by John Everson
“Sleep,” a voice somewhere said. “Let it go now.”
Chapter Forty-One
Plea
Kharon stood outside in the dark. The shapeless, formless black of nothing roiled all around. Daytime had come, and NightWhere slept. Mostly.
Another cycle of sin delivered. Kharon never tired of the nighttime. He existed to lead people into the dark. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. The air of limbo was chill and heavy. He savored the moment of solitude. They were few for him; he needed to sleep soon to be ready for a new cycle, and once he woke…NightWhere was demanding.
“Let him go,” a voice behind him begged.
Kharon opened his eyes in surprise. Nobody disturbed him at this secret moment between the death of night and the birth of day.
She stood nearby, pale skin aglow in the black.
He smiled and slowly shook his head. “He demanded to be here,” Kharon said. “I explained to him what the toll would be. I offered him the chance to turn back.”
“He doesn’t understand, not really,” she said. A tear glistened on the marble of her cheek. A liquid ruby against the pale marble of her skin.
“He has free will. He made his decision. I cannot make you leave, but you cannot interfere. If you do… Then you lose-eternally. I will make sure you decorate a cross in the pit and no one will be able to stop me. Do not go beyond your bounds. His path is nearly done. For better or worse.”
“You mock those words,” she whispered.
“Yes,” he grinned. “Yes, I do.”
Chapter Forty-Two
Lesson Three
Mark opened his eyes to a room that glowed faintly from the corners of the floor and ceiling. The room’s edges bled a reddish light, enough to lift the darkness and wreathe the walls in bloody shadow. Everything seemed blurry at first, and he wondered for a split second where he was before he reached up to wipe his eyes.
He realized as he did so that he could reach up to wipe his eyes.
Without help. Or pain.
The events of the last night flashed in his head and he took a deep breath. The pain had been…unbearable. He had been sure that despite making it through the fire and blades, he was a dead man once he reached the other side. So much of his body had been burned, so much blood lost… Hesitantly, he tried to move his legs.
They slid across the cool silk of the sheets without problem. They felt a little achy maybe, but no more so than after any good, deep night’s sleep. He felt rested. As the fog completely cleared, Mark realized that he felt…good.
He sat up.
No pain.
Mark held his arms out, palms up, and studied them in the faint light. When he’d exited the tunnel of blades, his forearms had been covered with blood, and the palms of his hands had been hamburger.
Now? They were clean. The skin unbroken.
Had he dreamed it all? The whole scenario seemed ridiculous when you thought about it. What sex club would really have moats of fire and acid tucked in its back hall…or a tunnel designed to kill you with a thousand cuts by the time you reached the other side?
Had they slipped him a hallucinogenic?
Mark stared closer at his hands. The normal, familiar creases extended from his wrists up to the center of the palm and then slipped across in a double-lined fold at the center.
But there were other marks on his hands as well. A lattice of pale-pink lines. And on his left hand, a faintly puckered circular pattern. As he stared, he remembered putting that hand down right on top of a blade protruding from the floor. He’d only seen it as the edge was slipping past the skin and into his palm. The pain at lifting that hand back off the knife had been excruciating.
The cut was healed. It looked like a scar from years before.
Mark slipped his feet off the bed and stood up, staring down at his legs, which also, on the surface, looked unblemished. But when he bent over, he could see that parts of the skin, where it had literally been burned away, were paler than the rest. He saw the faint pink scars where the blades had cut beneath the dark hair of his legs.
“How long have I been asleep?” he whispered.
Something moved in the other room.
Mark turned towards the sound just in time to see the glint of red light flicker off a couple dozen silver studs and posts decorating the otherwise flawless skin of a hermaphrodite’s shoulders and ears.
“Did you dream about me?” Damia asked with a knowing lilt. “No worries, I’m here for you!”
“No,” Mark refuted. “But how long was I out-last night I was…”
“A bloody mess?” Damia finished for him. “Yes, you were. But a good night’s sleep in NightWhere cures everything. If you survive the night…you’ll be just fine the next morning. One of the perks, you know.”
