NightWhere

by John Everson

  He heard Kendrick’s voice in his head, “You’re going to get more than you bargained for.”

  Who were these people, Mark wondered. It was as if he’d stumbled into a secret society that met in the catacombs and traded secret passwords and handshakes. And based on Kendrick’s warnings…potentially got rid of people who crossed them.

  Permanently.

  Mark swallowed hard and tried to tell himself that he was being ridiculous. The club was secret because it had to be-otherwise the cops would bust it. But NightWhere weren’t the Mafia. They weren’t going to kill him just for insisting they let him see his wife again. He just hoped that, when he did see her, Rae would come back home with him. He couldn’t imagine what he would feel like if she said no. If this really was the end.

  He walked slowly back out of the alley and down the busy street to his car. The next two weeks were going to take forever to pass by.

  Mark got in his car and started the engine. All he could see in his mind’s eye was an image of Rae gagged and chained against a rack.

  He wanted to have the key to free her. To be the key.

  To bring her back home with him.

  Mark whispered to himself in the silence of the cab of his car: “I’m coming, baby. I’m coming.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Gordon

  There are moments in everyone’s lives that they wish they could change. That insult you hurled at your father just before he had a heart attack. That moment when you were drunk and leaned over to kiss your best friend’s girl. Or that moment that you took a steak knife out of the wooden block by the kitchen sink and plunged it into your wife’s face. Actually, her right eye.

  Gordon wished he could have taken all of those moments back, but mostly, he wished he could undo the last. He could live with his dad going to the grave hating him. He could live with the broken nose his friend had given him for tasting his dumb slut’s tongue when they were both drunk.

  He was going to have a hard time living with Miriam’s corpse, though, which was currently bleeding all over the linoleum. He hated messiness. So this only pissed him off further. Gordon pulled the tablecloth off the dining room table and threw it over her. He had to go take care of Freddy, who was crying in the back bedroom again. Then he’d decide what to do with the naggy bitch that bore the boy.

  It wasn’t supposed to be like this. He had loved her once. Before Miriam had turned into a nag. An endlessly bitching, whining shrew. He didn’t know exactly which word had finally broken his bubble of protection. Was it pathetic, dickless, loser or joke? One of those words had made him drop the piece of leftover ham in his fingers and pick up a knife. It was all a red blur in his mind now.

  Gordon pulled the tablecloth back and stared at the congealed blood across his wife’s face. The silver blade of that fateful knife was spotted in red above where it protruded from her eyeball, and the white of that eyeball was also spotted in her blood.

  Gordon had rocked Freddy to sleep in the next room, and now he was going to take care of some outstanding business with the boy’s mother.

  Actually, he’d already taken care of business when he’d pulled out the knife and silenced his haranguing wife once and for all. But sometimes taking care of one problem only led to others.

  Like a body.

  And child care.

  Damnit.

  Gordon wrapped Miriam in the tablecloth, after pulling the knife from her eyeball. Something creamy oozed out from the hole as he did, but Gordon didn’t wait around to consider what it was. He pulled the cloth over her mouth, silent for the first time in all these fucking years.

  He wouldn’t miss her.

  But Freddy would. Gordon was going to need some child care.

  He’d deal with that tomorrow. After he tucked Freddy’s mom’s body in the basement. He slung her corpse over his shoulder and clumsily twisted the doorknob to the basement. He maneuvered her weight (slight as it was) through the opening and then carried her down the wooden plank stairs.

  “You ain’t ever gonna yell at me again,” he whispered. And then he dropped her body to the sand of the crawl space and shook his head.

  “Nope, never again.”

  Gordon smiled, in a crazy, I-have-finally-gone-over-the-rainbow way and walked away from her without burying the body or saying any other last words.

  Sometimes, you were just done.

  But for Gordon, done was just a temporary thing. He couldn’t just leave Miriam here like this. But she would keep for now.

