The Beast picked up interest. Voices singing, laughing, arguing, drew its attention from the memories of its last feasting. The scents, too many to single out, stirred its appetite. Max felt the strength of its waking course through him. His own rage and hunger sparked.
A dealer standing nearby, eyes hardened, face weathered, glanced at Max and moved away.
Max focused on the kind of bait that usually drew other predators. Zap, survivor of a failed pre-Woodstock concert in North Dakota, was surrounded by the usual younger generation of vulnerable prey drawn to her dreamy reality. Heroin addicts stood teetering on the brink of falling over from this world into the next. The tourists were already leaving, having taken as much as they could in the few minutes they’d spent in the park. They’d earned their New York horror stories. The fresh runaways were already being circled by pimps. He began picking out the other predators, watching, waiting. The world was reducing itself to a simpler reality. A basic foundation. The Beast’s interest was aroused completely, and it was picking out its own possible victims for them to pursue. Max stoked its interest, feeding the Beast the candle’s blood scent, and the transgression of its presence at their doorstep.
Something fell at Max’s feet. He looked around. Scooped up the object. A bone. Metacarpal. Human. Stained, as if it had been stewed.
A trophy. An offering. Another sign, like the candle.
The Beast rose up in a frenzied answer to the challenge. Max doubled over, arms crossed over his belly, straining to keep from screaming, from grabbing the nearest human being and tearing that person apart.
He squeezed the bone until it seemed it might fuse with the bones of his own hand. The pain did nothing to ease the Beast’s rage.
He popped the bone into his mouth. Crushed it between his teeth. Swallowed the jagged pieces and dust. Tasted marrow, old blood, acid, spices, cum.
The Beast sniffed at the offering, circled it, licked it for memories. Max sat up, breathing hard, caught between hunting for hunters and prey.
A sound punched through the noise of the city turning over to night. A quiet, childish sound, irrelevant to everything going on in and around Max. A titter, excited, uncontrolled, with a telling edge of joy well beyond anything felt by the people who normally came to Tompkins Square Park.
Like the rap of a knuckle on a steel door, it didn’t belong.
He was up and walking before being fully aware that he’d caught a trace of his prey. The Beast filled him, eager for more than a taste of bone.
The mood in the park was shifting with darkness closing in. The pace of business being conducted had picked up, the product and cost more desperate. Moans and whimpers wove themselves into the rhythms of the music rising to the rooftops. Max negotiated the changing tides, pushed by the certainty of prey ahead, and the Beast at his back.
He couldn’t fix on a figure, a scent, even a scrap of clothing. The laughter was gone. Whoever was running ahead of him understood he had brushed too close to his target. Still, there were instincts, his own, and the Beast’s. There were ripples and breezes and curses, slight disruptions in the parks’ pattern. Signs. A trail.
He cut across Tompkins Square Park, coming out 7th Street. Foot traffic was lighter outside. Shadows darted far down the street. Max went up to Avenue A, then downtown, pausing to let the Beast catch whatever it could in the mosaic designs covering the occasional street lamp post. Across Houston, West past Katz’s deli, back south again on Ludlow, shuttered storefronts and closed factory entrances denying cover for whoever he was following. He paused at trash containers, rifled the clothes of the homeless, showed the Beast to a group of drunken students and divined by their terror and screams that they’d seen something that had already drained a fraction of their fear from them. Across Delancey, down Chrystie over the bodies of drunks and the lost, zig-zagging Hester and Elizabeth to land on Canal, where he stopped to take in the new hunting ground. The open and honest display of pain and need of Tompkins Square Park had scabbed over. Secrets huddled behind blacked out windows and locked doors, their whispers choked by shame and by a fear of who those secrets would betray.
