Bumping the edge of the platform, Max stopped. The dancing woman filled his eyes, his mind. The swaying curves of her breasts pushed scarves one way, then another, but always the red silk veiled the flesh underneath, leaving only the impression of softness. Ripeness. Erect nipples. Her head was swathed in scarves, leaving only her eyes visible. Eyes that were like hooks, planted firmly into the tender, vulnerable parts Max never knew existed in him; eyes that held him, frozen.
Max found the urge to fight. His body chafed at bondage, wanted to move. For a moment, he managed to hang on to his thoughts, and he wondered how the scarves could hang on the woman with no visible support; and he wondered why the flesh and shapes of her hands and feet were so different; and he questioned the reasonableness of the fear that gripped him, when he had found himself in far more dangerous situations in his life and never felt afraid.
The woman came to the edge of the platform. A sickly-sweet scent blew into Max’s nose and mouth and turned his lungs cold. Her brown hand rubbed a scarf against his lips, eyes, ears. She went down on one knee, still moving back and forth, rolling her shoulders, her elbows and wrists rotating through small circles in the air, and she pushed the scarf into his mouth. Once again, his feeble grip on thoughts and instincts gave way.
He tried to keep his mouth closed, tried to clamp his jaws shut. When her cold fingers pushed against his tongue, and cool silk rubbed against the insides of his cheeks, he tried to bite down. But his mouth would not obey him. His hands would not leap up to bat away her arm. His eyes would not shut against the relentless glare, fury bright, of her eyes.
She finished stuffing the scarf in his mouth and caressed the side of his face. Jumped down from the stage, pushed her body against his.
He tasted chemical dye and worm shit. He tasted his own gorge rising, until she traced a line from his chin down to throat to solar plexus, ripping open his turtleneck with her nail. His bile receded, burned in his stomach. Guts twisted, boiled, shivered with the urge to explode, as if filled with an acid enema. Skin, where she touched it, stung as if opened by a razor’s edge.
The woman embraced him. Max tried to draw his head back, but his neck would not the obey instinct. Her arms, suddenly impossibly long, circled around him and linked somewhere between his shoulder blades. Her breasts pressed against his broad chest. Dancing on the stage of his body, her legs entwined his, rubbed him up and down. Her pelvis slowly thrust against his crotch and hips. But instead of lust, her frigid presence made his penis shrink and genitals draw up.
Her eyes bore into his, filled his mind. Red scarves brushed against lips. Kissed him.
“No one will ever love you the way I will,” she said. Her voice was many voices, as her body belonged to many corpses. She laughed, as she had on the phone.
Reason dropped away like a stone thrown over an endless cliff. Max tried to hang on to the image of Kueur and Alioune; to the sound of their voices; the feel of their hands on his skin; the hot, slick, welcoming darkness of their sex. But memory slipped out of his reach, spun away into a numb and empty void. Vanished. Max tried closing his eyes, shutting the holes of his prick and anus. He willed his ears to be sealed. Stopped breathing. Anything, everything, to stop his self from being ejected like sperm into a dead and infinite womb.
But with her eyes and her touch, the woman drained him.
Nameless, empty, alone, he screamed. But the scarf in his mouth allowed no sound to escape. His voice echoed in the hollow world left to him until even sound was lost to him. The walls of his hollow world collapsed, and darkness followed. But the terror never died.
Max woke with a cry, walking and naked.
The veiled woman led him on a leash of scarves the length of his body through a short, dark hallway ending in a spiral, metal staircase. The scarves were not sewn or tied together, but instead merged into one another through interlaced folds. It ended in a tight noose around his neck. A taut string of scarves linked his neck to his bound genitals, looped between his legs and between his cheeks to his fettered wrists and elbows. Rising out of the stooped walk in which he had awakened brought a sharp pain that forced him to resume a stiff and only mildly painful gait.
The hallway was cold. Stepping onto the staircase sent frozen spikes up his legs and spine.
