“But why me?”
“Are you afraid?”
A chill passed through Max. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.” He laughed, shrugged his shoulders, stroked his wide palm with cold fingers. “I’ve never been afraid before. I think what I feel is something else. Like something is waiting for me, and I don’t know what it is, what it wants, how I will deal with it. My world, inside and out, has changed. I feel … uncertain?”
“Dread,” Alioune said, pouring boiling water into cups. She stared intently at the stream of steaming liquid.
Kueur came to Max, put the letter back in his robe pocket, settled herself in his lap. Her arms snaked over his shoulders, around his neck. A leg twined around his. She was hot, even through the towel and robe. Her breath smelled of sex. When her tongue probed his mouth, he tasted his own cum.
“You must face this haunting,” she whispered in his ear. “Stalking, surely.”
“In times of change, the past sometimes comes to haunt,” Alioune said, appearing suddenly beside them offering a tray of cups.
“Merci, Alioune,” Kueur said, taking one. To Max, she said, “You must, or the cost will be terrible. And we do not want to lose you, Tonton B`eb`ete. Especially now that we have truly discovered what we can be to each other.”
Max took a cup, sipped the tea. Alioune’s mixture went down like a caress and sent soothing fingers of warmth through his body, into his muscles, along his nerves. A feeling of calm settled over him. He exhaled a long breath that released all the tension his body had been hoarding. Alioune pressed against him as she sat, cup in hand. She sipped, then rested her head against his shoulder. “You must pay the price for change,” she said gently.
“I thought I already had,” Max answered, thinking of his Beast.
“That was only the beginning,” said Kueur.
They finished the tea and sat huddled together as the afternoon passed in silence, like a hunter circling its prey.
On his way back to his apartment, walking on Leonard Street with the river, sunset, and brisk fall breeze at his back, Max struggled to remember how time had passed before and after meeting the twins in Paris’s Bois de Boulogne. The moment he saw them with the young Brazilian boy masquerading as a woman remained vivid in his mind, like an explosion of light and emotion. Like Creation’s Big Bang. Seeing them carve into the prostitute while at the same time pleasuring him, one feeding on pain, the other on ecstasy, had awakened feelings he never knew existed. In the twins, he caught a glimpse of a part of himself in the moment, and in the future. The reflection tantalized him with its differences, seduced him with possibilities. Raised hope, which remained even after the consummation of their relationship, so that he wondered what he was hoping for in staying with them. Fired a need to protect, as if the twins had emerged fully grown from his own loins. Cast a cold shadow over him at the thought of losing them.
In that moment, Max remembered making the first clear, conscious decision of his life. He would not interrupt their play, or kill them, or run away from something he did not understand. He would not become their victim, or allow them to control his life. Max vowed to help them instead.
He would watch what they became. Be their friend, their guardian. But at a distance, so neither his appetite nor theirs would interfere with their relationship. And so the Beast that had been Max would not corrupt their development, and their blossoming would not distract him from his work.
That moment was so different from the random paths of death he had followed before and after that it hardly seemed to belong to him. And since that moment in the Bois, his life had been shaped by his visits with the twins. The years spent killing, for himself and others, was a fog of vague memories. The days shared with Kueur and Alioune were light-filled islands of life. He was old in time without the twins, and young in time with them.
Max laughed to himself, wondering if there was a way to borrow from the young to make the old feel better.
“Why laugh alone?” a woman’s voice asked.
Max froze, focused on his surroundings.
He was alone on the tiny island of Finn Square, waiting for the light to change. The streetlamps had just turned on, and the crisp autumn air was tainted by exhaust from cars accelerating to beat the red signal. The open space gave him a view down West Broadway, up Varick, and up and down Leonard. A few pedestrians walked in the distance. Neon restaurant names glowed between closed storefronts. Darkened office building windows reflected the closing darkness while spilling the emptiness they had contained through the day onto the streets.
The breeze gusted. Something cool and smooth settled over his ear and cheek. Max jerked a hand up, startled, and brushed away the sensation. A red scarf fluttered away.
