Bath Haus

by P. J. Vernon

  His timing is spectacular, and maybe he can see me? My every move. Constant control might be impossible, but he can erect guardrails. Keep me in my lane beneath a veneer of self-determination. This is what pushed me in the first place. Made seedy corners online and in bathhouses so damn appealing. He knows what I’m doing and when I do it. Strategically timed texts keep me uncomfortable. Payback for my mistakes. For bringing a killer into my life and now into our home. His life, his home.

  Paranoia, Oliver. Don’t avalanche.

  I slip the USB stick in and a media player launches. I hold my breath. Panic stirs, snakes up my back. The contents are organized into chapters. Sixteen of them for sixteen scenes, and I play chapter one.

  A Caucasian man sits on a half-gutted sofa. Fit and young. Hair so dark it’s nearly black, so it’s no one I recognize—though I’m unsure why I would expect otherwise. The camera zooms, fixing on a close-up.

  “Devin,” he says, then: “Twenty-two.”

  He must be answering offscreen questions, but what’s your name? and how old are you, Devin? are too muted to hear.

  “I’m straight.” Accent’s vaguely Jersey. “I have a girlfriend.”

  He hammocks his chin in the groove of a thumb and forefinger.

  “Nope. Never done anything like this before.”

  His cheeks dimple when he smiles.

  “I’m nervous.”

  He brings a glass into frame and takes an anxious sip.

  “Okay. Sure.” Devin pulls his shirt off, and a hand reaches from behind the camera. Long fingers run over his chest, tiptoe across his clavicle. “You got my cash? Just gotta jack off, right?”

  Amateur porn. My pulse settles because I’d braced for something else. Shit like blackmail. Or worse. Maybe Kristian had filmed our encounter.

  “Her name?” The same hand forks over a wad of bills, and Devin rubs his exposed biceps like he’s suddenly cold. “Ashley.”

  Another sip. Beer by the foaminess, and his eyes seem to go glossier with each gulp.

  “Uh, soccer. Sometimes, but not so much lately.” Devin massages a bare shoulder. “Mostly studying a lot, I guess?”

  He polishes off the drink.

  “Nursing. Probably pediatrics.”

  He’s starting to slur. Maybe the on-camera beer’s not his first?

  “Nah, no tattoos.”

  Devin nods, and hesitates before standing.

  “Sure.”

  He slips acid-washed jeans to his thighs. Ditto a pair of neon boxer briefs.

  “Like this?”

  He stumbles once, twice while spinning slowly for the camera, and maybe it wasn’t beer in that glass. Or only beer. After a second three-sixty, the screen fades. For thirty excruciating seconds, nothing and I bite into the inside of my cheek. Then chapter two plays.

  Blackness resolves into a mop closet of a room. The quality’s poor, but the walls look like cinder block. No windows. The camera seems fixed high in a ceiling corner. Pointed downward like closed-circuit surveillance.

  Not a thing in the space but a mattress. Mottled with spilled whatever and thrown on a concrete floor. The scene holds a filthiness that’s not the video’s fault. It reminds me of Haus. Of the room I followed Kristian into so naïvely. Not exactly the same, but sparse and similar enough to wonder. A clock at the frame’s bottom keeps minutes.

  The same dark-haired guy from the first scene—Devin the maybe-nursing student—walks in. Stark naked. He stumbles around almost aimlessly. His gait, hapless, off-putting, bordering on unsettling. He’s drunk or otherwise intoxicated. He bumps into the mattress two, three, four times.

  Something about this is wrong. Very wrong.

  A second man enters. Likewise naked, and my chest knots. Kristian. No mistaking it. He even flashes the camera a knowing smile. Acknowledges its presence for the benefit of the audience.

  It suddenly occurs to me that Devin hasn’t gazed up once. When people know they’re being filmed, the natural compulsion is to look at the camera. He isn’t aware of it. The footage is surreptitious. Either the camera’s hidden or he’s too inebriated to notice. Regardless, Kristian hasn’t alerted him.

  But he has alerted me.