A firecracker went off nearby, startling the Beast. Trucks gunned their engines heading over bridge, challenging the demon’s own roar. Exhaust and the low rumbling from idling traffic waiting for a green light clouded Max’s senses. The clatter of a busy nearby restaurant kitchen seemed to taunt the both of them. Max grunted. Growled. The Beast made him punch a steel security gate. Heads turned in Max’s direction, turned quickly away. Above them, a window slammed shut. In the wide open space of Canal Street at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge. A truck headlight reflected off of something stuck into a wooden door frame.
Max recognized the sign, understood the invitation. Blood candle. Bone trophy. Knife. A killer’s trophies, a murderer’s invitation.
Someone wanted the Beast released. Perhaps a potential employer wanted to test him, see what they were going to buy.
Take the offering. Couldn’t swallow steel, like he had bone. Give it away, like the candle. Give the knife away.
In his hand, the knife would belong to the Beast. He’d give it to the Beast, another fang for it to bare. To use to kill. He took a step toward the knife. Another. Two more, quicker.
A half-dozen men ran up, blocking his path deeper into Chinatown, holding up their hands, firing off the noise of their panic. From their midst, Mrs. Chan emerged, walking cane in hand . “We have enough darkness here,” she said, standing in Max’s path. “All I ever asked was that you not add yours.”
Mrs. Chan’s escort backed away. Most raised their fists, sank into fighting stances, preparing to step back up to defend their master. Max could tell even the ones thinking of running knew they were going to die.
“Business,” Max said, the burden of speaking like the human part of himself making him want to puke.
“My neighbors saw you cross Houston,” Mrs. Chan said, leaning on her cane. She looked more like a child than an old woman, short, thin, shadows pooling in the wrinkles on her face, wearing her lucky Boston Red Sox baseball cap because she must have felt she needed the red. “They saw how you were. You are not as you have been, when you have come here on business. My neighbors are not happy with me.”
Max focused on breathing. The Beast’s hoarse snorting resonated with his every exhalation. “I’m fine.”
“Have you been practicing your meditation? Your chi kung?”
“Yes.”
“It does not feel that way.”
“If I hadn’t, you’d all be dead by now.”
“And yet, you don’t look well. Do you want to kill us?”
“I could.”
“You could try.”
Max shivered, the challenge stabbing at the Beast’s heart. Every muscle in his body knotted, twisting, tightening, instinctively trying to lock and shrink and turn him into a statue rather than lash out. His body imprisoned the Beast, and it burned and howled and scored his bones with the poisoned claws of its rage. Mrs. Chan was challenging him, not to a fight, but to force himself to push the limits of his self-control. He didn’t think he could hold on for long, or survive many more such tests.
“And yet to came to me to learn,” Mrs. Chan said, her voice soothing. She waved her stick at the men behind her, and they relaxed slightly. “Would you kill that part of yourself by seeking my death, and the death of my friends?”
“Something would,” Max muttered.
Mrs. Chan bowed her head. She tapped the can against the concrete sidewalk. A horn wailed. Tires screeched as someone took a sharp, fast turn toward the bridge.
“What are you after, my friend? Are you a tree of shadows, insubstantial, shedding or growing darkness with the changing seasons of your spirit? Or are you what casts the shadow tree you’re seeking? What will you find when you finally shake those ghost branches? More shadows, or yourself?”
Max stared at his instructor, hanging on to what had caught his attention when he’d seen h
er practicing and teaching in Columbus Park: the calm, the self-assurance in the face of what lived inside him. She might live, or she might die, she was ready for either. In her heart, in her spirit, she believed she could stop him in a fight, however impossible it might seem. She was like a rock sticking out of the earth – there might only by a few inches beneath the soil, or an immoveable mountain.
The Beast circled the need to test to her, but Max found the leverage to keep the demon at bay. Like the lonely light of a campfire in the mountain wilderness, the tiny embers of his calm center was enough to fend off what lay in wait behind the burning bright eyes staring out from the darkness. His calm, and the promise of more and better prey, the ones who had left him candle, bone and blade, the ones who probably watched them know, eager to witness and celebrate the Beast, was enough for the Beast. It would wait a little while longer.
