The Never List (12 page)

It might have been my imagination, but I was pretty sure her voice had a hint of challenge in it. She was a psychology professor, after all, maybe not on the clinical side, but close enough to know some tricks of the trade. These psych types, they knew how to push your buttons.

My head started reeling. It was like hitting replay on some bad scene from my other life. Could I take a deeper cut, could I take more pain, could I save her? Jack’s face flashed in front of my eyes for just a second. Right now, even while he was locked up miles away, he was winning again. Once again I couldn’t take the pain, couldn’t take the fear. I turned to Adele, meeting her eyes, screwing up my courage even though my heart was pounding madly.

“What do I wear?”

She smiled, seeming almost proud of me. “Good. You’ve clearly made a lot of progress.” She looked me up and down, noting, I was sure, the sad state of my sartorial choices. “I’ll bring you something. It’s important to blend in there. The last thing we’d want to do is stand out in this crowd. And I guarantee you don’t own anything appropriate for this venue.”

     CHAPTER 15     

Late that night I sat in my car in the parking lot of the hotel, regretting my decision to go as powerfully as I’d ever regretted anything in my life. I was talking to myself out loud, fighting down the panic attack I could feel creeping up on me. For one thing, for the first time in years, I would have to drive at night. While it was true that Adele had offered to take me, I never got in the car with strangers. No matter what.

But if the driving in and of itself was not enough to push me over the edge, the “special” destination most surely was. At a minimum, it would be dark and crowded and, from the sound of things, filled with exactly the types of people I had spent my life trying to avoid.

I gripped the steering wheel and banged my head on it gently several times. I couldn’t believe Tracy was not here for this. This
was exactly why I needed her to come, I told myself. This was her element. She probably went to this kind of place for fun.

I started feeling anger welling up in me. It reminded me of how I’d felt during the time just before my escape. I hadn’t examined it much in the cellar, I was so focused on my goal. But now, sitting alone in my rental car in a deserted parking lot, something dawned on me. Tracy had always made me feel guilty for everything I did back then. But really,
I had borne the whole burden.
For all the bossing around she had done, for all her leadership down in that cellar, she had never done anything productive to get us out of there. And I did. I did. And now all I ever felt was guilt about it.

Here I was, having a revelation, and Dr. Simmons was nowhere to be seen. To be fair, I knew she had tried to make that point subtly in sessions for years, but I had dismissed it. Yet here I was, facing perhaps the most terrifying situation I had encountered since my escape, and I was having a psychological breakthrough. Maybe Adele was right: therapeutically, this experience was good for me.

I sat up straight and pulled out of my wallet the photo of Jennifer I’d brought along. I opened the glove compartment, bent the end of the photo, and closed the compartment door on its edge. There. Jennifer before me, like an angel, to keep me going forward. I checked the rearview mirror and turned the key in the ignition.
I am stronger than this
, I told myself. These were the words that had gotten me through my escape, and they would get me through this, too.

I thought of Jennifer, as I looked at her face before me, and of how different everything would be if I could put her to rest. Maybe then I’d even be able to live a normal life, among other humans. Out of my apartment. In the real world.

I drove for nearly an hour along the winding back roads. Plenty of time to tick through the list of all the dangers of the situation. Before I even got to my destination, my car could break down, or I could have an accident here in the middle of nowhere. I checked
my cell phone reception no fewer than four times. The bars were all there, but I wasn’t sure I could have explained to anyone where I was anyway. I considered pulling over and sending Jim a text, but I didn’t want him to know I was on the trail of something yet, if I even was.

Finally, I arrived. I saw a driveway cut into the road, with no signs or markings other than a small, barely noticeable metal post with a yellow reflector, just as Adele had described. I pulled in and drove for about a mile up a hill along a crudely rutted dirt drive. I felt panic rising up inside me again. This activity did not meet my standards for careful behavior. What if this was a trap? What if there was nothing out here but empty woods, where anything could happen? What if somehow this Adele person was in league with Jack Derber? It occurred to me that I knew very little about her and was relying on what I thought of as our shared history together, some kind of bond that she may not have felt at all. And yet I had let her lead me down this path.

