NightWhere

Chapter Twenty

Crawling Through the Wreckage

Where did you start to look for a place that only appeared once a month? And never in the same spot.

Mark had never returned to any of the other sites where NightWhere had been held, but he decided to drive back to the first one, down on Riverside Avenue in the South Loop. He knew he could get back there easily-it wasn’t too far off the expressway. Maybe there’d be some kind of clue there. What kind of clue that might be, he didn’t know.

All he did know was that he was grasping at straws.

An hour later, Mark was walking down the cracked sidewalk of Riverside, noting how much more run-down the area looked in the light than it had at night when he’d walked with Rae here. The door to the place was unlocked. He stepped inside, and the room stretched out ahead, long and empty. There was no furniture, and the industrial, grey carpet was stained with brown circles in a variety of places. Looking up, it was easy to see why. The white panels of the drop ceiling were also stained in rusty circles. The roof leaked, and nobody was here to care.

He walked through the place and saw the crumpled, yellowed sleeves of used condoms here and there in the corners. On the floor in the hallway, he found a black postcard that had the familiar self-devouring snake logo around the gothicly styled letters NW.

All it said was:

Night

Where

Your dreams…and nightmares come true

There was no phone or address. It was a calling card-something to say “we were here” but not who we were. And perhaps it was aimed to set the idea of NightWhere in some unsuspecting sex addicts’ heads. Subliminal marketing.

Mark folded it up and slipped the card into his back pocket. Then he began to move towards the exit. There was nothing there. Hell, he couldn’t even figure out how NightWhere had fit into that space. It had all seemed so much bigger the night he’d brought Rae here.

Thinking about that, he walked back along the south wall to follow the layout he knew that the club had. He pointed to the right and could imagine the bar and the stage set over there, though it still seemed a bit tight. But then he got to the end of the room, where the “Intro to Flogging” racks would have been…and he wasn’t sure how they could possibly have fit here.

He understood that things always looked different when they were empty, compared to when they were filled but…even if the racks could have been set up back here…where was the door to The Red? They hadn’t gone through it that night, but it had been there.

He walked along the back wall and then in the far corner found a small white steel door. It was certainly no ornate wooden medieval arched doorway, but he turned the handle anyway. The door opened, and Mark stepped through it.

Into a back loading dock.

Okay. Wrong door?

He stepped back inside and walked all along the back wall but found no other doors.

A chill gripped his stomach.

This was absolutely where he had brought Rae the first night. And yet, it was impossible for NightWhere to have existed in that space.

Mark walked out of the old building and got in the car to drive to the last place that they’d held NightWhere. In an industrial park.

It was easy to find-of the three locations he knew of, probably closest to his house. He even remembered the address-someone had changed the real address to NW13. The piece of paper that had marked the building as NW was gone now and the doorway was simply 2303-13. Mark could see through the dirt-streaked windows that the place had been vacant for a long time.

He tried the door and, just like the last place, it was unlocked. He stepped inside and instantly shook his head.

There was no way NightWhere could have been held here.

The three times he’d been there, he’d noticed that it was impossible to tell the difference between the locations once you walked inside. While the places hosting NightWhere were all radically different, the inside layout of each had been identical. Always there was a walk through the entryway and a long gap until the bar where Sin-D held court to the right. And then the stage just in front of that, and the whipping area way down the aisle towards the back. And then darker areas that he hadn’t traveled to the left, including the door to The Red.

When he walked into the industrial park building that he’d seen Rae enter (twice!), he didn’t see any way that NightWhere could ever have existed there. The room beyond 2303-13’s door was about twenty feet long and maybe forty feet deep. And that was it. The stage and Sin-D’s bar would have taken up virtually this entire space.

Mark walked the entire room, searching for a doorway that would have opened onto some other aspect of the club. But the only other door opened to a back parking lot.

After circling the room twice, Mark left and went back to his car. There was one other person who could vouch for what NightWhere had been that night. Who might have some information about Rae, in fact. He remembered the route she had taken, and he thought he could find his way back. He’d followed Ridgely Street east until Pontrain Avenue. And then had headed north.

Mark walked back to his car and started it up. He pulled into traffic and began to retrace his route of that night, as he’d followed Rae. He remembered turning at the main streets. Because he’d been so curious about where she was heading…the route had stuck in his head.

But once he turned onto Bailey and headed east again, he wasn’t sure. He knew it was along here but…

Then he saw the sign for Santa Fe Burritos and grinned. He remembered that. It was right next door to the lot that Rae had pulled into.

He pulled in just before reaching the Mexican place and parked near the entryway to the two-flat he had seen Rae enter. He remembered that night clearly-Rae in her red dress, walking out of the door farthest from the restaurant, a loud-shirted man following her on a leash.

Mark got out of the Sonata and walked up to the apartment door. He rang the doorbell and waited. Then he knocked on the door; he couldn’t tell if a doorbell had actually rung inside.

Mark waited on the stoop for another minute before pressing the doorbell buzzer again. Something creaked to his left.

“You’re not going to find him that way,” a voice said.

Mark turned and saw a thin, grey-haired woman pushing open the door of the next flat. Her glasses were so heavy they made her eyes look poached.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“Boy’s been missing for almost a month,” she said. “Police have been here a couple times. Hope nothing bad happened to him. He was such a sweet boy. Always willing to help an old lady, you know?”

Mark thanked her and returned to the car.

So Rae had literally kidnapped the guy. What the hell? And what did that mean about her disappearance? Had she chosen to stay away, as he’d suspected? Or had she been lured into something that she could not escape?

He started the car and pulled away, wondering…now what? He had no other way to connect to the club.

Mark decided to drive to the north side of the city-to the other location where he knew NightWhere had been. An old building in Evanston where they’d taken the elevator to the thirteenth floor. He got a little turned around when he left the expressway, but eventually he found the building. He recognized the façade’s gargoyles and the courtyard. He parked and walked into the building’s lobby, remembering the staircase and old-fashioned elevator in the center. He got on the elevator intending to go to the thirteenth floor (which had been labeled NW when Rae and he had ridden it). But when he went to push the button, there was nothing labeled NW or 13. He only saw buttons labeled 12 and 14. Mark took a deep breath. This was the right building, he was sure of it. And he was also sure that there had been a button between 12 and 14 when he’d been here last.

He rode the elevator to the twelfth and fourteenth floors, in case NightWhere had somehow managed to relabel all the elevator’s buttons that night. But each floor was the same. He stepped out and saw a long hallway with numbered rooms. Apartments. He walked to the end of each and faced a blank wall. There was a small door in each of those walls, made of glass and surrounded by red. A fire extinguisher sat inside each of those glass doors, not the entryway to a sex club.

There was no room here that could have hosted NightWhere.

There was no thirteenth floor.

Anyone who hadn’t seen what Mark had seen, right here in this building just weeks before, would have said there was no NightWhere.

But he knew better. Mark had been there.

And his wife was still there.