola mother never saw her when she found us in the bush. She only judged a mother had left us, by the weave of our baskets and blankets, and the gold hidden next to our bodies for our care. She judged the father had driven the mother to do this, and that our mother must surely be dead, for the basket’s weave showed the kind of love that could only be broken by death.”
“Your Jola mother was as quick to judge as your real mother,” Pale Fox said with a dismissive gesture.
“Not quick enough, if she was with you long enough to have us,” Alioune spat back.
Pale Fox swept his clawed hand around, as i
f to lash at their faces. When he opened his mouth to speak, his teeth flashed, longer and sharper than they had been moments before. “Chiao came to me while I was in the body of a man. I had the habit in my own domain to take the body of a follower for a few days, so I could taste the old shape and the old ways of perceiving. She had sought me out, sensing my presence from afar, drawn to my power, knowing I was more than what I seemed. The moment I saw her, I knew she was also more than what she seemed. We talked of innocent things, then of her land, and then of mine. I told her Ogo stories into the night, and when she asked, we loved each other’s bodies. That was when we discovered the godhood at the heart of our souls. That was when I, in a moment of passion and hope, planted a fragment of the fonio seed in her, to see if her godhood might bring forth another Yasigui.
“Your mother spoke of love, of leaving her land and the places and things to which she belonged. She felt the emptiness in my heart, and thought she could fill it. She thought she could become my twin, and share what I had shared with Yasigui in the womb of creation at the beginning of our universe.
“I waited, saying nothing—”
“You did not encourage her?” Alioune asked, incredulous.
“You didn’t fill her with dreams and fantasies?” Kueur added. “You made no promises? You didn’t seduce her with your pathetic Ogo stories?”
“Words!” Pale Fox shouted. “Talk! All empty, meaningless. We were gods enjoying a time of peace from the dreary reality of mortals. To talk of a future, to build palaces of pleasure and wisdom out of smoke was to say nothing.”
Alioiune nodded her head. “You lied to her.”
“You’ve no understanding of the ways of gods.”
“We know enough,” Kueur said with a contemptuous edge.
“Your mother knew. I can’t help what she chose to believe, but she knew what I wanted. The seed grew quickly in her womb. Nine days we stayed together. Then you came. Twins, instead of the one daughter-sister I needed. I wondered what I should do—find some way to combine the two of you? Kill one, raise the other to be my twin? But which? It was all new to me.
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