Ad Nauseam

by C. W. LaSart

  “You looking for a date?”

  The voice startled Chad. Turning, he could make out the figure of a woman standing in the deep shadows of a doorway. When he didn’t reply, she stepped out into the light cast by a street lamp. She was pretty in a tired sort of way, still young enough to have retained her sex appeal despite the lines etched around her eyes and mouth. If she was a junkie, it didn’t show yet. Her figure was full in the right places, her body not yet reduced to the cadaverous stature of someone who has handed the reins of her life over to drugs.

  “Actually, I’m looking for a place called Club Carnal.”

  “Never heard of it.” She took the ticket from his outstretched hand and angled it towards the light, her brow furrowed as she squinted to read the handwriting on the back. Handing it back to him, she shrugged. “Sorry.”

  “Thanks anyway.” Chad smiled and turned to walk away then changed his mind. “You want to come with?”

  “Like a date?” She opened her eyes wide with feigned innocence, though the corner of her mouth quirked up in the start of a sarcastic smile.

  “Maybe. Just to see what’s there. I mean, really, it’s not like there’s a line of dates here on the street.”

  She shrugged and stepped up beside him on the walk.

  “My name’s Lily. You aren’t some kind of serial killer, are you?”

  “Chad.” He accepted her gentle handshake, liking the way her slender hand felt in his own. “And no, I’m not any kind of killer. But I probably wouldn’t tell you the truth if I was, you know”.

  Up close, he saw she was younger than he’d guessed. Probably in her early twenties. She was braless under a deeply cut shirt that clung to her full breasts and ended at a skirt so short it could practically pass for a belt. Though he was average height, he figured she would have to crane her neck to look up at him without the stiletto boots she wore.

  “So what do you do?” She asked as they walked, her head turned toward him, watching his every move.

  Chad’s mind swam, trying to come up with a believable lie, wondering about the wisdom of telling her his occupation. What if it was a set-up? He was filled with visions of some pimp following at a distance, sneaking up to conk him on the head and roll him.

  Oh come on! Chad thought, shaking his head at his own folly. You are walking down a dark, deserted street in the company of a hooker you just met, looking for a club that probably doesn’t exist on recommendation of some creepy old bastard in a run-down pawn shop that sells douche bags in the middle of the night. And now you want to start thinking about what is or isn’t prudent?

  “I’m a lawyer.”

  “That’s cool. Maybe I’ll take your card. Might need you some day.” Lily laughed, a husky sound Chad enjoyed.

  “Sorry, I only do family law.”

  ”Good one,” she replied, grinning. “I’ll have to remember that.”

  “Can I ask you a question?” Chad said.

  “Probably not.” She said with a sigh. “But you will, anyway.”

  “Why do you do it?”

  “Do what?” She cocked her head to the side.

  “You know. What you do for a living.” Chad resisted the urge to kick at the ground like a boy on the schoolyard. Somewhere between that shadowy doorway and their short banter, he’d begun to like Lily.

  “What? Being a hooker? It’s okay. I know what I am.” Lily tipped her head back and looked at the stars. “I guess it’s just something I fell into. My Mom died when I was young and I was on my own at fifteen. I could go on and on with my sad story, but the truth is, it pays the bills. And it’s a hell of a lot better than waitressing for quarter tips.”

  “I’m sorry that happened to you.” Chad’s apology felt inadequate, and he felt guilty about his comparably privileged life.

  “Not your fault. We all have our problems. Hey look. We’re here.”

  They stopped in front of a low brick building, the windows covered by boards. It looked to have been closed up for a while, and Chad couldn’t immediately tell what sort of business it had housed when open. Glancing up and down the street, he saw that more businesses were boarded up than not.

  “Well, this is 122, but I don’t see a 122 ½. Usually it would be an apartment above the actual business in a place like this, but there’s only one floor. I guess it doesn’t exist.” He was a little pissed at the old man for sending him on a wild goose chase, but at least Lily’s company had been nice.

  “Maybe it’s down there?” Lily pointed down a narrow alley south of the building which was barely wide enough to let them enter side by side.

