He was eager for Oz’s death for many reasons, but at root of them all was the need to get back to who he really was.
Max followed the flow of the Beast’s rage and hunger, but with the slightest nudge altered its course. Osiel was still only a name, a body—an object of desire. Blood was blood, and there was plenty right in front of the Beast.
He gave his demon Carlos’ body. The carving went better with the knife. When the came heart came out, he slipped it into the chalice Osiel had indicated before the Beast could cram it down his throat. The rest, he kept for them.
The Beast turned on him like a dog who’d had a bone pulled from its jaws when it couldn’t have the heart. But it was frustrated, as well, by the lack of satisfaction from tearing apart the rest of the fast-fading death squad bodyguard. Something was still siphoning the vital essence of human suffering from their victims.
Max turned their attention to Osiel. He had to be the cause. Once he was dead, he and the Beast could resume the normal course of their existence.
There was nothing more left to do. The conditions of the contract had been met. No one was left to witness, but that wasn’t Max’s problem.
The Beast ran free and hard, with no more walls or cages to contain it. With another gentle nudge from Max, it channeled its anger, took on speed and strength, became a river hurtling over a rocky ledge sweeping everything along on its terrible current. Max followed the Beast’s lead, content to let its appetite finish the hunt.
The Beast found Osiel inside the stone shelter, nearly invisible in the shadows within.
The Beast ran them into the darkness within the shelter. Stopped.
Illusion. Only illusion.
But it remembered, like Max, the forest and the tearing thorns, and only a little while ago, the room of masks and tablets.
The force of the Beast’s hunger ripped through Max’s gut with the searing drive of white hot lead poured into the coils of his intestine, made him double over in agony.
A woman laughed from the darkness.
Max smashed his fist against the wall until painted plaster fell away and he was bloodying his knuckles on stone. The pain in his hand answered the Beast’s, and he found a measure of balance. Enough to keep hunting.
Max circled the structure, knife in hand. This was his time. And Osiel’s.
“What are you waiting for?” Max asked. He was surprised by the nicking of his thigh with the blade he held as he leaned into the scream of his question.
“You should learn to savor these moments. I die to be born again in greater glory. As will you, someday. They do not come often”
“I’m not going to die.” He could make out Osiel’s figure in the darkness. But it seemed to him that the shadows were too deep and dark. There had to be curtains hanging between them.
“Everyone does. Even monsters. For you, it’ll be by your own hand.”
“You can’t stop me from killing you.”
“But you will live in greater glory for your death.”
“I don’t need glory.”
“You don’t need love, either.”
“No.” Max shifted, craned his neck for a clearer look. The darkness shuddered, as it had before. The Beast didn’t want to see. “But it will come.”
“More lies. I thought you wanted to die with dignity.”
“I’m on the other side. With you. I can see these things in time. Can’t you?”
“No.” As soon as he answered, a pale oval appeared over Osiel’s shoulder.
A skull face.
But not all bone. A translucent film of ghostly flesh covered the skull like a film of clear gelatin, distorting the planes and lines of the bone just enough to convey the hint of an expression. A few strings of brown tissue clinging to the cheeks, jaws, and around the eyes reinforced the appearance of a brief and startled look, followed by amusement.
“What do you see?” Osiel asked.
The skull face moved around the Oz, floating through darkness. Max expected a human outline, a painted picture of a skeleton on a body, just as he’d seen at the festival. He wanted to catch the edge of a cleverly designed mask meeting the fleshy surface of an exposed shoulder. Both he and the Beast needed the obvious indications of trickery. The reassurance of illusion. At this point, lies were more comforting.
The face floated toward Max, its expression shifting from amusement to curiosity. Long sinewy segments of darkness gathered around the head, connected to the skull, collapsed around the shoulders of a woman’s body.
The hair writhed like thousands of silken serpents, then gathered in tight bundles on the sides and top of the skull, tiny roots like tongues embedded in the transparent layer and nearly touching bone.
