by John Everson
“Nice to see you too,” Mark said.
Richard laughed. “It will be,” he said. “You have no idea.”
Kharon’s voice rang out across the pit. “Drink, or drown,” he said.
Mark looked back at Richard. His friend was smiling, but his smile held very little humor.
“Here’s the thing, ol’ pal. You’re kind of a pathetic loser, and I don’t know why I ever hung out with you. I should have taken Rae away from you just to save her a lifetime of grief. But, you know, 20/20 vision and all that. At the moment, I’m looking forward to one of the best blow jobs of my life. And you’re gonna give it to me.”
Mark shook his head and laughed. “I don’t think so.”
Richard crossed his arms, letting his hard cock poke straight out at Mark’s face. He shook his hips to make it weave in the air, pointing…
“Drink, or drown,” Kharon said again.
“Here’s the thing,” Richard explained. “Unless you suck the cock that Rae really loved, you’re not getting out of here. And Kharon’s got a hundred other followers who would be happy to come and piss on you for the rest of the night.”
Mark turned and looked back at Kharon. The Watcher’s lips twisted down, in a sneer. He said nothing, but his head nodded, slightly.
All around the pit, the naked guards stood close, not allowing any place for Mark to pull himself up and run away. Not that he knew where he could run to anyway. Behind them, a dozen more white legs walked into position. And behind those, he saw another line begin.
“You don’t have a lot of options, my friend,” Richard laughed. “But you better do a good job. Otherwise…Kharon’s just going to make you do it again. And you know, I’m the judge. So…make it count.”
Mark felt tears gathering at the corners of his eyes. When he’d come to look for Rae, when he’d insisted that he be allowed to see her, he’d never thought that he’d have to endure shit like this. And now…Richard was right. He didn’t have a lot of options. He bent down until his face was eye to eye with Richard’s crotch. Then he closed his eyes and opened his mouth. Something smooth and yet hard entered his lips. And pressed against the top of his mouth. It moved against him.
Something inside Mark died at that moment.
“Rae did it a lot better,” Richard remarked.
Someone in the onlooking crowd began to laugh, and soon the rest joined in.
Mark refused to open his eyes, but tears leaked from their edges. They streamed down his cheeks, cutting through the wetness of his humiliation.
And then he heard his mother’s voice.
“Oh my goodness, Mark, I never knew.”
He opened his eyes. He pulled away from Richard and stared in complete disbelief. His mother stood with the crowd of Watchers, naked as the rest of them. He cringed at the sight of her low-hanging breasts and grey thatch of crotch hair-things he never wanted to see.
But worse, his father stood naked next to her. Dad looked just as he had the last time Mark had seen him, five years before. Just before he’d had a heart attack and died in the bathroom. A year before his mom had ODed on sleeping pills.
They were both dead and couldn’t possibly be here now. Yet…
“I never thought a son of mine would be a cocksucker,” his dad said. The disgust dripped from his words. “Look at you! Look at what you’re doing. Is that what your mother and I taught you? No wonder you can’t keep your wife happy. Poor thing. She deserves better. You really are disgusting. I don’t think I can ever look at you again.”
His father turned away and took Mark’s mom into his arms, slipping his arms around her wide back and waist. Mark had to look away when they began French-kissing, and his mom began to grab his father’s wrinkled, hairy ass with clear intent.
But looking away from his impossible parents only put him back to the hard dick in front of him.
“You either make this cum, or you’re going to get another shower,” Richard reminded. “And if you don’t get busy, you’re going to have to start on me all over again.”
Sure enough, Mark saw that Richard’s steel was turning to taffy.
Mark closed his eyes once again and pushed everything from his mind. The thing in his mouth, the sounds of his parents fucking nearby, the laughter of the surrounding crowd. He forced himself not to throw up and pictured Rae’s broad, welcoming smile.
He had to see it again.
That would make all of this worth it.
He hoped.
Mark opened his mouth.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Last Time
The invitation came just in time.
