The Beast That Was Max (19 page)

He took a deep breath and thought of the condition of Emile's body when he'd come to collect the corpse. The twins had never cared for the details of cleaning up, and he really did not mind. Not for his twins. The task allowed him the vicarious pleasure of seeing the results of their handiwork and recalling that night in the Bois de Boulogne. He remembered the twins were also a beast, and fantasized what that beast might do to him under the right conditions, and what would happen if he was not careful.

The Beast growled, and spat, and hissed. Circled. Settled, curling in on itself, tail twitching. Claws retracting. Eyes glowing. Watching. Waiting. Knowing that the Beast's way was not the way to get what was wanted. Needed.

His heart slowed. He softened, though the warmth did not leave his groin.

Max opened his eyes and found Alioune still watching him. There was no hint of fear, impatience or boredom in her expression. Her face remained a blank mask. He looked back at Kueur, and found a reflection of Alioune framed by dusk.

Their blankness tore truth from him. Words spilled out like blood from a wound, surprising him.

"I want to be with you. To be a part of what you do. I want you to give me what you've given those you've used and thrown away. You won't hurt me. I have the strength, the stamina, to take whatever you have to give. I just want to be… closer. No barriers between us. Do you understand?" His question hung in the air, fell without an answer. His voice had sounded strange, distant, as if someone else were speaking. He'd never heard himself beg.

Kueur's gaze shifted to Alioune. Max turned back to the sofa, his eyes brimming with tears. He wondered how long it had been since he'd cried. He wondered if he wanted to cry because of the desperation tearing at his gut, or because he felt as if he'd surrendered a part of himself.

"We've never given anyone anything," Kueur said gently, her voice drifting out of the fading light. "We do not give, nor do we take."

"Let me watch, then. I'll get Nicole back, and let me see what you do."

"As you did that night in the Bois?" Alioune asked. "Yes."

Alioune stood, hips tilted and arms at her side, like a model. "And what did you see?"

"Two little girls. The two of you. That prostitute, a Brazilian boy. His dress ripped off, his breasts slashed. Alioune cutting him, Kueur kissing his wounds. The blood on your faces. And him. That kid. Crying for you not to stop. Begging for you to keep going. Demanding that ... that you rape him."

"What did you understand?" Kueur asked. The nearness of her voice startled him. She was standing five feet behind him.

"That I—" The Beast howled, drowning out what he might have said: loved you? No, he would not have said that. Could not.

"Why now?" Alioune asked.

Max looked back and forth between the twins. "Because I'm getting old, and closer to death," he whispered. "Because I've tasted everything. Tried to feel . . . something, besides what this Beast inside me feels. Anything. There's nothing left to try, except for you."

He waited a few moments for them to fill the silence. Then he walked to the door, defeated. Weak. Stripped of illusion and dream, carrying only bleak reality.

The elevator came, and he went in. The twins stood next to each other, looking at him. The elevator doors began to close. Night flooded the loft through the wide window behind them. The doors closed, and Max went down.

~*~

Alioune picked up the phone on the fourth ring. It was their bedroom line. Unlisted. No message machine. "Hello?"

"I'm going to kill her," he said. "I'm watching her right now. She's in the McDonald's on Seventh and Thirty-third. You'd think she'd have better taste. When she comes out, she's going to stop at the Barnes and Noble, then walk over to Thirty-second to her office. I'll be waiting in the stairwell. She'll be found on the roof. There'll be headlines, I'm sure. Midtown Consultant Found Dead. Murder Comes to Midtown. Maybe the detectives will come to question you. I know they'll never target me. But she doesn't have to go that way. You don't even have to use her. Just give me—"

Alioune hung up the phone. Max followed Nicole but did not wait for her in the stairwell next to her office. He went instead into the subway, traveled to the Lower East Side, lurked until evening among the old tenement buildings, and left a body behind but took with him the Beast of his unsatisfied appetite.