Mark shook his head. “No, I didn’t know. But how…”
Damia stepped closer, pushing her chest out until the studded tips of her nipples brushed against his. “Don’t ask,” she said, lifting her mouth to cover his. Mark felt something warm and hard move against the skin of his thigh, and felt a surge of disgust. He pushed her away. “No,” he said.
“Still not ready for the best, huh?” she grinned. She pinched a nipple with one hand and held up a turgid penis with the other. “I guess I’ll have to take you to the rest then. Last chance.”
Mark shook his head.
“Suit yourself. You would have enjoyed me a lot more than what you’re about to do. Trust me.”
Mark said nothing, but followed the tattooed skulls for the third time down a dark hall. They passed the room they had entered on the first day, and Mark recognized the doorway that they had entered last night.
He slowed down a moment to look inside, but there was nothing there…just darkness, with the hint of an orange glow far away.
“I know how you enjoyed it, but we’re done there,” Damia joked. She slipped a hand around his wrist and pulled.
Mark grabbed at the doorframe and missed. But his hand slid along the wall and felt something warm and wet there. When he pulled it away, his palm was slicked in red.
“What is this?” he asked.
“Just what it looks like,” Damia laughed. “It flows from the flaying beds to irrigate all of our walls. Pain is the lifeblood of NightWhere.”
Mark stared at his hand in disgust. With no place to clean it, he finally wiped it off on his thigh.
Damia walked on. The corridor grew narrower, the ceiling constricting until it was just above their heads. At times, Damia ducked as she walked to avoid a gnarled outcropping in the rock.
Mark was more aware than ever of how the walls glistened…he imagined Damia and he were microscopic, walking inside a vein.
The corridor ended in a doorway. It looked heavy and medieval-dark, rough-hewn boards held together by dark iron strips. Damia pulled it open and waved Mark inside. “It’s time for you to do your part to keep our corridors wet,” he/she said.
Mark shivered at the words. He didn’t like the sound of that.
The room was a torture chamber. Unlike the last two places they had taken him, which had seemed to extend on and on, this room was very contained. Maybe fifteen feet long in one direction and twenty in the other.
A circle of the robed figures stood just ahead. As Mark stepped forward, the front of the circle parted to reveal what was at the center.
A woman. She was nude, but appeared to have been painted; her skin was black as pitch. Her head was covered in a burlap bag that was tied with twine around her neck, and the NightWhere logo of a snake curled in a spiral to eat its own tail was painted across the midnight color of her belly in red. Her arms were tied above her head to a pole. Her ankles were also fastened.
Kharon stepped out of the mob. His ghoulish face showed what was supposed to be a smile, Mark thought. Yellowing teeth spread beneath lips so pale they appeared grey.
A corpse smile, he thought.
“Humiliation,” said Kharon. “Pain.”
The Watcher stepped closer to Mark and wrapped long coffin-ready fingers around Mark’s wrists. His touch was cold as the grave and hard as bone. Mark couldn’t help but see the ribs pressing through the man’s parchment-thin skin, or the blue veins that protruded across the man’s chest and waist where he was poorly covered by the robe.
“You’ve passed the trials where your own life was the toy. Today, you’ll need to use another. We have a willing victim here for you. She needs to be defiled. We have drawn you the map of her degradation. It remains up to you to complete.”
“And if I do, you’ll finally let me see Rae?” Mark asked.
Kharon nodded. “You will see her if you do this. But I warn you…she will not see you as the knight in shining armor you think you are being. She is happy here. And she is trying to complete her own final steps towards the place she has always yearned to go.”
“I’ll take that risk,” Mark said.
Damia stepped forward and pressed a black leather whip into Mark’s hand. “You don’t know what you’re saying,” she laughed.
Kharon turned the woman so that her naked back and ass faced Mark. “Whip her until her flesh melts beneath your power.”
