Max roared with the Beast. The ghosts screamed and yielded their pain. Images flickered in Max's mind, like pieces of dreams caught in daylight. Brief, mad moments of struggling bodies in his grasp mixed with sudden explosions of violence with knife, ax, pick, scalpel. The wild orgies of feasting on bodies living and dying washed through him, stoking his appetite for more. He moved to the rhythm of ghost hips struggling under his, arms and hands lashing and slapping at him, legs flailing. He shuddered, and electric arcs of pleasure racked his spine and guts and heart and brain, as he came again and again.
Max rose into the storm of scarves and spirits, back arched, arms and legs spread wide, like a helpless baby lifted out of the crib. And like an infant, he cried for more. Hunger drove him into a desperate frenzy as it burrowed into his stomach. The need for violent sensation drove spasms through his body. He wept, he pleaded for more even as memories of the pain he had caused played themselves over in his mind in an endless loop. With every death, his appetite increased. Every soul consumed drove him deeper into starvation.
The Beast roared again, but its voice was smaller, its presence a dim reflection of what it had been in life, and even of what it had been only moments before. And as its presence shrank, the emptiness inside Max grew, as if he were feeding on himself.
He tried to rein in the Beast, but just as when it had been a living part of himself, he could not curb its appetite. He could only hang on and ride, keeping his sanity by letting it take him wherever it wanted to go and joining in its desperate consumption.
His bones felt like ice. His sense of smell clogged, his skin's sensitivity died. He tasted ash. The leash of scarves around his cock pulled, relaxed, pulled again, drawing him deeper into the silken petals of ghostly sex. He thrust harder, forced himself deeper, but his mechanical passion only heightened his feeling of emptiness. He wanted to stop, but could not. He wanted warmth, life, Kueur and Alioune, but his actions denied them. Horror insinuated itself into the hollow world expanding inside of him like a balloon growing to encompass a vaster emptiness with every spas-tic pump of his hips. Horror became his world as the ghost of his Beast, frustrated, blinded by hunger, turned on him, raped him, penetrated and violated him through every orifice, soiled every organ, thought, emotion, memory. He was the horror as, riding the Beast, he raped and violated himself.
Max tried to scream, but the scarves worked themselves down his throat and nose, into his ears, up his ass and into his penis, as if jealous for the fruit of his attention.
No one will ever love you the way I will, they all whispered in his mind.
Max wanted to black out. Die. But the darkness never came, or the peace of death. He could only suffer. That was the death his angel granted him.
He searched for something to hold on to, a weapon with which to fight back. A statement, a curse, a feeling. Nothing came to him that might touch the ghosts. Even remorse eluded him.
He tried to remember intimate details about his victims, so he could separate them in his mind and distance himself from their need for pain. But the dancer's kiss had drained him of his past, and all he had of them was their own memories of death and the Beast's primitive hunger. Even the events since he had awakened as the dancing woman's captive were fading. Max fought to hang on to what he had just seen on his way to the House of Spirits: the pile of body parts, the pillar of flame consuming contemplative lovers, the woman with the necklace of severed heads.
They were all that defined him. No matter how seductive their appeal, he was not the fear and suffering of his victims, not the rage and appetite of the Beast. Max was something else.
But what? Fire and body parts suggested nothing but the idea of suicide. The woman on the blood pond, she had offered him a sword and a lotus. A weapon, a flower. Death, and life. He was death, like the angel. And a part of him was dead, as well: the Beast, returned to him by the ghosts, rooted in him as if it were a living part of him. But he was life, as well. Still flesh and blood, still alive. The spirits of his victims were dead, and only dead. There was an advantage in the lack of balance.
They had no bodies. There was no way they could hurt him. But they were hurting him.
The scarves. The spirits had taken possession of the scarves. The red silk had become the symbol of their unity and purpose. There was still the body of the old homeless woman, and enough body parts to form an enticing dancer, and perhaps a few fragments more scattered throughout Painfreak. But the scarves were the key.