Gordon had hidden the body in the loose sand of the crawlspace a few days ago, but he couldn’t hide the fact that his wife was no longer at home. He’d told the couple people who asked about her that they had had a fight and that she’d stormed out.
After he’d laid her body in the basement, he had driven her car to a neighboring town and left it in the supermarket parking lot just to add some substance to the lie. So her car was gone. He’d put some personal belongings in the backseat for good measure, along with an overnight bag with deodorant, toothbrush, minipads, condoms and underwear and a T-shirt. So far, apparently, the grocery hadn’t noticed it-nobody had contacted him about finding it.
He’d called up Miriam’s sister, Belle, to see if she could watch Freddy for him the next few days while he was at work since Miriam “had apparently run off”. Belle was usually free, since she hated actually doing anything resembling regular fucking work. She seemed to spend all of her time surfing Facebook and spying on her friends, if she wasn’t texting them. But she did love her nephew, so he locked that problem up with one phone call.
He thought there was a delicious irony in having Miriam’s sister sit on his couch and take care of his baby, while her sister was lying in the sand just a few yards below her feet.
Belle was younger and better looking than Miriam ever had been. But she had the same propensity to flap her gums too much. Tonight, he’d given her two twenties to stay late, in addition to having been there all day. Belle never turned down money. Sometimes he wondered if she’d have done it if he’d offered her a couple of Ben Franklins to suck his dick.
He hoped that he wouldn’t have the time to find out. Though he was tempted to try.
Gordon had packed a small overnight bag with his own bathroom essentials and extra clothes and had stowed it in the passenger’s seat of his Toyota pickup.
He hoped that, after tonight, he wouldn’t be coming back.
Belle would be pissed when he didn’t come back, but she’d take care of Freddy. So he wasn’t worried about his son. Kid’d probably be better off without either of his parents in the end.
They’d probably eventually discover the body in the basement, but what would he care? If things worked out, Gordon would be a full-time resident in NightWhere and wouldn’t be seen in the Granville Heights subdivision again.
He didn’t like to think about the possibilities if he did end up coming back home tonight.
But he was really feeling good about the idea that he wasn’t coming back. He knew how to handle a whip and a cane. He knew how to be cruel. Why would they say no after he had proven his loyalty for so long?
He would do anything that they asked.
Anything.
Gordon ran his thumb along the edge of the razor-sharp knife he kept sleeved at his waist. He smiled and licked away the small drop of blood that gathered on the head of his thumb. He looked forward to whatever twisted shit the freaky Watchers at NightWhere could come up with.
Anything.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Woke Up With a Monster
Everything hurt.
Her brain throbbed. Pain pulsed like the rhythm of a train. She didn’t want to open her eyes. For a moment, she didn’t. She simply thought back to what had happened sometime this morning. Sometime after she’d emerged, bloodstained and naked from the gothic doorway that guarded The Red.
She had had to tell Sin-D about what had happened to Peter and Amelia. The bartendress had smiled at Rae’s composure (or lack thereof) and poured her a vodka with a splash of cherry juice. “Virgin blood,” she’d laughed, pushing it forward. “Drink it up, you need it.”
“Have you ever done anything like that?” Rae asked at dawn, round about her third drink of “virgin blood”.
Sin-D laughed and then slipped the thin straps of her shirt down from her shoulders, exposing the globes of her breasts. But that wasn’t what she wanted Rae to see. Sin-D turned her back to Rae and said, “Touch it.”
Rae reached out and put her fingertips on the bronze skin of the bartendress’s shoulder blades. They were covered in a network of thin pink lines, culminating in two rippled puckers on either side of her spine. Rae could feel the gnarled flesh of the scar tissue there; it was different to feel it, rather than to simply witness that Sin-D had scars.
“I’ve done worse things than that,” Sin-D said. She turned and for a moment, Rae was confronted by the wide, pink silver dollars of the woman’s prominent nipples before Sin-D pulled up her shirt.