  A sudden chill sweeps up my arms, raising bumps on my skin. My cheeks grow warm and my scrotum tightens. Something deeply, profoundly, primally wrong is unfolding here.

  Kristian whispers inaudibly into Devin’s ear. Then he embraces the man, kisses him, cups and fondles him.

  Devin might reciprocate, but nothing about his mannerisms scream consent. To the contrary, it looks like he’s been drugged. Heavily. Movements are staggered, exaggerated in ways that don’t make sense. Kristian takes his hand, leads him to the mattress. He shoves him backward onto it. A hard push to his chest that reverberates in mine.

  He climbs on top of him, dick hard.

  A series of memories pop off like a string of firecrackers. Images, smells, feelings, all visceral and raw. Kristian’s grip. His touch. His tongue traveling over me. Spinning me, coming from behind, positioning me the way he wants it. The way he wants to fuck.

  Fear crawls up my spine, and I clutch my chest, my throat. I can’t breathe.

  Through invisible ducts, billowing steam pours into the office. Obscuring, masking, suffocating. It blots out the window’s sunlight, and the room draws dark. Jungle humid and sweat gathers on my arms, under my pits, between my legs. Beads roll down my face.

  I already know what happens next.

  Kristian kisses Devin’s ear. His fist finds his throat.

  The struggle is instant. Twenty-two-year-old Devin flails, jerks, and jitters like a harpooned fish. I know what’s racing through his mind. The horrifying conclusions he’s drawing. The inescapable reality. No more Ashley. No more soccer. There will be no Devin, Registered Nurse.

  He grows more fitful, spiking adrenaline pushing through whatever roofies he’s swallowed.

  Kristian presses hard against both our bodies. My lungs collapsing beneath his weight. My sternum fracturing and buckling inside my chest. The man on the tape can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. No physical penetration. Only mindfucking during the few minutes asphyxia lasts.

  Despair distills itself into a concentrated resin at the bottom of my heart. Devin’s time is ending. His face blues and he froths. A last jerk this way and that before he accepts what’s happening.

  He seizes, then stills.

  When Kristian stands, he shudders and I wonder how intense his high is.

  He runs fingers through sweat-wet hair and smiles into the camera a second time. Grins at me once more. He doesn’t glance behind on his way out of frame. The lifeless body he’s left on a mattress. Devin, who mere minutes earlier moved and breathed and lived. The clip dissolves to black.

  A snuff film. Kristian has left me one minute and fourteen seconds of snuff film.

  No! One minute and fourteen seconds of snuff scene! I punch the space bar before chapter three starts. Jesus, there are sixteen of them!

  It’s the worst fucking kind of personal message. Showing what might have been, what still might come to pass. He’s sharing what comes next for me.

  I’m petrified, an inanimate extension of the chair I sit on. He raped my mind, plunged me into a darkness unlike, Christ, unlike anything imaginable. How do you, how does anyone make sense of this? A whole life discarded for the sake of an orgasm?

  I’d struck the keyboard like a mallet just as another clip queued up. Another interview, another man, another murder. My paranoid nightmare—the one I’ve fought and rationalized and bald-faced lied to myself about—isn’t. It’s reality, and there are others. Others who didn’t escape. Others whose lives were taken, begging silently as Kristian shattered their windpipes. Entire lifetimes, entire worlds, faded to black.

>   The image, the hidden bodies, rotting, melting into wet piles of corruption. They’re all real. Somewhere, right now, Devin’s remains are as real as the shallow grave he’s buried in.

  Sixteen whole chapters, and I could’ve been one of them.

  The tiny dot at the top of my own monitor—the camera—spurs a fresh wave of panic. I spent exactly zero seconds appraising Kristian’s room at Haus. An entire film crew could’ve stood in the corner, and I wouldn’t have noticed.

  Not while we kissed. Not while I stood against the wall. Not while he pressed his chest to my back.

  Sixteen chapters.

  However many men.

  I very well might be one of them.

  17

  It takes all of me, all my willpower, any strength that remains, but I push the chair from my desk and stand. Dazed, I grab the USB stick and stumble downstairs, where I pluck a ziplock bag from the kitchen pantry.