Max checked the windows again, peered through a hole between boards protecting subway construction work abandoned for the weekend, then patted himself for a planted transmission receiver. He found nothing. But the voice was real. Someone had spoken to him, from nearly right next to him.
He waited. Shadows stretched, twisted, scurried before cars and trucks, blossomed under streetlamps. At the next corner on Varick, one shadow hesitated before vanishing up the street. Max followed.
Buildings loomed over him, doorways yawned. Homeless men and women looked out from cardboard shacks and dens fashioned out of accidental juxtapositions between steel and concrete. Max examined them as he passed, searching for the elusive maker of the shadow he pursued. Startled cries and moans of fear greeted him. He moved on, stalking sudden movements on the periphery of his vision. The streets shortened as he broke into a run. The echo of his footsteps chased him as he hunted his unknown prey, turning corners, threading his way through traffic.
At last he stopped, lost and confused. He searched for street signs but found he could not read them. Traffic streamed past every street corner except the one he stood on. A woman’s laughter rained down to him as if from a great height, and the scent of a sweet perfume pooled around him until he thought he would choke.
“Who are you?” he screamed. “What do you want?”
“You all right, mister?”
Max spun, faced an old woman. Dark eyes looked up at him from a grim-crusted, wrinkled face. Strands of white hair escaped from her tightly drawn coat hood like smoke trails from lost rockets. Her thin lips were twisted into a smirk. The stench of her filthy clothes and body dispersed the scent of perfume and made him gag. She seemed familiar, but Max dismissed the feeling. The streets were littered with her kind.
“What?” He looked past her, at the street sign he could understand, the cars passing, pedestrians glancing quickly in his direction as they crossed the street.
“She told me to give you this,” the old woman said, pressing a red package into his hand.
He grabbed hold of her coat, shook her once, dragged her close. “Who?”
She hissed, and her breath filled his lungs with corruption, his head with the smell of corpses fished out of swamps, cut open on autopsy tables, chopped up and drained of blood and fluid and maggots. He pushed her away, coughing. He wiped his face and spat, but the flavor of decayed flesh and exposed, rotten viscera remained with him. When he looked up the old woman was gone. A red scarf danced away on the sidewalk.
The package in his hand, another red silk scarf with its ends loosely folded over, fell apart as he held it up. Inside, a swatch of pale leather he recognized as human skin was tied tightly into a bundle by dried sinew, like a fetish pouch filled with sacred matter containing magical spirit and power. He worked the knot loose with a fingernail, opened the bundle. Bone fragments, ends jagged, tooth marks scarring the stained surface, clattered as he shook them in his palm. He picked up a fragment with a jewel embedded in the center of a rune etched into the bone. His fingers became cold, and the cold spread like spilling blood over his hand, arm, shoulder, chest. He shook the other bones in his palm again, found a bloody rear molar. On the inside of the leather, under the bones, a message had been scrawled. Movin
g under a lamp, he read: No one will ever love you the way I will. Next to the words was the sign of Painfreak.
Bones. Pieces of old enemies, prey, sacrifices. His, Alioiune’s, and Kueur’s, taken from the Box in the twins’ loft. A tooth, no doubt knocked loose from one of the twins. His hands trembled. The cold creeping through his body seized his heart, nestled in his gut and groin, and ran its icy edges along his spine. He wanted to run to the loft, but did not want to see the locks broken, the Box ransacked, the sanctum of his most precious intimacy raped. Most of all, he did not want to know he had lost Kueur and Alioune.
Frozen to the spot, Max understood he had been discovered by fear, and that it had filled every empty space inside of him that had ever held rage and hate and cruelty, and all the other sharp fangs and talons of his old inner companion, his Beast. Knowing the name of the thing he felt did not help him dispel or even control it. But knowledge released his body to act and follow the impulses of habit and training even as his thoughts ran tight little circles around the hope that Alioune and Kueur were still alive.
He ran to a nearby phone, called the number to the loft reserved for him by the twins. Someone picked up before the line had a chance to ring.
