NightWhere (16 page)

But once he turned onto Bailey and headed east again, he wasn’t sure. He knew it was along here but…

Then he saw the sign for Santa Fe Burritos and grinned. He remembered that. It was right next door to the lot that Rae had pulled into.

He pulled in just before reaching the Mexican place and parked near the entryway to the two-flat he had seen Rae enter. He remembered that night clearly—Rae in her red dress, walking out of the door farthest from the restaurant, a loud-shirted man following her on a leash.

Mark got out of the Sonata and walked up to the apartment door. He rang the doorbell and waited. Then he knocked on the door; he couldn’t tell if a doorbell had actually rung inside.

Mark waited on the stoop for another minute before pressing the doorbell buzzer again. Something creaked to his left.

“You’re not going to find him that way,” a voice said.

Mark turned and saw a thin, grey-haired woman pushing open the door of the next flat. Her glasses were so heavy they made her eyes look poached.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“Boy’s been missing for almost a month,” she said. “Police have been here a couple times. Hope nothing bad happened to him. He was such a sweet boy. Always willing to help an old lady, you know?”

Mark thanked her and returned to the car.

So Rae had literally kidnapped the guy. What the hell? And what did that mean about her disappearance? Had she
chosen
to stay away, as he’d suspected? Or had she been lured into something that she could not escape?

He started the car and pulled away, wondering…now what? He had no other way to connect to the club.

Mark decided to drive to the north side of the city—to the other location where he knew NightWhere had been. An old building in Evanston where they’d taken the elevator to the thirteenth floor. He got a little turned around when he left the expressway, but eventually he found the building. He recognized the façade’s gargoyles and the courtyard. He parked and walked into the building’s lobby, remembering the staircase and old-fashioned elevator in the center. He got on the elevator intending to go to the thirteenth floor (which had been labeled NW when Rae and he had ridden it). But when he went to push the button, there was nothing labeled NW or 13. He only saw buttons labeled 12 and 14. Mark took a deep breath. This was the right building, he was sure of it. And he was also sure that there had been a button
between
12 and 14 when he’d been here last.

He rode the elevator to the twelfth and fourteenth floors, in case NightWhere had somehow managed to relabel all the elevator’s buttons that night. But each floor was the same. He stepped out and saw a long hallway with numbered rooms. Apartments. He walked to the end of each and faced a blank wall. There
was
a small door in each of those walls, made of glass and surrounded by red. A fire extinguisher sat inside each of those glass doors, not the entryway to a sex club.

There was no room here that could have hosted NightWhere.

There was no thirteenth floor.

Anyone who hadn’t seen what Mark had seen, right here in this building just weeks before, would have said there was no NightWhere.

But he knew better. Mark had been there.

And his wife was
still
there.

Chapter Twenty-One

Waking Up

The blood made her feel strange.

Rae woke and it was everywhere. It dripped from the ceiling. It flowed in a slow wave across the floor. It rolled down the walls in a quiet, steady drain. The air stank of rich, wet iron, and when she woke, its warmth moved in a humid fog all around her. When she sat up, the blood on her back grew instantly cold.

Rae shivered.

The last thing she remembered, someone had been whipping her. But it had gone farther than that. Men had come to her with knives and dipped their points in her breasts. Women had pressed things that hurt between her legs and laughed as they’d acted like men, pantomiming sex with her.

Someone had slapped her across the face with a board, and even now Rae could feel the throbbing from that hurt continue.

But now…

She looked around, propping herself up on her hands. Everything was red. Even her. The blood coated her body; she wore it like a translucent veil.

“The beauty in sadness is you,” a voice echoed through the room.

“What do you want?” she asked, watching the blood flow all around her, licking her flanks as it slid by. She wanted to move, to get out of its way, but it was…everywhere. And she had to admit that its touch, if gruesome, was warm.

“I want you,” the voice said. A faint laugh. “And I seem to have you.”

“What is this place?” she asked. The room glowed with the heavy light of death.

“The Red is just the entryway,” the voice said. “You can stay there if you want. And you’ll have blood and pain to your heart’s content. This room…is the divider.”

The voice grew silent, and Rae rubbed the congealing blood across her naked breast with one hand, trying to scratch an invisible itch. It felt as if she were coating herself in cooling jelly, and instead of stopping, once she had finished scratching the itch, she continued to massage the blood against her skin. The image of Countess Bathory in a bath of blood flashed before her eyes, and Rae now understood that woman’s hideous obsession. She was reveling in it now herself. It looked obscene to be coating her body with blood with her hands. And yet…it felt amazing. Evil and decadent.

“Divider between what?” she finally asked, picking up the conversation again.

“Between The Red and The Black,” the voice said.

“The Black is why we’re really all here. It’s where you can become one with the Night Mother, the Midnight Queen, and really transcend. Pain means nothing. Pleasure means nothing. All that matters is that you still can feel…something.”

Something
then touched her back, massaging the wet warmth into her shoulders. Rae felt her hair stick to the fingers, which slipped up and around her neck, matting the hair further.

“Stand up,” the voice commanded.

She did, and the room suddenly seemed smaller. The ceiling was just above her head and the walls just a couple feet away. Rae stood in a cube the flowed blood from all six sides, and the voice encouraged her to touch it.

“Feel the flow,” it said.

“Touch the life as it flows by. That warmth…was someone…”

She did hold her hands to the ceiling and took a deep breath as the crimson slipped around her fingers and dripped down her arms.

