Max stared down at Alioune. Into her eyes, razor-lined pits ending in black velvet cushions. His gaze slipped to her lips, moist, parted. He tried to see the pink of her tongue, but the darkness was too deep. Then he looked away. Cornered by her question, he searched for a way to escape over the bare marble island countertops in the darkened kitchen at the back of the loft; in the silent clock hanging in separate, colorful pieces of abstract swirling design on the long wall to his right; through the grain of the oak floorboards. He found nowhere to run. Instead, he plunged into the chasm at the heart of his new self. He floundered, falling without landing through space excavated by a lifetime of living with appetite and its satiation, the Beast, and mysteries that had carved their way through him, changing him, leaving no memories, only tracings of discontent.
Talk, he screamed at himself, inside. Tell them what you feel. You want them. You always have. Since they were girls. Now more than ever. Admit that things have changed. You've run through everything there is in the world. There's nothing left except for them. But you're afraid, you've always been afraid. Of them. Of their power. You want the thing you've seen in the eyes of their lovers, before they vanished forever. But you're afraid.
Of vanishing.
Of loving them.
The Beast that was Max howled. Cried for release.
Love.
lovelovelovelovelove
The Beast did not want to be caged. It did not want to be killed, or tamed, or exiled to some lonely place, or hunted until it dropped and died choking on emotion. The Beast wanted the ecstasy of sensation. The pleasure of pain, the pain of pleasure.
He was hard. His heart beat wildly.
The Beast screamed for release.
Max timed a leap. Checked the sofa for weapons, the twins for jewelry and accessories they might use to fight him. More than ever, he wanted to take from them what he wanted. Give them the only thing he really knew how to give.
But he had not survived the years by letting the Beast have its way with every impulse. Nor had he devoted his life to the twins, protecting them and nurturing their relationship with him, only to snuff them out without getting what he really wanted. Not their bodies, but the thing they did together.
He was not a madman. The Beast was not all of Max.
He wanted, needed, more than what the Beast desired.
Alioune's scent filled his lungs. Kueur's gaze bored into the back of his head. Max closed his eyes and remembered Emile, who had taken a liking to them and broken into their hotel room in Lisbon to take them one night when he knew Max was out of the city. Max missed Emile, and still felt the scar on his abdomen where Emile had cut him during a friendly barroom sparring session in Singapore. He missed him, though he would have killed Emile himself for attacking his charges if the twins had not managed the task by themselves. Unlike his old comrade Lee, age had dulled Emile's awareness of his limitations.
He took a deep breath and thought of the condition of Emile's body when he'd come to collect the corpse. The twins had never cared for the details of cleaning up, and he really did not mind. Not for his twins. The task allowed him the vicarious pleasure of seeing the results of their handiwork and recalling that night in the Bois de Boulogne. He remembered the twins were also a beast, and fantasized what that beast might do to him under the right conditions, and what would happen if he was not careful.
The Beast growled, and spat, and hissed. Circled. Settled, curling in on itself, tail twitching. Claws retracting. Eyes glowing. Watching. Waiting. Knowing that the Beast's way was not the way to get what was wanted. Needed.
His heart slowed. He softened, though the warmth did not leave his groin.
Max opened his eyes and found Alioune still watching him. There was no hint of fear, impatience or boredom in her expression. Her face remained a blank mask. He looked back at Kueur, and found a reflection of Alioune framed by dusk.
Their blankness tore truth from him. Words spilled out like blood from a wound, surprising him.
"I want to be with you. To be a part of what you do. I want you to give me what you've given those you've used and thrown away. You won't hurt me. I have the strength, the stamina, to take whatever you have to give. I just want to be… closer. No barriers between us. Do you understand?" His question hung in the air, fell without an answer. His voice had sounded strange, distant, as if someone else were speaking. He'd never heard himself beg.
Kueur's gaze shifted to Alioune. Max turned back to the sofa, his eyes brimming with tears. He wondered how long it had been since he'd cried. He wondered if he wanted to cry because of the desperation tearing at his gut, or because he felt as if he'd surrendered a part of himself.
