NightWhere (38 page)

No, Gordon needed to disappear himself. And he couldn’t think of anyplace better to do it than in NightWhere. He could dedicate himself to pain here. He could offer people the kink they desired, and satisfy his own lusts in the process.

He liked it here and wanted with all his heart to call it home. Now, apparently, he could.

Gordon had felt victorious that first night. But on the second night, he was less sure. He got up the next day—actually the next night—and walked out of his room and down the hall into the thick of NightWhere. He’d tried to play as he normally did, but he found himself looking sidelong to see if any of the Watchers were paying attention to him. Wasn’t he one of them now? Shouldn’t they know?

On the night after he’d herded Mark into the fire pit, he didn’t see Kharon at all after the group dispersed from the fire pit cavern. Didn’t see any of the usual Watchers back in the Blue Room actually, except Sin-D. He flogged some people in the Blue Room and then disappeared into a sadism room in The Red. He’d found himself some empty kicks and then had walked back to his room alone. He didn’t feel like part of the in-crowd.

The same thing happened the following night.

He’d been taken in, but also summarily dropped. What the hell?

Today, he’d awoken to find Kharon at the foot of his bed. “You’ve had time to get acclimated and understand what we really are,” the Watcher said. “Tonight I have something for you to do.”

Gordon grinned, considering a number of ways in which he might draw blood. At last, Kharon was going to let him be part of the Watchers’ circle. “Just tell me what I have to do,” he said.

“Nothing right now. Wait for me in the Blue Room, and I’ll come for you later.”

Gordon hung out with Sin-D at the bar for a couple hours, until Kharon appeared. “We’re ready for you now,” the Watcher said. Gordon slid from his bar stool but Kharon put out a hand.

“Finish your drink,” he said. “There’s no rush.”

Gordon did as he said…sort of. He really chugged the last of his beer and then nodded. “Let’s have some fun,” he said. After the past couple days he was anxious to really put the pain on someone. Now that he was a permanent resident of NightWhere, he knew that he could take things farther than he ever had before. Stewarding Mark to the fire pit had opened his eyes. There was more here than met the eye. He knew that this place was more than off the map. It was off the earth, in some sense.

Gordon knew that he was serving demons.

He didn’t care. He loved the work. And wanted more.

He followed Kharon through the medieval door and into the murky corridors of The Red. They walked together down the long corridor, passing rooms of torture and perverted pleasure.

“Have you enjoyed your stay so far?” Kharon asked.

Gordon nodded. “Thank you,” he said. “Staying here full time is a dream come true.”

“Especially when your wife is buried in the sand of your basement,” Kharon said coolly. “I’d guess you don’t want to stay home too much longer.”

Gordon paled. “What do you…”

“Don’t act surprised,” Kharon said. “You know what we are. Of course I know what you did. Why do you think I let you stay here full time?”

Gordon looked at the ghoulish man and gave a nervous smile. “So…she was like my ticket in?”

“You could say that,” Kharon smiled.

They arrived at the door at the end of the hallway that wound through The Red, and Kharon motioned for Gordon to step inside.

Gordon did.

Hands grabbed him by the wrists and waist and legs as soon as he entered the room. Gordon tried to bring his big beefy fists up to knock them away, but instead metal bands clicked across his wrists. He felt the cold iron before he saw it. Black robes were all around him, like a flock of human-shaped vultures.

Chains clinked when he lifted his foot and he realized that leg irons had also been slapped around his ankles. Gordon stopped struggling and instead looked around the room, trying to get a read on what was going on. He knew it wasn’t good.

Kharon walked before Gordon, while the Watchers held his chains. The ghoulish man didn’t say a word. Instead, he reached around Gordon’s neck and fastened a rusty metal collar, before stepping back and pulling on the chain, urging Gordon to follow him.

Kharon led him to a stone table in the middle of the room. Then he handed the lead chain to Rae, who stood nude at the head of the table. Gordon saw that she’d been scarred with the sign of NightWhere; the seductive snake twined around her belly button before eating its own tail just above her crotch.

Another woman stood just behind her, someone Gordon had never seen before. Her skin was black as pitch, but also decorated with the snake. Dozens and dozens of iterations of the snake. She too was naked, but instead of being aroused at her exotic body, Gordon felt his sex wither and retreat.

He was not going to be doling out any beatings today. These women had something else in mind. And he knew it was not going to be good.

Not for him, anyway. Not good at all.

Chapter Fifty-One

Field of Flesh

The door closed and Mark was alone in NightWhere. All hints of the old wooden barn vanished with the closing of the door…he stood in a cool, dark room that seemed old, but in a classical crypt way, not of the farm. The floor was stone, not wood, and on the far end he could see the orange flicker of flame from a wall sconce. He walked towards the light, his steps echoing faintly.

