The Beast That Was Max (36 page)

"If it's any consolation, I don't want it," said Max.

"No, it isn't," Kueur answered. "But we want to be a part of the act, Tonton. Part of this new life you're bringing into the world. We want to know the joy a new life brings, and the terror."

"Even if it wants to kill me?"

Kueur patted Max's chest. "We didn't let you kill the child. Do you think we'd let it kill you?"

"We will protect you, as you have always protected us."

A warm sensation passed over Max, touching the doubts and uncertainties he had felt about talking to the twins. Part of the tension inside him relaxed. But emotion still roiled in his heart as he discovered words had only skimmed the surface of the meaning he wished to convey, and he could think of nothing to say that would bring him closer to the twins. Nor could he summon the questions that would penetrate the mystery of their natures, pinpoint the exact hurt that needed attention, and raise answers to heal the wound they carried.

The temptation to point to the weave of threads that tied them together and label it with a word like
love
, or
passion
, or
desire
, was nearly irresistible. He craved the power of a spell, a curse, an anthem, anything that might summarize and contain the part of his feelings he wanted to communicate. But the clumsy phrases of mortal lovers not only failed to describe the content of his relationship with Alioune and Kueur, they could not even point to the path he walked in their company or to the boundaries of the world in which they traveled. Stumbling through the rituals of everyday love would cast a pall over what he valued more than his life. Belief in the stunted vocabulary of mortal love would sunder what had been created when he sacrificed the Beast for feelings he thought were love and passion but were in truth more primal and vast. Frustration provoked him, rousing the ghost of the Beast. He wanted to lash out with violence, sweep away the source of his irritation with an act of brutality. Kueur, Alioune. The baby. Himself.

Killing was easier. The equation of appetite and its satiation was much simpler to understand, and complete.

Max closed his eyes, concentrated on the twins. The warmth of their bodies. The fragrance of their sex. The musical lilt of their accents echoing in his mind.

The Beast, a cold spot that could not be warmed by the embrace of any bond, including the one to its host, subsided with a cantankerous growl.

Frustration dissipated. Rage dissolved. Relief gave Max a moment of respite from the chaos of his emotions. The brief taste of a strange new intimacy rooted beyond physical realms had left him and the twins unscathed, as far as he could tell. And thirsty to drink deeper, to reveal more of himself and try once again to sink into the depths of the mystery of others.

"Can you really protect me from the baby?" he asked, letting fear into his voice. "Nothing coming from being raped by the women I killed can be contained. It hungers. It feeds on me. The thing is wild, uncaring, demonic."

"You make the child sound like us," said Alioune. “Before we met you and started changing."

"Maybe that's what I fear most. The change. Even if we—I—survive, our lives will be different. The baby, whatever it is, what would it mean for us? What would we do with it?"

"Raise the child," Kueur answered.

"We'll have to take care of it, manage it somehow...."

"Tonton, we are as lost as you are. The road you once walked has ended. Another beckons. You did not know the choices you made in the past would bring you here. You can't go back. The road forces you forward. And you are afraid. Alioune and I, we understand. We are with you on that same road. Helpless to ease the pain, relying on the help of others. It is as hard for us as it is for you."

"You're not pregnant."

"But we are with you. Losing, with every step we take, the delusion of freedom from the consequences of the past. Discovering we are not as independent as we thought we were."

"You're free to come and go. Both of you. I'm the one that's a prisoner of this thing inside me."

"
Non
, Tonton. You're wrong. In the past, we always took care of ourselves, even with the Jola mother who found and adopted us. Through Senegal, West Africa, the Sahara, to Europe, we survived and fulfilled our needs. It was when you discovered us in Paris, became our guide and showed us we could be more than wandering cubs, that we chose another path. As you did. We all tricked ourselves by coming and going as we pleased, thinking we controlled our destiny by satisfying our appetites, trading recklessly in lives and desires. But when our lives joined, we left our old paths and went off on a new road together.

"Alioune and I didn't think of what we were leaving behind when we left the Bois de Boulogne with you. We found ourselves in a world full of possibilities we had never imagined existed. The excitement, the hunger for newness swept us up. And for you, Tonton, discovering us filled the emptiness in you that the Beast, even when it lived, could not fill. None of us considered what lay ahead, what would change, what we were giving up. You continued your work of killing, and satisfying your appetites. And we moved through the world, adopting the mask of humanity, thinking ourselves invulnerable, as if more than you and our powers protected us.

"But we'd made our choice and did not see the world close in around us, the path we walked become more defined. We did not see that the price of straying from that path grew higher the longer we walked together.

"When you came to us months ago, wanting us, our lives came into focus. You had chosen us, and we you, that day you found us in the Bois. Since then, through the time we spent in Paris and then here, you had walked beside us, letting us mature, until we were ready to truly belong to you, and you to us. If we had refused you when you wanted us, we would have had to leave you forever.

"The cost of that choice was too high. We stayed, demanding our price so we could survive in your company. And you paid that price, sacrificing the Beast for us. Another road opened, and we took it together. This time, at least Alioune and I did not hide behind illusions.

"When you came back from Painfreak, and again when you saved us from our father, we realized how much in our lives was beyond our control. How much we had to lose because of what Alioune and I, and you, had chosen. Though our nature called for us to be wild and act as we wanted, we became afraid. We saw the perils of the road we had chosen.

"We've talked, Alioune and I. We've seen mortals on TV wrestle with the consequences of their decisions, and with threats and disruptions in their lives. We hoped we might be stronger, better, than what we saw. But we feel as helpless as any weeping mother, any broken child, any rageful man from the programs we watched. We feel as helpless as you, Tonton.