"We've never given anyone anything," Kueur said gently, her voice drifting out of the fading light. "We do not give, nor do we take."
"Let me watch, then. I'll get Nicole back, and let me see what you do."
"As you did that night in the Bois?" Alioune asked. "Yes."
Alioune stood, hips tilted and arms at her side, like a model. "And what did you see?"
"Two little girls. The two of you. That prostitute, a Brazilian boy. His dress ripped off, his breasts slashed. Alioune cutting him, Kueur kissing his wounds. The blood on your faces. And him. That kid. Crying for you not to stop. Begging for you to keep going. Demanding that ... that you rape him."
"What did you understand?" Kueur asked. The nearness of her voice startled him. She was standing five feet behind him.
"That I—" The Beast howled, drowning out what he might have said: loved you? No, he would not have said that. Could not.
"Why now?" Alioune asked.
Max looked back and forth between the twins. "Because I'm getting old, and closer to death," he whispered. "Because I've tasted everything. Tried to feel . . . something, besides what this Beast inside me feels. Anything. There's nothing left to try, except for you."
He waited a few moments for them to fill the silence. Then he walked to the door, defeated. Weak. Stripped of illusion and dream, carrying only bleak reality.
The elevator came, and he went in. The twins stood next to each other, looking at him. The elevator doors began to close. Night flooded the loft through the wide window behind them. The doors closed, and Max went down.
~*~
Alioune picked up the phone on the fourth ring. It was their bedroom line. Unlisted. No message machine. "Hello?"
"I'm going to kill her," he said. "I'm watching her right now. She's in the McDonald's on Seventh and Thirty-third. You'd think she'd have better taste. When she comes out, she's going to stop at the Barnes and Noble, then walk over to Thirty-second to her office. I'll be waiting in the stairwell. She'll be found on the roof. There'll be headlines, I'm sure. Midtown Consultant Found Dead. Murder Comes to Midtown. Maybe the detectives will come to question you. I know they'll never target me. But she doesn't have to go that way. You don't even have to use her. Just give me—"
Alioune hung up the phone. Max followed Nicole but did not wait for her in the stairwell next to her office. He went instead into the subway, traveled to the Lower East Side, lurked until evening among the old tenement buildings, and left a body behind but took with him the Beast of his unsatisfied appetite.
~*~
Max kept the answering machine line busy speaking into the digital storage unit, filling it with threats and pleas and promises, until Alioune finally picked up the phone.
"Tonton B`eb`ete," she said, her voice soft, full of sorrow.
Max growled. "You know I'll come up there. You know what I'm capable of. I'll make you do to me what you did for the others. I can do it. I'm a hunter, a killer, and I am hungry. Only you can give me—"
Kueur's voice sliced through his words, cutting him short on an extension. "You cannot hunt us. You cannot hurt us. You have helped us, and we appreciate your aid and support. But at the age when you were killing your pet collie Pat, torturing your adoptive mother by cutting yourself in the comfort of your American suburban home
, and beating up lower graders in school for money, we were learning to survive in the streets of Dakar. When you were setting fires under parked trucks, we were making our way across Africa. Alone. And at the age when you learned to control your urges, refine them so that no one knew what was going on inside your head, we were in Milan, Lisbon, Marseilles, finally Paris, learning to control our own urges. In public. And we survived, Tonton. Without television, without parents to buy us food and clothes and shelter, without the police and jailers and counselors to teach us our lessons. We survived the women who shaped your appetites, the men who taught you how to satisfy your hungers. How can we not survive you?"
"I'm your uncle," Max said, his throat dry. "How can you deny me the secret of your pleasure? Why won't you give me my last chance to feel something?"
"Not this way, Tonton B`eb`ete," Kueur said.
"What way, then? What do you want me to do?"
He hung up after he could not stand to hear the quiet, steady sound of their breathing over the phone.
