The Beast That Was Max (26 page)

"And one of those adventures was in Africa?"

"Many, in Africa. So many spirits, so much life. I thought, once, foolishly, I might make it my home." The spirit looked out her side window. They passed a minivan, and children looked out from behind the driver and made faces and gestures at them. "But I was tricked. Used, by their father. Driven away by so much pain that my adventure had become worse than what had disturbed my sleep. I fled back to my homeland. I left the woman in Saigon, and she spent her last days in an opium den. I returned to Chiao's sleep and let the other parts have their chance at adventure." She turned away from the scenery of homes and cars and night, focused on Max. "Do you believe me?"

"Is it important that I do?"

"It is, if you love my daughters."

They passed La Guardia Airport, St. Michael's Cemetery, descended into a wall-bounded collection of lanes, and emerged onto the Triboro's ribbon of steel and concrete suspended in the night over water. Manhattan's towers glittered to the left. The jagged horizon before them seemed to reach out for the car. Water slipped under the bridge like oil. Wind keened at the windows. The Beast was quiet in Max, watching the spirit.

Chiao ignored the city, staring instead at Max. "I do not have much time," she said. "You are their only hope."

"I know," he answered. "I've always known that." They rolled into a plaza leading to tollbooths. The Beast growled in Max. It ached to hurt the spirit, sensing Chiao as kin to the ghosts who had recently tortured it. Max took a deep breath and reasoned with himself that, whatever the spirit claimed to be, it was not what had caused Max and the Beast so much recent pain. Besides, he could see no way to kill it. Max chose the machine booth lane. "What do you want from me?" he asked.

"Do you listen? Did you hear what I said when I breached the wall between our worlds?"

Max smiled as he dug out a token from the coin box under the seat. "That's what they say to me sometimes. `Don't you listen, Tonton, when we speak of our past?'"

"And do you?"

Max waved his hand. "Sometimes I get distracted. The Beast, the thing inside me, you know, it makes me hungry. I find it hard to concentrate."

"You are afraid of what they are."

"I know Kueur and Alioune, what they are," Max spat, angry. "I am a part of them. We belong to one another." He threw the token into the toll basket. The Beast screamed in outrage. As they went down a ramp and onto the highway by the river, Max fought the urge to crash the car into the guardrails.

"Your fear and love are their doom," Chiao said, gazing at the water and the lights from the other shore reflected in the flowing darkness. "My own fears and loves have already cursed me. I should have dared to go to their father and fight him, though he has the power to kill this part of Chiao, as you do not. My own fear of death and my hope for your strength drove me to find you, as surely as my love for them. I was stupid." Chiao veiled her old face behind gnarled hands.

Max glanced at her. He could see through her more clearly. "You're fading."

"It is not easy coming into this world. In my own land, with my own people, there is belief to sustain me. But in this land, where there is hardly any faith, I must await my opportunities. Death. The passing of a spirit. Running water, for I am a spirit of water. We make do with what we can, even if all there is is blood and water. Or blood and flesh housing an enraged, dead spirit."

The work for the night ahead flashed in Max's mind. He took an exit, drove on the service road and side streets until he found an abandoned corner by the towers of a housing project. He stopped the car, knowing he had to abandon it, keep moving, distance himself from the slaughter. But he could not walk Manhattan's streets haunted by a ghost. "If I were to believe you," he said, eager to end the dance between them, "if the twins really are missing, what can I do?

"Find them first." Her arm shot out, and her hand passed through Max's blocking arm and into his head before he realized what had happened.

The Beast leaped, and Max smashed his fist into the passenger-side door. Cursing, Max pulled back, squirmed against his side of the car. Chiao's hand withdrew. The world spun for Max for a moment. Images of roads, lights, buildings superimposed themselves on each other. Nausea seized his stomach.

"Can you see?" Chiao asked, fading more quickly, ghost hair and clothes a wisp of mist, the red tracery of her form only a suggestion, like the afterimage of a firefly's flight.