  A surreal hallucination. Brief. Maybe too brief to be an actual hallucination. The baggie is suddenly filled with pills. Piles and piles of white pills. Then it’s empty again. Then the flash drive is slipped and sealed inside it.

  I wish it did hold pills. For the first time in a very, very long time, I crave them. Not like a once-habitual user craves them, but with a sense of frightening urgency. The bitter taste on my tongue. Swallowing one after another after another until a warm euphoria blooms. A crawling numbness that flowers and crowds out everything else. A mind at peace is impossible, but I’d settle for fake peace. Beautiful and fragile and false like wrapping paper.

  Deep breath in, deep breath out. In a bizarre way, I’m grateful for the baggie’s contents. If they were pills, I’d swallow all of them. I might not wake back up to this nightmare.

  I grab my keys. Baggie in hand, I make for the marked cop car out front.

  * * *

  • •

  This time I sit in Detective Henning’s office. A foam cup of orange juice ripples each time Detective Henning touches the desk. First, when she opens her laptop. Second, when her elbows come to rest. Third, when her boot strikes the desk leg as she shifts uncomfortably.

  “Devin. Twenty-two.”

  “I’m straight. I have a girlfriend.”

  As hard as she tries to stay stoic in my company, she fails. Tiny movements, her jawline tensing, the way she runs her thumb over her fingernails over and over again, betray her.

  “Nope. Never done anything like this before.”

  When she stops the clip, she exhales loudly. Then we sit in silence for an uncomfortable length of time before she breaks it: “You have to tell him.”

  Not what I expected. “Nathan?”

  “Yes.” She squares her shoulders. “You’re going to have to tell Nathan what’s been happening.”

  “Why would I—”

  “What you’re trying to do here? It’s unsustainable.” Her tone is conflicted. She’s empathetic. She doesn’t want Nathan to find out, but I can almost see the foregone conclusions surfacing in her mind. The narrowing and winnowing of possibilities. Of ways to do her job and help me maintain my charade.

  With every passing moment, my safety and my relationship inch closer to mutual exclusivity. They may never have been reconcilable. I lied to myself. It’s funny, really. I’ve lied to nearly everyone else in my life, and yet somehow managed to save the biggest untruth for yours truly.

  “No.” I’m completely unmoored, and she must see this in my eyes. “I can’t.”

  “I received the membership list from Haus.” She skirts my entrenchment. “We’ve completed a very thorough cross-referencing of each name with publicly available data. Photos, social media, everything.”

  I ball my hands into fists beneath the table.

  “We’ve come up with nothing, Oliver.”

  “How is that possible? There was blood. And you talked about cameras and canvassing.”

  “There’s nothing.” She leans forward, crosses her arms. The day’s heat has coalesced into a storm. Drops from the summer rain collect on a window before streaking down like comets. “There’s nothing placing you there. Every room came up negative for blood with luminol. Is that suspicious? Given the expected kink, sure. But we can’t find your records. We can’t find Kristian’s either.”

  My questions keep pace with the pelting raindrops on glass. “Do you believe me? Do you believe I was there? That I was attacked? That someone tried to kill me?”

  She pauses, weighing her next words carefully. “I’d like to believe you, but that’s not enough. That’s not going to locate this man, nor will it keep you safe.” She closes her laptop harder than necessary. I imagine to excise the video’s images from her mind.

  “Let me explain how this is working so far. I can’t place you at Haus. Traffic cams put your vehicle, or I should say, Nathan’s Range Rover—his is the only name on the title—in roughly the same neighborhood, but the parking lot isn’t covered by surveillance. Both the owners and the receptionist refuse to corroborate your story—dispute it, in fact. I’ve got no other cases resembling yours to suggest a pattern. And, Oliver, I know you’re sick of hearing this, but you’ve reported two entirely different assaults. Your credibility is tissue-paper thin.”

  “My credibility?” My throat’s covered in finger-shaped contusions, and Detective Henning’s questioning the veracity of my story?

  “Yeah.”

