The Beast That Was Max (37 page)

Kueur went to her side. "No sleep for us, my sweet sister. We'll feed on his delicious pain and pleasure, rest in the darkness of his veiled desires. And we'll see who dies first, us, or him." She laughed, then sobered. "We'll have to watch for interference. The dead."

Max curled up on the sofa, huddled under the prayer blanket. Hope was too demanding, with its possibilities of elation and despair. He stared at the twins, remembered the time he had spent with them in the Box. "Is he as good as me?"

"Who could be, Tonton?" Kueur replied. "But he is good enough, for now, until you can join us again."

"Still, he has desire," Max acknowledged, feeling the twins' distance from him.

"Stunted and twisted, but yes, Tonton, he has that. He hungers. And we will satisfy him. For us. For you. For the little one." Kueur turned to Alioune and said, "Shall we?"

The twins went into the Box, leaving the door wide open, sharing the intimacy of hunger's satisfaction that had turned into the joy of their work for his child. He watched the twins bracket Dex, undo his ponytail, run their hands over pain-mottled skin. The physical aches and discomforts of Max's body faded as he lost himself in Kueur and Alioune's attention to drawing Dex's secret heart out and purifying his soul. In the background, the men in the alcove remained quiet and still while tiny motors whined, extensions unfolded, mounts turned, lenses refocused.

Kueur laughed sweetly, removing the candles, dripping hot wax pooled under flame onto Dex and setting them on top of a rolling metal cart. Alioune reached down to a lower cart shelf and removed a harness with a double dildo secured at the groin, the smaller, crystal-encrusted phallus pointing outward.

"Remain as you are, my sweet, and tell us what you want," Kueur said when she was done. Alioune reverently inserted the large, knobbed and twisted dildo into Kueur's vagina. The hint of a smile passed between them; its subtle light might have cast the shadow of amusement on the figure in the Louvre's most famous painting. They both shuddered slightly as Alioune completed the insertion, the leather and metal harness rasping on satin skin. While her sister carefully adjusted straps and closed locks, Kueur continued speaking, her words a soft, seductive song. "Beg us for what you want. Don't make us angry, or we'll set you free. Do you want to be free, do you want to leave? Or do you want what we have to give you? Do you want to surrender what you have for us? Tell us," she said, raking her nails along the wax burn marks across Dex's shoulder.

"Tell us," echoed Alioune. She shifted on her knees from Kueur to Dex, teased his red, erect penis with her tongue.

Dex moaned, shuffled closer to her, began to lower his arms.

Alioune reared, bared her teeth. "Stop!" she commanded.

"Don't move!" Kueur growled. "You were told to stay still. How dare you disobey!"

Dex stiffened while his erection drooped. The twins stepped away and behind him. Stood silent, legs apart, Alioune with her arms crossed over her breasts, Kueur with her hands behind her back. Dex cried out, called to them, pleaded for them to return, to let him please them, all while remaining in his original position, arms out and feet spread wide. "That is all I want to do," he said, hoarse from his ceaseless, desperate cry for their return. "To please you. Tell me, what do you want me to do, what do you want me to say, so I can feel your touch—no, just be in your presence—wait, so I can just serve you, to know I'm a part of your world, no matter how small, because I can't go back, do you understand? After what you've done to me, shown me, I can't go back to what I was. I can't … please, don't leave me here . . . alone . .." His words lost themselves in wet, inarticulate blubbering.

"Do you want to leave or do you want what we have to give?" Alioune asked.

"Take what we have to give," said Kueur, "let go of what we want. Or we will throw you in the gutter, and you will live the rest of your life in the depths of your worthlessness, this golden moment of life gnawing at every scrap of meaning you try to hold on to until they are all lost in the emptiness that will be your life without us."

"Let me stay . . ."

"Tell us what you want . . ."

". . . beg for what you need . . ."

” .. . please.. ."

"Is it this?" asked Alioune, draping herself over Dex's shoulders, hooking a leg around his thigh, grinding her body against his.