Her voice sounded as if it came from one of the nearby building's windows. Blood-tainted water pooled on the car floor.

"What? I don't understand. What am I supposed to do—" A leering face exploded like lightning across his consciousness, vanished, leaving him shaken.

"I have nothing of my own, except for them," the old woman whispered, now only a dissipating column of mist thinner than a smoker's hurried puff.

"Was that him? Their father?"

"I should have stayed with my children," wailed the spirit in a voice nearly drowned out by the wind-driving rush of cars from the nearby highway. "I should be stronger than the pain . . ."

"Who is he? Why is he taking them? What does he want?" Max shouted, jumping into the damp passenger seat, straining to hear the voice, to feel the spirit's touch in his mind again.

". . . not follow your fear, or your love . . ."

The voice was gone, like the spirit. Max kicked the steering column in frustration, shattering the housing and rocking the car. He threw the door open and burst out, slammed the door shut again, headed for the nearest telephone booth. A cluster of youths, camouflaged in dark clothing and hoods, eased out of the shadows around the telephone. The Beast rolled out of Max as his stride lengthened and his fists balled. A frail, young voice cursed. The youths scattered. Max called the twins' loft, his own private line to them as well as their general number. The answering machines picked up. He did not trust himself to leave a coherent message. Instead, Max strode downtown, searching for either a cab or a car he could steal, riding the Beast's and his own rage. He had never liked threats against the twins. People had died for the hint of mistreating them when they had only been his charges. Now that they had moved beyond that relationship, now that he was tied to them in ways he had never thought possible, danger to the twins meant more to him than his life. He could not, would not lose them. He would not lose that part of himself he had found in them. Death was nothing compared to that loss.

The dim voice of reason warned him. He had acted rashly before when it came to the twins. And suffered because of it. The last time—but the last time, he had been influenced by ghosts. Allowed his senses to be deceived. This time, he was going to make sure the twins were in danger.

A gypsy cab stopped for him, took him downtown on the West Side. The doorman to the twins' building was missing from his station. The door to their loft was ajar. Inside, dishes and glassware lay shattered on the wooden floor. Something burned on the stove. The celebratory meal they had been arranging for his triumphant return was ruined, and they did not answer his call.

Reviewing the recordings from the cameras he had installed for their security, he saw a man, dark-skinned, tall, with a drawn face and slightly bulging eyes, enter the lobby. He lashed out with a lightning-fast blow at the doorman's head. The doorman fell. The stranger dragged him to a side room. The stranger took the elevator up, smashed through the loft door, entered. The twins had turned to face him. The stranger looked up at the camera, smiled. And then the monitors went dead.

Max paced the loft for a few moments, trying to filter another truth out of what he had seen. But he could see no trap, no trick. The twins were gone.

He sat on the couch facing away from the picture window, head in his hands, remembering. Sifting through the images Chiao had given him. Tunnel. Water. Highways. Buildings. Max stood, went to the window, looked out across the Hudson to the Jersey shore. Kueur and Alioune were on the other side.

Max went downstairs, roused the doorman. He went to the nearby parking lot to retrieve one of the cars he kept for work: an old, black Buick Le Sabre. The Beast's roar, as loud and constant as the sound of a mighty river going over a fall, followed him as he drove to find the twins and bring them back.

~*~

The part of Max the spirit had filled with knowledge of the twins' location drove through the Holland Tunnel. Traffic was light, and the stuffy air tasted of exhaust. Driving with the window open, Max let the wind rush through the car, blow through his short-cropped hair, whip against his cheek, and cry in his ear. That part of Max which held his instincts, skills, and talents was filled with joy as it moved his body with cold purpose. He was preparing to kill again. He knew his target by the visage he had glimpsed in the flash of Chiao's memory, and he knew his enemy's location. The certainty of purpose was all the confidence he needed.