  “Witnesses,” I protest. “The other men. There were so many, and they all saw me running out. They must’ve seen Kristian. Pretty sure only one guy was cupping his bleeding fucking face.”

  “Nobody on that list will come forward. No one wants to admit they were there. Someone in your position should understand that. You claim the same pressure forced you to file a false report.”

  “You are absolutely right. But there is a pattern. The tape shows it. You just watched him murder someone. Exactly like he tried to kill me. And god knows how many others are on that flash drive!”

  “Were you drugged like this guy appears to have been?”

  “No.”

  She speaks slowly, takes care to enunciate each word to completion. “I think I just watched someone who’s similar to the man in your photo drug and murder someone. But I can’t know this. I can’t know this wasn’t acting, a work of fiction. We think it occurred years ago, but timestamps are easily manipulated. The scenes transition with a dissolve effect, meaning they’ve been edited. And we have no idea where it was filmed, whose jurisdiction.”

  As Detective Henning ticks through each obstacle, from speed bump to dead end, my heart falls deeper into my chest. This was never going to be easy, I figured that from the start, but my duplicity and lying have made it damn near impossible.

  What a stupid thought! What a stupid fucking thought. My duplicity and lying are why this happened at all. I wouldn’t have downloaded the app or gone inside Haus. I’d never have run into Kristian. It’s my fault. I’m not supposed to say it but it’s true.

  “Kristian is in your jurisdiction right now. He’s working with our fucking contractor. I want to know what you’re going to do about it!”

  “Oliver. Lower your voice.” Detective Henning folds her arms.

  “Wait,” I say. A sudden recollection bursting to life. “My credit card!”

  “I thought you paid—”

  “Cash. I did, but not for the drink.”

  “You were drinking that night?”

  “No. I mean, yes. Not really. Just one in the bar at Haus. They took my card at the front, but I never cashed out.” I open my banking app. “The drink charge should be there. Timestamped and everything.”

  Detective Henning sighs, purses her lips.

  I scroll, but my first pass at pending charges comes up empty. I must’ve missed it, so I start again carefully at the top and—fuck. My heart, my chair,
even the ground under me, they all sink.

  I didn’t miss the charge; it’s right there. The Saturday timestamp. The amount. The expense.

  10:48p | $14.12 USD | Dry Cleaners

  “Well?”

  “The charge, it’s—” I stutter and turn my screen around. “It’s listed discreetly, but it has to help. You can confirm it’s their standard practice. It matches the timeline.”

  “Uh-huh.” She looks up, rightfully incredulous. “Maybe if the name was notable, but Dry Cleaners? Circumstantial is too generous.”

  “But the time. It substantiates my story or at least part—”

  “Look, I’ll bring in the receptionist at Haus for formal questioning. Compel him to make another statement. It’s one thing to mislead or cover up when questioned on friendly turf. It’s quite another to deliberately lie on an official investigatory document. While sweating bullets in a police station.”

  This makes perfect sense—to bring him in. So much sense I wonder why it’s taken until now to do so. Why it took a snuff film to needle the man—the Cheshire Cat—who clearly lied to her once already.

  I keep this to myself. Victim or not, I’m not entitled to the inner workings of police matters. And cops often mislead. To trip up persons of interest, to get to the truth. Lying to discern truth.

  “Two, I’m going to follow up with your contractor, Darryl. I suspect his crews are all under-the-table. Especially given the short time it took your attacker to land the job. Hopefully the manner in which Kristian found and contacted him will be revelatory. You mentioned you’d left a key for Darryl?”

  “That’s right.” I eye the orange juice. The inside of my mouth tastes like sidewalk chalk, but the cup looks to weigh a metric ton.

  “Did he leave it behind when he left?”

  Shit. I didn’t look. Between panicking over Tilly and discovering a fucking snuff film, I completely forgot to check if the spare was returned.

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure if he left it in the mailbox on his way out or not.”

  “You need to find out. If he left it, then it’s unlikely Kristian had time to make a copy. If Darryl took the key home with him by accident, there’d be plenty of opportunities to slip it from him. I suggest changing your locks. Today.”