by John Everson
Mark walked faster, willing down the panic that was beginning to grow in his gut. He was trapped here…lost in a field of death. Or near death.
The heavy stench of iron hung strong in the air; he could taste it on his tongue. It reminded him of the heavy, palpable air of the Everglades. It was like he was walking through the swamp of death.
Mark ran.
Laughter rang out behind him and rippled through the bodies like a breeze. “You can run…” one ghastly woman cackled, reaching out a hand with no fingers to brush him as he passed.
“But you can’t hide,” a man with no lips finished.
Mark didn’t slow down. Until he fell down. His foot hit a heavy slick of blood, and he tried to catch his balance, but instead he overcorrected and pitched forward, landing with his face inches above the canal of dark blood flowing away from the Field of Flesh. The smell was ripe-rich and thick and metallic, but also somehow sweet-to the edge of rot. Mark pushed away from the wet, slick stones and stifled the urge to gag. His arms were wet, and he tried to wipe them off on his jeans before moving forward again, this time at a slower but still-urgent pace.
The whispers now quieted, and as he looked around, he realized that the bodies here were thinner. Paler. Closer to death?
Their skin all shared a similar parchment-like texture; in some, he could literally see the emaciated muscles beneath. These must be the oldest ones, he surmised. Many of them were missing lips and eyelids; their faces looked like clotted clay over bones, their eyes rheumy, blue pools of jelly. Many of the women still had full, prominent breasts-the badge of youth,-yet their lined, faded faces suggested an age difficult to mesh with the fading youth of their bodies.
He stopped at one woman who lacked both an arm and a leg; blood flowed in a steady trickle from her stumps, but her stomach, though almost translucent, still had the form of a twenty-year-old. The nipples of her breasts protruded in an apparent constant state of excitement. Her cheeks were high, and her lips tight; but the hair had fallen from her eyelids and lashes. Her eyes had the milky sheen of the blind.
“How long have you been here?” Mark asked.
She was slow to speak, lips moving in obvious pain. “How old is the earth?” she answered in a voice like sand.
Her eyes moved to stare in his direction, but he could tell she did not see him. “There is no beginning and no end. Only this moment forever.”
“How did you get here?” Mark asked, his voice almost a whisper.
“The same as you,” she said. Her voice barely whispered above the faint whispers from elsewhere in the field. “I accepted the invitation.”
“But when…” he began to ask, but she cut him off.
“You have very little time,” she said. “Use what you have before you are planted here with us.”
Mark nodded. “Thanks,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
The girl laughed, her voice growing stronger. “You would be,” she hissed, “If I still had my arm…”
Her eyes seemed to focus finally then, and Mark saw a hunger that decades, maybe centuries, of racking pain had never stilled.
Behind him, a flurry of voices suddenly let out a series of cries and screams. Mark turned and saw a disturbance in the field, many rows back. The bodies looked as if they were swaying in a heavy wind.
“Are you the harvester or the harvest?” a shrill voice called from his left.
Mark had a sudden chill in his stomach, as he considered the prospect of joining the field.
He began to run once more, and after a few more rows of faded flesh, he turned to look behind him. The screams and cries from the field were closer now. Just a few rows away. He could see something moving now in the field. Something black.
A Watcher?
Mark swore and turned to run down the path as fast as he could. From the sounds behind him, the Watcher was closing in.
Finally he saw the end. The pale corpse-like bodies gave way to a darkness. He couldn’t tell what that darkness really was, but Mark breathed a sigh of relief for it. He wasn’t lost. The end was in sight. Really…it was the beginning. Somewhere in that black, the rest of NightWhere lay.
And Rae.
Somewhere ahead, was his wife.
He broke through the last row of bodies and stopped, doubled over, trying to catch his breath. Behind him, the bodies shivered and moved. Whispers turned to cries. A black figure moved just a couple rows inside the field, coming towards him.
Mark turned back to look ahead. The stone path stretched out in front of him for several yards, interrupted in the middle by a dark canal. Mark took a deep breath and straightened up. Then he sprinted forward to stare down into the channel. He could see the small gutters all along the path that exited the field and emptied into the channel.
He stared down into the shadow and could see a faint but clear motion below. He could see the runoff from the gutter that had cut through the rows of bodies he’d just exited, streaming red and thick down the wall of the large channel. It splashed as it joined the moving tide below.
A moat of human blood.
It was a good six feet wide. He couldn’t tell how deep.
Behind him the Watcher cleared the field.
Mark swallowed hard. It was no ordinary Watcher. This one wore a black hood and carried a long scythe.
It was the Grim Reaper come to life.
Mark stepped back and then took a quick running leap across the moat. When he landed, he turned and looked back at the Field of Flesh. The Reaper stood there on the edge of the moat, but did not follow. The arms and legs of some of the bodies behind him moved and shifted, and a faint sound still whispered from them, though Mark could no longer make out any distinct words. It was truly like a farmer’s field, shifting and moving in the breeze. If the breeze was the fetid, torturous breath of hell. And the harvester was the Grim Reaper.
