NightWhere

by John Everson

  He was going to drink it down, slowly. And when it all felt right…

  …the knife that killed his father.

  Perry Pierce didn’t have a lot to live for anymore, but he knew what he liked. Good music, good smells, good buzz. And then he’d use the same knife that he’d killed his father with and let the blood out. It had been beating within him for so long, wanting to leave…it was time to let it go.

  Mike was out tonight, and that was part of the plan. He knew Mike had a thing for Tony-they were at a game and, if Mike came home, he’d come home drunk. But more likely, he wouldn’t come home at all. He’d end up at Tony’s and claim that he was too drunk to get back.

  Perry knew better. He was being cheated on, and Mike was too much of a chickenshit to cop to it.

  Perry didn’t know what Tony had that he didn’t have, but there you go…people just fuckin’ suck, in general. And not in a good, gay suck way. Just sucked. In a kick-’em-in-the-teeth-’cuz-it’s-every-ass-for-himself kinda way.

  There wasn’t anything you could do to hold the ones you loved close. They were yours for a little while, and then they slipped away. If you didn’t kill them, or cancer or AIDS didn’t kill them, they killed themselves. Or at least the love you had. Everyone moved on, whether you were moving or not.

  Perry was tired of moving.

  He took a sip of the bourbon and felt the heat spike across his tongue and then trail down the back of his throat. It was hot like a good blow job, he thought with a smile.

  “Fuck me,” he whispered and took another sip. He wanted the world to spin, but he didn’t want to waste the bourbon. It was powerful stuff, the kind that should be savored.

  He let it lay on his tongue and thought about all the times he’d let Mike tie him to a wall and whip the shit out of him. He thought about the dungeons they’d gone to together, Mike showing him off like some trophy fuck.

  He thought about the time he’d gone to that secret club. The invite had come when Mike was out of town, and Perry had checked it out. He couldn’t hide the bruises, though, when Mike had come home, and they’d almost broken up over that. Perry had ignored the following invitations.

  He toyed with the knife and thought of the day his father had come after him, screaming at him like some maniac. “Faggot?” his dad had screamed. “No son of mine is going to be some kind of faggot…”

  Perry relived the moment again and again. The words were in his head like a recording, but worse was the memory of his father stepping into the kitchen and holding a bottle out, threatening his son. Perry had grabbed a knife from the steak knife holder and warned his father back.

  “No son of mine will…” his dad had said just before impaling himself on the knife in Perry’s hand.

  He’d run after that. And run with the knife. He’d kept it close ever since, as a reminder. A reminder of what he’d done. What he could do. Tony beat him, but he was never afraid…he knew what he could do.

  Perry emptied the glass and poured another thirty dollars of bourbon into a glass. Maybe it was a waste, he thought, since he’d be gone before the burn really went deep.

  “Fuck it.”

  He pulled the knife across his wrist and let the red bleed out into his lap. He watched, with a strange disconnection, as the blood streamed across his forearm and then down his thigh to wet the floor.

  And then someone was there, in the room with him. A man he remembered from the sex club. Dark eyes and pale skin, a chest to die for.

  “Back in black…” AC/DC sang as the CD started over, but Perry thought about it and laughed…this man was more white than black.

  “Wrap it up,” the man suggested, pointing at Perry’s wrist. “Someone will come for you tonight. She will take you to The Crossing,” the man whispered.

  Perry didn’t know why or how, but somehow he found himself staunching the intentional flow of blood from his wrist with a strip of material from a T-shirt.

  “Sure,” he said, answering the man. He felt hypnotized…the man was beautiful. His words were seductive in a way that he couldn’t explain. “I will. Why not?”

  “Come to The Crossing,” the man said. “Don’t let yourself go alone.”

  And Perry nodded, taking a sip of the bourbon and staring at the red stain growing through his T-shirt. “Why not?”

  The man wasn’t there anymore to hear.

  Chapter Ten

  Dreaming

  Sometimes the night seemed to last forever. Sometimes Rae wished it would never end.