"With every decision, there is something lost for something gained. The road we take changes, and we can't always see what's ahead or what was left behind. This is what frightens us. And you, too. The baby is a threat, and a promise. It is the past come to haunt us, and the way through which we must go to find the future. The child hurt us all, but maybe it will heal us a little, as well. Too late now to jump from the path, Tonton. We walk the same road together."

This time, it was Max's eyes which burned with tears. "I feel old with all this talk of roads taken and given up. But maybe not so afraid."

"So do I." Kueur said.

"And I," said Alioune.

Max gasped for breath, as if he had dived into dark waters, plumbed warm depths with a grazing touch of soft sand, and surfaced stunned by daylight and desperate for air. He blinked, surprised the tears gathered in his eyes had not fallen. For a moment, he was confused. Emotions surged through him. Some he recognized as his own. Others, he was surprised, belonged to the twins. The Beast's insatiable rage rushed past, as well as the terror and despair of its victims. For that moment, he did not need bonds or words or spells to feel close to Kueur and Alioune. He was them, and others, and they were he.

The moment passed, leaving behind only the doubt that it had ever come. Max sat up, forcing the twins to shift around him.

"Are you all right?" Alioune asked.

He almost laughed. He pressed fingers to forehead, re-assuring himself of his solidity. "I'm fine. I should just be more careful what I wish for."

Kueur smiled, pinched his arm with a seductive look. "Not too careful, we hope."

Max sat back, let the twins cover him once again with the prayer blanket. He looked up, drawn to the restless, red-tinged candlelight leaking from the Box into the loft's darkness. Dex stood, naked, with his back to the open door, legs spread wide, arms extended to the side and elevated over his head. In each hand he held a thick red candle. The melting wax dribbled along the candle sides, on to his fingers, down his arms, leaving red tracings on his flesh. Another candle burned on top of his head, and others on each shoulder and on his feet. Hot wax flowed over swollen joints, raw bruised skin, into open wounds. A fine tremor shook Dex's body, as if he were only a conduit for the pain and not its final reservoir. The columns of thin smoke rising from the flames curled and swayed to the frequency of Dex's trembling. Under the monotone hum of electronics in the alcove, Max could hear the New Age crystal healer whine.

The Beast showed no interest as it lay in Max, cowed and shocked by the moment's communion with the twins. Dex's superficial resemblance, in his finery of pain and red glowing candles, to the image presented by ghosts of Max's victims in the House of Spirits, could not be comforting for the Beast, either. An angel of death, Max recalled, made of red scarves. He turned away from the memory with a shudder.

"If Legba was right," Max said, "I should wish for another soul."

The twins gave him a blank look. Alioune asked, "Why?"

"The child needs one, according to the loa riding the mambo. If I had another soul, I could give it to the child, and then it wouldn't want to kill me."

Kueur put her hand on his belly. "The spirits of your victims, you say they're the ones who gave you this. Perhaps they wish to possess the baby?"

"If that was their intention, then I ruined the plan when I escaped from the House of Spirits. I don't think they've found me, or they would have entered their creation by now.”

"We could find the child a soul," Kueur said, looking to Alioune, and turned to Dex.

Max shook his head. "No more innocents. I have enough to pay for."

"Dex is not an innocent," Alioune said, standing, putting a hand on her hip. "He has lied. Let people die when he could not help then with his crystals, when he could have taken them to other healers. And he has used what small powers he has to spread illness, and kill, for others as well as to satiate his own petty hungers. He told us. Freely."

"Even worse. His corruption in this baby? I might as well seek out the ghosts of my past."

"We could cleanse him." said Kueur. "Prepare him for you. Bind him to all of us so the child and its soul would never harm us, could never become an agent for the dead."

Max scoffed. "He'd never survive."

Alioune shook her head. "His strength comes from the depths of his depravity. Desire is strong in his heart. He wants so much, so badly."

"Look at him, Tonton," said Kueur, standing, strutting toward the doorway, presenting Dex like a game show hostess sweeping her hand across a stage full of prizes. "Look at what we've done to him, how long he's waited, suffering. And still, he stands. For us. Is that not right,
mon petit
Dex?"

The healer whispered, "Yes."

"Louder!" Kueur commanded.

"Yes!" Dex screamed, sending ripples of agony through flame and smoke.

Kueur raised an eyebrow and placed a fingertip at the corner of her mouth. She glanced at the alcove, winked, cocked her head toward the Box, smiled at the reaction she received from the suited men.

Max did not bother to look over at the men. He studied Dex, trying to understand the hunger the twins had uncovered in him, wondering if he wanted the soul of such a man in his child.

His child. He smiled at the slip, at the thought of passing something of himself on beyond his death. His amusement quickly vanished under reality's harsh glare.

"You see?" Alioune said, joining her sister.

"Let us do this for you, Tonton."

"I don't think I want to rely on his soul to protect me."

"It will not be his soul when we are done with the harrowing," Alioune said. "It will be a small spirit, with sins and corruption burned away. The hunger will be left, yes, but do we not all have appetites? The child could hardly be a part of our family without appetites. The spirit will be strong, and that is what is important. Strong, and imprinted on the three of us. We will work hard, make certain the soul is worthy of you, and your child."

Max considered, reluctant to hope. "What if the child is a girl, or some kind of monster?"

"The soul, Tonton, will be pure, and take without protest whatever shell it receives."

Nausea twisted Max's stomach. "How long? Is there enough time?"

Alioune went to the Box, leaned against the door and looked in. "We have enough time, if we work straight through to the time of your delivery." She looked to her sister. "If we work true, cut with precision, and release the soul at the proper moment."