The Beast That Was Max (25 page)

"No," he answered, surprising himself. "I found something I thought I'd lost forever, in Painfreak. In the House of Spirits. I don't feel so old, anymore." He met Kueur's open gaze, glanced at Alioune. Smiled. "I think I'm as old as I truly am, however old that's supposed to be, and not as old as I thought I was."

Alioune put her palm across his forehead, pushed him back down. Her cool skin was soothing. She smelled of lemon, and saffron.

"The thing you took back is dead," she said.

Max started to protest, stopped. "I know," he said.

"It cannot fit itself back into the rhythms of your life. It cannot grow with your spirit, cannot learn, or take nourishment from your experiences. It will forever be apart from you."

"But I need it," Max said, nearly pleading.

Kueur took his hand. "Maybe you needed it dead, and not alive. I think the price you paid for the change was fair,
non
?"

Alioune ran her fingers over Max's face. Kueur took his other hand, kissed the spot of Painfreak's invisible mark, and said, "Welcome back."

A phone rang: Max's private line, which only he could access. None of them moved to answer it. In the age between each ring, Max thought of the scarves and worried that he had forgotten some key factor in severing the ties with his past. Dread struggled against the Beast, churned again in Max's stomach. The answering machine picked up the call.

A harsh, cutting voice spoke over the speaker, which crackled and whined and hissed in protest. "Tread gently on the paths of the dead, my son," said the voice. "They are not as generous as the living, nor as forgiving."

When they went to replay the message, they found the phone and answering machine burned to slag.

" 'My son?' " Kueur asked.

"I'm an orphan. I never knew my mother or father." He remembered the woman in the boat, the blood, the sword, and the lotus. A chill rose like mist from a lake up his spine.

"Then it's too bad she did not leave you her number," said Alioune. When Kueur and Max looked to her, she took Max's hand and led him toward the Box. Kueur's laughter followed them.

"Be gentle," Max croaked as the Beast roused itself.

"As gentle as we can be," Kueur reassured him, with a sharp slap across his cheeks. She slipped his old white terry-cloth robe over his shoulders.

Max stopped at the entrance to the Box. He reached into the pocket, drew out the first scarf he had found in his apartment, its message still wrapped in red. His heart skipped. The Beast roared. Max smiled.

"Let's play a game," he said, ushering Kueur in after Alioune. "A game with fire, and silk."

Acrid smoke rose from the muzzle of Max's .22-caliber Ruger. The dead man lay sprawled in the snow pile on the edge of the curb, illuminated by an overhead streetlight. The first shot, to the temple, had been in the service of the triad contracting for the man's death, and had left a blackened hole in the skull. Max dumped the gun under the nearest car and walked away, staying close to the cover of buildings and away from lights. He stripped off latex false hands and dumped them in a bag with his wig, facial latex, and the rest of the disguise he had used to stake out the killing ground. His mind was a clear pool reflecting sights and sounds. Gazing into the pool of perceptions, Max was pleased. The job had gone without complications so far, and there was nothing near to cast a shadow on the water.

The second shot, in the neck, had been for the Beast in Max. The Beast screamed in his mind and ran hot in his veins as the man's blood flowed from the neck wound into the snowmelt running along the gutter. Pressure built in Max's chest to cut off Johnny's head, hands, feet, sex. His genitals ached with the need to satiate the Beast through atrocity. He glanced over his shoulder to give the Beast a last look at the work, grateful that he had once killed the Beast in him, and recently found and taken back its ghost. He had missed the Beast's strength in the work he did, but its madness had made his love for the twins, Kueur and Alioune, a deadly passion. With the Beast a dead thing inside him, unable to touch all that was living in Max, it could not rule him as it had in the past. He was free from the compulsion to satisfy the appetites he shared with the Beast at every opportunity. The twins were safe in his love. And Max had the Beast's power and vision to take him through the darkness of the tasks he chose to perform.

