by John Everson
She leaned over the bar, and suddenly I had that beautiful boob right in my face. What could I do but kiss it? So I did. Her skin tasted like booze and vanilla, and I felt my concentration swoon. I could get lost here, I thought, still tracing the curve of her femininity with my tongue. Sin-D pulled away and winked. “You wanted both, so you got it,” she said. “’Tail and Tease.”
“I think I ordered the wrong kind of ’tail,” I mumbled.
She leaned forward and licked the tip of my nose with her tongue. “Bad boy,” she said. “If you want that kind of cock-tail, you’d better finish that drink and get out on the dance floor. This is the waiting zone, stud.”
I nodded, but she was already moving away to help another customer. I could see the bare cleft of her ass revealed, twin globes shaking between the beads of her skirt as she walked down the bar.
Something stirred at my left, and I turned to see a cloud of black hair bending down over the stool next to me. A woman. She was setting a handbag on the ground, and when she straightened up, and slid onto the seat, I realized that she was a striking, if painfully thin woman. She might have been ten years older than me, or not. It was hard to tell. While her facial complexion was pure above the faded leather dog collar she wore around her neck, the skin of her arms and shoulders, and of the part of her back that I could see where her thin black dress dipped low, were crisscrossed with chicken-scratch scars. She looked weathered, but still desirable.
“Hey,” I said as she settled in.
She raised an eyebrow and brushed back a strand of kinked raven hair from her forehead. “Hey,” she answered. Her tone didn’t invite further discussion. Her breath sounded rushed, as if she’d been running.
“Who won?” I asked.
She gave me a blank stare, and I thought the brown of her eyes held deeper mysteries than I ever wanted to plumb.
“The race,” I added to clarify. “You sound like you’ve been running.”
“Just wanted to get in here before they locked the doors,” she said.
“They lock people out?”
Her eyes brightened, and she looked me over more carefully. “You’re a virgin, aren’t you!?”
I shook my head adamantly. “Not since I was twenty-seven.”
“Didn’t you read your invitation?” she asked. “If you don’t make it here by ten, you’re SOL. Everyone gets in, they throw away the key, and…”
“…then somebody yells ‘Let’s party like it’s 1999’,” I finished for her.
She gave me a piqued look. “Something like that.”
A chipmunk-cheery voice and two bouncing breasts suddenly were back on our side of the bar. Sin-D leaned down, elbows on the bar with her hand on her chin. “What are ya havin’?” she asked my new friend. “Bloody Mary…or just blood?”
The thin woman gave her a “you can’t be serious” look and then finally answered. “Alcohol first, blood later. Tequila Sunrise?”
When Sin-D turned away to mix the drink, the woman turned to me. “How are you with a flogger?”
“Inexperienced,” I said. “I’m more of an observer.”
“Figured,” she said. There was an element of disgust to her tone that I couldn’t miss. She downed half of the Sunrise as soon as Sin-D set it in front of her.
“Just remember,” she warned. “If you spend your life watching, your life will pass you by, unlived.”
“Is that from Famous Quotes, Volume Two?” I asked. My sarcasm was not appreciated. She cracked the glass down on the bar and stood up. “People who refuse to learn are doomed to remain dumb.”
Part of me wanted to laugh at the ridiculousness of that declaration, but instead, I saw an entry here.
“I am not refusing to learn, but I don’t have a teacher,” I said. “This is my first time here…would you show me the ropes? Can you teach me something? I know there is more to this place than just this bar and the band and the whips-and-chains club over there.” I pointed to the far corner of the room where the floggers were busily eliciting twisted moans of pain and pleasure. Their hands, and the leather straps they held, never seemed to slow. “Can you show me the secret side of NightWhere?”
I knew I was probably pushing it there, but what the hell. She looked like a woman who knew the score here, and she was challenging me…so I used it. If she believed what she said, then she should live by her words and show me the ropes. Although, preferably, without putting any of them around my wrists.
I saw the change in her eye. The spark of a challenge. She saw in me someone she could break in. She couldn’t know that I intended simply to hitchhike on her good (bad) nature to get where I needed to go.
“Come with me,” she said, and held out a long, thin hand. I pressed her fingers in mine, and slid off my stool. Her fingers were warm. And firm.
She led me past the goth band, who, I noted with amused disinterest, seemed dressed exclusively in fishnets, even though they were all men.
The blue and red lights reflected strangely off the scars on her back, illuminating and accentuating them as if she were white cotton in a field of black light. When we reached the wall of racks, she was greeted warmly. Obviously she was no stranger to this section of the club. Two of the male floggers offered her their whips, but she put up her free hand and turned them down. “I have a date,” she said.
I wasn’t sure I liked the way they grinned when she said that. It made me fear for the wholeness of my skin.
We stopped in front of a large wooden door. It looked like the entryway to some medieval castle, all rough-hewn wood with iron straps inlaid, fastened by fat bolts. There was a guard there, or maybe a ghoul. Certainly he looked more like the latter. His skin was a sickly gray and he was bald and emaciated; his face lined with a dozen rivers of age. But when my guide nodded at him, he didn’t balk. He stepped to the side, and opened the cavernous door for us.
