NightWhere

Dedication

This one’s for all those krazy, kinky kids who loved
The 13
^th
, especially Meli Hooker, Colum McKnight and Sarah Ham. I hope this one gives you deeper, darker, decadent dreams.

Acknowledgments

NightWhere
has been with me a long time. I first thought of the dangerously erotic, if still murky concept before I finished the final draft of
Covenant
, my very first novel. I remember telling Charlee Jacob about the idea during the World Horror Convention back in 2002, and I remember her urging me to sit my ass down and write it.

It took me a while to heed her advice, but ten books and ten years later, I finally put the last touches on
NightWhere
. Along the way, there have been many, many people who have been supportive and helpful in ways they probably don’t even know. I can’t list them all, but I do need to thank my editor, Don D’Auria, for taking me with him to Samhain and giving me the green light to go down this deep red path. And as always, thanks to my wife, Geri, and my son, Shaun, for indulging and letting me take the time away to go there. An appreciative nod also for support and inspiration over the years to Charlee Jacob, Edward Lee, Lucy Taylor, Tim Waggoner, Jonathan Maberry, Gerard Houarner, Jeffrey Thomas, Dave Barnett, James Roy Daley, Cheryl Mullenax, Bryan Smith and W.D. Gagliani.

I’ve been lucky to have many readers and reviewers follow me along for the ride through all of these strange and twisted stories, and want to thank Peter Schwotzer, Nick Cato, Colleen Wanglund, Tony Tremblay and Nanci Kalanta in particular for their support, as well as my longtime “street team” members P.S. Gifford, Sheila Halterman, Sheila Mallec, Erik Smith, Paul Legerski, Dave Benton, Lincoln Crisler, Peg Phillips, Martel Sardina, Raymond Brown and Damian Maffei. Finally, huge thanks to my Euro-horror connection, Rich Baldwin, and my web guru and horror movie co-host, Lon Czarnecki, (you should see the film fests we hold in my basement!)
 

It’s been a really long time in coming, so I hope all of my readers enjoy this twisted tale. I enjoyed, in a most perverse way, writing it…

Prologue

The world stretched away in a field of stalks. They were everywhere, as far as the eye could see. At first glance, it looked like a cornfield—branch after branch after branch of amber leaves standing quiet and still in the faint summer breeze.

But then Colum looked closer and saw that the amber wasn’t truly amber. The color was lighter, more suffused with a blend of white and pink. They were waves of fleshy grain, not amber.

And flesh was a good color description, because the stalks weren’t grain.

The top of each thin trunk held a head. Blonde hair hung in ragged curls down the shoulders of many, while many other scalps were shaved. The brunettes stood out in the field, their dark locks looking almost like spoiled produce in the midst of so much pale flesh.

Because it was truly a field of flesh. Thin, naked bodies all standing straight and tall, arms at their sides, heads forced to stare straight ahead. Nobody hung their face, nobody lifted their arms. The sea of naked men and women stood as one, stiff and ready. They stared in one direction and blinked only occasionally.

Mostly, they just stared.

And waited.

What the hell was this place? He’d gone down a corridor, looking for a private place to smoke. And somehow he’d gotten turned around. Meli always said he had no sense of direction. Of course she was always the one who liked to
give
direction. He imagined right now, back in the Blue Room, she’d already surrounded herself with five guys, all of whom were following her commands and working with hands and lips to pleasure different portions of her anatomy. He needed to get back there, to enjoy the view. But the old wooden door hadn’t led him back to the swingers club, it had led him to this…true obscenity. A Halloween nightmare.

He walked forward until he stood at the beginning of the field and now could see the details of the bodies. He saw the breasts of the women, sagging or proud, and the bellies, wrinkled or taut. He saw the veins on their thighs and the hair between their legs…or lack of hair. He saw the men interspersed between the hags and girls. Some had torsos covered in dark, wiry hair and others were pale and smooth. Their cocks all hung slack and still, despite being surrounded by nudity.

He walked through the field of naked humanity. As he looked closer, he saw not simply the tits and cocks.

He saw open gashes and the scars.

He saw the rips across the women’s nipples, the trails of past abuse sewn back in heavy black thread to something near normal. He saw the jagged rips across the men’s bellies, pink worms of flesh that cut through the black hair. He saw the stumps where arms once had been and the holes that earlobes once had covered.

And he saw the blood, still flowing.

This field had been flayed, but left alive to grow back in place, to recover. The scarecrows of the damned.

“Get out now,” a whisper came from somewhere deep within the bodies.

He looked at the nearest face and saw a man missing his lower jaw. A mound of pink had scarred above his windpipe, and a handful of broken teeth still clung to a gnarled mass of pink flesh and yellowing bone that grew beneath a crushed mound that might once have been a nose.

The face did not move. Its eyes did not blink.

He looked down and saw a latticework of pink that cut across the man’s shoulders and chest. Scars from some horrible beating or accident. Scars like a road map to a destination that…he did not want to know about.

“Are you the harvest, or the harvester?” a voice asked from somewhere inside the bodies.

Voices whispered from deep within the rows of bodies. The field of flesh suddenly drew a breath as one. The sound was slow and deep…a building gasp of communal awareness. Fear.