“You can do anything in NightWhere,” Sin-D said. “Killing is easy. Surviving to do it again…that’s the hard part.”
An hour later, the club closed for the coming of morning, and Kharon turned up at Rae’s unsteady elbow to escort her back to her room.
An hour can allow a lot of alcohol to enter the bloodstream.
Rae struggled now to open her eyes, as she thought about Kharon and what he had taken from her. What he had given to her.
In the windowless dark of her new bedroom, he had shown himself to be more than simply the man who ran this strange sex club. He was the god who ran it.
When she had taken his robe from him and let him stand strictly naked before her, Rae nearly pulled away.
She had seen it before, on the first night she’d stayed. But at a glance, Kharon was hideous.
His face was gaunt, his chest bony and small. His belly was white and sickly looking, and his entire frame seemed a bit crooked, as if he’d been broken and sewn back together again and again. She knew he had saved her life, and yet, some part of her knew too that he was sucking her life dry for his own purposes. She had no illusions-Kharon was not benevolent. But what did he really want from her-that’s what she didn’t know. He was demanding, but also kind, as if she was some kind of sexual pet. She liked being a pet.
She had watched him kill the “rabbits” and had done his bidding when he demanded that she kill Peter and Amelia. He had no qualms about taking life.
When would it be her turn?
All those things ran through her brain, but when he put his hands on either side of her head and guided her mouth to his hips, she didn’t resist. Just the opposite, really. Part of her reveled in the danger of being this man’s pet. If he was a man at all… She’d realized over the past few days that there was more to NightWhere than sex and pain.
There was a darker, deeper element. And she had begun to wonder if Kharon and the other Watchers were even still human.
Certainly their needs were familiar, she thought as he guided her head up and down in his lap.
Her head was pounding with a burgeoning hangover when she felt something gush behind her lips and down her throat. The taste was acrid and bitter, and when she looked up, Kharon’s eyes seemed to glow with a fiery light.
As his orgasm dripped from the corner of her mouth, she looked into those eyes and asked him, “Where are we really? This isn’t some abandoned warehouse that we’ve taken over just for the night.”
He grinned faintly and shook his head.
“Are we in hell?”
Kharon laughed. “Hell is for the dead,” he said. “We are in NightWhere.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Lesson Two
Despite appearances, humans are hardy creatures. On the surface they seem weak and easy to take down-they have no external skeleton, spines or protective armor, lack the advantage of long deadly claws or sharp teeth and can be fatally wounded with just one blow. They appear soft, fleshy, easily broken.
But…strangely…despite their apparent outer frailty, humans are resilient beasts. They thrive on hardship-witness the generations of men and women in India who live on the brink of starvation their entire lives. Humans survive and triumph over the bitter cold of Antarctica and the sandstorms and brutal heat of the Sahara. And never mind the elements. There are dozens of stories about individuals, abducted and locked in depravity, who have weathered daily physical abuse, only to emerge unbeaten years or even decades after first being locked in someone’s dungeon.
Humans are survivors.
They outlive. Outlast.
When everything looks impossible, the human brain somehow trumps the physical impossibility and pushes the frail flesh farther.
All that said and considered, Mark wasn’t sure that he could survive the second challenge put before him by Kharon.
After the humiliation episode was over, they had taken him to a small bedroom where he had spent part of the night leaning over the toilet in the adjoining bathroom and throwing up. Then he’d spent an hour in the shower trying to cleanse himself from the degradation.
But he had finally fallen asleep. And when he’d awoken…Damia was standing next to his bed. He/she was nude, yet with the decoration of the tattoos and metal studs covering her body, the nudity barely registered with Mark at first.
But Damia didn’t let it rest. She swiveled her hips at his eye level, letting the bluish-pink head of her cock slide back and forth on Mark’s sheets. Taunting him.
“You licked the dick last night pretty good,” she teased. “So how about giving me a little of that lip now?”
Mark shoved her away from his bed and sat up.
