NightWhere (10 page)

“I liked you that first night we met,” she said. “I was kind of wishing you might get out of this.”

“My wife came home from here the last time with a flyer,” he said in Selena’s ear. “All it said was ‘The Red’.”

“Is that why she came back?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. But she made a beeline for the back of the club as soon as we got here.”

“If she goes that way, you’ve lost her forever,” Selena said. “I’m not trying to be mean or anything, I’m just telling you the truth.”

“Where is it?”

“The Red?”

He nodded.

“Back beyond the racks. But you can’t get in there without an invitation. It’s a club within the club.”

“Show me,” he asked.

Selena nodded and led him off the dance floor to the back of the club. They walked past people necking in the corners and then people groaning as the floggers fell.

“Window dressing,” Selena said, pulling him past the handful of nudes on the racks. “This is all just a tease.”

She pointed behind them at the men and women, fat and skinny, naked and clothed in leather…they came in all shapes and sizes. The only constant was that they clustered around the black boards and steel chains that made up the row of racks at the back of the club.

“They’re playing at this,” Selena said. “The real pain artists, the one your wife wants to find…they’re in there.”

She pointed down the wall towards the corner. An arch of grey stones surrounded a double wooden door. The doors were made of dark wooden slats, held together by iron bars that attached to the hinges on one end and curled out into a circular snake design at the other. The center bars were the most ornate, with the snake forming a large circle and then instead of biting its tail, as the usual emblem of NightWhere did, the heads of these snakes slipped upwards from the tail to hold round iron doorknockers in their fangs.

Mark didn’t hesitate. He walked past a velvet-rope barrier to lift the doorknocker. But Selena grabbed his shoulder.

“You can’t!” she said.

“My wife’s in there,” Mark laughed. “I certainly can.”

Instead of knocking, he pulled the door open and caught a glimpse of candle flames and deep-red light in the space beyond. A scream as overwrought as the clincher from a B-grade horror movie escaped from somewhere within.

And then the door slammed shut, pushing Mark back into the main room of NightWhere.

“Can I help you?” a male voice asked from behind them. His hand rested on the top half of the previously open door. Mark turned and saw a pale man with his other hand resting on Selena’s shoulder. Her lips pressed tightly together but she said nothing.

The man grinned, his face little more than a skull with skin and stubble. He looked like a Nazi camp survivor.

“My wife is in there,” Mark said.

The man shook his head in agreement, cocking his chin slightly as he stared hard at Mark’s eyes. “And so…”

“And so I’m going in to find her.”

“Nobody goes into The Red without an invitation,” the thin man said. His bony fingers kneaded Selena’s shoulders as he spoke. Mark saw her tremble in revulsion as they slipped lower across her chest with each motion.

Mark rolled his eyes. “Yeah, whatever. We’re here as a couple, and where she goes, I go.”

He reached out to pull the iron ring of the door again, but a cold grip instantly took his wrist.

“I don’t think you’re understanding the way things work here, exactly,” the man said. His voice was ice. “If your wife gave you an invitation, I will let you go in. Otherwise, the modus operandi of NightWhere is…every man for himself. Your wife has her own itch to scratch. It is not yours, or you wouldn’t be here while she is there.”

The man pressed his skinny, bald chest up against Mark’s shirt. His eyes were slanted and wide, his pupils deep black orbs in a circle of steel. They inched closer until Mark could feel the man’s breath on his lips. “Nobody gets into anything here without an invitation,” he said. “And you are not invited.”

A hand slipped around Mark’s waist from behind. Selena.

Warm breath tickled his neck from behind as she whispered. “C’mon,” she said. “Just forget it.”

The man’s eyes seemed to widen even more in a dangerous humor, and Mark saw his skin crease in a river of wrinkles as his mouth opened in a cackle dark and grim.

“I’d listen to her while you can,” the man laughed. “Enjoy her—she won’t last long. I will guarantee that.”

Selena’s hand pulled him hard then, and this time Mark complied, stepping back away from the door.

“Come back when you are wanted,” the man laughed and pulled the wooden door open to step through himself. A flash of red shadowed his head, and he was gone, the door shut with a heavy creak behind him.

Selena held Mark’s arm and pulled him towards the dance floor beyond the row of masochists along the wall playing with whips and floggers. “I want you,” she said quietly.

Mark shrugged her hand away.

“I want my wife,” he said, and walked towards the bar.

Chapter Twelve

Invitation 2

Rae stepped through the medieval wooden door in the back of the club and felt her heart stop. The invitation had grown damp between her fingers in the short time she’d held it, but then, almost as soon as she’d stepped in front of the iron-hinged doorway in the back of the club…someone came to snatch it away.

The door had opened, and she had been pulled into The Red.

Everything changed.

The modern, blue-light-and-black-metal and ripped-fishnets, dark-techno feel of the outer club disappeared and she was in a place that felt like the antithesis of the Blue Room. This place was ancient. Like catacombs.

Her skin felt cool and clammy as the light of a hundred candles inset in the walls lit her way, and when she stepped past the candle foyer, the deep light of The Red slid across her skin, absorbing her into its world. She was in a different place…the room in which she’d entered NightWhere was almost on a different planet than this. That was casual. Out there, it was just a game. Sex and pain for fun. Frolic.

Here…she felt…nervous. Like a tourist in the dank caverns of a horror movie. The shadows misted dark and hot around her. Clouds of foul air hung in the long hallway, hiding whatever lay beneath it. Rae’s feet—and whatever was near them—were obscured from view…still, she stepped forward.

The wooden door closed behind her with a snap.

She turned, but there was nobody inside the dark. She saw the shadow of the door and the flicker of candle flames. A hint of the fog drifted past like a grounded cloud.