Max found the Beast inside him, tiny, its roar reduced to pitiful mewing, but still savage and relentless, sparking lust for blood and pain, firing up spirit memories of death and dying. As small as it had become, there was still no holding back the Beast. It was rooted firmly in Max's own desires. But the Beast could be directed, with effort and will. He knew it could be done, knew he had done it, though he could not recall when or how. Using the Beast, he was certain, was at the heart of Max.
He urged the Beast on, focusing on the spirits. The Beast roared, though it sounded like a squeal, and initiated a new cycle of pain and suffering among the spirits of its victims.
Max felt the threads of his sanity fray from the pain searing every orifice, twisting his gut, squeezing his heart.
Wrong. Not the spirits. Stupid. The scarves.
His arms jerked forward, plunged into the mass of red silk. Fingers closed around fabric. He pulled, ripping silk with all of his strength.
His hands tore at the scarves crowded into his mouth, teeming at the other ports to his body. He bit and he sliced with his nails and he tore with bleeding hands. The screams changed pitch. The Beast cried out in triumph, joyous in creating a new kind of pain. All the colors of fear rose out of Max like smoke, scorched out of existence by the Beast's blinding presence.
The storm of scarves flew apart, scattered, drifted to distant corners of the House of Spirits. The angel dissipated, releasing Max. He fell suddenly to the ground, rolled, got up. Scarves pulled out of his body, flicked away from his skin. The pressure around his cock and balls vanished as the scarves released him. The Beast growled, caught the scent of silk from all corners of the world, coarse and weathered and cheap. The red glow dimmed, sputtered. Spirit fire shimmered wherever whole scarves settled.
Heat rose through Max. Hot fire erupted in his belly, heart, mind. Riding the Beast, he hunted each scarf down, tearing every one he caught to shreds. With time, the Beast's strength waned and its appetite died. It was not as strong as when it had been a living part of Max. But as a dead spirit housed in his body, Max found it easier to live with. He continued the hunt, pushed himself, until there were no more whole pieces of silk. Until the spirit fires had gone out, and the voices of his victims no longer screamed.
With the ghosts banished, Max gathered the torn silk scattered around the cavernous storeroom he found himself in, by the light of a few half-dark banks of fluorescent lights. He went down the hall, found the room in which he had seen the pillar of fire. The lovers were gone, as was the cloud of many colors near the ceiling. The silk burst into flames and then vanished in black, foul puffs of smoke when he tossed the pieces into the fire. He made a dozen trips back and forth, until every piece was gone, as well as the limbs, torsos, and heads.
When he was finished, all he wanted to do was curl up in a corner and sleep. But he was naked, and hurting, and far from safety. With the Beast sleeping quietly next to his soul, Max started back to Painfreak's main rooms. He paused at the room he thought belonged to the woman with the sword and the lotus. The door was closed. He opened it, and blood spilled out over his feet. The boat and its passenger were gone. He left the House of Spirits and tracked bloody footprints back down into Painfreak.
~*~
The Asian doorman smiled politely as Max emerged from the warehouse wearing what he had picked up from the club floor in clothes discarded by patrons in the heat of sexual frenzy.
"I trust your stay with us was more satisfying this time," the doorman said. "Please, do
not wait so long to visit us again."
Max paused, looked down at the man. "I'll never come back."
The larger of the two doormen stepped out of the shadows, exchanged a glance with the small doorman, and laughed.
The Asian doorman maintained his smile and gave Max a slight bow. Max moved on. "That was what you said the last time," the smaller doorman said.
Max looked back. The Beast he had just regained grumbled. But both doormen were gone. His shoulders sagged, and he staggered off into the Brooklyn night in search of a taxi.
