The Beast That Was Max (24 page)

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 angel 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.

Max roared with the Beast. The ghosts screamed and yielded their pain. Images flickered in Max's mind, like pieces of dreams caught in daylight. Brief, mad moments of struggling bodies in his grasp mixed with sudden explosions of violence with knife, ax, pick, scalpel. The wild orgies of feasting on bodies living and dying washed through him, stoking his appetite for more. He moved to the rhythm of ghost hips struggling under his, arms and hands lashing and slapping at him, legs flailing. He shuddered, and electric arcs of pleasure racked his spine and guts and heart and brain, as he came again and again.

Max rose into the storm of scarves and spirits, back arched, arms and legs spread wide, like a helpless baby lifted out of the crib. And like an infant, he cried for more. Hunger drove him into a desperate frenzy as it burrowed into his stomach. The need for violent sensation drove spasms through his body. He wept, he pleaded for more even as memories of the pain he had caused played themselves over in his mind in an endless loop. With every death, his appetite increased. Every soul consumed drove him deeper into starvation.

The Beast roared again, but its voice was smaller, its presence a dim reflection of what it had been in life, and even of what it had been only moments before. And as its presence shrank, the emptiness inside Max grew, as if he were feeding on himself.

He tried to rein in the Beast, but just as when it had been a living part of himself, he could not curb its appetite. He could only hang on and ride, keeping his sanity by letting it take him wherever it wanted to go and joining in its desperate consumption.

His bones felt like ice. His sense of smell clogged, his skin's sensitivity died. He tasted ash. The leash of scarves around his cock pulled, relaxed, pulled again, drawing him deeper into the silken petals of ghostly sex. He thrust harder, forced himself deeper, but his mechanical passion only heightened his feeling of emptiness. He wanted to stop, but could not. He wanted warmth, life, Kueur and Alioune, but his actions denied them. Horror insinuated itself into the hollow world expanding inside of him like a balloon growing to encompass a vaster emptiness with every spas-tic pump of his hips. Horror became his world as the ghost of his Beast, frustrated, blinded by hunger, turned on him, raped him, penetrated and violated him through every orifice, soiled every organ, thought, emotion, memory. He was the horror as, riding the Beast, he raped and violated himself.

Max tried to scream, but the scarves worked themselves down his throat and nose, into his ears, up his ass and into his penis, as if jealous for the fruit of his attention.

No one will ever love you the way I will, they all whispered in his mind.

Max wanted to black out. Die. But the darkness never came, or the peace of death. He could only suffer. That was the death his angel granted him.

He searched for something to hold on to, a weapon with which to fight back. A statement, a curse, a feeling. Nothing came to him that might touch the ghosts. Even remorse eluded him.

He tried to remember intimate details about his victims, so he could separate them in his mind and distance himself from their need for pain. But the dancer's kiss had drained him of his past, and all he had of them was their own memories of death and the Beast's primitive hunger. Even the events since he had awakened as the dancing woman's captive were fading. Max fought to hang on to what he had just seen on his way to the House of Spirits: the pile of body parts, the pillar of flame consuming contemplative lovers, the woman with the necklace of severed heads.

They were all that defined him. No matter how seductive their appeal, he was not the fear and suffering of his victims, not the rage and appetite of the Beast. Max was something else.

But what? Fire and body parts suggested nothing but the idea of suicide. The woman on the blood pond, she had offered him a sword and a lotus. A weapon, a flower. Death, and life. He was death, like the angel. And a part of him was dead, as well: the Beast, returned to him by the ghosts, rooted in him as if it were a living part of him. But he was life, as well. Still flesh and blood, still alive. The spirits of his victims were dead, and only dead. There was an advantage in the lack of balance.

They had no bodies. There was no way they could hurt him. But they were hurting him.

The scarves. The spirits had taken possession of the scarves. The red silk had become the symbol of their unity and purpose. There was still the body of the old homeless woman, and enough body parts to form an enticing dancer, and perhaps a few fragments more scattered throughout Painfreak. But the scarves were the key.

Max found the Beast inside him, tiny, its roar reduced to pitiful mewing, but still savage and relentless, sparking lust for blood and pain, firing up spirit memories of death and dying. As small as it had become, there was still no holding back the Beast. It was rooted firmly in Max's own desires. But the Beast could be directed, with effort and will. He knew it could be done, knew he had done it, though he could not recall when or how. Using the Beast, he was certain, was at the heart of Max.

He urged the Beast on, focusing on the spirits. The Beast roared, though it sounded like a squeal, and initiated a new cycle of pain and suffering among the spirits of its victims.

Max felt the threads of his sanity fray from the pain searing every orifice, twisting his gut, squeezing his heart.