A robe of red roses covered the woman’s body and limbs. Bees circled her, dipping from one flower to the next.
She raised a hand, segmented finger bound tightly by knots of leathery sinew. Eyes floated up from midnight pits, stared unblinking at Max. A tongue, moving slowly from side to side like a black snake head entranced by a charmer’s swaying, passed over her teeth, and lips clear as spring water.
The hand crossed the boundary between night and day and caressed Max’s cheek.
The Beast froze, caught in the open, unable to escape into the lies of illusion. But with Osiel just beyond its reach yet still ready to be taken, it refused to go back to hiding.
Max remembered Osiel’s question, and answered, “Death.”
“And how is my Queen, la Santisima de al Muerte?”
“She’s smiling,” Max said. “And she’s beautiful.” He was surprised by the arousal of his sexual appetites, even more by the Beast’s similar turn of attention. The faint scent of candied yams teased his senses. He wanted her. So did the Beast. Now.
In this final moment, was Osiel unleashing another spectacle in order to escape his fate?
The Oz came to the entrance and put his arms around the woman’s waist. Thorns from hidden rose stems drew blood. A few bees buzzed with agitation.
Osiel took a long, deep breath, closed his eyes. “I’m sorry I followed the serpent back to the living world.”
“You’ve seen too much,” the woman answered.
Max couldn’t stop staring at her, though her eyes had rolled to the side and she’d turned her skull slightly in Osiel’s direction.
“Too much pain. Too much light. I miss the comfort of darkness.”
“Anything else?”
“You.”
“My husband. Wise as ever.” She laughed and slipped from grasp, stood aside. Head bowed, she looked to Max, her jaw tightly clasped, rows of teeth closed shut. Her lips formed a ripple frozen on the sea.
Osiel emerged from the shelter and looked up at the sun directly overhead.
Only then did Max notice the sun hadn’t moved since they’d entered the valley.
“Who knows more about sacrifice than women?” The Oz asked, then headed back to the altar between the two stone huts. “I wish I was a woman so I could understand the glory and pain of childbirth. But then, I would not have what’s kept me entertained in these years of exile, either.” He swung his hips as he walked, turned around at the altar, leaned back. His cock lay engorged against his thigh, rising. Osiel kept Max’s gaze locked with his, finally laughed.
He lay down on the altar. Stared into the burning maw of the sun. Max remembered the obsidian blade in his hand.
An image from the festival flashed in his memory: the woman, masked and robed beside the figure he’d thought might be Osiel. The skull-faced woman watching them was her.
The Beast quickly crashed through the fleeting recollection. Max didn’t even try to hold on. The woman didn’t matter.
Osiel was ready. So was the Beast.
Max didn’t expect more than a brief glimpse of Osiel’s agonized expression, the aborted cry of his pain and the delirious sensation of the old man’s life gushing from his body along with his blood. The Beast was fast, and after waiting for so long, he didn’t
think this kill would be one he’d get savor. But he anticipated that the intensity of Osiel’s death, the feel of his heart skipping beats, his lungs rattling for air, the grand opera of involuntary convulsions and choked screams, would compensate at least in part for the sweet power he’d hoped to enjoy in controlling the life draining out of the man by turning down the tap of pain from a torrent to a trickle.
Short, sharp cruelty would have to be enough to staunch his hunger until he got back to the villa and lingered over the locals. But the killing didn’t go quickly.
Max’s mind raced ahead of the Beast riding his body, as if pushed by a tailwind. The eternal now of the great Oz’s fantasy world stretched, becoming the detailed explication of a particular corner of that now.
The now of Osiel’s death became his world.
He saw himself raising the obsidian blade while the other hand stretched forward to grab Osiel’s head. Fingers gouged the man’s eyes, dug into the eye sockets. Slowly. The exquisite details of bursting membranes and gushing fluids lingered obsessively in his vision, reluctant to give way to what might come next.