Mark kept his eyes on the black figure and backed away from the moat. He moved slowly towards the dark wall ahead, searching for an exit. Or perhaps…an entrance.
There was an alcove to his left, and Mark walked towards it. Set two feet within its arched top was the wood of a door. He put his hand on an oval iron ring in the center. He held it there for a minute, afraid to pull. What was on the other side? Would the Watchers leap out and capture him instantly?
The only way to find out was to open the door.
He did. It creaked towards him with a horrible sound. Mark was sure the noise had given him away, but the hallway ahead remained empty. He could see the faint glow of crimson reflecting from the surface of the walls, thanks to the tongues of flame that guttered from wall sconces set every few yards amid the red stone. It glistened and moved-a waterfall of blood that kept the hallway moist and humid. It was like a rain forest, only instead of the air being ripe with life, it was cloying and thick with the irrigation of death.
Mark knew this hall. It was the passageway that led to the various rooms of torture and defilement that made up The Red.
He took one last look back, and the Reaper had disappeared. The field of bodies looked still. Mark didn’t want to hang around to find out where the harvester had gone. He stepped through the doorway and pulled it tight behind him. He stood there a moment, catching his breath. Then he headed to the right, unsure of where exactly he was in the labyrinth of NightWhere. But when he reached the end of the hall after a couple of turns, he knew right where he was.
He’d found the antechamber of The Red, which received visitors from the Blue Room. Its walls were aglow with the light of scores of candles, all set in small arched alcoves in the walls.
He pushed one of the heavy oaken entry doors open slightly and peered into the crowd of bacchanalian fornicators beyond. He saw men in leather chaps and women dressed only in silver chains dancing to the heavy somnolent strains of the live band. He didn’t recognize the song, but it sounded like a dirge, despite the drums and electric guitars. The dance floor shifted and swayed to the music, while a handful of the NightWhere
denizens took a time-out at Sin-D’s bar. Beyond them all, he saw the bartendress mixing drinks and laughing. She wore next to nothing; he could see the X of black tape covering the free-hanging globe of one breast. He thought he recognized the thick shoulders of Kendrick on the far end, tilting back a glass on his usual stool.
Already there was a line at the front door of people exiting the club. The night was almost over. At least for those who thought of NightWhere as a club.
For those who knew that it was more than that…the darkness never ended.
Mark pulled the door shut.
Rae was not out there. That was the room of dabblers and their keepers. Rae was serious. More than serious.
He feared she was already damned.
Mark turned and headed back the way he had come.
Two men waited for him in the hallway, smiling.
This was not going to be easy.
They were large men. Both. One looked to be Asian, and the other looked as redneck as any boy in a middle-of-Indiana bar on a Tuesday night.
Either way, Mark knew he was in trouble.
“You do not have an invitation,” the Asian man said. He was bare-chested and wore a white sarong around his middle. In his hands, he held a flogger tipped in steel hooks.
“I don’t want to be invited,” Mark said. “I just want to take my wife home.”
The Caucasian man-dressed simply in a pair of grey shorts-laughed. “Nobody comes or leaves here without permission,” he said.
He stepped forward and Mark stepped back. This didn’t look like things were going to go well.
The Asian man advanced with his flogger and cracked it once in the air. Mark ducked back, narrowly missing the metal tips.
At the same time, the white man grinned and pulled a steel pole out of a small pocket in his shorts.
He lifted it to hammer down on Mark’s head.
Mark was not inclined to accept the steel and leapt backwards again.
He also wasn’t inclined to keep stepping backwards.
“Wait,” he said.
The Asian man grinned. His teeth were shockingly white against the brown of his skin. “There is no stopping,” he said. “Only movement towards the goal.”
“And the goal is…” Mark asked.
“Pain.”
Mark knew there was no dodging this. He nodded, as if acknowledging his understanding of the situation, but at the same time, he was slipping his fingers in the back pocket of his jeans.
“I can only answer that with this,” Mark said.
He pulled the gun from his pants, aimed at the Asian man’s chest, and fired. A bloom of red appeared as the man fell backwards, away from the gun. But Mark didn’t wait to watch. He turned the gun on the other man who was already in motion. He pulled the trigger again and a spray of warm crimson splattered across his face as the bullet stabbed through the man’s gut and his face registered the pain.
His face said…damn…but before he could actually utter a word he had fallen to the ground.
Mark began to step around the two, but hesitated, as he looked at their bodies on the floor.
He’d killed them. Two men. He had shot them and stolen their lives. They lay there on the floor of the stone hallway, blood streaming from their chests to the floor. And as he watched, that blood seemed to be pulled away from the corpses…the streams curved and altered to move towards the wall and its cascade of crimson. In seconds, their blood was leaching from their bodies in a straight stream to the steady, bloody waterfall on either side of the corridor.
Mark shook his head. It was all too much.
He looked at the Asian man, whose sarong had loosened as he had fallen to the ground. His genitals were now exposed.
Mark could see clearly that he was only half a man.
Someone had cut his balls off.
A eunuch.
