Rage exploded in his head, shot down through his chest and limbs. Before he knew he’d moved, he was on the man, tearing an ear off, sinking his teeth into the back of the neck until he scrapped bone, and then digging deeper to get at marrow. He spat out skin and ligament and muscle, then dove down again into the flailing mound of flesh, riding the wave of pain, rooting for nerves and organs that might seize and convulse from his poison.
He didn’t know how long he savaged the man, but when he finally pulled away, his rage a gentle hum at the back of his thoughts, and strangely sated, as if he’d feasted on the entire contents of the first table of food he’d first seen in this place, the man had stopped moving. Once again, he couldn’t tell if his bite or the violence had killed his victim.
Sucking on bone chips still in his mouth as if they were hard candy, he looked to the robed figure. Rage dried up and blew away in the stranger’s withering presence. For a second, he thought he heard himself mewl.
“You forgot to ask him why.”
The boy spat the chips out.
The robe undulated, while its wearer’s shoulders and legs remained still. “You’re different from the others who come here. Not in the same way I am, but still different.”
“What is this place?”
“Do you want to learn?”
“Is there a way out other than the way I came in?”
“Not for you.”
With Shishir waiting outside, there was no other choice. “Then yes, I want to learn.”
The robed figure knelt by the boy. Two women and a man looked into the room. The man stared at the corpse. One of the women asked if they could come in. The figure pulled down the hood slightly, turning away from the boy, revealing a part of itself to them. The three ran away.
“First,” the figure said, “you must know you have come to a temple to appetite. Some consider it paradise, others hell. Its name is Painfreak, and it is a gathering place for men and women and their hungers. If that man betrayed you, or the ones outside, the act was a sacred one born from this place. Many hungers live here. Many desires. People come, to be satisfied, to be desired. Today, the door opens onto Calcutta. Tomorrow, Paris. The next, Peking. So all the world may satisfy itself.”
The boy didn’t understand, but didn’t care. “What about you?” he asked. “What’s your name?”
“I came here searching for my desire, which the world could not light. I never hungered or needed for anything, or anyone. Curiosity made me study seduction’s art, to see if I could inspire desire in others. But no one ever wanted me. Maybe I should have gone to a monastery, where my kind prosper. But curiosity wouldn’t let go. What would it be like to need? Or be needed? That’s a kind of hunger, I suppose. A pale one, in this temple. In all the time I’ve been here, I’ve never found the answer. Now I’m trapped in those questions, in this place, waiting to need or be needed, afraid to leave and carry with me an ache for a missing hunger, and the memory of starving in the excess of what might have satisfied it.”
The boy wished the robed figure hadn’t talked for so long. “You didn’t tell me your name.”
“Do you remember yours?”
The boy couldn’t answer.
“So we have that much in common.”
“What’s the second thing I have to know?”
“The time here is always now.”
Again, the boy didn’t understand. “Are there more things?”
“You’ll come to them. In time.”
“I’m not wearing that,” the boy said, poking at the robe, its rough texture scratching skin. He was careful not to push too deep and feel what was underneath.
“You won’t have to.”
They sat in silence for a while, and when the robed figure got up, the boy stood, too, and they walked out into the halls. Clothes were found, empty rooms, places to sleep, feed, shit and piss, clean up.
Hours passed. Days. The boy drifted in the robed figure’s wake. They rarely spoke, and usually the exchange was sparked by a question from him, which was always answered, though often not in a way that made sense to him. After a while, he stopped asking where Painfreak came from and where was it going, whether the figure was a man or a woman, and why didn’t anyone try to throw them out. He gave up trying to figure out what he saw people do to each other, such things he’d never imagined or witnessed. Though he’d forgotten a lot, he was sure he would have remembered these particular acts.