Osiel convulsed. The Oz hadn’t been expecting that kind of pain. Someone laughed behind Max, softly, like a rustling of heavy fabric.
Max’s first cut sliced the throat, but not deeply, just enough to raise a line of blood and scrape the trachea. A gentle snowfall of jabs pierced the tender nerves at the base of the neck, the armpits, the lower back at the kidneys, the groin.
The Beast attended to Oz’s genitalia as if jealous someone else had toyed with skin and organs first. Alternating between pricks and slices, the Beast composed its own symphony over the notations of previous mutilations, critiquing the old work with vicious brevity and penetrating succinctness. If the Oz had performed his own mutilation in the course of performing rituals, then the Beast provided instruction in how to truly suffer for one’s beliefs. It offered a definitive guide to the depths that could be mined on the quest to discover appropriate sacrificial gifts for ceremonial and for personal occasions.
The Beast worked its way down the legs, to the feet, always a neglected territory, introducing Osiel to the connections between bundles of nerves on the soles of his feet and other parts and organs of his body. Two-dozen jabs were all the Beast spared for the territory before working its way back to the ribs, slicing away skin, digging for a view of a beating heart.
Osiel screamed without stopping through the Beast’s introduction of itself to his body. He knocked his head back against the stone table until his skull cracked and blood splattered. His arms and legs kicked, shattering an ankle. But he didn’t try to escape. He held on, whenever he could, to the edges of the stone with fingers gripping until skin tore off and small bones popped, as if fearful he might slip off and lose the path home.
The Oz lost his voice after the first pass, and as the Beast continued its work, Osiel’s agony inscribed the cracks and whistles blurting from his throat.
At first, Max appreciated the spectacle. A gift from a grateful Oz, he thought. A trick of the worm.
Blood warmed his fingers. The Oz’s involuntary struggles sent shivers of pleasure through the hand and up the arm he used to hold his victim down.
He hadn’t even penetrated to the deeper organs, yet.
But a sense of disquiet rippled through Max’s elation. He was following the trail he knew so well to the rapture of pain and pleasure, and yet, he wasn’t getting closer to what he wanted. His appetite grew with the spectacular effects of a pornographic theater of torture of his own making. But nothing he did or experienced touched his hunger.
A wall still stood in the way of his connecting with what he was doing. He might as well have been a machine performing an automated function on an assembly line. What he did had no meaning outside of the purpose it fulfilled for Osiel, and for his employers. The Oz was going to die the death for which he’d bargained. His employers would gain favor and alliances with a new set of monsters.
But Max’s needs were going to be baffled, again. After all the work and waiting, the sacrifice, and now the sight of his prey at last receiving what he’d wanted from Max, he wasn’t going to be satisfied. The burden of his appetite would simply grow larger.
He didn’t know if he could take such punishment. Max feared he might reach the breaking point no torturer or killer had ever pushed him to.
Osiel’s genital scars were the signposts to Max’s future. How long would it take for him to turn the obsidian blade on himself and try to dig out the satisfaction he craved from his own flesh?
Not long, if the Beast had anything to do with it.
The Beast caught the meaning of Max’s thoughts, but refused to consider failure. It was in its element. The world had finally adapted itself to the demon. It hadn’t yet confronted the flaw in its performance, the imminent collapse of instinct and action in the face of brutal indifference. It didn’t want to know killing Osiel meant nothing.
Again, laughter teased Max. He felt something brush across his calves, like a woman in thick skirts passing close by. A bee landed on his shoulder, took off right away. He wanted look back and actually see the bone-faced woman, Osiel’s wife, the Queen of Mictlan, laughing at his suffering. But Max couldn’t free himself from the Beast’s focus on Osiel.
But he could withdraw, as the Beast often did, to the empty quarters inside him.
