NightWhere (30 page)

“Jesus,” Mark whispered again.

“Not here,” Gordon said. “Not here at all.”

“Yeah, I guess not,” Mark said. “So now what?”

“You walk the path of fire,” Gordon said.

“Like hell.”

“Exactly like hell.”

“I meant, there’s no way…”

Mark turned to look at his captor. “I can’t survive walking over that.”

Gordon shrugged. “That’s what they thought, and look at them now.”

“Yeah,” Mark laughed grimly. “They’re dead.”

“What makes you think they’re dead?”

“Well, they…”

Mark looked at the bodies on the crosses, especially those whose heads hung just a couple feet above the glowing coals. As he stared, he realized that now and then, the bodies shifted and jolted. Maybe it was because the flesh was bubbling and burning and popping, as he’d first assumed, but then again maybe…

“No way,” he said.

“We are in NightWhere,” Gordon said. “Kharon told me that the crucified are still alive. They can’t die. They tried to escape the path of pain…and they were punished. Kharon won’t let them die.”

“How can he stop it…”

Gordon lifted the whip and readied himself to crack it. “Walk the fire,” he commanded, and the leather snapped with a resounding crack at Mark’s feet. He jumped and felt the blood well up on the edge of his heel, where the whip had caught.

“Fucker,” he said.

“I can beat on you all day,” Gordon said. “And I’d love to do it.”

With that, he lifted his arm and the whip began to rain down on Mark without pause. The thin leather caught him in the back and the neck and slipped around and ripped against his cheek. Mark screamed in anger and turned on Gordon, grabbing at the leather.

He missed it the first time, and the whip smacked against his chest, leaving an instant red welt across his breast. But the next time Mark was ready; his hands held on to the braided leather and would not let it slip through. He pulled, trying to yank it from Gordon’s grasp. But instead, he only pulled Gordon closer to him. And the bigger man laughed. With one beefy fist, he punched Mark in the mouth.

Mark went down, releasing the whip as he slapped his hands on the hot stone ground, trying to keep from falling into the glowing pit.

“Do you know how these people lost their skins?” Gordon asked.

Mark curled in a ball on the warm stones, protecting his face and cock from the sting. His arms and back and ass absorbed one brutal slap after another.

“I’ll tell you how,” Gordon said, when Mark didn’t answer. “They refused to go through the fire. And instead of having their skin burned off, they had it whipped off…by someone just like me.”

The whip came down again and Mark screamed. “Stop it!”

Gordon grinned. “But I’m enjoying this.” He kicked Mark in the thigh and then again in the back. And then in the ass. With each prod, Mark rolled just an inch closer to the glowing pit of coals. His skin was already red and swelling with the heat coming off the sea of fire.

Fire was actually a misnomer. While there
were
occasional tongues of flame that erupted from the field ahead, the reality was that the stone path ended in a moat of glowing coals. On the other side of the pit was a stone path that led to a wall and a stairway out of this valley of hell…but to get there…

“You have thirty seconds,” Gordon said. “And then I’m going to start using this. I’d prefer, honestly, that you don’t cross the fire. But that’s your choice. I’ll be here for you, if you stay. And I don’t have to be gentle anymore.”

Mark looked up and saw what Gordon held in his hand. His captor had slipped the whip into a holster on his black leather belt, and now in its place he held a flogger. But at the end of each leather strap, the flogger featured a metal hook.

“I call this the shredder,” Gordon said. “I used to use it on my friend Amelia, and by the end…even I barely recognized her. Funny thing was, a month later, she was always ready for more. I don’t think you are half the woman she was.”

“What happens if I cross the coals?” Mark asked, staring at the ripples of orange and yellow that flickered across the top of the bed of fire.

Gordon shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never been here before. But Kharon said that I can’t let you come back, or it will be me walking those coals and hanging from a cross. Believe me, I’d much rather that be you than me.”

Mark made a decision. He crawled to his knees and nodded at Gordon, holding his hand up. “I’ll go,” he said. “Just let me stand up.”

Gordon ran a hand across the sweat of his balding scalp and shrugged his enormous arms. “You have five. Four. Three…”

Mark jumped up and ran. He bolted past Gordon and aimed towards the row of figures he saw still standing far in the distance. The Watchers hadn’t moved. His heart pounded and his breath came hard after all the running he’d already done, but now he felt a sense of victory. He’d ducked the asshole with the whip and the flogger, and he was going to blow past the asshole with the fucking druids from hell down by the doorway and get the fuck out of this goddamned place.

Mark loved Rae, but faced with the glowing fire of the pit…he realized…maybe not quite enough to voluntarily walk through fire for her. Sometimes those love songs about doing anything for your lover exaggerated just a bit.

Sorry,
he said in the depths of his heart.
I’d like to walk the line. But I can’t.

He ran, until the rough stone disappeared from beneath his bare feet.

Mark hung in midair for a second and then fell five feet to the bottom of a stone pit. The pain was instant.

“Shit!” he screamed, as his leg twisted beneath him and his raw skin slammed against the stone floor at the bottom of the trap. Something trickled underneath his ass, and then he felt a burning sensation.

Gordon looked over the top of the pit. “I’ve got news for you, pal,” the large man said. “The pit is no better than the fire. They pipe acid down this canal every few minutes. And if it touches you… Well…”

Mark could already feel his skin blistering from where a few drops had touched him. He clawed his way up, careful not to step on any of the wet parts of the stone ditch.

He looked down the channel and saw there was more liquid coming, just as Gordon promised. A thin trickle flowed at the center beneath his feet, but down the way…the crest was growing.

“How do I get out?” Mark asked.

Gordon pointed to indentations in the wall a few feet away.