  In the meantime, he had things he wanted to do. Things that would hurt. Not himself. But someone else. Like that Amelia chick. In fact, after sticking the knife in Miriam’s eye and then feeling the way she had jerked and trembled as he held her while the life bled out of her, and then laying her down on the floor, still kicking… Well, after experiencing that, he had a feeling that he could finally do something to satisfy Amelia’s desire for pain. He was looking forward to the next invitation from NightWhere, more than ever.

  Of course, this time, he was going to have to find a babysitter.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  October 18

  The time passed slowly. Mark worked every day at his job-sometimes to the extreme-burning the midnight oil because it was somehow comforting to throw himself into a project. Of course, in the back of his mind he also knew that the only reason he was doing it was because he was desperately trying to avoid something else. Something that was poisoning his soul.

  The weekends were endless, but in the end, two weeks did pass. And finally, the day came that had seemed as far away as Christmas to a kid in June. And Mark stood in front of the porno shop where he had tackled Kendrick. It was October 18.

  Mark wasn’t sure where to go when he got to the shop. Should he stand around and paw through DVDs until someone approached him? Loiter in the alley?

  After standing outside of the paper-obscured door for a minute, he decided to call the phone number that Kendrick had given him the last time and “announce” that he was here waiting. On the third ring, a voice answered.

  “We’ve been waiting for you.”

  “I’m at the porn shop, like you said.”

  “Good,” the voice answered. “What do you want from us?”

  “I want to come back to NightWhere,” Mark said. “I want to see my wife again. My wife and I were coming together, and then she started going without me.”

  “Perhaps she was the only one invited.”

  “I’d like to come back,” Mark said again. He tried to stifle the nerves in his voice.

  “You’d like to find your wife, Rae,” the voice corrected.

  “Well, yeah,” Mark said.

  “My name is Kharon,” the voice said. “I will let you visit NightWhere one more time, to satisfy your curiosity. But you will need to stay with me; I will be your chaperone. And this will be the last time.”

  “That’s fine,” Mark said. “Can you tell me…is Rae okay?”

  “Rae is doing exactly what she has always wanted to do,” Kharon said. “And if you ask me, I think you should leave her to that. But since you are so persistent…I will give you this last chance to talk to her. But you must do one thing first.”

  “Anything,” Mark promised.

  “Then here is what you must do,” Kharon said. “One of my people is waiting for you downstairs by the peep-show booths inside the building. His name is Dan, and he will be near Booth 13.

  “You must go downstairs and do exactly as he says. He will show you a film. At the end, if you still want to come to NightWhere, Dan will escort you to me.”

  The line abruptly clicked off.

  Mark pocketed the phone and looked at the door to the porn shop again, as he took a deep breath.

  Adults Only.

  “Here comes one now,” Mark said, and reached out to open the door.

  It was warm inside the store. After standing around in the chilly night air outside, the smell of Pine-Sol and the warmth of humid
heat were good. A thin guy with crazy hair and rectangular glasses stood behind the bar scratching a lamb-chop sideburn repeatedly. Mark nodded at him and walked down an aisle of Amateur DVDs, browsing idly at the pale breasts and pink nipples that flashed out at him from all of the covers. On the back wall of the store was the sign for downstairs.

  Peep Shows 25 Cents, it said, with an arrow pointed south.

  “Going down,” Mark murmured and headed towards the stairs.

  The stairs had once been white tile, but now they were just grey. Smears of mud and scuffs from black heels all but obscured the original color. But it was the smell that really told Mark he was descending into the bowels of a porn shop.

  The stairwell smelled of old cum and mildew. At the bottom of the steps, Mark turned a corner and the fluorescent glare of the upstairs shop cut off. The hallway below was like another world-a slumbering place. The light was dim, the shadows long. Mark walked to the end of a short hall and found a display with a small lamp aimed over the glass to illuminate the movies that were on display in the booths that lined the adjoining hall. Behind the glass were rows of DVD cases with channel numbers listed above them. If you went into a booth and plunked in your money, you could tune the TV to watch titles like Bosom Buddies and My Wife’s Breast Friend.