  “I suppose it could be. You want to check it out?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come on. If it’s not there, we’ll come right back out. And if it is, I’ll buy you a drink.”

  “You’d owe me more than one drink for going down that creepy alley.”

  “Okay, I’ll buy you as many drinks as you want.” He held out a hand to her, grinning in the most disarming way he could when she didn’t take it. “It’s okay. I’ll protect you.”

  Lily snorted, her eyebrows raised as she made a show of looking him up and down, clearly not reassured by his fancy clothes and lean build.

  Chad laughed and shrugged, pulling his hand back.

  “We’ll be a team. If someone attacks us, I’ll distract them while you take off one of those high heels and stab them with it.”

  “I’ll go down there with you on one condition. If we don’t find anything, you walk me back to my place and pay for a date.”

  “That sounds fair. If we don’t find anything, I might just want that date after all.” Chad winked and held his hand out again, and after only a moment of hesitation, Lily took it.

  ***

  The light from the street barely illuminated the narrow alley and they had to proceed slowly to keep from tripping over trash that littered the ground. A heavy stink of urine and garbage made them breathe through their mouths, and Chad had to squeeze Lily’s hand to keep her from fleeing when a rat squeaked at them from atop a pile of refuse. Chad was about to give up and turn around when the thump of heavy bass reached him, more a feeling than a sound. A few yards down, they came upon the door.

  Set flush with the brick, the heavy steel door was huge, easily twice the size of an average one, with no discernible knob or handle. Spray painted in black letters across it were two words: CLUB CARNAL. The music came from behind the door.

  Looking over his shoulder at Lily, Chad raised his eyebrows in question. She shrugged, squeezing his hand lightly. He raised his other fist and rapped on the door, expecting a hollow gonging noise to reverberate down the alley, but hearing only a soft knock. After several moments he turned to Lily.

  “There’s no way anyone will hear us knocking over that music. Maybe there’s another way in.”

  The door squealed on unseen hinges as it opened inward, revealing a man in a stained white t-shirt and snug jeans with homemade tattoos covering nearly every inch of exposed skin, including his face and neck. Ignoring Chad and Lily, the guy leaned out and surveyed the alley with narrowed eyes, before allowing them to enter.

  Inside it was dark, the only illumination coming from a black light that caused neon graffiti on the walls to glow crude etchings and misspelled words that shocked the eyes in day-glow pinks, greens and yellows. The music was loud and heavy.

  Turning toward Chad, the big man said nothing, just held out a scarred hand, eyebrows raised.

  “Oh yeah.” Chad said, his voice swallowed up by the beat as he patted first one pocket, then the other with a frantic certainty he had lost the ticket and they would be thrown back out into the alley with the rats and garbage. He jumped when Lily slid her small hand into his front pocket, her fingertips grazing his balls as she retrieved the ticket deep within and laid it in the bouncer’s palm. She winked at Chad as they waited for the man to inspect the stub.

  Satisfied with what he saw, the guy opened an interior door and ushered
them past the entrance.

  Chad’s first impression of Club Carnal was one of sensory overload as he tried to take in all the sights and sounds at once. It was much louder than he would have imagined from the alley. The music vibrated in his chest, and was occasionally punctuated by shrill laughter and screams. The dance floor was full of gyrating bodies in various states of undress. Both women and men danced on raised platforms, their nude bodies glowing with neon paint like that which adorned the walls in the entry. A recessed area contained circular booths where couples and whole groups of people lounged, some engaged in sex acts while others smoked hookahs made of brightly colored glass, the bluish smoke creating a haze that fell upon the room like mist.

  Lily pulled on Chad’s arm, her mouth close to his ear so he would hear her shout.

  “No way this place is legal.”

  He nodded, then smiled when he saw the look of awe that had transformed her face into that of a little girl’s. The strobe lights made her pale skin look bluish, then green, as her mascara ringed eyes scanned the room, wide with wonder.