The woman glanced at him over her shoulder. Dim light from a bulb hanging at the base of the stairs illuminated the pallor of the skin around her eyes. The rest of her was a shifting cloud of dark red.
“We are not done, my love,” she said, one voice rising out of many. “We have not even started.”
They climbed the stairs. Max began shivering. His shoulders and elbows burned with pain from his arms being twisted and tied behind his back. He opened his mouth to ask the woman what was happening, found it stuffed with fabric. Silk.
He remembered fear and terror. He remembered losing his name, memories, sanity. Discovering bits and pieces of them again gave him no comfort. Max. He was Max, searching for Alioune and Kueur, in Painfreak. He was alive, and the creature leading him, he was certain, was dead. The world and his life beyond those facts were hidden in the mental fog and sharp threads of pain binding his mind.
They reached another floor, walked along a winding hallway with uneven walls and ceiling. Soft, violet lights over mostly closed doorways lit their way. A shriek erupted from one open doorway, where murmuring dhol chants praising Ahtu rolled out of the absolute darkness within. The stench of gasoline and burning flesh flowed from another doorway opened to reveal a room in which a naked couple sat, legs wrapped around one another, holding hands. A pillar of crackling flame consumed them, blackening and rolling back their skin, exposing red tissue and flashes of white bone for a moment before these too were charred. Their heads rolled back, lips baring teeth in a fiery grin, liquefied eyes staring at the roiling cloud of many colors above their heads drinking in the angry smoke of their sacrifice. Shaken, Max looked down at the worn, stained floorboards. He managed not to look into several more open rooms until he heard his name whispered. He looked to the veiled woman, who walked ahead and gave no sign of calling him. Again, someone called his name. He turned to the left. A four-armed woman stood in a boat floating in a pool of blood that lapped at the edge of the open doorway. Her skin was black, her smile terrible, her eyes filled with Max’s reflection. A necklace of heads hung from her neck, and one set of hands held an iron hook and an upturned skull brimming with blood, which she sipped. In the other set of hands, she held a lotus and a sword, which she presented to him. Her blood-smeared face broke into laughter as Max, drawn to her offer, stared at the pool’s edge and wondered how to reach the boat. The leash pulled him forward. He stumbled after his captor.
The doorway was left behind, but the woman’s image burned in his mind. Blood pounded in his ears, flushed through his body, and drove off the cold. For a moment, he almost recognized the four-armed woman and his fright withered. Hope flickered. He searched for meaning in the image: a path to escape, a force to rescue him from his entrapment. He found nothing except fog, confusion, and pain. Hope died, and darkness filled the hallway.
A series of tugs on the leash forced him to trot forward until the walls and ceiling were lost in absolute darkness. Max could not tell if he had entered a room or was still in the hallway. Suddenly, the tension in the leash eased. The sound of flapping wings surrounded him, then vanished. His arms dropped to his sides. He stood straight, his bonds gone. Except for the tightness around his genitals. He reached with numbed fingers for the scarf tied securely around his balls, his hard cock. Found a slack leash trailing to the ground.
Max shook out his arms, stretched, rubbed himself to generate heat. When life had returned to his fingers, he dug into the scarf tied around his cock for a knot to untie. Finding only unyielding silk wound tightly around him, Max began to back out, trying to retrace his footsteps.
“Welcome,” the woman said, all around him. “To the House of Spirits.”
Max stopped. “Alioune,”
he said. “Kueur.”
“Come, my love. Find me.” She laughed, teasing him like a fickle lover.
He took a step forward. Anger roused him, and for a lucid moment he knew what he wanted, and what he would do to get it. “I want the twins,” he growled.
“Forget them.”
“I can’t. I won’t.”
“Yes, you can. They’re safe, at home.”
Anger crumbled as doubt made his voice quaver. “I called—”
“But never reached them. I answered instead.”
