Chapter 36: Snake 04
Albanino’s expression seemed somewhat surprised, though it was impossible to tell whether he was genuinely astonished or had simply put on such an expression at random. He appeared to deliberate for a few seconds, then suddenly laughed.
“Who was it that accused me of ‘making things complicated’ back then?” he said while laughing. “Why do I feel like compared to a blowjob, the current situation is far more complicated?”
As he spoke, he remained lying there lazily, his head resting on the armrest of the sofa, gazing fearlessly up at Hestal, who was looking down at him. On some level, this posture could explain a great deal—wasn’t there a saying that predators never expose their bellies to a fellow predator of equal strength?
“I think it’s because neither of us has anywhere left to retreat now,” Hestal replied calmly.
“After the Westland Pianist attacked the chief forensic pathologist of the Forensic Medicine Department?” Albanino asked cheerfully.
Hestal appeared unmoved: “You know full well what happened.”
“Of course I understand—this is exactly the outcome I wanted.” Albanino admitted frankly, placing a completely unnecessary stress on the word “exactly” for emphasis. “I’m willing to be the one who pushes for a qualitative change—because this is precisely the development I’ve been anticipating. I’m very curious to see how much of your soul you can bare to one of your own kind—but you? From what I can tell, this wasn’t part of your design, yet now you seem to be enjoying it too.”
They both understood what Albanino was referring to: when Hestal had gone to find Albanino that rainy night, he had never intended to turn Albanino’s home into the Pianist’s crime scene.
Thinking about it now, Albarino strongly suspected that the other party might have simply wanted to go mock him, throw a couple of punches at his face, and maybe add a few words meaning something like “I’m cutting ties, I’m not playing with you anymore”—after all, the whole business with the hitman Johnny had genuinely made Hestal very angry.
But in the end, they had stirred up an absurdly high-profile sexual assault case, one that not only drove everyone at the Forensics Bureau and the Police Department nearly insane, but also completely disrupted the Pianist’s consistent pattern of committing crimes, making the whole affair doubly bizarre even for the profilers.
As Hestal had put it—”a net.” This case had ultimately been manipulated by Albarino, steering things in a direction he liked. To put it in the harshest terms, in this sexual assault case, the Pianist had been used.
For someone as obsessively compulsive as Hestal, he should have put a bullet through the head of the one who caused all the trouble—but he hadn’t. Instead, he was now pinning the culprit down on the sofa, and with a perfectly serious expression, demanding: “I want to fuck you again.”
—It seemed there was no way to describe this other than “once you’ve had a taste, you can’t get enough.”
“I suspect that if I admit I’m actually enjoying this, you’ll get insufferably smug,” Hestal replied, his voice low and dangerous. Albanino saw the extent to which the other man’s pitch-black pupils had dilated, squeezing the pale blue irises into a thin, delicate ring that looked almost inhuman.
“True,” Albanino answered with a smile. “It’s hard for me to maintain any grace while savoring victory.”
Hestal blinked. He had one hand braced beside Albanino’s head, slowly lowering himself down, and some strands of blond hair—previously slicked flat with hair gel—fell from his forehead, swaying as they dangled over it. Albanino almost wanted to laugh even more: he could picture this man walking around his law firm with a deadpan expression, enduring the baptism of pitying looks from the few people in the know who saw him as “the poor victim of the killer Johnny.”
None of them knew what kind of monster was hidden beneath that exquisite human shell, nor what sins he had committed.
But sin, too, could be called beautiful—just as Friedrich von Schlegel said: ugliness is a thorn in the soul, yet it is also where the charm lies.
Hestal would never know what was in his heart. He merely continued to look down at him, suppressing his heavy breathing, and asked, “So, how much do you still want to plant larkspur on my corpse?”
“You can’t even imagine how much I want to,” Albanino answered in a low voice, hearing that his own voice had already gone hoarse. “The desire to destroy you is just as vigorous as the desire to possess you.”
Hestal was likely not surprised by this answer, because he flashed Albanino a chilling, toothy smile, then closed the distance between them and leaned down to kiss him.
—Or, it wasn’t really a kiss. The other man mercilessly tore at the freshly healed wound on his lower lip, until the blood flowed again, then slowly licked it away. While doing this, Hestal seemed almost as if he were unhurriedly consuming him. Albanino frowned from the pain, but his fingers still climbed onto the other’s shoulders, his fingers tightening forcefully on that skin, likely to leave a bruise by tomorrow.
Albanino kind of wanted to retort, “As someone who’s been to medical school, I’m telling you this is very unhygienic,” or some other meaningless words. In the end, he didn’t say them—those words felt like they had been chewed up and swallowed by Hestal.
