The Beast That Was Max (17 page)

The scream grew louder, a pure and intense note, rushing through a private pipeline from its source to him, until its intoxicating pitch became a line, a road, a boundary, and a gate. The Beast awakened from its stupor, sensing a return to appetite and its fulfillment. Max focused beyond the moment and its cutting-glass laughter, inspired by the promise of a route out of his paralysis. The scream stretched out, its path through him weaving laughter and pain into one, bringing order out of the chaos, introducing the clarity of vision beyond his suffering.

And in that moment of clarity, Max remembered Mani. Upstairs. The sound of the elevator working. Rithisak.

The spell broke. In its shattered pieces, Max recognized Rithisak's hand corrupting the link he shared with Mani and seeding his mind with the poisons of doubt, guilt, fear.

He stood and ran.

Mani's scream was real, shattering the safe house's silence. It guided him back up the stairs, floor, ladder, to Omari's technological aerie.

The red bulbs were on, illuminating a cleared space among the racks of equipment and supplies where Mani moved.

Danced.

Mouth open, eyes wide, the scream a ceaseless river of sound gushing from her throat like blood, like the Beast's roar, like the pain and pleasure of living, Mani danced to the accompaniment of her own droning voice. Muscles twitched beneath red-tinged skin as her arms and hands snaked through the air, fashioning invisible signs, warning and inviting at the same time. Hips and shoulders rolling, thighs glistening with sweat, she stepped lightly across the small space of her stage, delicate and graceful, untouchable and powerless: like mist in moonlight.

And at the mouth of a corridor between two rows of packed shelves, a thin, bald, Asian man stood in a baggy set of casual clothes that made him appear much younger than the lines on his forehead and the corners of his eyes declared him to be.

"Rithisak!" Max shouted, closing the distance between them.

Words pummeled Max from the inside out, forcing him to stop, bend over, and absorb the blows: Do not stand in the way of our love, unless you wish to be consumed by it.

"Fuck you," Max muttered.

The Beast rose to Rithisak's challenge, overcome by the flesh-and-bone promise of true prey. Max stood, lurched toward Rithisak. His hands reached forward, fingers curled into claws.

You challenge an `ap thm`op, naked and unarmed? The question came riding the crest of voiceless laughter, though not the cutting kind Max had just escaped. The wave crashed, blinding Max in a maddening jumble of perspectives, voices, thoughts, feelings. He saw himself through Rithisak's eyes: nude, scarred, wild-eyed and dangerous, flailing now as if fighting off a storm of wasps. He saw himself through Mani's eyes: wounded, vulnerable, enticing. And he saw himself through the death-cursed creature Mani carried, though the meaning of the infant entity's psychic perceptions eluded him while leaving a residue of nausea.

The little man jumped forward, producing a small wax figure from his pocket. Ducking under Max's grasp, Rithisak rubbed the figure against his body, catching blood and sweat and bits of skin. He backed away, drew out a pin, stuck it into the figure while whispering to it. Pain shot through Max's ribs, burst in his stomach, in correspondence to the area on the doll pricked by the sorcerer.

Too late, Rithisak told him in a gloating thought before returning his attention to Mani.

Too late, Mani said. Our time together has passed.

Max was not certain if she spoke to him or to Rithisak. Pain lanced him again, this time from the side of his neck to his hip. He kept moving, pain fueling rage, his own and the Beast's; rage fueling motion, in the physical world, and in the mad universe trapped in the meat of his brain. Mani slid out of his way as her scream wore on, passing so close to him he heard her cycling her breath to sustain the note.

Do you love her as I do? Rithisak asked.

"Never," Max answered, using the word to strike Rithisak in place of his hands.

The scream stopped. Max staggered, as if its absence had knocked out a vital underpinning to his balance. Someone grunted.

A tiny wail answered.

"No…." A man's wavering voice. Rithisak's true voice, escaping the weathered husk of his body.

Max's head and vision cleared as the flood coursing through the bond he shared with Mani subsided. Rithisak stood a few feet away, and Max rushed forward, striking the doll from the man's hands. The wax figure fell headfirst to the floor. A blow to Max's head stunned him, dropped him to his knees. The Beast urged him back to his feet.