“But the tooth, the bones—”
“A lover’s lie, easily forgiven.” Bone fragments rained down on him. He covered his head against the downpour. A few bone pieces fell in his hand. He felt the arcane symbols etched into bone, the inlaid jewels and precious metal coatings. “You wouldn’t answer the invitation. You had to be drawn here. With a lie. But I knew you’d understand. You’ve told so many, after all. Forgive me, as I’ve forgiven you. For the lies.”
“Who are you?” Max shouted. “What do you want?” He walked, arms outstretched, eyes opened wide to catch any glint of light. His foot caught against something solid. He lost his balance, slipped in a puddle, fell. A charnel stench engulfed him. Coughing, he struggled to rise. His hand closed around cold, stiff fingers, then jerked away.
A flash of red light illuminated body parts scattered around him. For a heart’s beat, he saw limbs and a pair of torsos. The flash burned in his eyes. Spots, like circles of blood, floated in his vision. The light flashed in his mind again, and he remembered seeing the faces of two severed heads among the body parts. The old woman who had given him the bone bundle and a younger woman whose eyes over a veil of red silk had captured him.
And suddenly, the faces were familiar. He had seen them before. Arms, hands, legs, the different shades and textures of skin, the odd coloration, scratched at his awareness, as well. But memories eluded him. He got to his feet, walked gingerly through the body parts, careful not to slip on fluids and decomposing flesh.
A faint, angry howl ripped through him. His hands twitched, closed around imaginary throats. His body ached for the pleasures of sensation.
The Beast was dead. It did not sing in him anymore. Yet he heard it, like an echo from another time. He broke into a sweat, though he was colder than he had been when he had awakened.
“Come to me,” the woman said.
Was the Beast’s cry hiding in the susurration of the woman’s speaking voices? Max wondered. Or was it lost. Trapped.
“You want to, you always have.”
“No,” said Max, turning, searching for an exit in the pitch blackness.
A flash of red light froze an image of wood floor, cavernous ceiling, and distant walls of exposed pipes and conduits and support beams in his mind. The spill of broken bodies was to his left. Something had moved at the center of the flash.
Max ran toward a wall, stopped when another flash of light burst in front of him. A shadow at the center of the light writhed. Flapped.
“You see?” the woman’s voice whispered, near and far. “I’m not angry over your lies. I understand you’re afraid only because you don’t recognize me. But I know you need to find me. Follow the light, my precious. It’s a game we both must play. Hunter, and hunted. Follow the trail I leave for you, as you did when we first knew each other.”
“I don’t want you.”
“But you do. Surrender to that part of yourself. Don’t fight against your nature. Don’t throw away what is already yours.”
Max ran in the direction opposite from the last flash.
“Earn my love. Track me down. I know you can do it. Because of all that we’ve been to each other, I know you can find me.”
Max skittered to a stop. He should have reached a wall by now, but there was nothing. “I love the twins,” he shouted. “I’m going back to them.
“No. You belong to me. The one you took. All of the ones you took. Then abandoned. You’ve come to us.”
“No. I’ve never been with anything like you.”
“Another lover’s lie.” The sound of fabric snapping in a wind rose out of silence, turned to laughter. “You made us. Left us. But we found what you lost. Or perhaps it drifted to us, after you drove it away from yourself. The thing you loved us with. It’s with us. It teases us. Hurts us. But without the flesh, the heart, the soul, the mind of its master, it can’t satisfy us. So we tracked you through this monster. It is a fine monster, eager to please, sensitive, gifted. Hungry. Are you proud of your prey turned hunter? But only so we can return this part of yourself. Make you whole. And then you can love us as you did. Give us pleasure. Pain. We will love you as no one ever will, if only you would love us as you once did.”
The Beast’s cry drove Max to his knees. He covered his ears, but still the Beast’s roar filled him.
“Who are you?”
“All that’s left.”
Another flash. Red pierced his eyes, staggered him.