~*~
Kueur's eyes widened when she opened the door. Alioune froze for a moment as her gaze met Max's. After their initial shock, they both rushed across the threshold to embrace him. Max shrugged out of their arms and entered their loft, eager to shed the ill-fitting clothes he had gathered. He walked gingerly to the couch facing away from the picture window and lay down, naked. The twins came to him, Kueur sitting on the edge of the sofa, Alioune standing by his head.
"Do you still feel old?" Kueur asked. Her eyes darted as she catalogued the cuts, burns, and bruises on his body.
Max started to say yes, that he was tired, that a thousand raging ghosts were chasing him and wanted to give him their terrible love. The colors of fear shimmered in his mind. He almost said he wanted to die, and the plea for them to finish him and consign his spirit to some safe and secret place began forming in his mind.
The Beast, familiar, comforting, but alien in him after so long an absence, sounded a thin, faint howl. And Max realized that with the thing he had cast off back inside him, the ghosts would have no way to track and find him. To draw him to them. They might find new scarves or another symbol of their death to inhabit. Fleshy parts of his victims might dig their way out of graves, quickened by their dying emotion, hungry for his touch. But Max was out of their reach, at least until they found another way to renew their bond with him.
He was safe from that hell. And the Beast was with him. Fear dissipated like graveyard fog in the morning sun. Whatever was left of the Beast was enough to keep fear at bay for a while. The blur of time and victims no longer made him breathless. He sat up on his elbows, looked over his body. Probed past the pain and exhaustion and soreness, past the physical and spiritual wreckage of his rape. And he found excitement, satisfaction, energy. The Beast was where it belonged.
"No," he answered, surprising himself. "I found something I thought I'd lost forever, in Painfreak. In the House of Spirits. I don't feel so old, anymore." He met Kueur's open gaze, glanced at Alioune. Smiled. "I think I'm as old as I truly am, however old that's supposed to be, and not as old as I thought I was."
Alioune put her palm across his forehead, pushed him back down. Her cool skin was soothing. She smelled of lemon, and saffron.
"The thing you took back is dead," she said.
Max started to protest, stopped. "I know," he said.
"It cannot fit itself back into the rhythms of your life. It cannot grow with your spirit, cannot learn, or take nourishment from your experiences. It will forever be apart from you."
"But I need it," Max said, nearly pleading.
Kueur took his hand. "Maybe you needed it dead, and not alive. I think the price you paid for the change was fair, non?"
Alioune ran her fingers over Max's face. Kueur took his other hand, kissed the spot of Painfreak's invisible mark, and said, "Welcome back."
A phone rang: Max's private line, which only he could access. None of them moved to answer it. In the age between each ring, Max thought of the scarves and worried that he had forgotten some key factor in severing the ties with his past. Dread struggled against the Beast, churned again in Max's stomach. The answering machine picked up the call.
A harsh, cutting voice spoke over the speaker, which crackled and whined and hissed in protest. "Tread gently on the paths of the dead, my son," said the voice. "They are not as generous as the living, nor as forgiving."
When they went to replay the message, they found the phone and answering machine burned to slag.
" 'My son?' " Kueur asked.
"I'm an orphan. I never knew my mother or father." He remembered the woman in the boat, the blood, the sword, and the lotus. A chill rose like mist from a lake up his spine.
"Then it's too bad she did not leave you her number," said Alioune. When Kueur and Max looked to her, she took Max's hand and led him toward the Box. Kueur's laughter followed them.
"Be gentle," Max croaked as the Beast roused itself.
"As gentle as we can be," Kueur reassured him, with a sharp slap across his cheeks. She slipped his old white terry-cloth robe over his shoulders.
Max stopped at the entrance to the Box. He reached into the pocket, drew out the first scarf he had found in his apartment, its message still wrapped in red. His heart skipped. The Beast roared. Max smiled.
"Let's play a game," he said, ushering Kueur in after Alioune. "A game with fire, and silk."