Mark stepped forward and pulled on the shorts of the heavyset white man until they slipped halfway down his thighs.
Damn.
He, too, had been unmanned. Mark felt worse, somehow, for killing them.
But he also knew that he needed to move. Mark shrugged and stepped past the half men towards the hallway that had held so much pain for him. He was moving into the thick of The Red.
The gloomy red hall wound around, past the torture rooms, and then at last he reached the end.
The room that he’d escaped from.
The entrance to The Black.
Chapter Fifty-Two
Rae of Dark
There was nothing Mark wanted less…and nothing he wanted more…than to push open the door to the room at the end of The Red.
His heart was pounding.
His hands were sweaty.
His eyelids twitched as he stared at the door’s handle.
If he could have said “Father, take this cup from me…”, he would have. But he knew that he had transgressed all God-fearing laws in coming to NightWhere in the first place. Those were not words he could utter, except in complete blasphemy. The only salvation was going to be the one he created. If he created one. That would remain to be seen in the next few minutes.
Mark opened the door.
The Watchers stood in a semicircle just yards from the doorway. They faced away from Mark.
They were watching Rae.
Mark’s wife knelt on a stone bench, prostrate before a man who was laid out on a stone table in the center of the room. Mark didn’t push the door fully open. Instead, he peered in and took in what was going on.
Rae wasn’t just lying down before the large, naked man.
She was fellating him.
With gusto.
Mark could see the muscles in her shoulders move as she bobbed her head up and down atop the man, sucking his manhood inside her mouth and then letting it out again as the Watchers…watched.
Only…the ironic thing about this sex act was…
She was giving head to a man who had…no head.
There was simply a bloody stump above his shoulders. The man’s neck simply…ended. In a clean line of crimson. Mark spied the fat-faced, disembodied head a few feet away from the table. It lay sideways on the floor, its dull eyes staring vaguely off into a distance it would never again see. Mark recognized those eyes. It was the head of the man who had chased him across the bed of hot coals with a whip and a smile.
Gordon. He couldn’t feel too awful to see how Gordon had met his end, yet…
“Jesus,” Mark whispered to himself.
His wife was diligently fellating a corpse.
It was hard to think of giving her a tender kiss and an “I love you, baby” and taking her home to his bed after witnessing that.
Mark closed his eyes and then reopened them, but the tableau remained the same. Rae’s beautiful ass moved faintly back and forth as she sucked the cock of a dead man, who seemed to watch what was happening to his broken body from the eyes of his head that rested sideways on the stone floor of the room. All while a bunch of robed ghouls looked on.
Part of Mark wanted to close the door and back away. Selena waited for him in the car. She was soft and beautiful and loving and…everything he had always wanted in a mate. And he’d left her behind. Alone. To rescue this woman who truly wanted to be beaten ’til she bled. And who apparently liked to suck the sex of the dead.
What was wrong with him?
“I still love her,” Mark said to himself. He couldn’t have explained why. Maybe it was just history. But he felt he owed her enough that he had to try to save her soul. I said better or worse, he thought, and said in his head that this was definitely worse.
“Wait,” a familiar voice said.
Mark looked over his shoulder to see the beautiful form of Selena. She stood there in the dark, bloody hallway like a sign of salvation. Pale skin an offering of white against the dark.
“You’re supposed to be in the car,” he whispered. A trace of anger entered his tone. He didn’t need her here, complicating an already difficult sit
uation.
“I can’t let you do this,” she said. “I don’t care if you love me…but I can’t let you give them your soul. Not after all this…”
“I can’t let them take hers,” he said, backing away. “I have to do this. You know that.”
Selena stepped forward, slipping her arms around his neck and pulling the soft, luscious flesh of her body close to his own. He couldn’t help but melt when her breasts meshed against his chest.
But Mark felt something else too. Duty. Promise.
“I can’t,” he said. “I appreciate it but…”
“If you go in there, then I have failed. Everything I’ve given up was for nothing.”
Mark turned away from her when he saw the blood tears begin. He stared at the dark door that led to Rae. A voice inside him screamed to leave this alone. Walk away. Be with Selena.
But the part of him that mattered knew that he would never sleep well again if he walked now. He was here. He had to do his best, one last try, to save Rae. Mark pushed the door open and entered the room. It looked as if he’d entered a medieval torture chamber. The walls held dangling chains and manacles. A rack stretched all across one wall and whips, floggers, chains and other devices hung in a neat row. Nearby, a line of three tall steel boxes, vaguely human shaped, was against the wall. Mark recognized them as iron maidens.
But the focus of the room was the wide stone dais in the center. And that’s what everyone in the room was gathered around.
He stepped forward and the robed figure at the front of the table turned to stare directly at him.
Mark knew those evil eyes immediately, without even seeing the rest of the man’s face.
Kharon.
The Watcher.
“We’ve been waiting for you,” the ghoul said.
The rest of the robed figures turned as one to stare at Mark.
Rae looked up from her ministrations to see what Kharon was talking about, and her mouth split into a happy smile.