They spent time, a great deal of time, in a hall of mirrors, which the robed figure said was supposed to reveal appetites. The boy watched his reflection. He seemed older than he should be. And around him, clouds swirled, dark, streaked with lightning, raining blood, and they seemed to be blowing out from him, as if he was the horizon they were crossing to bring their fury.
The boy thought he saw himself as he should be, small and thin, without a storm brewing around him, standing next to the robed figure in its reflection.
“If you stay, you have to work,” the robed figure said one day.
“Who’s going to tell us to leave?” the boy asked.
“You don’t want to know.”
The robed figure showed, by example, the nature of the work it could do, by walking into a room full of people, but remaining aloof, mysterious. Soon enough, a few men and women gathered around it. The figure refused to speak, and slowly walked away. Two women followed. They found a room, and allowed the boy to sit in a corner and watch as they stripped for the figure, and made love to each other, and beat one another until bruises mottled their skin, and finally wept and crawled away.
“Did you enjoy that?” the boy asked.
“No. That’s why it’s called work.”
“I thought no one wanted you.”
“Do you think it was me, beneath this cloth, that they wanted? Or was it just the question of what I might be?”
They went back over the territory they’d already covered, only this time the figure gently pushed the boy into rooms where things were happening, with only one warning: never bite. Not even when they beg for it.
The figure’s fingers were always cold.
At first, he watched over the drugged, exhausted, unconscious, and the dead. He learned how to kill the dead again if they got up, or send them on to where they were needed. Then he learned how to give injections, how to cut and stitch, saw and break, to the limits of human endurance, and just a little beyond. He overcame his instinct to join in the occasional fights that exploded every now and then, and instead let them evolve, shaping the conflicts with minimal interventions so that onlookers were entertained. He studied pain, in the acts and reactions of others, discovering the moments where hesitation was required, so that pleasure might blossom, briefly, like a desert flower, before the arid duress of suffering returned.
The first scream he personally inspired resonated with a chorus of wracked voices that rose up in his mind, as if they’d been waiting for another to join their number. But the only particular memories the scream brought back was of the man who’d touched him, and what he’d done to him.
The thing born inside him that day wiggled as it was fed by the scream, and whined for more.
He learned deeper arts in the craft of castration, which he recalled practicing as a way to pass time in a city, someplace long ago, for local butchers. He wrote on skin, then on organs. He learned the play of whips and sticks on flesh, then moved on to mastering the full panoply of torture instrumentation.
There was the day he lost his virginity, which he hadn’t been aware he’d been keeping, and the day he killed to feed the thing inside him. They were the same day, with the same woman.
On that day, the robed figure stopped pushing him into new rooms. On that day, he was given a room of his own, to shut or keep open, as he saw fit, and told he was free to bite because the poison that had protected him as a child had sunk deep into his heart, into his soul, and though his teeth were less of a threat, he was much more dangerous.
He lost tra
ck of the robed figure, forgot about it for long periods, remembering their allegiance only when he ran across it in some of the older sections of Painfreak, where most patrons didn’t wander. He’d catch a glimpse of the figure as it floated over the bowed floors of broken-down halls, through rooms with cracked walls and falling ceilings haunted by the withered unfleshed remains of desire. The boy liked the ghosts, and studied them for inspiration. He never called out to the figure, and it always moved on, without greeting or farewell. He never saw the figure in the hall of mirrors, anymore.
He named the thing inside him Beast, because that’s what it was and what it made him into, but he still couldn’t recall his own name, and no one ever knew him long enough to give him another.
One day an older woman came to him, white-haired, wrinkled and sagging in her nakedness. She smelled of eucalyptus. He asked her if she wanted him to take her to his room, and she agreed, though when they entered she didn’t submit to any of the devices and instruments he had collected. Instead, she lay on the floor and asked that she join him.
“What do you want?” he asked, puzzled, thinking she’d made a mistake in seeking him out.
“Innocence,” she said. “Will you be my Max?”
“Who’s he?”
She rubbed her stomach, turned on her side and cried. “The one who wasn’t born.”
