NightWhere

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Revenge

They say the road to hell is paved with the best of intentions, but Mark had the best intentions, and the road was proving very difficult to find. The bondage night had proven a bust, though he had to wonder about Selena showing up again out of nowhere. It creeped him out a bit…as if she was following him. Maybe she was acting as a spy for NightWhere.

Either way, he hadn’t gotten anything from her. He stared at her card where it sat on the kitchen counter. He wasn’t going to be calling her anytime soon. Whatever she wanted, it had nothing to do with taking him back to NightWhere.

Mark walked through his empty house and felt lonelier than he ever had before in his life. He picked up the postcard that he’d found in one of the abandoned NightWhere locations and stared at it again.

Night

Where

Your dreams…and nightmares come true

No lurid photos. No other indication of any kind about what it meant. But as he stared at the seemingly obscure phrase, he noticed that there was something more to the card that he hadn’t seen before. Faint grey lettering was just barely visible along its edge. Not much of a promotional gambit-most people would never see it. But it was there: “www.nightwhere.666”.

Mark frowned. Dot-com, sure, but there was no web suffix of.666 that he’d ever heard of. He took the card to his computer and launched an Internet browser. As soon as it loaded his home page, he typed “www.nightwhere.666” in the web address window. He bet that he’d end up with some “No Such Page” style message, but instead, his computer screen suddenly turned black.

Slowly, like a movie animation, the word NightWhere materialized at the top of the screen, silver letters carving through the black, in an arch over the tangled image of a snake.

Below the logo, a headline also appeared: Do You Know This Molester?

Mark gasped.

Beneath the headline, was a photo of a man’s face. The very same face he saw in the mirror every morning. There was no question; this was no “that guy looks like me” scene.

The photo was of Mark, grinning full face at the camera.

“Holy shit.”

Beneath the photo it said:

Mark Rogacz may look like just an innocent bystander, but he has flashed dozens of girls at a local grade school near his house and is believed to have had sex with at least five children aged 8-12.

He has a long history of sexual abuse and police have speculated about the possibility that he has hidden away the bodies of some of the girls he has slept with in the basement of his home.

This man appears affable and trustworthy, but he is actually a very dangerous sociopath. Police suspect he may have even murdered his wife, who has not been seen or heard from in several weeks.

If you see him, do not interact with him; call the police immediately.

“What the fuck!” Mark sat back in his office chair and stared at his own mug shot staring back at him from the computer screen. His chest felt like ice. How could they do this to him?

He didn’t ask why…he knew why. Because he hadn’t played along. He had tried to pull Rae away from NightWhere, and when she’d gone anyway, he’d tried to find her.

But, Jesus…if this was on the Internet, how long would it be before police were at his door, ready to pull him in for questioning?

Probably not too long, he speculated.

“They’ve ruined me,” he whispered to the empty room. “First they took my wife, and now they want to take what’s left of my life too?”

Mark clicked the X with a sharp finger snap to the mouse and closed the browser. Then he sat back and took a deep breath.

He had to find Rae. For his own sake now, as well as her own.

He stood up and went into the bedroom to change out of his sweatpants and into his jeans. It was after 11:00 p.m., but he needed to go out. He knew places where the city came alive after dark. And that’s where people might have information on NightWhere.

He wasn’t going to find NightWhere sitting in his house…or looking on the Net.

And based on what he’d just seen online, it looked like he didn’t have a lot of time left to find it before the authorities came looking for him.