Another part of Max listened to the wind, watched the tunnel unwind before him, felt the pressure of water bearing down on the walls, and could dwell only on the part of death that meant loss to him. He wondered if the wind carried their death cry, if the road they traveled was as closed and endless as the tunnel appeared to be, if the weight of all the lives yet to be rushed to fill the hollow space of their existence.

Max slapped the outside of the door until his palm stung, trying to drive away the dull, agonizing threat of loss. He did not want to think of the twins as gone. Nor did he want to feel the tug of sympathy and hurt for those who had suffered from the loss of men and women he had made his victims. Madness stirred in dark corners, in the shadows of awareness, as he almost felt the connection between his pain and theirs.

The tunnel mouth appeared at last around a bend, opening to night trimmed with streetlamps and service station signs and distant lighted windows. He wondered if the Chiao spirit had felt the same elation and surge of freedom when she had separated from the rest of the dragon buried under bombed, defoliated, and napalmed earth. Max spat out the window, hating that he had bothered to wonder.

The car climbed up a ramp, proceeded along a skyway. His heart jumped at an exit sign for Bayonne. Images fell into place one after another in his mind.

Like a commuter gliding through radio stations looking for a comforting song, Max searched for memories of himself with the twins and found the first, as he always did, almost immediately: two young, brown-skinned girls torturing a transvestite prostitute in the Bois de Boulogne. The prostitute cried out in pain. And pleasure.

Max's erection grew with the fear and desire from that distant moment. Max shuddered as he went down the exit ramp, paid the toll, and pulled over to the side. The fresh memory of their first time together overwhelmed him: Kueur, giving him pain while Alioune teased pleasure from him; pain spiking through him to Alioune, while pleasure drained into Kueur; the flow reversing, coming back through him to them. He barely remembered the other woman with them that first time, though her body had served to amplify the experience before their passion had consumed her life. The nova brilliance of sensation did remain, however, etched into his mind and body.

The memory of that sensation was enough to blind him for a moment. He bowed his head, caught his breath, shifted in the seat as his erection shrank into a warm pool in his lap.

The part of him that was the ghost of his old Beast, still strong enough in death, Max understood, to drive almost any other mortal insane, let loose a roar that rose from his genitals through his guts and reverberated in his heart.

Max took off again, winding through Bayonne streets, momentarily drained. Sad. Beyond the love he claimed for Kueur and Alioune. On the edge of his true desire: death. He wished for the heat of the twins' bodies, for the bright sound of their voices, the intimacy of their hungers playing over his senses in the Box, to drag him back to life.

The images in his mind clicked into place on Bayonne's west side beyond Kennedy Boulevard. The roar of jets sounded from across Newark Bay; their lights danced in the black sky. Rundown warehouses and factories loomed all around him. Max hit the brakes. The car slid on the icy street, coming to a halt by colliding lightly with the only vehicle parked on the block: a small, windowless van. He stepped out, a hard, cold wind coming off the water to cut through his coat and chill his bones. Snow mountains loomed, spread over sidewalk and street.

The building he wanted faced the water. He broke in through a boarded window, crept along the wall surrounding raw, unlit space, following the echoes of a fight and the cries of Alioune and Kueur up a flight of stairs.

Five fires burning in punctured drums arranged in a wide circle illuminated the second floor, its barren expanse broken by the occasional piece of ruined machinery and ancient office furniture. Sparks sputtered on the concrete floor, smoke swirled under the fifteen-foot ceiling before being whisked out by the breeze through breaks in the boarded windows. Max stepped into the circle of flickering light behind the twins.

"Who's this?" asked the black man standing at the center of the circle atop a fallen file cabinet, hands on hips, shirt and pants ripped, face scratched, eyes torn from his face. Max recognized him from the security tapes: the face was the same, though his black leather jacket was a shredded heap by one of the light drums, and his blue jeans and gray sweatshirt were dirty and torn.