He killed her on the floor, picking up a heavy metal manacle and smashing it into her skull until her hair was no longer white, until she had no more hair, or skull, or head, until he couldn’t see because of the splattered brain in his eyes, which still stung from the bits of shattered bone that had flown into them.
The Beast filled his mind with its joy, and he fell asleep, blindly ecstatic.
When he woke, the robed figure stood at the doorway to his room. “Now we’re different. Night and day. You are appetite. I am its absence. It’s time we parted.”
“We already have,” the boy said, riding the passion of his belligerence. But the Beast didn’t rise, and the figure didn’t show fear. The boy was left angry and afraid, paralyzed.
“No. Not until now.”
The boy didn’t want to leave. There was danger waiting for him outside this place, that much he felt was certain. And he’d earned a position in the hierarchy of the domain in which he survived; he even had his own room.
Only the room was suddenly cold, and the mechanisms he’d gathered in it, so familiar and comforting, turned on him, exuding menace. The danger was not outside, anymore.
The robed figure hadn’t moved, nor revealed its face. The smells and sounds of the place, this Painfreak, remained the same. People screamed and wailed in the background, they cried out from the depths of their hungers. They whimpered and laughed. The stink of their sweat filled the air.
The boy understood, suddenly, without thought, and surprised himself with a vision that reached beyond the immediate necessities of life. Painfreak had not changed. He had.
He was the threat in the place he’d thought of as home. “You’re going to miss me,” he said.
“No,” the figure replied. “I won’t.”
The boy left, taking care not to brush the cloak’s rough fabric as he passed through the doorway.
The sound of weeping was close behind him. He didn’t look back. Did not care. He didn’t want what he was leaving behind.
He wandered the halls and rooms and great galleries of Painfreak, but this time with a purpose. He followed well-dressed men and women, those who wore styles of clothing he was familiar with, that reminded him of long ago, until he found a room with walls of marbled rose walls trimmed in gold and a polished black floor, lit by brilliant chandeliers hanging over a long table full to overflowing with food. Men and women danced slowly to gentle music, laughed, and whispered.
The hairs at the back of his neck rose. He waited in a corner for someone to approach him, to say, “Little boy, I’ll make sure you’re safe.” But no one did, and after a while he didn’t want to kill everyone in the room, and his heart had stopped beating fast, and the Beast quieted, though it was still hungry, and disappointed in its host’s reticence.
The coldness of his old room lingered at the base of his spine. He knew better than to fight to stay in a place he wasn’t wanted, or satisfy any gnawing needs for revenge. Especially when that place was so much larger than anything he would ever become.
And there was gratitude, scattered like petals before a procession, for everything he’d learned and received.
The boy tracked people appearing and disappearing magically through a doorway, and followed.
He walked down a hallway, from light to darkness, avoiding others, but nearly tripping over a boy, stinking and filthy, barely more than skin and bones, crawling at his feet.
Until a stench, both shocking and familiar, made him stop. He looked for the pits that could be found in Painfreak, in which some liked to bathe in, and which he’d avoided. He found instead a doorway looking out on a bustling crowd set off beyond a row of columns. The smell blew in from that open doorway, along with the sound of train whistles and the murmur of a crowd.
He went through, and a man emerged from shadow behind the columns, along with a beggar, a man in uniform, and a fourth who used his umbrella as a crutch as he limped out. The first tall, thin sliver of bone and muscle, bleeding from an arm and the top of his head, came closer, stepping over three bodies. A chill breeze seemed to gust from him.
Before anyone could speak, a small, Asian man with his eyes hidden by sunglasses appeared from the darkest shadows by the door, grabbed the boy’s hand, and pressed a cold, metal bar against the skin between a thumb and forefinger. Behind the Asian man stood his tall, wide companion, eyes also masked. The sheen of their sweat reflected what little light there was in the alcove. Both wore the slightest of smiles.