The room seemed extraordinarily quiet. But as he walked across its length he began to hear something in the distance. It was almost like the moan of the wind through a faraway attic, or the whisper of a conversation behind closed doors. Mark guessed it was the sound of NightWhere, somewhere ahead beyond the walls.

But as he reached the wall the sconce was on and followed it a few yards, it abruptly turned. He followed it to the left and saw more sconces guttering with low flames. He stood in a small hallway that opened to a vast room. There were trees inside, he thought, or corn stalks. Something repetitive and vertical. He could just make out rows and rows of something, reaching up from the floor and disappearing into shadow.

He stepped into the room and the susurration grew. Then he understood where it came from. The stalks stretched out ahead of him like a cornfield—only, the field wasn’t growing corn.

It grew bodies. He would have said corpses, from the looks of most of them. They were all stripped and standing. He couldn’t see what held them upright, but he assumed they were all tied to posts or something. Many were missing limbs, and all visibly bled from numerous gashes and cuts. Their skin was greyish and drawn, as if they’d been dead and hanging for days. Mark stared at one man whose empty eye socket cried crimson. He was sure from the wound and the man’s limp limbs that the man was a corpse. But then, the head tilted slightly, moving to stare with its one good eye at Mark. The lips opened slowly and whispered just one word:

“Run.”

Mark instinctively looked behind him at the warning, but there was nothing there but darkness.

The whispers grew as he stood there. He heard other faint warnings like “Run” and “Go” but also the occasional plea, “Help me, please,” or worse, “Kill me.”

Mark stared and the bodies stretched to his left and right for as far as his eyes could see. It was truly a field of flesh.

“Are you the harvest or the harvester?” a voice growled from his left.

“I’m only passing through,” Mark answered. The whispers suddenly turned to laughter.

“Nobody passes through,” a woman in the front row said. Her head hung at a broken angle, and blood streamed from a long gash in her belly. Mark saw the glisten of intestine through the gash and forced himself to look away.

“I’m going to NightWhere,” he said. “I’ve been there before.”

“You’re
in
NightWhere,” someone said with a laugh that ended in a scream of sudden pain.

“The real NightWhere,” another voice continued. “This is the field that feeds the evil. We bleed for you.”

Mark noticed then that there were gutters in the stone floor on either side of each row of bodies. He stepped closer. The troughs were about six inches deep and maybe three inches wide. At the front of the human garden, he could see the grey of the stone at the bottom of the gutters. But by the third body down the line, the bottom stone was obscured by the dark flow of crimson that rained down the chests and thighs and feet of each ravaged body. From some, the flow was thick, especially from those missing whole limbs, but lacking any tourniquets or bandages to staunch the blood.

From others who simply were cut, the blood flowed slower…but all contributed some flow of pain to the drains that leached their lives away. Mark guessed that this was the reservoir that fed the steady stream of crimson down the walls in The Red.

“We bleed for you,” several of the bodies echoed. The whisper of that phrase spread across the Field of Flesh like a slow wind, and soon Mark could hear hundreds of echoes.

“Not for me,” he said. “I don’t want your blood.”

“Then you will join us,” an old woman in the second row said. She had raw circles of meat where her breasts had once been, and her belly had been flayed open. The skin hung in wrinkled flaps and clung wetly to her thighs.

Mark shook his head and decided to waste no more time. He stepped forward, walking with tentative strides between the rows of bodies. He was careful not to step in the troughs, but he couldn’t help but walk through the crimson on the path. It was covered in blood that was slowly, steadily draining across it into the gutters. The whispers grew in volume as he passed—voices calling out in laughter and pain alike, “We bleed for you.”

Hands grasped at him as he passed, but most seemed to barely have the strength to move, and he brushed them off easily.

Mark began counting the rows, but after he had reached fifty-seven and still couldn’t see the end, he gave up. There were thousands of people in this room; now that he was in the middle of the field, he couldn’t see anything but bloody, staked-up bodies in every direction. Most of them didn’t move as he passed. Those were the best ones. It was the ones who had intestines trailing out of their midsections, or who had eyeballs hanging from strings of gore across their cheeks, that really freaked him out when they moved slightly and reached for him.

The pleas of “kill me” grew more frequent as he walked.

Soon the fear that he would never reach the other side began to gnaw at him. He’d been walking for ten minutes, and still he saw no end to the path. The rows seemed to stretch on forever as the bloodied fingers grasped at his shirt, staining his clothes with their pain as he passed.

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.