When we stepped through, it felt as if we’d walked into another world.
While outside in the club, it felt modern, if dungeon-influenced, here, the medieval wasn’t an influence, it was a fact. We were in a dungeon. A long stone hallway led away from the antechamber, its walls occasionally lit by the flickering orange light of a low-burning torch attached to the walls.
And the walls…they looked freshly painted…if the painter had been dipping his brush into a recently gored carcass. The hallway smelled dank, and metallic. But it wasn’t empty, not completely. While there was nobody in sight, the echoes of screams and moans…and even faint cheers…reverberated out of the dark at us.
I was suddenly both anxious, and afraid, to see what lay ahead.
“Let’s start here,” she said. Her voice was cool, soft and distant, though she held my hand.
She stepped into the doorway of a side room, and I followed. Inside, torches lit the dark gray rock-hewn walls with shifting shadows, but it was the floor that held my attention almost instantly.
A man lay naked there, in the center of the room. A ring of people surrounded him, though they were not lying down, but on their feet. They too were nude, and ranged from fat dumpy old women to hot, skinny chicks who looked like someone had just panty raided them and dragged them here from their sororities. Most of the younger women had the kind of full-body tans that said they were not strangers to tanning beds or beaches.
Oh, there were a few cocks dangling around that circle too, but I wasn’t looking in their direction.
My eyes were on the taut belly that writhed and jolted on the floor.
And the weird colors that covered it.
Because the circle of bodies surrounding her were not just holding candles.
They were diligently pouring the byproduct of those candles in a molten stream onto the girl’s nipples and belly and lower…
Hot wax dripped in a kaleidoscope of colors onto the nude girl’s most sensitive parts, dying her
in red and orange and yellow. With each drip of hot liquid, she twisted and groaned on the floor…whether in ecstasy or pain, it was hard to tell…but she didn’t get up.
When one guy tipped his blood-red candle to rain over her pubes, and a trail of scarlet drops drew a line from her bellybutton to the swollen lips that opened below, I shook my head.
No way anyone was going to dribble hot wax on my Johnson. Not on your life. That said, I had to admit that I enjoyed the colorful view. And my guide knew it. She stood very close behind me, and after we’d watched the waxing for a couple minutes, her hand brushed across the front of my Dockers, lingering on the thickness that had grown there.
“You like the wax room?” she whispered into my ear. “I could arrange for you to stay here a while if you like.”
I wanted to say yes, but I shook my head. “No, I would rather see more.”
“As you wish,” she said, and drew away from my shoulder, pulling my hand until I turned and followed.
We stepped back into the shadows of the long stone hallway, and moved silently towards the next doorway, on the right side of the hall. I could see the glint of flames escaping the room like skittering shadows on the wall opposite. We stopped just before entering, and my guide looked up at my eyes with a smile that was as cruel as it was amused. “It’s warm in here,” she said. “You’re probably overdressed, so if you want to get more comfortable once we’re inside…?”
“I’ll be fine,” I promised, but a moment later, I began to wonder as the sweat began to slip down the back of my neck. It beaded under my arms and instantly showed through in darker patches on my already black shirt.
“You saw ‘wax’ in the other room, but this is the NightWhere version of waxing,” my guide told me. It only took me a moment to understand her meaning.
In the center of the room was a stone-bordered pit, with a heaping mass of glowing orange coals. Tongues of flame jumped in the air periodically from the incendiary heat, but it was the view beyond the heat that drew and held my eyes. Along the wall, a dozen men and women, stripped nude, were arranged side-by-side in a row against a stone wall, hands locked in cuffs and held up by chains bolted into the stone above their heads.
A ghoulish man wearing what looked like a black, tattered loincloth paced between the imprisoned, waving a long iron pole to and fro, seemingly idly. But then he turned suddenly and pointed the iron at one of the men in the midst of the chain-line. He thrust the iron rod at the man’s chest and rolled it up across his nipples.
The sulfurous smell of singing hair filled the room almost instantly. The man shook and trembled beneath the rod, but didn’t cry out. In fact, his penis grew visibly hard as the burning-hot rod rolled back and forth across his chest, smoke rising in its wake.
Now that’s a pervert, I thought. Getting hard from being burnt!
“There are many things that can excite the human animal,” the woman at my side whispered, as if reading my thoughts. “Watch.”
I did.
I watched as the ghoulishly pale and bony man dipped his iron rod into the glowing pit, until the edge came out glowing electric orange. He waved that fiery rod around in the air a moment, and then brought it down to touch the pubic hair of the woman next to the man who no longer sported any chest hair.
In moments (and after a brief tortured scream), that black thatch of hair above her sex was nothing but char.