~*~

Max kept the answering machine line busy speaking into the digital storage unit, filling it with threats and pleas and promises, until Alioune finally picked up the phone.

"Tonton B`eb`ete," she said, her voice soft, full of sorrow.

Max growled. "You know I'll come up there. You know what I'm capable of. I'll make you do to me what you did for the others. I can do it. I'm a hunter, a killer, and I am hungry. Only you can give me—"

Kueur's voice sliced through his words, cutting him short on an extension. "You cannot hunt us. You cannot hurt us. You have helped us, and we appreciate your aid and support. But at the age when you were killing your pet collie Pat, torturing your adoptive mother by cutting yourself in the comfort of your American suburban home, and beating up lower graders in school for money, we were learning to survive in the streets of Dakar. When you were setting fires under parked trucks, we were making our way across Africa. Alone. And at the age when you learned to control your urges, refine them so that no one knew what was going on inside your head, we were in Milan, Lisbon, Marseilles, finally Paris, learning to control our own urges. In public. And we survived, Tonton. Without television, without parents to buy us food and clothes and shelter, without the police and jailers and counselors to teach us our lessons. We survived the women who shaped your appetites, the men who taught you how to satisfy your hungers. How can we not survive you?"

"I'm your uncle," Max said, his throat dry. "How can you deny me the secret of your pleasure? Why won't you give me my last chance to feel something?"

"Not this way, Tonton B`eb`ete," Kueur said.

"What way, then? What do you want me to do?"

He hung up after he could not stand to hear the quiet, steady sound of their breathing over the phone.

~*~

With the doorman huddled in a corner, staring at him with wide eyes, Max rang the intercom to the twins' loft until Kueur answered.

"I'll kill myself if you don't give me what I need," he said. He surprised himself, sounding like a desperate junkie. "Right here, right now. People will have to step over my body to get into this building. I'll write a suicide note in the guest book, addressed to you. Telling everybody how cruel you were, denying your uncle what he needed."

"You always give," Alioune replied. The intercom hissed, and her words carried a mechanical overtone. "You give so much. And you take. But do you ever share, Tonton? Have you ever shared? No more than you have ever felt, I think. No more than that."

Max held his finger against the speaker button but said nothing. Tears burned his eyes. He started to weep. Sobbing, he escaped to the street and ran.

The Beast howled as it gnawed at its own guts.

~*~

He'd kept Nicole for an entire day and night at one of his secret places on the West Side, downtown, where the smell of raw meat hung in the air like mist. The place was small, the paint on the walls peeling; the floor was filthy, but there was an alcove with a working toilet. A cold, rat-poison-scented breeze blowing in through a six-inch-wide grated vent opposite the steel door that opened onto a forgotten service duct leading up from the basement. A single low-wattage bulb illuminated the space. Refrigerated rooms surrounded the secret room on all sides, and above and below, insulating them against the world.

Nicole was hung spread-eagled in a harness suspended from the ceiling. He stared at her unconscious form as he lay, naked, flat on his back on the floor, trying to feel something. Anything.

He'd tried ordinary pleasure. He'd ridden her silky warmth, thrust himself into the portals of her body. But after his initial excitement, the sweet prize he'd sought receded and his erection had failed.

He'd tried his imagination. He'd allowed Nicole to regain full consciousness while restrained, suspended himself beside her and tried to ride her terror and panic as she became aware of her situation. He screamed when she did, and cried, and begged, and struggled. Letting himself down with a push of his release button, he'd taken and given hallucinogenics smuggled out of a desert government laboratory; tried a device that allowed Nicole to shock him with jolts of electricity with a trigger in her ball mouth gag; listened to her curses and pleas for release. But the pleasures he'd felt were no more than passing shudders, as if from a chill breeze running through a warm house. His imagination, too, had failed him.