When I finally rounded the bend in the road, I saw to my relief a club of some kind, complete with other patrons. Fifteen or twenty cars filled out a gravel lot at the edge of the woods. How likely was it that they were all in league with Jack Derber? Not very, I decided. I pulled into the space farthest from the door, breaking my usual rule. I wanted to keep some distance from this particular destination for a few minutes longer. Three spaces over, in a sporty red Mazda, Adele was waiting for me as she’d said she would be.

At first she didn’t notice me, and I thought again that there was time to turn back. I sat still in the driver’s seat, an icy chill tingling up my body. I looked out at the darkness, something I usually shut out tightly with the heavy white linen curtains of my apartment. Now it surrounded my car, seeming to penetrate the glass of the windshield, coming in to suffocate me slowly. I was in it, of it. It wouldn’t let me go. I was struggling to breathe as I tried to block
out the steady pounding reverberating in my head. I couldn’t tell if it was the beating of my heart or the music from the club thudding in the background.

Just then Adele noticed me sitting there. She opened her door and made her way over to my window. She looked at me, puzzled, and gestured for me to get out of the car, but I couldn’t move. I rolled down the window about an inch instead. The air coming in helped clear my head, and slowly I started breathing again.

“Come on out,” she said, looking at me with something approaching concern. I must have looked like hell. “I have something for you to change into.”

Adele was wearing a full-body black vinyl catsuit, and her hair was pulled back tightly into a bun.
Dominatrix
, I thought.
How fitting.

Her voice brought me to my senses at least. She hovered over me, looking at me expectantly. I took a final deep breath and opened the car door, grabbing my cell phone as I got out.

She handed me a rather heavy shopping bag. I could feel through the plastic that these were no ordinary clothes, and my suspicions were confirmed as I peered into the bag at a pile of high-gloss black leather. Even though I had anticipated it, when faced with the reality of entering some kind of fetish bar, my heart pounded violently and my knees went weak.

Adele was studying my face.

“Look, I know you’re scared, and I know that, after your experience, this is going to be hard for you. But it will be worth it. I’m going to show you something the cops never knew about.” She took a deep breath and continued.

“For years I regretted not telling anyone about Jack’s connection to this place. At the time I had convinced myself it wasn’t relevant. The truth is, I hadn’t wanted to get myself into trouble. I hadn’t wanted my parents to know what I was studying in college, since they were footing the bill. And in my mind, I had told the
cops all they really needed to know anyway. Everything they asked about at least. He was convicted, after all. No harm, no foul, right? But now, well, you’re not the cops, and there’s no tuition to pay, and … I know how you must have suffered. About your friend. And if it will help keep him in there …” she trailed off.

Her words indicated compassion, though I still couldn’t read it in her eyes. But on the surface at least, she did seem to want to help me. I could only imagine too that, somewhere in there, she had to be afraid of Jack Derber getting out almost as much as I was. She had his office, after all, and his chaired position. He might not like coming home to that.

“So tell me about this place.” I had barely dared to look over at it yet. When I finally got the nerve to glance that way, it didn’t exactly set me at ease. It was a low-slung, windowless building, with gritty, bare cinder-block walls and a flat, rusted metal roof. No way did this structure meet fire code. A fluorescent orange sign over the door blinked out the words T
HE
V
AULT
. Charming.

“Well, for starters,” began Adele, “I should explain that it’s BDSM. Do you know what that means?”

“BD …?”

“Bondage-Discipline, Sado-Masochism. Not as bad as it sounds. Real BDSM has rules. Very, very strict rules. First and foremost it is based on
consent
. Jack never really got that part. He kept breaking the rules. So much so that they banned him from coming here eventually. It simply didn’t excite him when he had permission. That’s probably why he—he—took you and the others.”