He let the Beast have his body, his awareness of place in a world. And when he surrendered, he found he couldn’t hang on to the moment, to any moment of the Oz’s killing. The territory of Osiel’s death slipped from Max’s grasp. Time was a shattered ceramic pot, its contents spilled and flowing off in all directions. Skinning, breaking ribs, cutting through bone, the display of organs and their puncturing and wounding, all streamed through and away from him on unseen currents.
Max floated through broken time until only the Oz’s beating heart remained as the last living piece in the puzzle of Osiel’s existence. The Beast knew its business and had saved the best for last. If found Max in the pit he’d made for himself, and forced that moment down, eager to share, to heighten the experience with the intoxicant of another fixation. Max found himself aroused, and like a reflection of the Beast, rose back into the moment of now, baited by the cacophony of pain.
Waiting for the end, Osiel stared with empty eye sockets at the sun overhead. Still disoriented, Max couldn’t remember what had happened to the eyeballs. Then he recognized their remnants on his fingertips, mixed in with other tissue.
“You want to eat the heart,” La Santisima said, in his ear.
She had no breath to warm his skin. But he imagined her face an inch from the back of his head, her lips parted, waiting for his kiss.
The Beast worked the heart free. Max felt the meat shudder in his hands. The sensation meant nothing. He might as well have been holding a newborn baby, or a clump of dirt.
The shock of the disconnection between need and reality finally broke through the Beast’s fixation. At last, it recognized the futility of everything it had done. Empty, hungry for the suffering of another despite all it had done, the Beast smashed itself into the bars of the cage it had fought so hard to deny. The moment shattered for the Beast as it had for Max. The horrors the instant contained spilled out in all directions, except for the one that would bring nourishment to the both of them.
The Beast fell back as Max had done, crushed, defeated, leaving Max with the cold duty of biting into the meat to tear off and chew a tough lump of Osiel’s heart, bitter, spiced with too much mushroom and worm, seasoned by tequila.
When he was done and had swallowed the meat, Max threw Osiel off of the altar and down the stairs. He cut the remains of the heart into smaller pieces and consumed every piece, carefully, delicately, making sure he left nothing behind.. Even if the killing could not nourish his nature, the meat was still good in his belly. It had been a while since he’d had a decent meal.
And La Santisima de la Muerta was watching.
W
hen he was done, Osiel’s wife said, “Thank you. That was satisfying.”
La Santisima de la Muerta spoke from a distance, and her words released him from the duty of Osiel’s sacrifice. His cock, still engorged, finally hardened all the way through. The Beast, weary of being denied, cautiously approached the possibility of a new avenue to its fulfillment.
“Not for me,” Max said. He raised the knife. A quick turn and slash would stun her.
He needed her. So did the Beast. More than anything else in the world or in the moment. She was all that was left if he didn’t want to be reduced to an animal roaming these mountains preying on serranos for the rest of his life. Whatever trick was hiding the meat of a human body behind an image of bones wasn’t going to last long beneath an obsidian edge.
“This wasn’t done for you. My husband needed to die. The door had to be opened for him to come home. And I required his punishment for running away. You were only an instrument, fulfilling your obligations.”
He strained to hear her approach, kept a tight grip on the blade. She laughed, in her dry and distant way.
It was enough for Max to take a step back and spin, the Beast adding its desperation to the blow.
She was closer than he’d expected. He pulled his arm in slightly, deciding on a strike to the temple rather than a slice across the eyes or throat.
She raised her head, eyes widening in surprise, and jerked back, but exposed her neck to the arc of the blade. The knife passed through her, all the way to where her spine should have caught and held the edge, with barely a hint of resistance. The roses gathered around her shoulders never shook, but the film of clear gelatinous matter substituting for skin and meat sprayed out in the wake of his blow, splashing him in the face, chest, arm and cock.
He staggered to the right, pulled off balance by the force of his blow and slipping on bloody stone. He reached for her shoulder, found a grip on a sticky mass that gave under his fingers like muscle and fat supported by bone and covered by sticky, sweaty skin. Only cold.
A bee stung his knife hand.
A Blood of Killers Page 47