“Tell me, are they all right?” he asked. “Because if you’ve hurt them …” He ran out of words, fear consuming the spark of his rage. The Beast that would have known what to say, and how, to make his enemy come forward…
A woman laughed. Another joined. And another. And still more. Until the phone blared with the piercing laughter of countless women, even when Max held the receiver away from him, even when he hung up the phone. The laughter continued, running on and on, gaining voices, taunting him with sudden swells.
The breeze gusted once again. Another red scarf flew out of the faint remnants of sunset. The breeze pinned it against the phone for a moment. The night looked as if a fresh wound had been cut into its side. Then the scarf flew away and the laughter died, and the world returned to a steel-and-concrete focus where sidewalks were hard and streetlights held back darkness, where cars and passersby moved restlessly in a city so full of harsh reality it had no room for dreams or nightmares.
Max held the package the old woman had given him against his chest, as if the bones of prey might protect him from fear. Invisible, icy fingers dug through his flesh and closed around his heart. He threw the scarf and leather swatch away. Bones rattled against concrete. There was only one thing that could keep him safe and save the twins, if they still lived. But the Beast was dead. And someone, or something, else wanted to love him.
He headed for the subway, driven by fear and the need to control it by exerting his will. Pursued by the red-veiled visage of a love like no one else’s.
The two men at the entrance stared at Max. The taller, wider doorman, bald and scarred, kept his hands by his sides. His loose black suit and T-shirt gave him plenty of room to move. The other man, Asian, slightly built, dressed in a long, gray tunic with slits on the side, trousers, and a tightly fitted cap, kept his hands folded in front of him. Except for a few more scars on the larger man, they looked no different from when he had first visited the club thirty years ago.
“You look familiar,” the Asian doorman said. “Have you been here before?”
Max remembered the mark and held up his left hand. The tougher-looking doorman stepped forward, guided Max’s hand forward, stopped. The Painfreak sign, the same he remembered from years ago, the same that had accompanied the messages he had been receiving, appeared on the back of his hand. His skin tingled.
“Welcome back,” the smaller man said. “It’s been a long time.”
“I’ve been invited,” Max replied.
“Of course,” he replied, closing his eyes. “A message was left for you. What you need is in the House of Spirits. Follow the sign.” He opened his eyes, met Max’s gaze.
Max bowed, then passed through the doorway as the two men stepped back into waiting shadows.
The club was buried at the end of a maze of tunnels and stairwells. Thick, slow-burning candles barely in each other’s line of sight marked the path. Footsteps had cleared dust and debris from the floor. Rats squeaked and scattered at his approach. A thread of pulsing, liquid beats wound through darkness, calling to him, drawing him to the heart of his search.
A giggling couple, apparently lost, stumbled against him near a candle, sobered when they saw his expression in the flickering light, and followed quietly as he made his way to the club’s double steel doors. They hurried past him as he entered, faces flushed with excitement. He doubted they would survive the night. Their high-pitched voices and sex-sweat scents were quickly lost in the storm of sounds and aromas that slammed against Max as the doors swung shut behind him.
The faint throbbing pulse that had echoed through the empty warehouse exploded into a cacophony of rumbling bass, screeching guitars, driving percussive rhythms that pierced flesh and bone and grabbed hold of an intangible part of his being. And squeezed. The stench reminded him of Bombay’s poorest quarters. Every human biological activity was represented: shitting, pissing, digesting, fucking. The pungent aromas formed an offensive cloud that repulsed him at first. Moments later, the sensory assault whetted his appetites. His stomach grumbled for meat, blood red and warm. He had a taste for salt. His parched throat ached for the cleansing burn of liquor.
Skin tingled, anticipating touch. Muscles twitched, reacting to ghost pain and pleasure. Nerves screamed, craving sensation. Excitement. Every part of him wanted Kueur and Alioune. Needed them.
Max stepped away from the entrance, prowled the bar area. Naked, vacant-eyed barkeeps and waitresses offered herbal concoctions, painkillers, stimulants, hallucinogens, and other substances he could not identify. Multicolored lights flashed stroboscopically through clouds of smoke that were acrid in one breath, sweetly scented in another. People stretched out singly and in groups on circular couches resembling inverted mushrooms. In a shadowy corner, a constant stream of people squeezed through a small doorway no fire marshal would have approved.