  Right now…she was feeling the former. She’d been awake for hours, as next to her, Mark slept, sometimes snoring faintly. She wished she could let go and dream, as he did. Instead, she lived inside her memories, reliving every moment of her last night at NightWhere.

  Every time she thought of Kharon, her skin grew flushed. She wanted to be with him now so badly her breasts ached. The memory of his touch was like a smoker’s lust for a cigarette. Once she began to see his face, his chest…she couldn’t let go of the memories. Her crotch warmed and grew wet, and her hand moved there to ease the itch that built…and then her fingers had to move faster, massaging that hungry spot faster and faster until she had to stop and quietly slip her panties down her thighs and around her ankles so that her fingers could more easily be buried inside her sex. Carefully, she moved her hips faster in a tight motion, sucking her fingers inside her as, next to her, her clueless husband slept.

  In the midst of it all, she saw Kharon’s face as if he were right there, and heard his voice as if he were licking and whispering in her ear.

  “Come back to me,” he said.

  “Stay with me,” he said.

  “Forever,” he whispered.

  Gordon rolled over and looked at his shrew of a wife. She may be tiny but she snored like a truck driver, and drool wet her pillow.

  If he could have, Gordon would have taken a hammer to her head and ended her miserable existence. He often drew great autoerotic pleasure from imagining just that. He hated her.

  But if he did that, there’d be nobody to take care of the kid. And someone had to do that while he went to work.

  So he let her live in his house and eat his food. But in his heart, Gordon wanted to kill her. To finally sever her hold on him. She’d dragged him into her life and used the baby to hold him there. It was never what he’d wanted.

  He closed his eyes and tried to imagine his life without her, but instead all he could think about was the sound and feel of his whip cracking down on the flesh of Amelia.

  He kept seeing the open O of Amelia’s pain-thirsty mouth. That, and the face of one of the NightWhere Watchers. He didn’t know them by name, but he knew them by sight. And this one, in particular, he’d seen around the club a lot. The Watcher kept saying things to him. Things like:

  Kill.

  Fuck,

  Kill.

  He liked the way this guy thought.

  And then the guy showed him the pictures of a blonde and a redhead tied to the rack. They were fuckin’ stacked bitches…and naked as jaybirds…and bleeding from the cuts that someone had slit across their breasts.

  Gordon reached between his legs to calm the excitement there, and instead of bringing himself off, he lost himself in the dream.

  In the back of his mind, a voice whispered, “Come to NightWhere for The Crossing.”

  Amelia shook on her couch and moaned. A scab pulled loose from the whip tracks on her back and blood began to flow again into the fabric. She hadn’t moved from the sofa in hours. She was barely alive.

  “Come back,” a voice said in her ear. “Join us in The Crossing.”

  “Yes,” she whispered. The thought of returning to NightWhere made her blood pump faster. But her eyes still did not open.

  Chapter Eleven

  Three Strikes

  Rae taunted the speed limit the entire drive, and when she finally hit NightWhere, she didn’t slow down. Mark followed behind her, wondering if she even remembered that he was ther
e. Tailor’s familiar black fingernails slipped around the door as it opened. She held out their invitation to the doorman, and as soon the door opened, she strode forward without looking back, fishnets pronounced and visible, corset overt and begging attention. She didn’t stop to stare into the doorman’s hypnotic eyes and get weak-kneed or to tell her husband where she was going.

  Rae was on a mission.

  Mark got it. He almost wasn’t hurt when she turned around inside the club and pecked him quickly on the lips before forcing a dismissive smile and then walking quickly away from him. She knew what she wanted.

  Mark…wasn’t sure anymore.

  He’d thought he wanted Rae, but now… He couldn’t satisfy her, and he didn’t think he held her attention anymore. He didn’t yearn for others to take her place, or even to have alongside her…she was the woman who made him hot! But she had told him to play the field, because she herself desperately needed to.

  And now…he was bored.