Wrong. Not the spirits. Stupid. The scarves.

His arms jerked forward, plunged into the mass of red silk. Fingers closed around fabric. He pulled, ripping silk with all of his strength.

His hands tore at the scarves crowded into his mouth, teeming at the other ports to his body. He bit and he sliced with his nails and he tore with bleeding hands. The screams changed pitch. The Beast cried out in triumph, joyous in creating a new kind of pain. All the colors of fear rose out of Max like smoke, scorched out of existence by the Beast's blinding presence.

The storm of scarves flew apart, scattered, drifted to distant corners of the House of Spirits. The angel dissipated, releasing Max. He fell suddenly to the ground, rolled, got up. Scarves pulled out of his body, flicked away from his skin. The pressure around his cock and balls vanished as the scarves released him. The Beast growled, caught the scent of silk from all corners of the world, coarse and weathered and cheap. The red glow dimmed, sputtered. Spirit fire shimmered wherever whole scarves settled.

Heat rose through Max. Hot fire erupted in his belly, heart, mind. Riding the Beast, he hunted each scarf down, tearing every one he caught to shreds. With time, the Beast's strength waned and its appetite died. It was not as strong as when it had been a living part of Max. But as a dead spirit housed in his body, Max found it easier to live with. He continued the hunt, pushed himself, until there were no more whole pieces of silk. Until the spirit fires had gone out, and the voices of his victims no longer screamed.

With the ghosts banished, Max gathered the torn silk scattered around the cavernous storeroom he found himself in, by the light of a few half-dark banks of fluorescent lights. He went down the hall, found the room in which he had seen the pillar of fire. The lovers were gone, as was the cloud of many colors near the ceiling. The silk burst into flames and then vanished in black, foul puffs of smoke when he tossed the pieces into the fire. He made a dozen trips back and forth, until every piece was gone, as well as the limbs, torsos, and heads.

When he was finished, all he wanted to do was curl up in a corner and sleep. But he was naked, and hurting, and far from safety. With the Beast sleeping quietly next to his soul, Max started back to Painfreak's main rooms. He paused at the room he thought belonged to the woman with the sword and the lotus. The door was closed. He opened it, and blood spilled out over his feet. The boat and its passenger were gone. He left the House of Spirits and tracked bloody footprints back down into Painfreak.

~*~

The Asian doorman smiled politely as Max emerged from the warehouse wearing what he had picked up from the club floor in clothes discarded by patrons in the heat of sexual frenzy.

"I trust your stay with us was more satisfying this time," the doorman said. "Please, do not wait so long to visit us again."

Max paused, looked down at the man. "I'll never come back."

The larger of the two doormen stepped out of the shadows, exchanged a glance with the small doorman, and laughed.

The Asian doorman maintained his smile and gave Max a slight bow. Max moved on. "That was what you said the last time," the smaller doorman said.

Max looked back. The Beast he had just regained grumbled. But both doormen were gone. His shoulders sagged, and he staggered off into the Brooklyn night in search of a taxi.

~*~

Kueur's eyes widened when she opened the door. Alioune froze for a moment as her gaze met Max's. After their initial shock, they both rushed across the threshold to embrace him. Max shrugged out of their arms and entered their loft, eager to shed the ill-fitting clothes he had gathered. He walked gingerly to the couch facing away from the picture window and lay down, naked. The twins came to him, Kueur sitting on the edge of the sofa, Alioune standing by his head.

"Do you still feel old?" Kueur asked. Her eyes darted as she catalogued the cuts, burns, and bruises on his body.

Max started to say yes, that he was tired, that a thousand raging ghosts were chasing him and wanted to give him their terrible love. The colors of fear shimmered in his mind. He almost said he wanted to die, and the plea for them to finish him and consign his spirit to some safe and secret place began forming in his mind.

The Beast, familiar, comforting, but alien in him after so long an absence, sounded a thin, faint howl. And Max realized that with the thing he had cast off back inside him, the ghosts would have no way to track and find him. To draw him to them. They might find new scarves or another symbol of their death to inhabit. Fleshy parts of his victims might dig their way out of graves, quickened by their dying emotion, hungry for his touch. But Max was out of their reach, at least until they found another way to renew their bond with him.

He was safe from that hell. And the Beast was with him. Fear dissipated like graveyard fog in the morning sun. Whatever was left of the Beast was enough to keep fear at bay for a while. The blur of time and victims no longer made him breathless. He sat up on his elbows, looked over his body. Probed past the pain and exhaustion and soreness, past the physical and spiritual wreckage of his rape. And he found excitement, satisfaction, energy. The Beast was where it belonged.