Max boxed slightly to Mrs. Chan. He took a step, another, heading cross town on Canal Street. The lights of the oncoming bridge traffic burned his eyes, but he stared, hard, into the light and the shadows they cast, looking for the next sign.
Mrs. Chan’s followers let him pass, but the clink of metal on concrete stopped him.
“Take what you need to finish your business,” said Mrs. Chan. “Find out what you are.”
“I already know,” Max said, picking up the knife. It has long, twelve inches. Heavy. Balanced, though not for him. There were nicks in the steel. It had been well-used, had done hard work. There was old sweat and blood in the handle leather.
“Then find what you need to be more,” Mrs. Chan said. She didn’t wait for him to find another answer.
He’d already forgotten her as he put the blade against his face. The scent of murder was strong. It had been a valued tool for sacrifice, and it had been sacrificed, to him. It pointed to its former owner, to his many victims, and to all the others who would be given to the maw of hunger and appetite. The Beast curled itself around the knife, savoring the morsels of pain it found.
Max put the blade under his shirt, close to his skin. The other two knives he carried seemed to shrivel in their sheaths. The steel was chilly, refused to be warmed by his flesh. It burned, like a cold flame. Scorched his flesh as he walked west on Canal, telling him he was getting closer. The pain cleared his head for a moment, pushed back the Beast’s attention. The knife didn’t want him, it wanted the hand that had always wielded it. Sometimes, things refused to be sacrificed. A bullet jammed, a bomb failed to explode, a blade broke. That was what came from putting so much into an instrument. The tool became a part of the owner. It could not function without its maker. Passed on, lost, abandoned, the tool betrayed its function. Sometimes, it came back to haunt, or avenge, its maker. Sometimes, the instrument turned into something even more terrible than what it had been fashioned to be.
Perhaps that’s what the Beast had been, a weapon that had been lost in war, or used and discarded. Perhaps it was broken. Or, it was still waiting for the time when it would be called upon to perform its function. Perhaps Max was only a vessel, the shell casing for the bullet that would kill something he could not imagine.
The Beast snapped up his thoughts and tore them apart. It had been aroused, and now it wanted to be fed.
Max turned on to Mott Street, heading downtown. Tourists filled the street, oblivious to him, to the young gang members watching and laughing, to the workers scrambling to make their shifts in secret factories. The knife drove him like the Beast did, blindly through the fog of the world’s distractions to the suffering at its heart.
He followed a group of four women into a mini-mall of tightly packed shops offering jewelry, electronics, liquor. They passed through a door. Max headed for the opening, but hands grabbed his arms and shoulder. An elbow to the jaw loosened the grip on his shoulder, but a kick to the back of his knee brought him down. They were good, with an advantage in tight quarters. He grabbed one man’s groin, pulled and twisted, slipped a kick and delivered a punch to the belly. On his feet, Max drew the knife and finished the two before they could bring out their own weapons.
The knife sang in his hand, in his mind. And yet, it was disappointed. He was not the same. He had no art.
The Beast protested, as well. Too fast, too soon, it felt.
There was more to come, he told himself.
The counter sales clerks and customers were screaming, shouting, moving for the exits. Behind the walls, more voices were raised. Footsteps pounded rickety floorboards. Max pushed through the opening, made his way through a narrow hallway lit by naked neon tubes. The Glock was out, the suppressor on.
Max sank into the urgency of the fight’s moment. He forgot what he was here for. An assignment, perhaps. Or maybe those four women had been prey the Beast had targeted. It didn’t matter. Counting the guards he heard coming, he fired off one shot, another, taking down two over-eager gangsters rushing around a corner and down the stairs in their shiny suits. The noise of their falls was louder than his shots. But the Beast boiled his heart with its lust for the ones who had sent the signs. The knife yearned for its master. Max remembered.
This way, he heard, from the blood spattered on the floor and wall. Here, a door. Max smashed the butt of the knife into a blank wall. A mechanism clicked, a crack widened, an opening grew. Stairs. Down. The door closed behind him. Darkness, broken by a faint glow a couple of stories further down.