Rithisak moved away, leaving the doll behind. The sorcerer's mouth hung open. Tears streaked his face. A high-pitched whine escaped from his quirked lips. He ignored his danger, the fallen doll, transfixed instead by something out of Max's peripheral vision. Max turned.

Mani held the blood-drenched placental tissue and minuscule, twisted corpse of her expelled fetus in her hands, which she held out in offering to Rithisak as she fell to the floor.

Max moved to her. The Beast rebelled, pushed him to Rithisak. Max went for the sorcerer, intercepted him as he dove for the child. Max caught Rithisak by the shoulders, whirled him around. Where are your tricks now? he wanted to say. Instead, he scooped one of Rithisak's eyes out, then the other, in mocking mimicry of the ritual defilement the sorcerer had performed to animate his corpse agents. The Beast roared with pleasure at the irony, and made Max pop both morsels into his mouth. Max rejoiced in the spiced flavorings in Rithisak's blood, the sweet milk of his eyeball fluids, the stringy meat of torn flesh and ligament. The song of Rithisak's agony made his heart race, made the Beast convulse with pleasure.

Something wrenched free inside Max. The trickle of foreign thoughts and emotions stopped. Max nearly let go of the sagging Rithisak. Where once he and the Beast had been more than enough to fill him, it seemed to Max that they were alone in vast and silent cavern. The Beast, oblivious in the heat of its passion, pressed for more blood.

Farewell, an echo of Mani whispered to one of them, any of them, none of them. A final breeze of her thoughts passed through Max, like a dying exhalation. He caught the hunger of beisac spirits, and loneliness, and terror of abandonment. Their passage resonated within him, made his flesh crawl. And he caught a last word, pray, and an image, a ghostly woman and child, taken too soon from life, filled with hatred for the living. He recoiled from the image even as the thought passed.

On the floor, Mani's shoulders sagged. The fetus fell from her hands, landed wetly on the floor. Her eyes closed. A rattling escaped her lungs.

Cold darkness blanked Max's vision for a moment. The sparse shadow self nestled in him disintegrated into a brief twinge of anxiety, and the burden of their bond dissipated, leaving a hollow still warm from her presence.

Rithisak screeched, Mani's death propelling the sorcerer into new realms of torment. Anguish carved a carnival of terrible expressions on Rithisak's face. Max watched, the Beast consumed. When the physical pain of his absent eyes regained ascendancy in the hierarchy of suffering, Max threw Rithisak to the floor. He grabbed an antique bayonet from a stack of edged weapons on a shelf, carved Rithisak's chest open with savage thrusts and manic rips backed by his body weight, and pushed his hand into the gash he made in the sorcerer's torso.

The Beast devoured atrocity, drinking deeply from its excess, as Max straddled Rithisak and rode his desperate convulsions. Max found Rithisak's heart, tore it out, ate it.

When Max was finished with the meat, and had moved past gnawing at bones, chewing on gristle and tendons, lapping at blood, and thrusting his cock into empty eye sockets of his enemy, Rithisak was a withered bag of skin between Max and the floor, emptier than the corpses he had brought back to serve him. The Beast lay sated in the kennel of Max's mind.

Max rolled off the body. Stared at Mani.

The Nowhere House embraced them. Max thought he might never leave the moment, never escape the walls of the tomb he had created for his enemy, and for the woman he had been made responsible to protect. He wondered what would happen if he smashed the Nowhere House case. Would he be trapped forever in a space between worlds, a time between moments? With the Beast quiet, his body exhausted, his mind raw, Max did not think his entombment was a bad fate.

A shadow moved. A strand of Mani's hair fell away from her face. The tiny head on the nearly translucent fetus jerked.

Above Mani, the air wavered like a desert horizon in midday heat. Max crawled away from Mani's body. The shimmering air brightened, leaching color from the red bulbs, hurting Max's eyes. A gust of cold air blew over Max, and through the emptiness left inside him in Mani's wake.