~*~
With the doorman huddled in a corner, staring at him with wide eyes, Max rang the intercom to the twins' loft until Kueur answered.
"I'll kill myself if you don't give me what I need," he said. He surprised himself, sounding like a desperate junkie. "Right here, right now. People will have to step over my body to get into this building. I'll write a suicide note in the guest book, addressed to you. Telling everybody how cruel you were, denying your uncle what he needed."
"You always give," Alioune replied. The intercom hissed, and her words carried a mechanical overtone. "You give so much. And you take. But do you ever share, Tonton? Have you ever shared? No more than you have ever felt, I think. No more than that."
Max held his finger against the speaker button but said nothing. Tears burned his eyes. He started to weep. Sobbing, he escaped to the street and ran.
The Beast howled as it gnawed at its own guts.
~*~
He'd kept Nicole for an entire day and night at one of his secret places on the West Side, downtown, where the smell of raw meat hung in the air like mist. The place was small, the paint on the walls peeling; the floor was filthy, but there was an alcove with a working toilet. A cold, rat-poison-scented breeze blowing in through a six-inch-wide grated vent opposite the steel door that opened onto a forgotten service duct leading up from the basement. A single low-wattage bulb illuminated the space. Refrigerated rooms surrounded the secret room on all sides, and above and below, insulating them against the world.
Nicole was hung spread-eagled in a harness suspended from the ceiling. He stared at her unconscious form as he lay, naked, flat on his back on the floor, trying to feel something. Anything.
He'd tried ordinary pleasure. He'd ridden her silky warmth, thrust himself into the portals of her body. But after his initial excitement, the sweet prize he'd sought receded and his erection had failed.
He'd tried his imagination. He'd allowed Nicole to regain full consciousness while restrained, suspended himself beside her and tried to ride her terror and panic as she became aware of her situation. He screamed when she did, and cried, and begged, and struggled. Letting himself down with a push of his release button, he'd taken and given hallucinogenics smuggled out of a desert government laboratory; tried a device that allowed Nicole to shock him with jolts of electricity with a trigger in her ball mouth gag; listened to her curses and pleas for release. But the pleasures he'd felt were no more than passing shudders, as if from a chill breeze running through a warm house. His imagination, too, had failed him.
Nothing moved him. The curves of Nicole's body, the dark wetness of her sex, the brown honey spots on her breasts, left him cold. Neither the fear and pain in her eyes when he tortured her, nor the ecstasy in her face when he drugged her, excited him. He'd offered everything in him he had to offer. There was nothing left to give.
He'd finally given up, feeling as if he were only going through the motions of pursuing sexual pleasure. As he had for a long time, whenever he took on the role of a lover.
He'd returned Nicole to her drugged stupor and wearily settled to the floor to consider his options. He'd wondered what would happen if he stayed in the secret room. Never came out again. Let the both of them die slowly of starvation. Of if he set a fire in the room. Or locked the both of them in one of the meat freezers. Or let her go, without scrambling her memory, and let the authorities and panicked employers try to track him down.
For the first time in his life, Max did not know where to look next to satisfy his hunger for sensation. The Beast paced restlessly in the cage of his body, until, exhausted, it settled in a corner and stared at the blank walls of his imagination. And whimpered.
A hand caressed his forehead.
Startled, Max jumped up, swung one arm up in a defensive arc while searching the floor for a weapon with his free hand. Alioune blocked and redirected his arm as she knelt by the open steel door. Kueur put a hand over his as she settled beside him. Wearing dark designer jeans and pastel silk T-shirts, the twins looked like a pair of exotic models posing on an industrial set.
"You see, Tonton, we are not without skills," Kueur said with a smile.
"Alioune? Kueur? What are you doing here?" Goose pimples crawled over his flesh as a chill breeze blew in through the open doorway. The stench of spoiled meat flooded the room. Oil dripped from the door hinges.
He smiled, despite his shock, at the craft of his two adopted nieces.