  He didn’t want this. He wanted a wife.

  Mark cut across the room to the bar as Rae disappeared straight into the throng dancing in the center of the club. The fact that some of the women weren’t wearing shirts didn’t even interest him at the moment. Sometimes all you really wanted was your own set of tits to grasp. And Mark’s were walking away…looking for another thrill.

  “Hey, stranger,” a voice said, and he looked up to see a pair of lilting blue eyes that he recognized.

  “Hey,” he said, smiling faintly at Sin-D.

  “You know, usually, it’s three strikes, you’re out.”

  “Huh?”

  “People don’t come to NightWhere to sit at the bar,” she said, “Unless you’re a loser like him.” She pointed at Kendrick who sat at the far end of the bar.

  He raised a glass and grinned. “Lost her already?” he said. “That must be a new record…you’ve been inside, what, three minutes?”

  “Fuck you,” Mark said, a little annoyed. He couldn’t have said whether that annoyance was more at Rae or Kendrick at the moment.

  “Wouldn’t you rather fuck me?” Sin-D asked, slipping her hand inside her spandex white top and pulling it down across the brown skin of her tits until the pink of her nipples began to show. Mark was beginning to think this was her trademark come-on.

  “She’s very needy,” Kendrick offered. “She looks good, but they never come back for seconds, you know what I’m sayin’?”

  Sin-D stuck her tongue out at Kendrick. “That’s ’cuz people don’t come here for the bar. They’re out there, having a fuckin’ good time,” Sin-D pointed towards the dance floor and the coitus cots that were only half-hidden behind velvet curtains spaced around the perimeter of the room.

  “Exactly,” Mark said. “Are you going to show me one?”

  “I think I already did,” Sin-D smiled. “But if I have to run you through the paces once more…I guess I could.”

  Sin-D winked and went to help another patron at the far end of the bar, as Mark settled onto his stool.

  “Really?” a quiet voice said at his elbow.

  Mark turned, and met the piercing eyes of Selena. She was sipping a martini, crystal liquor, clear and clean. Just like her.

  “Really what?” he asked.

  She raised a faint eyebrow and shook her head. “I was hoping after the last time that you might come to your senses, and stay away from the rabbit hole.”

  “Not really up to me,” he said. “She’s here, so I’m here.”

  “Your loyalty is admirable,” she said, taking a sip of her drink. “But misguided. I don’t see her anywhere. You need to choose your own course. There’s nothing to admire in the lemming.”

  Mark could see Sin-D and Kendrick watching them, as the bartendress mixed a drink for a balding businessman-looking character at the end of the bar.

  “You’re here for the same reason I am,” Mark reminded Selena. “So what’s your excuse?”

  Sin-D finished with her customer and returned to insert herself into the conversation, leaning down on her elbows between Mark and Selena. “How’s it going? Something I can help with?”

  “No,” Mark laughed and took Selena’s hand. “We were just about to dance.”

  Selena didn’t resist, or question his abrupt shift, and followed him out to the dance floor. Mark could feel Sin-D’s eyes following their every step. There was something the bartender didn’t like about Selena-he’d felt that from the first moment he’d met her. But there was something about Selena that Mark did like, very much. She seemed like a straight girl-she told it like she saw it. She wasn’t appalled by sex, but she wasn’t here to spread her legs for every guy who asked either. She seemed genuinely worried about him, though, and he wanted to find out…why.

  The band played a slow goth dirge from The Cure, something about prayers for rain, and Selena wrapped her arms around his neck as she swayed with him. He put his hands around her midsection and realized how skinny she was. But soft. His fingers gripped her waist and she moved gently with him, swaying to the music with a faint, secret smile on her lips.

  She leaned her head on his shoulder and whispered in his ear.

  “I liked you that first night we met,” she said. “I was kind of wishing you might get out of this.”

  “My wife came home from here the last time with a flyer,” he said in Selena’s ear. “All it said was ‘The Red’.”

  “Is that why she came back?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. But she made a beeline for the back of the club as soon as we got here.”