Mark gulped. How far did they expect him to go?
“Remember what you looked like at the end of yesterday?” Damia whispered in his ear. Her eyes flared with excitement. “That’s what you’re going to do today…to her.”
He raised the leather and snapped it forward. The end landed with a flat slap against the woman’s shoulder blades. She didn’t flinch.
“You’ll need to step it up a notch,” Damia laughed from behind him. “Or we’ll be here for a year.”
Mark pulled his arm back and snapped the whip harder the next time, and this time it actually did make a cracking sound. Where it touched the moon of the woman’s ass, the black paint flaked away, and the paler skin beneath bloomed red.
“Better,” Damia said. “But still pathetic.”
Mark pulled back and let the leather go again, and again, each time growing a little harder and firmer in his delivery, and slowly beginning to cover the woman’s back in hurt.
“I don’t see anything yet,” Damia taunted. “Are you kissing her with that thing, or flogging?”
Mark rolled his eyes. He wasn’t used to handling a whip, and he didn’t really want to hurt this woman either.
“Unless you find a way to enjoy the hurting…you’ll never pass this trial,” Damia whispered in his ear.
Mark was sweating now, the exertion of handling the whip made his armpits and chest grow damp, but still he struggled to hit harder. He tried to imagine the woman not as some innocent stranger, but rather as Kharon, or Damia…people whom he wanted to hurt.
The gambit worked.
The more he thought about Damia’s cartoonish back in front of him, the harder he was able to make the whip snap. Weals of red began to pinstripe the woman’s back, and when one blow landed perfectly across the woman’s snow-white ass, the skin instantly changed color-from the faux black to a more human-hurt purple-and a moment later, a spot of blood appeared at the top of the mark.
Behind him, Mark heard voices begin to chant. He couldn’t tell what they said, but it seemed ritualistic. Maybe demonic. Certainly rife with evil.
From somewhere deep within the walls a steady pounding began as well. It echoed through the small room like a heartbeat, steady and slow.
Mark’s arm began to tire, but Kharon urged him on. “Speak your thoughts,” the ghoulish creature urged. “Tell us about the pain you inflict. Tell us why you defile this woman.”
“I…want…to…whip you…to death!” Mark said, slamming the whip harder and harder into the woman’s back. Blood now broke from several places on her skin, dripping down her shoulder blades and ribs as he beat her, while explaining through clenched teeth, “If this were you, Kharon, I’d…be…happy!”
Two hands grabbed Mark at the waist and ran down his thighs.
“What, you don’t want to whip me to death?” an annoyingly feminine rasp asked, while a tongue wet the back of his knee.
“If I could…Damia…” Mark promised, “…I would…kill you.”
The whip was hitting the body wetly now. The woman’s back ran with blood, and Mark could see the deep red lines that bit down beneath the skin-carved canals in her flesh.
The woman flinched, but never screamed. Mark wondered at one point if she was truly even conscious.
But then two robed figures stepped forward and took the woman by the shoulders, turning her around to face him.
Mark’s breathing was now coming hard, and he bent over, struggling to catch his breath.
Damia stepped up to the woman, ran a finger down her back and held the finger up, dripping with blood. Then the hermaphrodite used it to draw a circle around her sex.
“Let’s see how well you’ve mastered the whip,” Damia said. “When you hit the bull’s eye, we’ll move on to the next stage of our little…game.”
“Jesus,” Mark said. “I can’t hit her there. C’mon.”
“You’re going to quit now?” Damia taunted. “I knew you’d never go through with this. Rae is better off where she is-without you.”
“Fuck you,” Mark said and pulled his whip arm back. As he did, he felt something tug against the leather. He looked back to see one of Kharon’s helpers holding the last tail of the whip. A black-haired woman with deathly white fingers fastened something silver to the edge of the whip.
A metal hook.
“Time to go fishing,” Damia said. “Remember, the faster you hit it, the faster you quit it!”