If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought her screams of complaint were actually moans of arousal—her nipples hardened, and her hips bucked rhythmically as the molten metal burned the hair from her pudendum. I imagined that she came in part just to get wet—so that her orgasm could put out the fire above the lips of her sex. Part of me anticipated her torturer pressing the tip of that poker lower, and opening her up to the “heat” even more…but then I mentally slapped myself. What kind of sick ass would think of sticking a red-hot poker up a woman’s…
The question was answered before I even finished mentally asking it.
Apparently a sick ass like the ghoulish gray-skinned guy in front of me.
Because that’s exactly what he did to the next girl.
Damn.
Ouch.
But I had to admit, he was an equal opportunity impaler. He sterilized his tool in the red-hot coals, burnt off the pubic hair of a fat, pasty man on the end of the line, and then slapped the man repeatedly until he turned, showing us the prodigious white ass that he’d probably spent the past twenty years sitting on behind a dark wood desk. And then the ghoulish guy stabbed that cooling, but still orange-glowing poker right up the man’s rectum with a none-too-gentle, well-aimed thrust.
I’ll be honest? I didn’t look away. I should have. But I didn’t.
A hand cupped my testicles, and I looked guiltily to my left, only to meet the dark, amused eyes of my guide.
“What’s your name?” I asked. Generally I knew the names of women before they cupped my balls.
“Why do you care?”
“Because I hate to call girls, ‘Hey, bitch’?”
“Good point,” she admitted, “sometimes we get irritable if you say that.”
She stopped kneading my crotch to consider.
“My name is Andreisa,” she said, tilting her head towards my obviously aroused cock with a raised eyebrow. “And I can tell that you are enjoying what I’m showing you.”
I shrugged. “I’ve always enjoyed watching,” I admitted. “But you all take it to a bit of an extreme here.”
She grinned. “That’s really kind of the point, isn’t it?”
Andreisa took my hand in hers once more. Her skin was cool and smooth, and I have to admit, I enjoyed its touch. She pulled me from the room and back out into the hall. We walked farther away from the main room of the club, and passed several rooms without stopping. The sounds of whips and the clank of chains echoed from within the shadows of a couple of them, but Andreisa only shook her head. “Passé,” she said. “I want to show you truly interesting places. With people who will haunt your dreams, doing things that will taunt your passions.”
In my head, I rather thought that a simple bit of nudity with the occasional slap of a leather strap would do me just fine. But I went along with her. What else could I do…she was my guide in the strangest, seediest place I’d ever been in my life. I was not fearful of what she would show me next. I was anxious. Filled with undeniable desire.
“This will be good,” she said presently, stopping outside of another room. “I want to show you what they do in here. I think you’ll like it.”
I followed her in, and instantly, the air grew thicker, humid with the scents of sex, and something else.
Maybe blood. Maybe something more grotesque.
The room was dark, and until my eyes adjusted, I couldn’t tell what was going on in the murk. From the sounds, it was both brutal and ecstatic.
And when I saw what they were doing, my initial reaction was utter shock and denial. Nobody would agree to do that. Nobody would bend over, and bend backwards, to accept such a thing.
And yet…
In the shadow room, people did. They writhed and moaned and screamed and allowed the worst defiling I have ever imagined to happen.
Through it all, I watched.
I almost didn’t even notice Andreisa’s fingers on my crotch, stroking me to a pathetic climax as I viewed and grew painfully aroused by the defilements celebrated in the room.
“I knew you were right for The Red,” Andreisa whispered in my ear, as I gave in almost unconsciously to grind myself against her skilled and agile fingers.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I breathed, not even really caring what words I said.
“You are a man who understands the pure joy of watching pleasure, in all its forms,” Andreisa said. “You were meant to be the audience to the perverse.”
I
nodded in uncontested agreement. I did know how to watch.
Later, when the sex in the room had subsided, and my pants were uncomfortably stained, Andreisa gently led me out of the room and down the hall again to the next point on her agenda.
“You like to watch,” Andreisa whispered at me in the darkness.
“It’s my job,” I answered.
“But you like it,” she pressed.
I nodded. “Yes,”
I can’t deny that I do.
She led me down an incline of black floors and glistening red walls until I found myself in the midst of a disturbingly visceral scene. All around the room, a ring of people stood, watching. Looking down at the black center of the floor. Where seven men thrust into the torsos of seven men and women. They were not fucking the sex of their mates, but rather various holes carved into the bellies and sides of their partners…and in one case, a head.
Blood streamed and flowed in vicious visibility across the midnight floor, blooming in rhythmic beats around the fatal fucking…
“They’re screwing them to death!” I said.
Andreisa nodded. “The ultimate rape fantasy,” she agreed. Then she reached a hand around my middle and dropped her fingers below my belt buckle.
“Don’t pretend to be offended,” she said, kneading the thickness she found there.
I didn’t say another word, but watched as the victims screamed, orgasmed (yes, I saw some visible evidence!) and bled out on the floor, fingernails clutching and marking the backs of their lovers/killers.
It was obscene and horrible and hideously erotic.
My pants were more damp than before when we left the room.
“There are so many rooms I think you will enjoy here,” Andreisa said. Her voice was smooth but I heard the edge in it. Like a blade poised eagerly over a vein.