  “If she goes that way, you’ve lost her forever,” Selena said. “I’m not trying to be mean or anything, I’m just telling you the truth.”

  “Where is it?”

  “The Red?”

  He nodded.

  “Back beyond the racks. But you can’t get in there without an invitation. It’s a club within the club.”

  “Show me,” he asked.

  Selena nodded and led him off the dance floor to the back of the club. They walked past people necking in the corners and then people groaning as the floggers fell.

  “Window dressing,” Selena said, pulling him past the handful of nudes on the racks. “This is all just a tease.”

  She pointed behind them at the men and women, fat and skinny, naked and clothed in leather…they came in all shapes and sizes. The only constant was that they clustered around the black boards and steel chains that made up the row of racks at the back of the club.

  “They’re playing at this,” Selena said. “The real pain artists, the one your wife wants to find…they’re in there.”

  She pointed down the wall towards the corner. An arch of grey stones surrounded a double wooden door. The doors were made of dark wooden slats, held together by iron bars that attached to the hinges on one end and curled out into a circular snake design at the other. The center bars were the most ornate, with the snake forming a large circle and then instead of biting its tail, as the usual emblem of NightWhere did, the heads of these snakes slipped upwards from the tail to hold round iron doorknockers in their fangs.

  Mark didn’t hesitate. He walked past a velvet-rope barrier to lift the doorknocker. But Selena grabbed his shoulder.

  “You can’t!” she said.

  “My wife’s in there,” Mark laughed. “I certainly can.”

  Instead of knocking, he pulled the door open and caught a glimpse of candle flames and deep-red light in the space beyond. A scream as overwrought as the clincher from a B-grade horror movie escaped from somewhere within.

  And then the door slammed shut, pushing Mark back into the main room of NightWhere.

  “Can I help you?” a male voice asked from behind them. His hand rested on the top half of the previously open door. Mark turned and saw a pale man with his other hand resting on Selena’s shoulder. Her lips pressed tightly together but she said nothing.

  The man grinned, his face little more than a skull with skin and stubble. He looked like a N
azi camp survivor.

  “My wife is in there,” Mark said.

  The man shook his head in agreement, cocking his chin slightly as he stared hard at Mark’s eyes. “And so…”

  “And so I’m going in to find her.”

  “Nobody goes into The Red without an invitation,” the thin man said. His bony fingers kneaded Selena’s shoulders as he spoke. Mark saw her tremble in revulsion as they slipped lower across her chest with each motion.

  Mark rolled his eyes. “Yeah, whatever. We’re here as a couple, and where she goes, I go.”

  He reached out to pull the iron ring of the door again, but a cold grip instantly took his wrist.

  “I don’t think you’re understanding the way things work here, exactly,” the man said. His voice was ice. “If your wife gave you an invitation, I will let you go in. Otherwise, the modus operandi of NightWhere is…every man for himself. Your wife has her own itch to scratch. It is not yours, or you wouldn’t be here while she is there.”

  The man pressed his skinny, bald chest up against Mark’s shirt. His eyes were slanted and wide, his pupils deep black orbs in a circle of steel. They inched closer until Mark could feel the man’s breath on his lips. “Nobody gets into anything here without an invitation,” he said. “And you are not invited.”

  A hand slipped around Mark’s waist from behind. Selena.

  Warm breath tickled his neck from behind as she whispered. “C’mon,” she said. “Just forget it.”

  The man’s eyes seemed to widen even more in a dangerous humor, and Mark saw his skin crease in a river of wrinkles as his mouth opened in a cackle dark and grim.

  “I’d listen to her while you can,” the man laughed. “Enjoy her-she won’t last long. I will guarantee that.”

  Selena’s hand pulled him hard then, and this time Mark complied, stepping back away from the door.

  “Come back when you are wanted,” the man laughed and pulled the wooden door open to step through himself. A flash of red shadowed his head, and he was gone, the door shut with a heavy creak behind him.