The Beast's scream subsided. A chill seized the base of Max's spine and shot up his back, setting off icy star bursts in his head. Ripples of fright broke over the waters of his senses.

A white mist was rising from the man he had just killed. Max froze. Not from the man, but from the flow of blood and water in the gutter. Max continued automatically to strip away his disguise, reversing and shortening his coat, taking off false soles, while he leaned against a building stoop and watched the mist rise, thicken, form into a human shape.

Instinct urged him to run. The Beast wanted to kill. Max fought against both. Though there was danger in lingering near a job, he needed to understand the mist's nature. Assess its threat and capacity to hurt him. He had learned about ignoring the past. The Beast, and the ghosts of victims who had tracked him through the part of himself he had discarded, had taught him.

At first he thought the mist was the manifestation of his target's ghost. But as he continued to watch, the mist took on female characteristics. Perhaps the spirit represented a defensive curse about which he had not been briefed. He snarled to himself, thinking of what he would do to the contractors if they had led him into a trap. But the spirit's form refined itself into the image of an elderly woman, Asian, dressed in loose pantaloons and a long blouse. She caught his eye, waved, mouthed words he could not hear. He felt no danger in her presence. Something else? Max scanned the surrounding buildings for observers, but the windows in the mixed residential and commercial Queens neighborhood were dark, as they should have been at this time of the night. Something buried in the snow pile, he reasoned, hidden for the past week and only now, during a January thaw, coming out: a homeless woman, dead; or a mugging victim; or a ghost locked in a broken piece of discarded furniture. Max was tempted to go back and kick the pile loose, to make certain. The Beast, confronted by a reminder of its captivity and how easily other spirits and its own appetite had deceived it, grew quiet, watchful.

Voices cried out. A car turned the far corner, screeched to a halt, sliding first on a patch of melting ice. Two men came out of the car, handguns drawn. More men emerged from the alley entrance facing the dead man's final resting place. A rapid-fire argument erupted. Guns were pointed. Someone knelt over the body, glanced at the ghost, screamed. The men cocked their guns, but no one fired. A man grabbed hold of a stick, passed it through the form, and threw the stick away. A cluster of men surrounded the ghost and the body, gesticulating wildly as they raised their voices. Others made the sign of the cross and drifted into the street, looking up at the roofline and windows, behind and under parked cars and trucks, into doorways. Max cursed, finished his transformation, eased around the stoop and crab-walked along the walls, careful to avoid trash cans, bottles and cans, snow mounds and ice sheets ready to crackle under his weight.

Shots rang out from across the street. Bullets slammed into the brick face above Max, spraying concrete dust down on him. He ran, reached the corner, glanced back as he turned it.

Men with coats flying open and weapons drawn pursued him. The car's tires screamed as they fought for traction, finally found it and took off down the street after him. The ghost floated past the pursuers and bore down on Max, crying out in a high-pitched voice that carried over the angry curses of the men below her.

"Wait," she called, "I must speak to you. There is terrible danger—"

The fastest of the pursuers broke stride and flinched as the ghost passed over him, shot at it once as its foot grazed his shoulder and finally slipped and fell. Max put his head down and sprinted around the corner.

Wheels taking a turn too sharply warned Max that the car was closing in. Even as the car momentarily lost control and slammed against a parked van, a hail of Uzi fire raked the sidewalk and walls around him. Max pulled a string from the bag in which he had stowed his disguise, twisted a cap on a bottle sticking out of a side pocket. Metal ground against metal, snapped, and then the engine gunned as the car finally freed itself. Max turned and threw the bag. Its arc took it through the ghost and into the car's windshield. The incendiary and fragmentation devices exploded on contact, consuming the evidence of his alternate identity and destroying the front portion of the car. The flash turned night into day, the fireball made the winter summer, both for a moment. Neither scathed the ghost. It was almost on top of him, reaching a hand out for him, its wrinkled face twisted into a hideous mask. The spirit still called to him. Max heard the burden of fear its tremulous voice carried and wondered what might frighten something insubstantial.