  Mark looked behind him, down at the line of open doors. The peep-show cellar was oddly quiet tonight. Odd because the evenings were usually when these kinds of places filled-with guys stopping into the porn shop for a quick stroke or blow job after work before they returned home to their harpy wives. Everyone needed an orgasm once in a while. Even if it was a solo flight.

  But tonight the peep show booths were all but empty.

  Except for one guy, who was pacing down at the end of the corridor.

  Mark turned away from the DVD case. The guy at the other end of the hall was here for him. Had to be. There was nobody else here. He took a deep breath and walked towards the man. The numbers on the doorways on the right side of the hall were going up-7, 9, 10, 11-he knew instantly that the guy stood in front of 13.

  Of course he did.

  Mark walked up and held out his hand. He forced himself to be totally over the top.

  “Hi,” he said. “Are you Dan?”

  The man turned and flashed a smile through two pale lips. He was bald, and his eyes looked grey in the dim light. He wore black leather pants and a black T-shirt. His skin looked sickly white in contrast to his outfit. He raised an eyebrow and nodded. “Mark?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Mark said. Dan did not accept his offered handshake.

  “Take off your clothes,” Dan said.

  “Huh?”

  “Strip,” Dan said. “I want you to drop all of your clothes, and then I want you to step into Booth 13 and watch a short film. Either do that, or get out of here.”

  Mark balked, but before he said anything, he remembered his conversation with Kharon. He knew that this was a test…he either did what he was asked, or he would not be seeing Rae again.

  Swallowing once, Mark pulled off his shirt and dropped it to the long-stained and dirty floor. Then he kicked off his shoes, unbuttoned his jeans and dropped them to the floor as well. He pulled his wallet out of the back pocket and stood there in socks and underwear in a hallway in front of the strange pale man.

  “Naked,” the man said. His face was completely devoid of expression.

  Mark turned to the side and slipped off his underwear, kicking them off to lie on top of his jeans.

  “I’m not taking off my socks,” he pronounced, thinking of the scum that had come upon this floor on a regular basis for God knew how long.

  The man held out a gold coin. “Watch the movie,” he said. “Then tell me if you still want to go to NightWhere again.”

  Mark nodded. Part of him wanted to scream, No matter what you show me, I want to go back to NightWhere because I need to find my goddamned wife!

  But he refrained.

  Instead, he took the coin and stepped into Booth 13. He closed the door and pushed the coin into the slot. Instantly, the TV monitor came to life, at first showing a naked blonde on a hotel bed, lying back and mouthing for the camera with fat, sensual lips, “Do you want to know what I could do to you? Call me, at 8-6-6…”

  But then the scene changed. The advertisement faded out and a darker room took over the screen.

  Suddenly, the TV scene looked a lot more amateurish. A lot more real. It showed a man, chained to a stone table. The guy was youngish, thirty-something. His hair was dark, and his face warm and instantly likeable. Maybe he was Italian, maybe Greek, but his dark, wide complexion somehow telegraphed that this was the kind of guy you’d be friends with on the first conversation.

  Mark wondered about the chains around the guy’s wrists and ankles, but the guy looked happy; his eyelids fluttered, and his cock was clearly hard. A big cock, from the way it lay across his belly.

  Why was he smiling? Mark wondered briefly…and then that question was answered, as a sensual hand reached into the film frame.

  The woman ran her hands up the chained man’s arms until they covered his wrists and then she leaned her face in as well, so that she was visible on the screen.

  Mark recognized her instantly. He’d had a suspicion just from seeing her hands.

  The woman leaning over the chained man’s body was Rae.

  He wasn’t terribly surprised to recognize her, given the circumstances that had landed him naked in a porn shop video booth.