“The price was paid,” the Asian man said, addressing the boy. “Thank you. A pleasure serving you. Come again.” He pulled the metal rod away, and the pair backed off.
The boy didn’t see where they went because he realized he’d been looking down on the man, rather than up at him, and that felt wrong. Then he felt something else entirely. A knife coming his way. He moved just enough to let if fly by his head.
The beggar and the uniform were on him. He blocked a kick, turned a blow, swept one of his assailants off of his feet and grabbed the head of the other with both hands, lifting the chin and turning the head in one smooth, swift motion, pushing through resistance, snapping the neck. He stomped the fallen attacker in the groin, and again in the neck. The Beast raised its voice, demanding more.
“What goes on in there?” the tall, cold man asked, eyes narrowed, gaze slipping to the doorway while his last companion limped hurriedly away.
“Whatever people want to happen,” the boy answered.
“I don’t want any trouble from you. I’m looking for the boy who just went in.”
He almost said, I’m a boy, too. But then he remembered a name: Shishir. A place: Calcutta. A time: now.
Time is always now.
He looked at his hands, at Shishir, at the bodies on the ground. Realized what he’d done. He wasn’t a boy, anymore. But he was back in the place he’d left a lifetime ago, running from danger.
He grunted, as if taking a blow to the gut.
The Beast howled.
He gave the Beast his voice, and paused an instant to watch Shishir’s eyes grow wider. Someone looked in from beyond the columns.
He moved, fast, anticipating the knife, shifting his hips as he closed, letting the weapon slide in the empty space between elbow and rib. He locked the wrist against his body with the elbow, spun, got low, turned a hip. Bone snapped. A startled cry ended abruptly as Shishir slammed against the hard floor.
He took his time choking the life out of the man, squeezing his fingers together slowly, savoring every raspy gasp for air, the fluttering lips, the spittle, the flapping tongue, the body, a wire of muscle, squirming under him. He was surprised
by how well the lessons he’d learned about pain translated to fighting.
The Beast wanted more, but he was done with Shishir, and he knew where there was more to feed on.
He went through the train station, the years and life he’d spent in Painfreak falling away, vanishing like mist and dreams in the dawn. The name, like the mark, remained, a shadow across his memories, a mountain forever veiled by mist.
He walked. Slowly. It seemed important for him to take his time, to be slow and deliberate. Not to rush.
Or run.
On his way back to the place rage told him he had to visit, he stopped in front of a mirror in a shop window and studied his reflection. His face was smooth, young, attractive in a fierce, masculine kind of way, beneath straight, black hair. A strong pair of shoulders and a stout neck didn’t divulge all of his strength. He looked fit, though he’d have to change his clothes and wash up. There was still blood on his face and shirt from the old woman, the one from his dream. He shook his head, laughed. Dreams didn’t bleed. It had to have been from Shishir, or one of his men.
He wasn’t dressed quite like everyone else on the streets. The pants, shoes and shirt were all of a different shade of familiar colors, cut and styled in a fashion that made many turn and stare at him. He couldn’t remember where he’d picked the outfit up, but resolved to find more subtle furnishings when he was done.
After the blood.
A man tried to stop him at the first floor entry. He bit the guard, on the chin, then the cheek, following up quickly with tearing rakes to the nose, ears and cheek, before ending at the throat. He’d expected the man to die at his first bite, but when that didn’t happen, he let himself go and the Beast joyously followed. The Beast had him linger over the throat, nibbling at the edges of the ragged hole in the flesh like he was giving a lover pleasure. He knew he should rush up the stairs because the man’s initial screams, and sounds of the struggle, had warned the one he wanted. But what was done was done. The Beast needed its reward.
When he climbed the stairs, he was slow and deliberate, listening and watching for an ambush. He kicked the third floor door in. Jolly was on him before he could step through the office entrance.
Waiting for Mister Cool Page 17