"We think it is time," Alioune said, letting her caress travel gently up his arm, to his shoulder and neck. "You are ready for us."
"Ready? For what?" He tensed. His cock shriveled, his genitals pulled up into the shelter of the hollow of bone between his legs.
"Do not worry, Tonton," Alioune continued. "Our building is discrete. The door man and the tenants who saw you will not betray us. As for Nicole, her friends believe she is on a vacation. Searching for herself. They believe, from the way she's been acting lately, thanks to you, that she is in crisis and needs time for herself. There is no one who will interfere with us."
"What are you talking about?" Max asked, his voice small. The Beast listened, trembling.
Kueur's fingers traveled along the length of his arm, glided across his shoulder, circled his left nipple. "You have learned some things, no? We denied you, and you did not let loose the Beast on us, or on another. And, after all these years, you finally tore down the wall between us and surrendered a part of yourself to us. We could not have come if you had not done that."
"Surrendered?"
"Share is the word closer to the truth," Alioune said.
She slid up to Max, legs stretching out on either side of him. "For you, giving is only half the equation. There is also the taking. You give to receive something that will feed the Beast in you. But when one shares, there is no expectation of a return. It is an act of selflessness. It is an act beyond the appetite of the Beast."
"I don't understand. What did I share?"
Kueur pressed her palm against his breast. His heart beat faster.
"Yourself," she said. "Your pain and desperation. Your most intimate desire."
"And what would that be?"
"Death," Kueur said with sadness. She kissed his left nipple. Her hair brushed against his skin. The warmth of her body burned him.
"Is that all you wanted?" he asked, his voice tremulous.
Alioune pulled her T-shirt off, then drew his head back between her small breasts. "Not what we wanted," she said. "What was necessary, for what you ask."
"You want us, Tonton B`eb`ete. And we would give ourselves to you. But what we do has requirements." Kueur leaned back, took off her T-shirt and unzipped her jeans. She was not wearing panties.
Behind him, Max felt Alioune maneuvering out of her jeans. "It is like an electrical circuit. We need the proper conductor. A creature beyond the care of pain or pleasure. A man, or woman, who has stopped caring about themselves, their hungers, their needs. Through
desperation, or joy, or despair. Or, quite simply, because they have forgotten what they need in their drive to please others."
Kueur, naked, pressed the heel of his hand against her sex. Her pubic hair scratched his skin.
"Like the prostitute you saw us with, in the Bois," she said. She brought his hand up to her mouth. Put his thumb in her mouth, ran her tongue along the edge of his nail. Sucked.
Bit.
Max flinched and tried to pull his hand away. But she was strong, and his thumb stayed in her smiling mouth.
Alioune circled his neck with her lean arms and whispered, "Do you remember his eyes, Tonton?" Her hot breath sent a shiver down his spine. She thrust the tip of her tongue into his ear, then gently kissed her way down the back of his neck. "Do you remember the look of his pleasure? He had given up ever feeling anything again. From trick to trick he went, selling himself for nothing, for the money to feed himself. So he could survive. So he could live for another night of searching for what he'd given up finding. Until he met us." She thrust her tongue against the hollow at the base of his neck, pulled back enough to speak. "We felt our pleasure through him, and he felt ours. But he was not as strong as you, Tonton. He did not last. None of them ever do. But you will. You will, Tonton."
Max moaned, sagged against Alioune. She supported him as she worked her tongue up and down from the hollow to his ear and back. He looked up at Nicole suspended above them. Her eyelids twitched.
"You had to leave the narrow path of your life before you could find what you needed," Kueur said, twisting his hand into a wrist lock.
He cried out and jerked his free hand over to try for a release. She let him go before he could strike her. Alioune pulled his hand back, pressed it against her breast. "Because the pleasure you seek is ours, channeled through you," she said.
"Our conductor of flesh and emotion," Kueur whispered, driving her nails into the flesh under his arms. "Of sensation, and pleasure."
The Beast That Was Max Page 14