He could see the field shifting violently a dozen or more rows down the line. He heard something scrape against stone and then a scream. He turned, trying to locate the sound. But his vision was blocked everywhere by the bodies. And all of them had turned, if they could, craning their heads to stare at him, openmouthed.

“What?” he hissed at the woman closest to him. Her bloodshot blue eyes looked as if she’d pried them open with toothpicks. Her lips were drawn back in the semblance of a scream.

Nearby, to his left, someone did.

“Are you the harvest, or the harvester?” a voice called again from deep in the field.

Colum turned and saw something black rise above the heads of the bodies just a few rows beyond. The bodies in that area seemed to move and shake, as if a heavy wind was cutting through the field. Then he saw it again, a row closer. And again.

He began to back up, stepping down the narrow stone path towards the doorway that he knew was behind him. Somewhere. He hadn’t walked
that
far.

And then he saw the pole moving through the field and the long, curved silver blade at its end.

And the black-hooded man who carried it. The figure raised the scythe high in the air, taking aim.

The bodies all around him were staring in ghastly silence, breath drawn, as if waiting for him to say something. Do something. A whisper came at his shoulder.

“Run.”

But it was too late for that. The blade descended.

And someone in the field finally answered the insistent question.

“The harvest.”

Chapter One

Invitation

Rae

The phone call that changed Mark’s life came on a Monday. It was a particularly Mondayish Monday, in fact, and Mark was just getting into the car at 6:40 p.m. after an amazingly shitty first day of the week. He was already praying for the weekend and the week had only just begun.

Then the phone rang.

“Mark?” a thin, high voice asked through the line. “Mark, it came!” she said. “It’s what we’ve been waiting for.”

“
It
came?” he asked. “What is…
it
?”

“The invitation.” Rae’s voice trembled. Mark’s heart clenched.

“Did you open it?” he breathed.

“No,” she said. “I didn’t want to open it without you.” Her voice sounded a thousand miles away.

“Then how can you be sure?”

“I just am,” she said. “The envelope is plain but there are red letters on it that say
‘
To Mark and Rae
’
.”

Mark shrugged. “Uh huh. Anytime I see an invitation that’s addressed to both you and me, I think utterly crazy thoughts too.” He cleared his throat. “But you don’t even know who it’s from.”

“Mark, there’s only one place this could be from. I think our names are written in lipstick, and there’s a big
cock
drawn in between them. I don’t think this is an advertisement from Macy’s.”

Mark smiled. “I’ll be home in fifteen.”

The invitation was simple. When you flipped open the folded front page, the inside read: “You asked for it. You have one chance to get it. Come to 2367 Riverside Ave. in Chicago tonight at 9 p.m.”

Mark held his breath as he read the words a second time. “How can we be sure this is it?” he asked. “I mean, it could be someone from another club we’ve been to.”

Rae smiled, and the blue of her eyes seemed to stretch into a silent laugh that always warmed Mark’s groin.

“Hold it up to the light,” she said in a voice barely above a whisper.

He did.

As he did, he breathed in sharply. “Damnit, Janet,” he whispered.

The invitation was watermarked. Just enough to be visible in the light. Across the paper in nearly invisible letters it read: “NightWhere”.

Amelia

Amelia Hammond held the invitation in one hand. With the other, she fingered the scars on her chest. She could still feel the burning sensation of the night those trails had been etched in her skin; just the touch of her nails brought back the memory. Her skin shivered.

It remembered…

Illicit kisses and tawdry teases and…

…pain.

She peeled off the bra and continued to trace the white lines that fractured her breasts. She looked like a porcelain doll that had been glued back together after a fall from a tall shelf. Her nipples grew hard as she followed the map of her past. She loved the sensation as they contracted and pulled against the wide brown silver dollars of her areolas. There was a tension that filled her veins, a need.

And in the air of her darkened bedroom, she could hear a voice whisper.

The Red.

She knew the voice wasn’t in her mind. It was in the room with her. Invisible, but present. It spoke to her every night when she turned out the lights. Sometimes she left them on, hoping to escape into sleep before the whispers began.

The Red.

She shivered again, but this time not in pleasure.

In fear.

The truth was, she needed what lay beyond the heavy wooden door of The Red. But it took something from her every time. It was like a drug. She needed the pain, the degradation…she needed to let herself go all the way down. The lower she crawled, the better it felt. There was a snake inside her, and it twisted the humiliation and pain in her head to become a bitter, honeyed pleasure.

The Red was her cocaine.

Every morning after, she promised herself that she would not go back, that she would save some piece of herself from defilement. She picked up her acoustic guitar for the next few nights after and wrote songs about salvation and finding strength.

And every time the invitation came, she stripped out of her work clothes to stand naked and wanting in her bedroom, asking herself if she could do it again. She fingered the scars she’d earned the last time she broke her promise. And then she always went to her closet, pushed the blue business suits and conservative blouses aside, and pulled out the clothes she yearned to wear everyday from their shelf in the back. The trappings of fetish. She rolled on her black stockings and slipped her silky legs into her leather boots and sucked in her belly to tie up her black lace corset. Within the hour she would be at the address, whatever address, that was on the invitation. Amelia was a junkie for the flesh, for the pleasure, for the pain.