Kueur stepped up behind Dex, positioned the dildo, rammed it into him. "Or this?" she said into his ruined ear, slowly pumping and rotating her hips. She snaked her arms under his, interlocked her fingers behind his neck. His arms were forced out of their outstretched positions, hitched up, hands held high. Bone cracked.

He tried to keep his feet positioned wide, but slipped as Alioune slid her leg down, drove the heel of her foot into the back of Dex's knee, put her foot down, reached around him and held on to Kueur's hips. Dex lost his balance, scrambled, legs flailing.

"Yes?" asked Alioune. "This?" The power and rhythm of the twins' gyrations managed to lift Dex off of his feet.

Kueur, her back arched, her head in profile, eyes half closed and lips parted in a feral smile, said, "And this?"

The twins moved, danced a slow, rocking dance, sinking in tandem into a crouch and then rising smoothly, the muscles of their thighs and calves and backs flexing under glistening skin. Their feet stomped the floor as they circled, carrying Dex between them skewered on a phallus of flesh and blood and plastic. Blood dripped from his anus, blood smeared across the twins' bodies. Kueur hummed a hypnotically repetitive tune while Alioune chanted, low and guttural.

They drove Dex back and forth between them, his flesh slapping against theirs, their sex joined on an axis of pain and pleasure. The magic circuit of hunger and satiation sparked as the twins' power, born from African and Asian spirit gods, flowed through Dex's conductive flesh, through his desire. Their eyes glowed, their faces were flushed.

Max gripped the couch, jealous. The ghost of the Beast was silent, hiding in some dark corner, cowed by unwanted intimacy.

Dex's cries rose above the twins' song. His writhing struggle fueled the dance, sending Kueur into a biting frenzy, provoking Alioune into a sinewy counterpoint to her sister's brutal pumping.

"Tell us, please, why won't you," said Kueur, spitting Dex's blood as she looked up from the raw wound on his neck. "What do you want?"

"There," Alioune said, then fixed her gaze on Dex's, made him stare into her eyes while bringing up a hand to hold his head in position by the jaw. She moaned when he did, opened her eyes to reflect his startled expression as a new corner of pain opened for him, a different source of pleasure erupted within him. Her mouth shaped the same 0 as his lips, and the play of fine muscles beneath her face captured the twitches and scowls and grimaces running across his face.

Kueur joined in the mocking, gasping, "Yes, yes," to her stroke, and then to Alioune's. Sensations rebounded through him, to them, back and forth. At last they gasped and, instead of falling into a deadly embrace, trapped him in the cascade of pleasure and pain that only Max and the Beast could survive, they stepped back. Released Dex. Drew him out, and drew out of him.

He fell to the floor, lay on his back, still crying out, body convulsing spasmodically. The twins circled him like proud, long-legged cheetahs inspecting their kill.

"Not yet . . ."

"Too soon…"

"You haven't told us. . ."

"You must tell us…”

And words spewed out of Dex like a hot jet of lava, fiery and desperate and bearing the chewed-up and molten pieces of himself carded from the depths of memory and desire and conditioning and genetic design. A primal howl, like a poet's consumed by rage, filled the loft, and in that howl parts of a life boiled away, vanishing in air.

It took several minutes for Max to catch the rhythm of Ilex's rapid speech and parse the sense in his ragged voice.

"—I let her die I did I could have told her she needed a real doctor damn bitch but she was so fucking rich she just sat there and ate it up her and her stupid daughter the pair of them not a brain between them so fucking stupid afraid of doctors hell I told them I did that doctors were only here to help even if they did more damage than good with their knives and tubes and medications and there I was talking in a roomful of crystals and the sun was shining in through the glass walls and the colors were everywhere and the air was warm and scented from these little burners I have spread all over the place and I was talking and letting her feel the cool glass and stone against her dried-up old skin and telling her daughter on the side that she could get some if she wanted to 'cause my dick was blessed with healing powers and could make her feel alive and like a woman instead of the slut bitch she felt like after years of living in that crazy old woman's house waiting for her inheritance while her uncles banged her and I told the old bitch she didn't have to trust the doctors all she had to do was trust me and have faith because the crystals would absorb and refract and boost her belief and heal her and she signed the papers because she believed and when she died I put crystals in her caskets to heal her on the other side and spent the rest of the money on a nice ranch in Arizona and her dumbshit daughter is still wondering how she wound up living with her youngest uncle entertaining his brothers when they come for a visit—"

"You do not believe anything you preach," said Alioune, probing his genitals with her toes.