He descended, nearly blind, the rickety wood frame swaying.
Max didn’t need the Beast to tell him there was more blood, deeper in the bedrock, freshly shed. And below, people crowded together, quiet, their breathing steady, as if gathered in a shelter to wait out a storm, or in a church, expecting an angel to appear. The knife felt like it was almost home. Upstairs, the voices of outraged Tong quieted.
“I’ll tell them you’re one of us,” someone said, above and behind Max.
“Who are you?” Max asked, tracking the speaker’s motions in the darkness. He was good, a trained op, hiding in the support structure and piping for the building above them. Their words echoed in the hollow space in the rock.
“You know.”
The Beast reared back, eager to push on, angered by the delay. The knife burned Max’s palm.
“They said you wouldn’t like us. You don’t like anyone, really. But you wouldn’t mind offerings. “
The man landed on the stairs. Max had him.
“You weren’t supposed to come here,” the guard said, with a trace of annoyance. “We would have made arrangements.”
“Who told you about me?” Max asked.
The door above them burst open. The guard shouted in Chinese. A few shots were fired, stopped quickly as numbers were shouted, back and forth, payment for damages, lost lives.
Max didn’t see the advantage for him in controlled scenario and put a round in the guard’s back. Curses rang out from the doorway, a few shots were fired randomly into the blackness. Cautiously, the gangsters descended.
Max moved ahead of them, feeling as if he was chasing the Beast already imagining itself in a feast of slaughter.
At the foot of the stairs, two men blocked a steel door lit by a single light above it. The air was hot, humid, stinging with gun smoke. Max showed them the gun and the knife. The stairs creaked behind and above him.
A third man came out from a corner, half-dressed, as if he’d been changing clothes, and Max pressured the Glock’s trigger. He didn’t recognize him from the park or the streets, and concluded he’d found one of his stalkers. Only the man’s eyes stopped Max. His gaze was on the knife Max held in his other hand.
“You brought it back,” the man said, tears streaming down his face. Hair peppered with gray, wrinkles gathered in corners of his mouth and eyes, the man was still trim and fit, a solid package, perhaps ex-military, though Max didn’t read the hardness of a combat vet in his voice or stance. Max found, instead, a brittle, broken quality to the man in his voice, in the need to change as if compelled to perform some kind of ritual befo
re going through the door. But the predator’s coldness was there, beneath the tears and in the shifting lines of his face, already turning an offense Max could not understand into a reason for murder.
The knife told him it had come home.
Max held the knife out, approached the man. Someone called out in Chinese from above. One of the guards looked up, answered.
The other guard moved to intercept Max. “Sir, please, we mean no harm, if you want to join us we would be honored, you mean so much—”
“You didn’t think it was worthy?” the salt-and-pepper haired man asked, wiping his face.
“But they said you’d appreciate offerings. To feed the Beast.”
Max froze for an instant, stunned by the revelation of his most closely-guarded secret. No one knew about the thing inside him.
But then, he remembered, there were two who did. The threat was not what he’d thought it might be.
Max felt as if the Beast was ripping through his ribs and chest to get at the man, understanding only that it had been exposed and made vulnerable. The knife seemed to be skinning the flesh from his hand in its effort to free itself from his grip.
Max returned the knife, burying it in the owner’s throat through the spine. The man staggered back, grabbed the hilt, reached back to finger the tip protruding from the back of his neck. He stared down, eyes wide, at the thing that had been returned to him, blood pulsing from torn flesh.
Max shot the closest guard, fired a few quiet rounds into the shadows of the stairs. Chinese curses were cut off by a barrage of gunfire. Patience had run out and automatic weaponry had been deployed. The other guard fell. The Beast took a taste of the blood coming from the killer’s throat before Max pushed through the door.
A Haunting of Horrors: A Twenty-Novel eBook Bundle of Horror and the Occult Page 185