“I can feel it,” she said.

“Then you may soon be ready to pass through,” it said.

Rae looked confused. “Pass through?”

“Indulge in the blood, become one with the life flow and you can walk through the curtain,” the voice said. She realized, finally, that the man sounded like Kharon.

“Pass through to what?”

“To The Black,” he said.

Something about the idea of joining him in a darker place excited her, and Rae slipped her fingers between her legs. They were well lubricated. She imagined a pile of dead, gutted corpses stacked above the ceiling of this room, contributing to her strange blood bath as she enjoyed its stickiness against her sex. How evil this was, to have so much blood flowing like a river, and to bathe in its scent and touch. She was not grossed out or offended by the death that slipped around her from all sides. Oh no. She found it exciting. And as she thought about the death of those who’d contributed to it, and the fact that they were now lubricating her middle finger, she gave out an involuntary moan of pleasure.

The voice all around her began to laugh.

“I have chosen well,” he said.

Chapter Twenty-Two

A Strange Meeting

Days passed, but Mark didn’t tell anyone that his wife was missing. What could he say? “Rae went off to a sex club to fuck strangers and never came home?” It was true, but it sounded pathetic.

They didn’t go out with other couples that much anyway. Most of the couples they knew in regular life were usually too passé for words. All they wanted to talk about was football and their whiny kids. Mark stayed out of that boredom, and when Mark and Rae met sex friends, it was usually within the confines of a club. The doors to those swingers clubs were like walking into another world…and when you walked out, you left that world (and those people) behind. So it was pretty easy for Mark to just ignore the fact that his wife was missing (at least publicly) and carry on with life.

All he hoped was that, after the next NightWhere, she decided to come home.

He watched the calendar and waited. He knew that in three to four weeks, there’d be another iteration of NightWhere.

It was two weeks after Rae disappeared that Mark ran into a familiar face. He was staring at the weathered veins of a jalapeno pepper in the produce aisle and wondering exactly how hot that pepper might really be when she walked up and put a hand on his shoulder.

“Hey, stranger,” she said.

Mark looked at the long white hair and couldn’t help but smile.

“Selena,” he said.

She nodded. “I’ve been called that,” she said. “And worse.”

Mark felt a seed of hope blossom in his heart. At last, someone who might be able to put him on the path. A path that had grown completely cold for him. “Hey, Selena,” he said. “I could use your help.”

She pursed her lips and shrugged. “What do you need?”

“I have to find NightWhere,” he said.

Selena looked instantly nervous. “Let’s talk about this outside,” she said.

Mark could take the hint. You didn’t talk about this stuff in front of pedestrians. He finished throwing a few things into his cart as Selena walked along beside him, clearly happy to talk about breakfast cereals and hair products, but loathe to discuss dangerously perverted sex clubs in public.

Once they got outside with a small cart of groceries, he pushed back.

“Tell me how I can get to NightWhere again,” he said as they walked through the parking lot.

“Get in your car,” she suggested. “Before your ice cream melts.”

“I didn’t buy any ice cream.”

She looked around nervously and then nodded at the car. “Just do it.“

Mark loaded the groceries and got in the car. Selena was the only person he had seen in two weeks who even believed in NightWhere, let alone had been there. He was not going to lose her.

He slid into the driver’s seat and Selena joined him in the passenger’s seat.

“I hope you don’t mind giving an old friend a ride,” she said.

“You’re not old,” he pointed out.

“But I am a friend?”

He raised an eyebrow. “Well, you have kept me company,” he smiled.

“I’d like to do that some more,” she suggested. When Mark looked at her, she had one blonde eyebrow raised and a hopeful smile on her face. He stared at her for a minute, taking in the pale softness of her features, the gentle slope of her cheek and the ice-blue stare of her eyes. If he weren’t married, he would have thrown himself at her feet begging for any kindness or favor she’d deign to give.

Now…he looked at her and thought she looked amazing…and then reminded himself that he was married. And without Rae participating or condoning, he wouldn’t go any farther. Mark had never been the one who really, really wanted to swap. He knew that was stupid and counterintuitive and all that…guys were always the ones who wanted to play the field, right? But it was what it was.

“So how can I find NightWhere?” he asked again.

“You can’t,” she said. “It only is found by the people it wants to find it.”

“I need to find it,” he said. “I need to find my wife.”

“Let me guess,” Selena said. “She didn’t come home after the last time?”

Mark described how she’d left him out two months ago, but how she’d driven from the club and picked someone up to take back.

“So what did she say about that afterwards?” Selena asked.

“She just said there was a guy who needed a ride, and she volunteered to go get him. And she promised that she’d take me with her to the club the next time we got an invitation. But then two weeks ago I came home and she was gone. She hasn’t been back since. And I found out that the guy she picked up never came home after the night she picked him up.”

Selena leaned across the seat and put her hands on his shoulders. He couldn’t help but see the shift in the milky-white skin of her cleavage as she leaned into him. It made him want to pull her closer…he did intend to stay true to Rae and honor their deal, even if she wasn’t right now…but God, Selena
was
beautiful.

“Mark, listen to me,” she implored. “If Rae has given herself to NightWhere, then she is damned. There’s nothing you can do about it. You’re just torturing yourself if you try to find her. And if you go into the club again, you may not get out of it alive either.”

“I can’t believe that,” he said. “Rae loves me. She’s just been sucked into this club and has lost her head for a while. I need to find her before she really gets hurt.”