A woman appeared, transparent, hovering over Mani, an infant at her feet. Her hair was long, as were her nails, and her mouth opened into a feral grin. The face was vaguely Asian, obscured as if a filtered lens or warped window separated the woman from the rest of existence. The baby dripped blood from its eyes and ears. Both glared at Max. The Beast stirred, stimulated by the apparition.

The gust returned, strengthened, until wind whipped through the floor with sudden hurricane intensity, sending shelving and racks crashing to the floor, launching papers, plastic, nails, and knives into the air. Laughter reminiscent of what Max had heard downstairs, chasing Rithisak's decoy, joined the wind's howl.

Max curled himself into a ball, covered his head. "Mani," he shouted, and again, with all the force he could raise, stretching the word so that it was as long and plaintive as the wind, he shouted, "Mani!"

The wind died away. A brief shower of objects clattered back to earth. The woman and child looked away from Max, then faded. Vanished.

Leaving Max alone, again.

Spent and ravaged, he slipped into a sleep without dreams.

When he woke, he thought at first that everything he remembered happening was a dream. The remains on and around him brought reality into focus. Max sat up, tried to shake out the detritus of a waking nightmare. As he sorted through memories, separating his own from Mani's and whatever else had taken root in his mind, he paused at the horror that had coalesced over Mani's body. Like a scavenger digging up a grave, the memory dragged another piece of the past out of him: the woman haunting the foot of the stairs. More tumbled into the light of consciousness: the faces of women he had killed in the service of his appetite. They surrounded him, smiles turning into rictus grins, soft eyes hardening into stones of petrified terror.

He had already slaughtered the undead. He wondered what it would be like to kill again what he had killed and consumed.

The Beast released a contemptuous snarl. Memories fled.

Max showered, dressed in the clothes Omari left for him. Soap, water, and fresh clothes could not touch the raw wounds left by Mani's passage through him. The Beast seemed small in the space carved out of him by all that had happened. Max's own appetites revolted him, as if the shape of Mani's former presence corrupted his self-perception. The taste of blood and flesh soured in his mouth. His balls throbbed, his cock felt like a shriveled root exposed too long to the sun. Worms of doubt and guilt squirmed in the turned earth of memory, exposing bits and pieces of the undigested past. His body ached. Sadness suffocated his mind, crushed his chest, decayed in his gut.

He quelled his flaring temper over the strange feelings, telling himself and the Beast they would soon be gone.

As he started climbing down the ladder to the lower floors, he surveyed the wreckage left behind. The stench of bodies perfumed the air. Roaches and rats darted from the walls, eager to sample the new feast laid out for them. Flies buzzed. He smiled at the bloody mystery his superiors would discover when the Nowhere House machinery turned itself off. Whom could they debrief? It was the kind of joke Lee would appreciate, and Max regretted not being able to tell him about it.

Or even remember that the trick had been played.

At the door to the Nowhere House, Max decided he needed a vacation. A restless new hunger rumbled beneath his sadness, though he could not put a name to it. He needed a change, though he did not want to change himself. Perhaps if he took the twins away, if they explored new places and appetites together, the world might be cast in fresh colors, and new tastes might be found to satisfy him, and the Beast within.

He opened the door. The city lay restless under night's cover, muttering and squirming in a nightmare's grip. Streetlamps glowed like distant, fuzzy candles through the Nowhere House shielding. Confident the taste for new adventure would stay with him, though he could never recall its genesis, Max stepped through the doorway.

The world spun around Max's head, his stomach lurched, and for a moment he forgot who he was, and where, and why. He landed on concrete, scraping his cheek and palms. When he got up, he did not know where he was, or why he was unarmed. The Beast, startled by the sudden loss of balance, cried out in protest. Max judged by its sluggishness that he had recently feasted, though he could not recall stalking prey. His body's condition told him he had just finished a serious piece of work for his employers, though his target and the assignment's difficulties were out of his reach. Light-headed, almost giddy, Max had a feeling it was better that he not remember. The Beast curled itself around forgetfulness like a pup at a teat.