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The other man pinned him viciously onto the sofa, and when his weight pressed down without the slightest attempt at concealment, he made no effort to hide the surging heat radiating from his body. Albanino let out a breathless scoff between the other’s lips, and by the time Hestal put some distance between them, he was truly laughing out loud.
“—You can’t even imagine. I think I may have just successfully proven my colleague wrong.” Albanino said in a low voice. He could feel his lips hot and slick, saliva mixed with blood. “Tommy once swore to me on heaven and earth that the Westland Pianist definitely had erectile dysfunction, and could only get aroused when pulling out a victim’s internal organs.”
Hestal looked down at Albanino, as if he wanted to sigh, or as if he was regretting why he hadn’t just killed him earlier. Albanino kept laughing, and even after Hestal sealed his lips again, he could still hear the joyful sound trembling in his chest.
Hestal irritably reached his hand into Albanino’s shirt again, pressing on his abdomen—not too hard, not too lightly—until a pained gasp successfully replaced that laughter. Then Hestal began unbuttoning his shirt—this shirt had clearly met a better end than the one the Pianist had destroyed in the early hours of the thirtieth—until the other’s entire chest was laid bare before him.
Albanino’s skin was indeed covered in crisscrossing scabbed wounds, similar to what Haistal had imagined earlier. The shallower scabs had dried into brown, like a small string of dark beads on the skin, while the deeper knife wounds were more swollen and grotesque, crudely stitched together with sutures, the stitch points still seeming to seep with a trace of blood.
When Haistal lowered his head and scraped his teeth across these accumulated scars, Albanino slid his fingers into his hair.
He showed no intention of pushing away at all, even when Haistal bit into his throat. The other party rested his teeth on his pulsing blood vessels, the veins surging madly beneath the other’s lips, and Albanino’s voice still carried an almost laughing tone. He indifferently bared his neck, slowly stroking Haistal’s hair, while at the same time whispering a promise: “Next time, I’ll be the one on top of you.”
Haistal didn’t take the bait, merely reaching out to pull open his belt—when the thing fell to the floor, the buckle struck the ground with a crisp clink, and Haistal had already deftly unfastened the button at his trouser opening, slipping his hand inside.
The longest cut from the string of letters he had left behind had extended to near his groin. Now it was wrapped in gauze and taped down, and even the skin that should have been within easy reach was largely off-limits. Hestal sucked at the skin below his Adam’s apple while his hand found the organ that had already hardened, and then he heard Albanino draw a low, sharp breath.
This was a first of sorts—after all, when the Pianist committed his crimes, Albanino had lost so much blood he couldn’t even get hard, and the time before that needn’t even be mentioned; the man hadn’t even undone a single button. This made the other’s sticky writhing and grinding beneath him feel like a novel experience. Hestal’s fingers lightly brushed his testicles and thighs, feeling Albanino’s soft panting by his ear, while his fingers combed through the ends of his hair, fixed in place with hairspray.
“I’m genuinely curious,” Albanino said in a low, rough voice, “because of your personal history—do you reject having someone on top of you? Or is it that before me, you simply had no nightlife at all?”
Herstal wanted him to shut up, a desire that ultimately manifested as a bite mark near his throat. Albarino made a soft sound, like an instrument that needed its strings plucked. But regardless, even as he cooperated with Herstal in kicking off his own pants, his words still hadn’t stopped.
“But I will do it,” Albarino said in a low voice. By this time Herstal’s lips had already slid downward, tracing along those scars, finally slowly licking across his areola—this action caused Albarino’s voice to falter slightly, with difficulty. “…I will open you with my fingers, and then fuck you deeply—deep enough to make you think of the moment you used a knife to cut open those people’s bodies. You will know that sex and death have no essential difference.”
Then came a pained hiss, mainly because Herstal had shoved unlubricated fingers into his body.
Albarino’s legs trembled, his lips visibly clenching tight, and only then did Herstal spare a moment to recall what injuries he had inflicted on the other man in the past few days. But regardless, he still said stiffly: “Can you shut up?”
“Don’t force people to do what they can’t, Hestal.” Albanino answered slowly. He must have felt the pain, but the surface of his voice was forever slicked with a layer of oil-like cheerfulness. “You have to do well enough for me to shut up.”
—But, regardless, most of the remaining hours of that night were scorching, melting, stretched into shapes that were not quite clear.
Hestal could remember how those fabrics fell to the ground, expensive cloth piled together with Albanino’s old clothes of wildly different styles; he remembered Albanino dragging his enormous backpack over from beside the sofa, the mocking smile on his face as he pulled a can of lubricant from one of the side pockets; when those liquids ran down Albanino’s legs, neither their color nor their texture resembled blood.
He remembered those eyes—green, inhuman, pupils dilated, the black irises like a terrifying black hole that would devour all things. He remembered the smooth and elegant motion of Albanino tilting his head back, sweat flowing down his neck and gathering in the hollow of his collarbone, looking like a magical spring in a fairy tale.