“This is not making me feel better about going in there.”

“It should. My point is that absolutely nothing will happen to you in that club without your consent. Nothing. No one will even touch you without your explicit permission. I’ve been coming here for years for my fieldwork, and no one has ever laid a hand on me.”

I couldn’t help staring at her in her vinyl getup. I could understand why they left her alone. She looked pretty damn intimidating.

“Okay, but if they kicked Jack out of there, why do I need to go in at all? What good will it do me?”

“This is the one place where you can meet people who knew Jack. Really knew him. This is the only way to reach that layer the police never could. Members of this club have been coming here for many years. It’s the only one of its kind within a hundred miles; everyone in that circle comes through here eventually.”

“I guess that’s what scares me—who are these people?” I said it with some disgust, but then stopped myself, wondering if Adele wasn’t really one of them after all. How long could you study these types, going in and out among them, dressing like them, immersing yourself in it, without participating in some way? I struggled for the right terminology before asking my next question: “What do they want out of this … lifestyle?”

She leaned back against the car and sighed. “My doctoral thesis asked the same question—
Paraphilia and Its Discontents
. Look,” she began again, suddenly serious, “they want the same things as everyone else: community, connection, maybe a little thrill. Some people are wired differently, numb to the ordinary. Some are trying to make up for a lack of something, maybe fix something that’s broken. Others just have a different mode of self-expression.”

I thought about that a second and decided to dare asking what I really wanted to know. “And for you, is this just something you study …?”

She smiled wryly at first, but the smile faded almost as quickly as it came. She bit her lip—hard, it seemed to me—then pushed back a stray lock that had come loose, taking both hands to smooth it back into that tight bun, her fingers working like those of a magician, fast and familiar.

“Come on, let’s go,” she said, ignoring my question. She stood up straight and nodded down toward the bag.

I looked at it, then back at her, realizing the time had come to move forward. Steeling my resolve, I slowly opened it. I took out the clothes and started changing into them, crouching down low beside the car behind the open side door. A black leather vest with some very intricate laces. Vinyl pants with spikes running down the sides. She let me keep my own shoes, which were black slip-on Keds. I looked ridiculous, but Adele simply jerked her head in the direction of the club. No one would even notice me, she said. An appealing thought.

The bouncer was a huge man with a shaved head and arms covered with fine spidery tattoos running all the way down to his wrists. He nodded at Adele. Clearly she came here enough to be recognized. He raised an eyebrow at me, shaking his head. I thought he seemed slightly amused, but he shrugged and let me follow Adele in. As I crossed the threshold, I closed my eyes, trying to beat back the terror inside me.

Once in the building, my body felt enveloped in a mist of darkness and evil. This place was a vision of hell to me, all red and black, packed with a crowd geared out in studded leather who seemed, beyond any other terror, utterly unpredictable. The music was crushingly loud, and the air above the bar heavy with cigarette smoke. “Slaves” hung back behind their masters, heads down, cowering. I had to wonder if they were here voluntarily or if they were just brought out for play.

Along the far wall was a T-shaped stage, and a girl in a full-body leather suit with a ball tied into her mouth was doing something I supposed had a distant relationship to dancing but seemed more like alternating poses of pain and ecstasy.

I realized, from the way I was hunching my shoulders as I followed
Adele, that I must have looked like her slave. For a moment my mind was catapulted back to the reality of that time when I
was
a slave. I started to feel dizzy—another sign of the panic attack I knew my body was harboring.

The place was full, and to me at least, everyone else seemed like a regular in this underground world. They appeared to be moving in slow motion, their faces contorted with rage, some of them following me with their eyes as I passed meekly by. I looked around at the carefully constructed scenes of torment that filled the space: machines, contraptions of agony were in use everywhere, with elaborate ropes and pulleys, chains and spikes, nodes and wires.

I realized I hadn’t taken a breath since walking through the door.