The club’s layout was the same as it had been thirty years ago in Saigon. The music was louder, the space bigger, the gossamer glamour more polished. But the atmosphere of death and decay was as heavy on his spirit as it had been in the middle of that war. A willowy man with rings in his nipples, nose, and along the bottom of his erect penis tried to kiss him, but Max shoved him away. Even with the Beast alive in him, he would have found no prey in the club. Everyone in Painfreak was already dead.
Finding no red scarves to taunt him, no guide or House of Spirits, Max pushed his way through Painfreak’s helpers eager to put him into another state of mind. He passed through the narrow entrance to the heart of Painfreak.
On the other side, the floor of the vast, hangarlike space was studded with circular stages set at various heights. On each stage, performers enticed a gathering of devoted attendants.
Men, women, hermaphrodites and eunuchs, costumed and naked, danced against the pulse of the music, seemingly possessed by their own rhythms. Some stood bound and twitching. Performers reached down from high stages and touched, or slapped, or whipped members of their following. Others, set on lower stages or in pits, allowed the audience to touch them.
One woman was being crucified by a couple in nun’s habits driving spikes through her hands and feet. Three men in suits licked the blood from her wounds. A small, hairless man swam desperately in a plastic sphere of water rotating in randomly shifting directions. He chased the air bubble trapped at the top of the sphere while fettered by one foot to a point on the globe’s inner surface. A figure half hidden by cables and electronic equipment moved for a collection of men and women connected by wired pelvic and hand gloves, helmets, boots, and skin pads to a massive block of interconnected components and digital readouts.
Max studied the performers, searching for Alioune and Kueur among the victims, for a guide with a red scarf among the tormentors. Restless spotlights, incense smoke, and
the layout of stages made it hard to see much detail from a distance. He made his way through the performances, pausing at each, taking in faces and body motions.
He let fear lead him away from a man slashing himself with a razor while video monitors played back scenes of genuine torture and murder all around him. Away from the woman hanging bound upside down in a black rubber suit connected by a mask to an air tank controlled by her audience. Away from the electric arcs sliding across flesh and the stainless-steel mechanical lover servicing a dozen admirers, and the tiny operating theater with a leering, misshapen surgeon holding up shiny, bloodstained instruments while begging for more volunteers to join him.
A flash of red fabric drew him to a part of the floor where the lights did not shift so restlessly, where the music changed from a relentless, bass-driven roll down an endless mountain to a hypnotic string of airy notes floating on the edge of awareness. Men and women danced slowly in this part of Painfreak, their bodies gliding with the music like hawks staying with a breeze. Veils and loose, flowing robes replaced the other participants’ more complicated costumes. Only one or two admirers, kneeling or prone before each stage, offered attention to dancers who remained aloof, involved in the sensuality of their own movements.
Another flash of red drew him to a grouping of veiled dancers. The music climbed an octave, gained several beats per second, shadowing his racing heart. Lighting dimmed. The dancers swung their hips and waved their arms for no one. Beyond them, the stages were empty. Max stopped, stared at the platforms, grew agitated. His fear sharpened until its edges sliced every coherent thought free from his mind.
A red scarf snapped out from behind a rounded corner. A brown hand held the scarf, drew it slowly back. Beckoning.
Legs shaking, palms damp and mouth dry, Max followed.
On a knee-high stage, a woman danced slowly, sinuously, covered by red scarves. Her eyes, one brown, the other green, locked onto him as soon as he rounded the corner. His gaze traveled the length of her body, followed her hips, her hands—one brown, the other alabaster white—the roundness of her thighs pushing through scarves to flash black skin once, then reddish brown the second time. Her feet were visible as the corner tips of scarves brushed against the tops of her toes. A yellow-tinged, delicate foot rotated on its ball while the other foot, larger, reddish pink, and scarred, ground its heel in counterpoint to the first. He tried to look away, but found he could not. Drawn into the hidden corner, he felt the curtain of her attention fall around him and cut him off from the rest of the club, the world. Himself.
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