"—believe yes I do I do the power it’s in stones I feel it--"

"Then you do not believe in yourself."

Dex paused, mouth moving but not speaking.

"Do you?" She pressed her heel into his groin.

"No no no no no no—"

"That's a good beginning," said Kueur, crouching over his chest. She traced the path of tears and cuts on his body with the tip of the crystal-encrusted phallus, then brought it to his mouth, pushed it into him. He opened himself, tongue flicking over edges and points. She pushed herself in, thrust slowly but steadily into his throat until he gagged, spat up blood, and swallowed crystal shards and dust. Back and forth Kueur went, then withdrew when Dex's heaving body and reddened face showed he was on the verge of passing out from lack of air. She undid the harness, Alioune helping, and removed the apparatus, placing it on the cart. Once again she crouched over him, her damp pubic hair brushing against his skin. Dex filled his lungs to bursting, pushing his chest closer to her, straining for breath and touch.

Max felt a warm, slick spot of memory open on his own chest.

"But only a beginning. We have much to peel away, so much to uncover." She sat on him, leaned forward, breasts brushing against his face. She licked the lacerations on his face, kissed his torn nose, his ragged lips.

"—please take me let me give take it take it all—”

“Because you want to?"

"—yes yes yes yes—"

"Because you believe?"

—yesyesyesyesyesyes—"

"Yes." She closed her mouth over one of his eyes, and when her kiss was done and she drew back to smile at Max, Dex's eye was gone. She reached over to the cart, took Dex's bag of crystals from the bottom shelf, drew out a smooth ruby-colored stone and placed it in the dark red socket. She kissed the other eye and replaced it with another stone, purple and faceted. And then she sat up on his chest, slid up to his chin, covered his mouth with her sex, and let him whisper the sins and horrors and petty wrongs of his life into her, from his lips to hers. She closed her thighs around his head, embracing him, welcoming the seed of his corruption into her womb. She closed her eyes, as well, and let her head fall back, mouth open, ready to receive wisdom from the heavens.

Or perhaps, Max thought, to allow the eyes she had consumed one final sight of heaven before they sank into eternal darkness.

Alioune straddled Dex's stomach, her back to Kueur. She spread his legs wide with a rough push, lowered her head, took his erect penis into her mouth, bobbed up and down, taking more of him into her, dipping closer to the crux of his legs, until she was taking all of him, from his balls to the head of his dick, into her again and again, faster, faster, until suddenly she stopped and reached back for the bag of crystals Kueur held out for her. Alioune reached in, took out two clear stones, dropped them into the raw pit from which Dex's sex had grown, and then again she reached into the bag, and this time took out a hexagonal rod and thrust it between the stones.

And Dex arched his back and pushed his hips high into the air, his butt cheeks quivering from the strain of reaching for something forever beyond his grasp.

Max wondered if what was left of Dex after the twins had taken what they needed for the baby would fall forever in darkness, or if Dex's New Age powers and spirits would greet his tattered remnants on the other side and raise a shadow of their follower. If there were crystal deities waiting to present Dex with salvation, they would find little of use in Dex's spiritual remains. The twins had picked their victim well, culling the most fragile of the healers from the herd that had come to help Max. With the core innocence of his soul stripped away, the crystal powers would find only the flaw of uncontrolled appetite surrounded by the self-absorption and delusion grown over a lifetime pursuing power and satiation. Max wished he could see through crystal eyes and watch over the soul the twins were paring down to make sure they did not offer too much to Dex's spirit powers, or too little. He wished for something, anything, to do that would fight the feeling of helplessness and contribute to the work of making certain what remained on the mortal plane would serve him and the child.