“Tease,” Damia complained.
“Fuck off,” he said.
“We’ve got a few minutes,” she said, moving back to the bed and climbing up on the mattress to kneel in front of him. “Let’s fuck off together.”
Mark rolled out of bed and looked for his jeans, hiding his crotch from her view.
“You’re not going to find those here,” the voice from the bed warned. “Kharon won’t allow you to hide yourself from us. We get to see you all the time. All of you. No secrets. Have to say, the view’s not too bad.”
Mark thought about how enjoyable it would be to put both of his hands around that thin neck and strangle the life from Damia until her fruity musical voice was silent for good.
“You’d have a much harder time strangling me than you think,” Damia said. Her voice was dangerously low.
Mark looked back at her and saw that her face held none of the sarcastic, playful humor she normally teased him with. She looked very ready to see him try to do her harm. And he sensed that if he did…despite her willowy form and half-female softness…he’d take the harder fall.
Mark didn’t risk it. He slipped off the bed and used the bathroom. When he came out, he joined the waiting Damia at the door.
“What’s the evil of the day?” he asked, half joking.
“Pain,” she replied, not joking at all.
Once again, Mark followed the leering skull tattoos of Damia’s backside down a long hallway. When their walk began, he’d thought they were in the dark, but soon he realized that there was always a darker place than the place he’d been before. The red haze that had glowed along the floor at the start of their walk soon deteriorated into pitch. Every few yards, a candle sconce lit the walls, which all looked strangely shiny and wet. But in between, the shadows seemed impenetrable. He hurried to keep up with Damia, as sometimes her pale rear disappeared into that blackness, and as afraid as he was of what was to come, he was more afraid of being lost out here in the corridor. There were movements as they passed along, and sometimes, far away, the echo of screams. God knew what lurked in the corners.
“God doesn’t know,” Damia answered his thoughts from ahead.
“Stop doing that,” he said. It was disturbing to know that the freak could tell every thought that went through his head.
“Not every thought,” Damia laughed, answering his head again. “But when your thoughts scream, I can hear you. And if I’m a freak, well…” she stopped and turned, and Mark almost ran into her. She leaned forward and planted a wet kiss on his mouth. “…well then you’re a freak lover!”
Mark wiped her spit off his lips with the back of his hand. “Not by choice,” he said.
“You chose to be here,” she retorted. “You know you want it.”
He opened his mouth to answer, but she put two fingers to his lips. “Later,” she promised. “You can have your way with me then. Now, Kharon is waiting. You don’t want to make him wait. Trust me on this, if nothing else.”
Mark nodded, and Damia motioned for him to step through a dark doorway that exited the hall.
They were waiting.
Twin rows of black-robed figures stood in a line that led down the rough-hewn stone floor. The foreground of the place was shadowed and warm, but Mark could see the orange glow of flames far down the other end. The place seemed to stretch on to infinity, an endless floor of grey-stone bricks and shadowed walls far to the left and right that were lined with wall sconces belching gutters of flame that both lit the room with dancing light and scorched the air with sulphur.
Damia’s cool hands pressed him forward, and Mark walked down the aisle between the figures. They didn’t move as he passed, but he could see the flare of light in their eyes as they watched him walk.
Kharon stood at the end of the aisle. His long pale face was instantly recognizable to Mark from yards away.
“You’ve gone through humiliation for Rae,” Kharon said as Mark drew closer. “But now you must go through pain.”
Kharon gestured to one of the figures at the head of the line of still figures. A large man separated himself from the rest and walked to stand at Kharon’s side. “This is Gordon,” Kharon said. “He’ll be your guide through this maze of hurt. I can guarantee you that he won’t be gentle. Many people in NightWhere bear the scars of his beatings. His wife did not survive them. But in the end, he is just your guide. You will decide how fast and how far you want to go. I have only this warning: There is no going back. Once you begin this path, the only way out is through. If you try to return to where we stand now…you will die.”