Nothing moved him. The curves of Nicole's body, the dark wetness of her sex, the brown honey spots on her breasts, left him cold. Neither the fear and pain in her eyes when he tortured her, nor the ecstasy in her face when he drugged her, excited him. He'd offered everything in him he had to offer. There was nothing left to give.

He'd finally given up, feeling as if he were only going through the motions of pursuing sexual pleasure. As he had for a long time, whenever he took on the role of a lover.

He'd returned Nicole to her drugged stupor and wearily settled to the floor to consider his options. He'd wondered what would happen if he stayed in the secret room. Never came out again. Let the both of them die slowly of starvation. Of if he set a fire in the room. Or locked the both of them in one of the meat freezers. Or let her go, without scrambling her memory, and let the authorities and panicked employers try to track him down.

For the first time in his life, Max did not know where to look next to satisfy his hunger for sensation. The Beast paced restlessly in the cage of his body, until, exhausted, it settled in a corner and stared at the blank walls of his imagination. And whimpered.

A hand caressed his forehead.

Startled, Max jumped up, swung one arm up in a defensive arc while searching the floor for a weapon with his free hand. Alioune blocked and redirected his arm as she knelt by the open steel door. Kueur put a hand over his as she settled beside him. Wearing dark designer jeans and pastel silk T-shirts, the twins looked like a pair of exotic models posing on an industrial set.

"You see, Tonton, we are not without skills," Kueur said with a smile.

"Alioune? Kueur? What are you doing here?" Goose pimples crawled over his flesh as a chill breeze blew in through the open doorway. The stench of spoiled meat flooded the room. Oil dripped from the door hinges.

He smiled, despite his shock, at the craft of his two adopted nieces.

"We think it is time," Alioune said, letting her caress travel gently up his arm, to his shoulder and neck. "You are ready for us."

"Ready? For what?" He tensed. His cock shriveled, his genitals pulled up into the shelter of the hollow of bone between his legs.

"Do not worry, Tonton," Alioune continued. "Our building is discrete. The door man and the tenants who saw you will not betray us. As for Nicole, her friends believe she is on a vacation. Searching for herself. They believe, from the way she's been acting lately, thanks to you, that she is in crisis and needs time for herself. There is no one who will interfere with us."

"What are you talking about?" Max asked, his voice small. The Beast listened, trembling.

Kueur's fingers traveled along the length of his arm, glided across his shoulder, circled his left nipple. "You have learned some things, no? We denied you, and you did not let loose the Beast on us, or on another. And, after all these years, you finally tore down the wall between us and surrendered a part of yourself to us. We could not have come if you had not done that."

"Surrendered?"

"Share is the word closer to the truth," Alioune said.

She slid up to Max, legs stretching out on either side of him. "For you, giving is only half the equation. There is also the taking. You give to receive something that will feed the Beast in you. But when one shares, there is no expectation of a return. It is an act of selflessness. It is an act beyond the appetite of the Beast."

"I don't understand. What did I share?"

Kueur pressed her palm against his breast. His heart beat faster.

"Yourself," she said. "Your pain and desperation. Your most intimate desire."

"And what would that be?"

"Death," Kueur said with sadness. She kissed his left nipple. Her hair brushed against his skin. The warmth of her body burned him.

"Is that all you wanted?" he asked, his voice tremulous.

Alioune pulled her T-shirt off, then drew his head back between her small breasts. "Not what we wanted," she said. "What was necessary, for what you ask."

"You want us, Tonton B`eb`ete. And we would give ourselves to you. But what we do has requirements." Kueur leaned back, took off her T-shirt and unzipped her jeans. She was not wearing panties.

Behind him, Max felt Alioune maneuvering out of her jeans. "It is like an electrical circuit. We need the proper conductor. A creature beyond the care of pain or pleasure. A man, or woman, who has stopped caring about themselves, their hungers, their needs. Through desperation, or joy, or despair. Or, quite simply, because they have forgotten what they need in their drive to please others."