Scarves danced at the center of the light. Moved fast and slow, spun, whipped, waved, all in the shape of a woman. A woman with enormous wings spreading out from her back. A woman with long, flowing hair. No face. Limbs, but no hands or feet. A thing made of scarves.
In the darkness after the flash, the Beast roared. The woman’s voice, all their voices, screamed.
A fragment of memory he thought lost in the terror that still rang through him rose out of the roar, and the scream. He remembered a woman in Calcutta, many years ago, sacrificed to the Beast’s appetite. She had been sold to him by a father lost in addiction’s haze. Had there been a red scarf? Some cheap, frivolous accessory tied around her neck, or head, or arm, to make her more attractive to him? He shook his head, but the memory would not expand into a coherent tale. But the image remained, connected to the scarves haunting him, and to the voice. And the old woman: not a morsel tossed to the Beast, but someone who had witnessed his work a week ago; caught and disposed of with barely a thought. Startled by the sudden remembrance, Max discovered other reminders of the past. The voices under the dancing woman’s voice: he had heard them before. The scarf woman’s eyes, her limbs, body, all the enticements that had lured him deeper into Painfreak: They were pieces of some of the women consumed by him over the years since the Calcutta woman, preserved in rage, and pain, and desire.
They were shards of lives he had shattered, spoiled drops of souls left over from his passion. Ghosts who found each other in the wake of his passage. Ghosts bound to him by their passion for the pain and death he had granted them. Ghosts clothed in the symbol of the eldest spirit’s degradation: a red scarf. They were perfect prey to the Beast’s perfect hunter. And they had used the part of his spirit he thought he had slain, the Beast, to hunt and capture him.
The leash around his cock jerked. He looked down. Found himself holding the leash. Pulling it. Forcing himself to stand up. His hand drew the leash around, stopped, pulled him forward.
The red light blossomed in the darkness before him, lingered, allowed him to study the apparition at its heart: an angel made of scarves crowded together, their folds and parts as curved and delicate as the lips of sex. Her arms stretched out to him. She filled the light, had nearly become the red glow. When she vanished again, his heart twisted with pain.
“Yes, my lover,” the angel said out of the darkness. “You know you must come to me.”
He wanted to say no, but his mouth would not open. His hand betrayed him, as did his feet. He moved to where the light had been. He followed his pain, and to his horror, he knew his hand and feet had not betrayed him. He wanted to go to the woman, to all the women he had slain. He needed to join the Beast. Take the women. Relive, again and again, the moments of their deaths. Bask in their suffering, savor their agony, drink in their deaths. As he had done when they were alive and the Beast had been his guide.
The light grew all around him, shading his skin in the red of the scarves encircling him.
“Here we are,” the ang
el said. The leash left his hand, snaked into the mass of scarves before him until his sex was connected to hers. A hand, true in form until it came near and separated itself into dozens of individual dancing scarves, caressed his face and body. Her mouth—four scarves rolled into sumptuous curves—pressed against his face. Cool, smooth silk rubbed against his skin, cupped and massaged his balls, circled the head of his dick in tight little circles. His body shivered, muscles relaxed, hard flesh became even harder.
“No one can ever love us the way you can,” the voices said, crowding one another, slightly out of synch. “No one will ever love you the way we will.”
A storm of scarves erupted around him. The Beast roared. Its ravenous appetite filled Max, and he eagerly accepted the familiar blood and sex rage. Something inside of him was better than nothing.
The spirit of the Beast moved through him, awakening dormant senses, pumping blood into seemingly forgotten internal organs. Each ghost in the roiling cloud came into focus for Max, and he was able to see all the twisted shapes of pain he and the Beast had made. His body yearned for the taste of blood pumping into his mouth, for the wail of despair born from torture. His heart pumped from the excitement of stalking prey through countryside, towns, cities. He burned where another rib, a second heart, a third eye, a womb enclosing a monstrous prodigy, a cunt, might have been. The stench of a freshly carved carcass engulfed him. The slick, warm envelope of a second skin moved over every inch of his body.
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