The other person let out a faint hiss as the wound on his abdomen was pulled, his lips bitten red, smears of blood rubbed across the corner of his mouth. And this person was still smiling—smiling in the moment of sinking and floating between the abyss of delirium and ecstasy, and of course smiling before the arrival of pain and death. When Hestal’s fingers tightened in the other’s hair, this person shamelessly wrapped his legs around Hestal’s waist—so brazenly, as if what flowed between their fingers was not sin and death, as if they had successfully concealed their desire to put each other to death.
Albarino was unsparing in letting out scorching moans, obscenely explicit sleep-talk, his fingers leaving scratch marks and purple bruises on the pianist’s shoulders. And his own body was covered in so many scars it looked like a canvas a painter had painted wrong—those purple-black marks and half-healed scabs tangled around him like long threads.
To keep his wounds from tearing open again, most of the time Hestal gripped his waist, watching the muscles of his abdomen and thighs tremble out of rhythm, while guarding against him bending or stretching his body at inopportune moments. He had almost pinned the other person fiercely into the sofa, with enough force that there was nowhere to escape—yet somehow he still did not seem to be the one in control of the entire lovemaking—
Perhaps because those green eyes were still filled with an indelible smile.
Hestal had some one-night stands, and that was about it. After all, his paraphilia had not yet reached the point where he could only get an erection by killing someone, so there were times when he needed to indulge his desires: he had some bed partners, slightly more women than men, expensive high-class courtesans, people he had met by chance in business circles. Hestal was not the type who could tolerate going to a bar to chat someone up; the partners he chose were quiet, polite, and knew when to stop.
So in any case, he had never had an experience like this. Because Albanino Bacchus was actually different—he was not the same as those soft skins and lips, and not the same as that gentle sex.
Sex involving Albanino could not be described with the word “gentle”; that was far too far off. Most of the time, it was a matter of provocation, fury, and burning—the feelings he brought Hestal were infinitely close to murder and destruction; it made him feel lava coursing through his marrow, a terrifyingly immense desire.
On one hand, he truly wanted to kill the other, to dismember him. At the moment of climax, he almost went to strangle Albanino’s neck again, and only the last thread of reason made him stop, because during this period Albanino would most likely still be meeting Hardy, and he did not need to leave more bruises on the other’s neck.
On the other hand, he truly wanted to tear off that seamless mask. He didn’t know if he would be able to catch a glimpse of the other person crying. It seemed like an extremely long war. He held the scepter and crown, his fingers closing over the warm flesh and blood of the living Holy Grail. When he came inside the other, he could hear Albanino’s hoarse gasps, blowing out intermittently from between his lips.
In the end, Hestal collapsed onto him, feeling his skin tremble from the intense passion. Albanino stirred beneath him and muttered something. Even without looking, Hestal could still imagine that smile.
They lay in a sticky mess, not too cold, just too exhausted. After a long while, he rolled off Albanino onto the last pitiful bit of empty space on the sofa, one leg still draped over Albanino.
It was at this moment that Hestal shifted and looked at the other.
The other’s hair was damp with sweat, curling against his forehead, appearing darker than its natural color should be. His skin bore bruises that had not yet faded, like a terrible shackle binding his neck, while his skin was covered with fresh, mottled red marks that extended along the edges of those wounds.
The problem was that being completely naked did not make him appear vulnerable. It was precisely in moments when he so casually exposed his body that others could glimpse something truly hard and solid beneath his exquisite mask of deception. Hestal could recall the moment in Elliot Evans’s basement, when Albanino walked in through the doorway, those green eyes strangely cheerful and bright, like a kind of emotionless, beautiful stone.
Even at a moment like this—when the two of them were squeezed into the same sofa in what appeared to be intimate closeness—Hestal could still clearly sense that the creature lying beside him was not human. Either Albanino had never regarded anyone else as his own kind, or Albanino had never considered himself human. Whichever possibility was true, it was very, very dangerous.
Hestal should have understood this, of course. He should have known it clearly from the very beginning.
And now Albanino glanced at him, his gaze almost satiated, and asked, “What are you thinking about?”
Hestal drew a deep breath, then slowly exhaled. The air was thick with the lingering traces of sex, and he could find no particular reason why he should lie.
“I’m very suspicious right now,” he said slowly—they both understood that when Hestal said “very suspicious,” it was basically the same as saying “I’m quite certain.” “If I don’t kill you now, someday I’ll fall in love with you.”
They fell silent for a brief two seconds. Albanino’s arm moved, looping around his waist as if completely unguarded, his warm fingertips tracing circles on the sweat-dampened skin.
Then Albanino laughed softly.