  What was surprising was that…Rae was holding a knife.

  A moment later, he quailed as she lifted the blade above the man’s chest, but she didn’t suddenly plunge it down to stab his heart; instead, she lowered the knife slowly and used it to etch her initials in blood across the man’s chest. And then she set the knife aside and began moving her crotch in a rhythmic motion on top of the man, clearly turned on by the blood.

  Mark felt himself grow hard, watching his wife grind atop the chained man’s hips. He had always found something incredibly exciting in seeing his wife with another. He could never have lived their swingers lifestyle if he hadn’t. The need to always feel someone new was Rae’s, but he couldn’t say that he hadn’t enjoyed watching the results.

  Mark watched as she lay her chest against the man and rubbed her nipples in the blood of her name. Then she raised herself back on her knees, still grinding her pussy down on the man’s groin, drawing his cock in and out of herself. Apparently being cut made her “victim” hard as well, because she was clearly enjoying his erection.

  Mark’s hand unconsciously gripped himself as he watched Rae fuck. He rubbed himself, enjoying her obvious, unbridled excitement. He moaned slightly when she opened her own mouth, approaching orgasm thanks to using the man beneath her.

  “You are naked and masturbating in a smelly basement peep show booth to a video of your wife fucking a man that she’s just carved her name into with a knife,” Mark whispered at one point to himself. He recognized the absurdity of it all, but that didn’t make him take his hand off his cock.

  Watching her hips slowly move up and down on another man’s crotch made him breathe faster. He fixated on the muscles of her ass as they shifted, and watched her skin move across her shoulder blades and the small nubs of her backbone. She leaned over the man and let her hair fall forward, sometimes brushing the guy’s face as she bent in to kiss him and rub her own chest to his.

  When she pulled back up and rode him vertically, the camera moved around to capture the lust of her facial expressions. Her mouth hung open in a continuous O of carnal excitement, and her chest was smeared red with her lover’s blood.

  Mark stroked himself as she stroked her lover, rocking on him to guide his cock deeper. The sound of his wife’s moaning from the tiny TV speakers-punctuated by the deeper grunts and groans of the man on the table beneath her as she ground herself hard against him-brought Mark quickly to his own point of losing control.

  But then, as Mark felt his own mu
scles tensing, as he forgot the place where he was and the reason he was here, as the pleasure wave grew, the camera pulled back and he could see that Rae and her chained lover were surrounded by people wearing dark robes…and all of them held knives as well. And then all of them dropped those robes and leaned in to stab at the man on the table. In minutes the scene was a bloodbath, with two dozen naked people smeared in blood all leaning close as Rae continued to increase her motions, fucking the man on the table as he bled to death. The man clearly screamed out in pain at his wounds, but Rae didn’t slow her forced use of him. If anything, her sexual rhythm grew faster.

  Then the ringleader, Kharon, picked up the discarded knife that Rae had used to carve her name into the man’s chest and handed it back to Rae.

  Mark heard what Kharon said clearly. And the man beneath her did too, as he suddenly began to twist and roll, trying to get away from Rae.

  “Kill him.”

  But the man didn’t, couldn’t, throw her off of him. His arms and legs remained chained, and she pinned his protesting midsection down to the table with her hips and ass. She held the knife out in front of her and stared at it.

  “No,” the man beneath her said. His voice was faint, but Mark could hear him say it over and over again as he shook his head from side to side. “No, I was only joking. I didn’t mean it.”

  Rae held the knife out in front of her, unmoving.

  In front of her, Kharon said something, but Mark couldn’t hear what it was. The camera shifted slowly around until Rae’s face was fully in frame. And Mark could see her decision solidify. He could see it in the sudden steel of her eyes and the lines that crinkled briefly in her forehead. And the mean smile that suddenly overtook her lips.

  The camera pulled back again just in time for Mark to see her move the knife lower, holding its blade to the man’s neck.