Max continued to run as the car, burning, crashed into the back of a parked truck. More pursuers rounded the corner and skipped, slid, stumbled, when confronted by the spectacle of flame and twisted metal. More shots rang out. Bullets whined past Max.

The ghost hovered by his shoulder like a marker made from luminous mist. "Wait, I must warn you, or they will be lost—"

"Fuck off!" Max shouted.

"Their father wants them—"

"Leave me!"

"Their father has found them—"

The rear window of an old Jeep shattered as Max passed the vehicle. "You'll get me killed!" He wanted to curse, to lash out at the creature, drive it away with his rage. The Beast, he was surprised to feel, was quiet within him, like a cat confronted by unpleasant mystery, haunches down, tail flat to the ground, its instinct to run paralyzed by curiosity. It had not done well by ghosts and spirits, and neither, Max realized, had he.

"Their father has taken them," the ghost continued, "and they will die for his desire. I do not want to lose my children."

Max spared the spirit a look. She had descended and was floating alongside him, effortlessly keeping pace with his frantic sprint. Her substance shimmered, thickened and thinned like a roiling cloud, and was veined with faint traces of red. Strands of ghost hair fell from her balding head to her shoulders, unaffected by her moving through the physical world so quickly. Her thin lips trembled and her mouth was open, revealing more mist and gaps in her two rows of teeth. Tears brimmed her eyes, crawled down her elevated cheekbones.

Max reached the next corner, found the stolen car he had left for his getaway, threw himself against it. He was inside without remembering unlocking and opening the door. The engine turned as soon as he started it, and he peeled out of the parking space and down the street. The dull thunk of a farewell bullet clipping the bumper accompanied his turn around another corner.

Sirens wailed over the sound of the car, and Max slowed, continued to drive with his lights off through a few blocks of industrial buildings, stopping to check for oncoming police at every corner. He focused on the wheel in his hands and the empty streets while he drove and caught his breath. He did not look at the woman's glowing form sitting next to him, did not listen to her incessant whispering about daughters and fathers and killing.

Max did not relax until he was on the parkway, heading for Manhattan. He took a deep breath, arched his back, and slammed his fist into the seat next to him. His hand passed through the old woman and cracked the seat back a notch.

"What?" he shouted. "What are you? What do you want with me?"

The old woman turned to him. Her form shifted over the cushion like a restless television image trapped in a screen as the car took gentle curves, slowed and sped up with traffic. "I am their mother."

"Whose mother?" Max met her gaze. "Someone I killed?"

"No, the ones you love."

Max tightened his grip on the steering wheel. "Alioune and Kueur?" He peered into the night unrolling in front of him.

'The ones I brought into the world."

"How did you die? At birth, or did their father kill you?" The ghost laughed. "I am not dead. Though I have come close over the years."

Max shook his head. "The twins said they were orphans. Their mother was supposed to be mortal, and Vietnamese."

"That is your name for my land. I am Chiao, the dragon. My true form sleeps in a maze of forgotten tunnels and bunkers dug by fighters during the last war."

"You don't look like a sleeping dragon to me."

"Dreaming, I take on an aspect, just as, killing, you take on an aspect of yourself." The Beast howled and squirmed under her attention. "The people of my land know this part of me as an old woman who comes to judge the wicked and save the innocent. I raise the water, to kill and protect."

Max poked her belly with his finger. "Your womb doesn't seem up to the job."

"My daughters were not born from this substance. During the last war for unity and identity, your people shook my earth with weapons, rained fire from the sky, spewed nightmares into the spirit world. So many conquests, so many wars—I had to fly from the blood and metal and nightmares. I found a young woman raped and left for dead. Her soul crippled. I joined her, and we traveled together. Found a way to leave the country, and had our adventures in the world."