  A pretty young woman holding an empty tray walked up to them, clad only in a loincloth, her nipples dusted with glitter and sporting clamps from which small peacock feathers hung. She grabbed Lily by the hand and led her away as Chad hurried to keep up, taking them to an empty booth that held a translucent pink hookah and a dish of sticky looking tobacco. The waitress disappeared without a word, only to return moments later with her tray full of drinks in carnival colors which she arranged before the two of them.

  Fumbling with his wallet, unsure of the price of the drinks he hadn’t ordered, Chad pulled out two twenties, which the woman tucked into the strip of leather holding the loincloth in place. She handed them each one of the mouthpieces attached to the pipe, then leaned over and lit it for them, giving Chad a full view of her bare crotch beneath the cloth.

  Lily put the tube in her mouth, breathed deeply, and held the smoke, a dreamy expression taking over her face as she exhaled. Even in the sporadic light from the dance floor, Chad watched as her pupils grew large and glassy.

  Must be some good shit, he thought, his own mouthpiece still in hand as he weighed the wisdom of smoking an unknown drug in an illegal club deep within the city. He already felt strange, probably from breathing the second-hand haze that enveloped the room. In the end he gave in, took a deep drag, and felt euphoria wash over him in waves.

  Is it hash? Opium? The world became soft at the edges, and his whole body thrummed like a tuning fork.

  ***

  Somehow the drinks on the table were half empty, and Lily was on his lap, her mouth tasting of fruit and bitter alcohol as she pressed it sloppily against his own.

  The low-cut shirt was rent down the middle, her bare breasts filling his hands. He looked down at them, unsure how they had gotten in this position, and noticed that each nipple was tattooed with a rose. That had to have hurt like hell, he thought, then giggled, pinching first one, then the other, much too hard. Lily moaned and shoved her wet tongue into his ear. Chad took another hit from the hookah.

  The glasses were empty now, and Chad leaned back on the bench, pants around his knees. Lily dragged her teeth up the underside of his cock, causing him to groan. It should’ve hurt, but everything felt wonderful and electric. His head spun as she sucked at him, his eyes trying to focus on the people around them. In the next booth, a fat businessman lay sprawled while a blonde bounced on his face, squealing each time she landed. A threesome was happening on the floor at his feet, though he had a hard time concentrating enough to figure out the players, and who was doing what to whom. The whole room was alive with writhing bodies, the smell of sex mingling with the sweet smell of smoke.

  The music stopped and the voice of the DJ boomed over the crowd.

  “The spoons!”

  The waitress returned with a silver object in her hand. It looked like a large melon-baller to Chad, the edges wickedly sharp. She set it on the table and pushed between them, pressing Lily back into the bench with a hungry kiss, her ass in Chad’s face. He reached out to trace the lines of her vulva, his finger sliding between the slick folds of flesh with ease as he rose up to his knees, almost falling over on shaky legs. Lily groaned as the waitress buried her face between her thighs and growled, her eyes glazed, a dazed expression on her face. The whole room seemed to tilt, but Chad welcomed the shift. It felt like his whole body was fluid and fire with bolts of pleasure shooting out from his groin as he slid his cock into the woman.

  The waitress glanced over her shoulder and grinned, a savage look on her face. For a moment, it seemed the flesh on it blurred into something demonic, skeletal and cruel, visible for only a second before she returned her attention to Lily. Chad shuddered but continued on, pumping for all his worth, not bothering to look at the stranger who slipped one thick, spit-slick finger between his cheeks to circle his asshole. He came with a roar and fell back against the cushion, watching the scene with pleasant exhaustion.

  The waitress sat up, pulling Lily with her so the three of them were thigh to thigh on the bench. Without a word, she retrieved the odd spoon from the table, scraped it down the inside of her leg. Chad shook his head to clear it, watching in open-mouthed awe as the young woman scooped a chunk of flesh from her leg with a smile, offering it to Lily’s waiting mouth. The wound was bloodless, as if she were made of pale clay instead of flesh and bone, a pale, golden light revealed beneath her skin.

  Lily swallowed with a sigh of pleasure, her eyes glowing with the same amber light as she looked across the woman to Chad, her mouth slack.