Mark felt a sinking sensation in his groin. The first time he hit this woman, he was going to rip her skin. And to hit the place he was supposed to…with a hook? Jesus fuckin’ Christ! His arm felt frozen in place…he couldn’t do this.
“Rae never loved you,” Damia whispered behind him. “She only loved to be defiled. Think about that…marrying you was her way of being degraded…”
Mark struck out with the whip without thinking. The anger took him over. The hook caught just to the left of the woman’s belly button, but instantly pulled free, a trickle of blood flowing in its wake.
“Nice shot, Sherlock. Maybe aim next time? You didn’t even hit the circle!”
The next slap caught her above the belly, beneath her left breast. A jagged wound appeared as soon as Mark pulled the whip back. He held the whip in his hands for a moment then, and stared at the three-hooked implement that was tied with a heavy filament to the end of his whip. It really was just an old-fashioned, three-pronged fishhook.
“If that were me up there, would you miss?” Damia asked. Her voice was a seductive tease in his left ear.
“No,” Mark growled and readied his arm to release the whip once more.
He caught her five more times across the belly and with one horrible strike hooked her breast, stretching the skin out taut before the flesh released the hook and began to drip blood, down across her belly and down across the target Damia had drawn in the woman’s own blood.
With each miss, the woman’s body shook, and when the hooks caught her breast, she did give out a faint, gurgled scream.
And then Mark held his arm back and took a deep breath, really focusing before he let the whip go. The slap of the end of the leather hit right between her legs, in that narrow cleft where every man wanted to go, and where now, none would enter without seeing the scar that Mark had made. When he pulled the whip back, setting the hook and then gouging her as he called it back, there was skin stuck to the hooks, and the delta of the woman’s crotch instantly blossomed in angry red.
Someone stepped up and took the whip from Mark’s hand, replacing it with the hilt of something heavy. He brought his arm down and saw that he now held a black-handled dagger.
The robed figures moved as one and released the woman from the pole. Her arms fell from above her head like dead weight, and she clearly needed support as the group escorted her to
a stone table in the middle of the room, behind the pole she’d been tied to.
They lifted and laid her on her back. Damia took Mark by the elbow and led him to the table. “Now comes the fun part,” she said. Mark didn’t like the way she emphasized the word fun.
“You’ve made your mark on her backside, but now you must make our mark on her front. She will forever be marked as a sacrifice to NightWhere.”
Mark looked at the hermaphrodite with total incredulity. He held up the knife. “Are you suggesting that I cut her with this?”
“Not just cut her,” Damia clarified. “You will follow the pattern we have drawn on her belly. And please don’t make any mistakes…you only get one shot at something like this.”
“I’m not going to stab somebody,” Mark said. “I could kill her!”
“Don’t stab too deep then.”
The Watchers moved and stood in line on either side of the table. The woman lay still. Mark held the tip of the knife to the top of the spiral snake. His hand shook visibly.
“Cut her,” Kharon commanded. “Use her flesh as your own. She is nothing. Clay to mold. Make her in our image.”
He’d come this far and already had turned the woman’s back into a bloody, torn mess. If he could keep his cuts very shallow, he wouldn’t hurt her too badly. And then this nightmare would all finally be over. Mark took a deep breath and pushed the edge of the knife against the woman’s skin. It resisted only for a second, and then the blade sank in. The blade was sharp. A thin trail of red instantly bloomed around the edge of the knife, and Mark struggled to keep its contact with her skin very gentle. He only wanted to break the skin, not go deeper.
He moved it a few inches, beginning to make the first arc, when Kharon stepped forward and put a hand on his wrist. “Cut her, don’t tickle her.”
“I don’t want to kill her,” Mark said.
“She is aware of the risk. Press harder. I want to see her flesh part.”
Mark’s heart beat harder, and he felt the tears well up in his eyes. He had done a lot of things in his life that he was ashamed of. He had done a lot of things that he really didn’t want to do.