“You came,” a voice said from the fog ahead. His eyes glowed red, like fire.

“I was invited,” she said.

“Yes,” the voice agreed. “You were.”

Rae stepped farther into the main hallway of The Red, and in the bloody shadows, she saw the nude shoulders of a man. She moved faster, intrigued. That’s when the slap caught her across the shoulder blades.

“Ouch,” she complained.

The voice in the dark laughed.

She heard the sound this time before she felt it. The crack of leather. Followed by the white flash of contact pain. As the sound faded, the pain blossomed orange and hot across her breasts. Her nipples stung with the shock of unexpected abuse. She gasped and stepped back, but didn’t cry out. Instead, Rae hugged herself, wrapping her arms in protection across her violated skin.

“You can’t hide here,” the voice said.

Suddenly, a light glimmered to life high above them. A single bulb in a corridor of shadow. But as it lit, a softer, deep-amber glow rose from the floor around her. Rae saw vague silhouettes moving in the dull light.

“Show her,” the voice said.

On command, hands grabbed Rae’s shoulders and as she turned to see who had touched her, more hands gripped her ankles. She was dragged through a doorway, and then her arms were lifted towards the ceiling, and with a rip, the hooks of her corset were yanked one way, then the other, and then the garment was gone. Moments later, her skirt was gone too. She felt cold fingers slipping along the top of her thigh, and then her fishnets were ripped away as well. Rae stood naked in a room of shadows and shadow watchers.

With her clothes, the hands were gone. Rae stood alone in the center of the strange cavernous place. Things moved along the perimeter. Things she could only just barely see.

“What do you want?” she asked.

The deep voice laughed. “What do you want?” it countered. “Why are you in The Red?”

“I was invited,” she said.

“You were invited because you asked. What is it that you need?”

“I need to feel,” she said. Her voice cracked.

“Mmmmm,” came the reply. And then…

Snap
.

Something broke across her rear end. Rae jumped, holding the stinging flesh of her ass, but another crack broke the dark and sent a spike of white pain up her arm as the leather bit across the joints of her fingers.

And then another slap took her in the belly.

And another across her thighs.

And one on her calves.

And one on her back.

Rae began to cry, jumping from the bites of the whips, but craving them at the same time.

Finally, when she doubled over, a voice whispered again, this time right in her ear, “Is this what you want?”

And Rae could not contain her answer. Part of her hated herself for it, but the bulk of her agreed.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes.”

The lights in the room abruptly went out, and Rae blinked, trying to see something in the inky blackness.

“We’ll let you know if we want you,” the voice said. And then it was gone and Rae was alone in the dark.

Chapter Thirteen

Going Back for More

Selena seemed like a nice girl. Okay, hardly a girl…definitely a woman. But Mark wasn’t interested. Not now. Not after having someone tell him that he was blocked from walking into the room where his wife was. The scene played over and over again in his mind, and he couldn’t let it go.

Wouldn’t.

He ordered a shot of Johnny Walker Black from Sin-D, who leered at him, cupping a breast for him to see its pale, sexy nipple. “Body shot?” she asked, and he smiled in spite of himself.

“Not tonight,” he said. “I think this shit would burn that beautiful skin.”

“Sometimes burning is
good
,” Sin-D said with wide eyes and the pink tip of her tongue touching the edge of her lip. She pushed the whiskey across the bar at him. “You need to live a little,” she added.

Mark downed the shot in a gulp and then pushed the glass back.

“I think I’m going to go do just that,” he said.

He made his way through the crowded dance floor and past the racks where two men were taking turns flogging and fingering a woman who had legs like tree trunks. Her breasts looked heavy as cow udders. Mark shuddered. But the skinny guys looked like they were getting off on playing with her. One of them was fully nude and sporting wood.

Mark waited until the area near The Red was clear of people, and then he ducked under the red velvet rope and hurried to the shadowed arch of the double doors. The Watcher who’d been there earlier would no doubt be back any second. Obviously they kept an eye on this entryway. To keep out people like him.

He pulled the iron ring and the right door creaked halfway open. Mark slipped inside and pulled it shut behind him.

Everything changed in that moment.

The pumping beat of the band outside was replaced with another throbbing sound…only this one was more organic. More sexual. The air was heavy, humid and hot. And the walls on either side of the entryway had dozens of small oval alcoves inset in them. Candles burned in each of those spaces. The room glowed and rippled with the flicker of the flames. The ceiling glowed faintly, but seemed to do so with its own light. It looked as if it was made of heavy glass, and a low red light glowed behind it. But the light wasn’t coming from any one direction…the whole ceiling seemed to bleed a viscous bloody color.

Mark stepped past the entryway and into a long hall. He walked to the right and passed a room with writhing bodies, all shifting and moaning on a floor studded with what looked to be nails. He stepped inside the entry a moment, squinting through the faint red light to see if Rae was there.

A burly man with a back as hairy as a gorilla’s was driving himself between the legs of a middle-aged woman close to the door. She lay back across the floor of nails, her arms outstretched as if she welcomed the man’s sex, but with every thrust, her heavy breasts shook and she screamed out in what sounded far more like pain than pleasure. When the man pulled out of her and rolled her onto her belly, her back resembled a pincushion; a thousand spots of red glimmered in the low light and began to run as her blood, uncorked, flowed from the wounds.

Mark winced. No pain, no gain?

Nearby, a thin, aging, black-haired woman held what looked like a college-aged boy by a chain that hooked to a leather collar around his neck. “When I say jump, I mean jump!” she yelled and hit the kid across the ass with a wooden paddle. He cried out, but in the next moment, she yelled, “Jump,” and he did, screaming as his feet came down on the nails.