  Chad shook his head again. This shit was crazy, but it didn’t seem quite as wrong as it should. Somewhere in the back of his mind an alarm sounded, and an old man’s voice screeched something about not partaking of the flesh, but he ignored it, accepting a smooth chunk from the woman’s belly with all the reverence of an alter boy’s first communion.

  The taste exploded across his tongue, sweet like honey and musky. Like nothing he had tasted before, filling his whole being with need.

  He wanted more, and she obliged, the spoon dipping over and over, the offering of her flesh disappearing into their mouths with increasing speed.

  Chad couldn’t get enough, the warmth inside his body felt like living light and danced across his every nerve, ending in orgasmic intensity. When the woman stood and pressed the spoon, still remarkably cool despite her touch, into his hand, he knew what was expected of him and turned to Lily.

  His entire world shrank down to just this moment, this booth, and Lily’s soft body. He wanted to cut a new entrance in her, one that no other man had ever used.

  They squirmed against one another, making and breaking connections at the mouth and crotch, nothing existed but fingers and tongues and his cock as he carved at her flesh. It came away easily, like ice cream, like butter, and they both consumed it greedily as the rest of the room retreated, until there was nothing more than moans and whispers and the liquid sounds of sucking and fucking and carnal bliss.

  Throwing the spoon down with impatience, Chad attacked her with his mouth, biting and chewing as Lily’s squeals of delight joined the chorus of physical pleasure.

  ***

  A shrill train whistle blew and afternoon sunlight stabbed his eyes, threatening to make Chad’s head explode as he awoke on a rough concrete floor. The throbbing in his head was so intense he felt nauseated.

  He slowly sat up in a room he didn’t recognize. He was naked from the waist down, and his cock felt raw and abused. His mouth was dry, and there was a coppery taste in it that made his stomach churn. He rolled onto his side just in time to unleash a stream of bitter vomit onto the floor.

  Lying in misery as his heaving gut calmed, Chad struggled to remember the night before, bits and pieces of memory causing his head to spin. He recalled a hooker. Lily? And some sort of club. It all came rushing back in a flood, causing him to bolt upright in another nauseating wave of pain.

  “Oh shit
,” he groaned, gathering his bearings as his head continued to spin. He was in what seemed to be a long-abandoned building. The floors were heaped with trash and dirt, and the windows were boarded over, the glass long gone. A train whistle sounded again, making him think he was near the railroad yard.

  But that was impossible. He’d been on Maple, and that was miles away from the railroad. Chad squinted to inspect the shadows around him, and realized he wasn’t alone. A naked woman lay a few feet away, her narrow back to him.

  “Lily? Is that you?”

  The woman didn’t reply.

  With sinking dread, Chad pulled his pants up and buckled his belt, crawling across the rough floor to where she lay, unmoving.

  “Are you okay?”

  Chad prodded her shoulder. As he touched her cold skin, a voice jabbered incoherently in his head, and he knew before he rolled her over that she would be dead. She flopped onto her back and Chad screamed, a high-pitched sound that echoed back to him as he fell on his ass. Rocks and glass gouged his palms as he scuttled crab-like away from the body.

  All of one breast and much of her thighs were gone, exposing raw, red tissue and gleaming bone. Her abdomen had been clawed open, her dull, useless organs drying in the air. In some places he could see where the tool had cut away the flesh clean, but other places looked gnawed on, the edges rough and chewed. Lily’s face had not been spared the ravaging, as her lips and much of the surrounding cheeks were torn away, leaving the tendons and fascia beneath.

  Her blue eyes stared off, the film of death already formed upon them, and her bloody teeth seemed to sneer at him, blaming him for what had happened to her. As Chad watched, a fat black fly landed on the surface of one eyeball and began to crawl around.

  He puked again, this time not stopping until each heave produced only a foamy stream of dark, bitter bile. But even as he retched, memories of the club assailed him and he felt a longing to be back, to immerse himself in that pure bliss one more time. His groin tingled with anticipation. He spit in the dust, trying to get the taste from his mouth.