Chapter Three
Acrid smoke rose from the muzzle of Max's .22-caliber Ruger. The dead man lay sprawled in the snow pile on the edge of the curb, illuminated by an overhead streetlight. The first shot, to the temple, had been in the service of the triad contracting for the man's death, and had left a blackened hole in the skull. Max dumped the gun under the nearest car and walked away, staying close to the cover of buildings and away from lights. He stripped off latex false hands and dumped them in a bag with his wig, facial latex, and the rest of the disguise he had used to stake out the killing ground. His mind was a clear pool reflecting sights and sounds. Gazing into the pool of perceptions, Max was pleased. The job had gone without complications so far, and there was nothing near to cast a shadow on the water.
The second shot, in the neck, had been for the Beast in Max. The Beast screamed in his mind and ran hot in his veins as the man's blood flowed from the neck wound into the snowmelt running along the gutter. Pressure built in Max's chest to cut off Johnny's head, hands, feet, sex. His genitals ached with the need to satiate the Beast through atrocity. He glanced over his shoulder to give the Beast a last look at the work, grateful that he had once killed the Beast in him, and recently found and taken back its ghost. He had missed the Beast's strength in the work he did, but its madness had made his love for the twins, Kueur and Alioune, a deadly passion. With the Beast a dead thing inside him, unable to touch all that was living in Max, it could not rule him as it had in the past. He was free from the compulsion to satisfy the appetites he shared with the Beast at every opportunity. The twins were safe in his love. And Max had the Beast's power and vision to take him through the darkness of the tasks he chose to perform.
The Beast's scream subsided. A chill seized the base of Max's spine and shot up his back, setting off icy star bursts in his head. Ripples of fright broke over the waters of his senses.
A white mist was rising from the man he had just killed. Max froze. Not from the man, but from the flow of blood and water in the gutter. Max continued automatically to strip away his disguise, reversing and shortening his coat, taking off false soles, while he leaned against a building stoop and watched the mist rise, thicken, form into a human shape.
Instinct urged him to run. The Beast wanted to kill. Max fought against both. Though there was danger in lingering near a job, he needed to understand the mist's nature. Assess its threat and capacity to hurt him. He had learned about ignoring the past. The Beast, and the ghosts of victims who had tracked him through the part of himself he had discarded, had taught him.
At first he thought the mist was the manifestation of his target's ghost. But as he continued to watch, the mist took on female characteristics. Perhaps the spirit represented a defensive curse about which he had not been briefed. He snarled to himself, thinking of what he would do to the contractors if they had led him into a trap. But the spirit's form refined itself into the image of an elderly woman, Asian, dressed in loose pantaloons and a long blouse. She caught his eye, waved, mouthed words he could not hear. He
felt no danger in her presence. Something else? Max scanned the surrounding buildings for observers, but the windows in the mixed residential and commercial Queens neighborhood were dark, as they should have been at this time of the night. Something buried in the snow pile, he reasoned, hidden for the past week and only now, during a January thaw, coming out: a homeless woman, dead; or a mugging victim; or a ghost locked in a broken piece of discarded furniture. Max was tempted to go back and kick the pile loose, to make certain. The Beast, confronted by a reminder of its captivity and how easily other spirits and its own appetite had deceived it, grew quiet, watchful.
Voices cried out. A car turned the far corner, screeched to a halt, sliding first on a patch of melting ice. Two men came out of the car, handguns drawn. More men emerged from the alley entrance facing the dead man's final resting place. A rapid-fire argument erupted. Guns were pointed. Someone knelt over the body, glanced at the ghost, screamed. The men cocked their guns, but no one fired. A man grabbed hold of a stick, passed it through the form, and threw the stick away. A cluster of men surrounded the ghost and the body, gesticulating wildly as they raised their voices. Others made the sign of the cross and drifted into the street, looking up at the roofline and windows, behind and under parked cars and trucks, into doorways. Max cursed, finished his transformation, eased around the stoop and crab-walked along the walls, careful to avoid trash cans, bottles and cans, snow mounds and ice sheets ready to crackle under his weight.
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