“You can go forward, but you can’t go back. Kharon told you that. If you don’t get out of there in the next couple minutes, you won’t be going anywhere.”

Gordon was right. Already the thin trickle of yellowish liquid at the very center of the brick canal had grown to a six-inch creek. And it was growing every second, the bitter scent of its acid growing with it. Mark watched as it cascaded over the edge of a brick that he’d been standing on just a minute earlier. He shifted his feet and straddled the bottom of the acid canal, making his way over to the wall with the carved stairs.

When he reached it, he quickly pulled himself up and out of the canal. The burn where he’d been touched by the liquid felt like flame, and his skin there was beet red. Behind, the rush of acid sounded like an ocean, as the deadly liquid filled the canal. He stared at the canal and shook his head in disbelief. He’d walked across this place before, and the ground had been flat. Now…there was no way back to Kharon except through the river of acid. And no way forward except the pit of fire. This place was like a Rubik’s Cube, and someone had just shifted a row behind him.

“You have thirty seconds to walk the coals, or I’m going to take all the skin off your ass,” Gordon said. “And frankly, again, I’d rather you stayed right here. I’ve had a shitty week, and I wouldn’t mind taking it out on you.”

“Not interested,” Mark said, daring for a moment to look away from Gordon’s toothy smile to the waves of heat that swam above the orange light beyond. If he took a running start…could he vault himself across the fire in just a handful of steps that didn’t ruin his feet forever?

“Ten, nine, eight…” The rake of steel cut into Mark’s back, and he yelped.

Gordon laughed. “Feel good?”

It didn’t feel good. Mark could feel hot wetness seeping down the crevice of his armpit.

The only way to Rae was forward.

Mark clenched his teeth, stared at the rock path on the other side of the coals, and made his decision.

He ran.

The first step was awful. Sizzling, horrible pain lanced up his calves and Mark screamed. But that was before his other foot set down on the burning coals. He almost fell face-first into the fire, but somehow, that human instinct that says “never give up” kicked in and Mark instead raised his burning right foot and forced it down again onto the fire, propelling himself forward.

Never give up
, he screamed in his head, but his feet and calves screamed something else.

They screamed agony.

Mark cried and yelled and felt his skin blister and crack as the pain shot up his heel and toes. The fire was unbearable and yet, if he slowed or stopped, his entire body would be engulfed…face, arms, privates… Mark stayed on his feet three more hideous steps and then the pain was too much. He put his left foot down and it collapsed beneath his weight. But that just made the agony worse.

His knee fell to the fire and Mark put out his hands to stop himself. That’s when the pain really started.

“Oh God,” he cried as the skin of his hands seared and burned, and the hair on his legs curled and smoked, and the fire began to eat him.

He screamed so loud he felt something crack in the depths of his throat.

The wave of heat turned his vision to flame. But Mark refused to die. With some hidden vestige of strength he used the pain to throw himself upright again, and, screaming at the top of his lungs, planted his foot hard on the coals once more, and then again…

The stone path on the other side of the bed of coals felt almost cold as Mark threw himself upon it, shaking and quivering with burning pain. He screamed and cried, and rolled across the stone, every movement opening a deeper pain in his body. He could feel his flesh still bubbling, suppurating, dissolving from the heat he had just forced it to endure.

“Oh God,” Mark cried, as every part of him screamed in agony.

Something shifted behind him, rock grinding against rock. Mark struggled to turn, to look back. He could see Gordon standing on the other side of the fire, watching. And he could see the path that he now lay upon. The path behind him was disappearing. Brick by brick, the perimeter that bordered the fire was letting go, slipping into the pit of coals. He had escaped the fire, but it was not letting him go that easily.

The fire was moving towards him, brick by lost brick.

Mark struggled to move forward, but every movement was fresh agony. His entire body was burned, and his feet and hands and knees still felt as white-hot as when they were on the fire. The pain was hideous and he lay down for a moment, just letting the agony take him. But then the rocks beneath his feet dropped away, and the heat of the coals blossomed up to embrace his feet and ankles.

The pain was hideous and immediate. His feet were in an oven.

Another row of bricks disappeared, and the heat embraced his calves.

Mark slapped his blistered hands to the rock and pushed his body forward, crying the whole time. His breath came in fast, horrible gasps but he forced himself to keep moving. Dull grinding crashes continued behind him, and he knew that the coals were gaining ground. His only hope was to reach the stairs ahead and to pull himself up and out of this hell. He crawled forward, inch by inch, gradually increasing his speed until he was at the wall. The rocks continued to give out; the fire pit was now just a couple yards away from the wall.

Mark looked up at the stairs and saw that they did not actually continue down to the ground. The last step was a good ten feet above the stone floor.

“No way,” he cried. “Not fair.” Tears coursed from his swollen eyes as Mark looked at the only salvation he could see, well out of reach of his hands. “Not fair!”

And then he saw the tunnel near where the base of the steps should have been. A black hole in the wall that kept him close to the fire. Apparently he was supposed to crawl through that.

Mark crawled painfully over to it and looked inside. Behind him, the grinding smash of rock slipping against rock and then falling away continued. The heat on his back grew. And now he could feel it more acutely than ever.

He crawled into the narrow tube, and something poked his arm. He looked down and saw a steel blade, just a half-inch long, protruding from the stone.

“Great,” he thought and pressed on, but then his knee spiked with more than just the pain of burned skin. Then his palm did too.

He stared at the path ahead and saw that it was littered with silvery bits of pain, all protruding from the floor and walls of the passageway. He couldn’t go forward without getting sliced to ribbons.

Another crash of rock. Mark looked behind and saw that the orange bed of coals now extended right up to the entrance of this passage.