“Now that is a truly dangerous epiphany,” Albanino said quietly, the lingering resonance of his voice still long and hoarse, evoking dark things, and sand slowly being pulled out from beneath a person’s body by the waves. “So, do you plan to kill me? Because you’re never certain whether I’m seeking the same thing as you—or whether I can give you what you want.”
Hestal tilted his head and looked at him: the arc of his Adam’s apple rising and falling, and on the skin of his neck, a thin white scar nearly drowned out by dark purple bruising. That was the wound Hestal had left on the other’s throat with a knife on the night he killed Bob Landon. The mark was too thin, too shallow; the color of the scar would soon deepen until it matched the skin, and then no one would be able to tell it had ever existed.
And it was on that very night that Albanino said, “There are too many things I want… If I told you all those vast and tangled thoughts of mine, you might grow tired of hearing them.”
—That was the problem: Albanino had never decided what position Hestal Amaret should occupy, and even now it remained the same; approaching the Westland Pianist had been nothing more than a whim. Before getting close to the other, he hadn’t even decided whether he wanted to kill him, cooperate with him, or drive him to madness. He himself didn’t even mind admitting, “The desire to destroy you is just as vigorous as the desire to possess you.”
The Sunday Gardener’s passion was so sudden, so fervent, capable of setting everything ablaze—but not one of them knew when this fire would go out, or what kind of ending would await them once it did.
He did not regard others as his own kind, and perhaps he had no desire at all to become anyone’s kind. Does a psychopath truly possess “emotions”? That is an entirely separate question.
—When the final moment arrives, those embers may bring about a catastrophic end for Hestal.
“I should kill you,” Hestal said slowly.
“That is what your reason tells you, admittedly so.” Albanino let out a soft, humming laugh, as though to him there was no essential difference between the words “I should kill you” and “I might fall in love with you.” “But? I think that sentence ought to be followed by a ‘but.'”
Herstal took a deep breath, and Albanino waited quietly.
Then, Herstal said in a tone that was almost a sigh: “I’ve never met anyone like you.”
—Regarding all that talk about masks, Albanino had been right about at least one thing: Herstal had spent his entire life in disguise, hiding himself deeply within the crowd, and it was impossible for anyone to truly understand him. Naturally, no one should know about this lawyer’s work after nightfall, the sins he had truly committed.
He had never left behind any evidence that could be used against him, yet he had been seen through so easily by one person—all because he had raised his left hand when facing the gunshot. How on earth had this happened? Sometimes Herstal genuinely suspected that Albanino, like a bloodhound, had caught the scent of something dark and sinful, and it was precisely this scent that had led him to find the Pianist.
No one had ever seen through his mask, except for Albanino Bacchus.
I’ve never met anyone like you.
If I don’t kill you now, one day I’ll fall in love with you.
And that is exactly the problem.
Albanino let out a chuckle, then tried to turn over, awkwardly twisting himself into a face-up position. He fell silent for a moment, and when he spoke again, he strangely changed the subject: “Look, Hestal, the owner of this house stuck glow-in-the-dark constellation stickers on the ceiling.”
The direction this conversation took left Hestal a bit baffled for a moment, but yes: faded stickers were pasted on the ceiling, depicting green glow-in-the-dark stars, with constellations connected by long lines of the same color.
Only the floor lamp in the living room was on, so those stars flickered with a dim glow in the places the warm yellow light couldn’t reach.
“I guess this might be the night sky of the Southern Hemisphere,” Albanino continued with this baffling topic, “because look, that little cross over there,” he pointed at a constellation stuck in the very corner of the ceiling, “that’s the Southern Cross, the smallest constellation in the sky. It can’t be seen from most places in the Northern Hemisphere.”
But staring at constellation stickers on a yellowed ceiling seemed like too abrupt a development. Hestal frowned and said, “Albanino—”
As always, Albanino would never abandon a topic just because someone else tried to stop him. His voice remained unhurried, and his finger lightly traced a line in the empty air: “The part visible to the naked eye—the Southern Cross is made up of four bright stars forming a cross. The brightest of them is called ‘Acrux,’ the thirteenth brightest star in the night sky. The Portuguese called it the ‘Magellanic Star.'”
He paused briefly.
“But in reality, that is two stars—a binary star system that cannot be distinguished because they are too close together.” His voice was soft and slow, as if he were lost in thought. “Two stars, each orbiting a common center of mass on their own paths. To humans, the reason they appear so bright is because we believe their brilliance merges into one.”
“Albanino,” Hestal gently interrupted. He already understood, but for that very reason, he equally wanted to sigh. “I’m starting to grow tired of your endless metaphors.”
Albanino stopped looking at those sticker stars. He turned his head to look at Hestal, his gaze quiet, pitch-black, unpredictable.
“No,” he said with a smile. The word left his lips like a prophecy. “I know you won’t.”