NightWhere

Chapter Thirty-Three

Waking up

Mark woke with something holding his arm down. He tried to move it, but…nothing happened. So he tried the other arm. And had similar luck.

His legs, also, refused to move from their place on his bed.

A bed that felt strangely cold.

Mark’s eyes blinked, but those seemed to be the only muscles currently working. He’d just have to work with what he had. He focused on the shadows, moving his eyes around the room, taking in every detail.

The ceiling was red as blood. Mark’s eyes traveled all along it, following the swirls and cascades. It ran darker and lighter in places, but it didn’t fade away. And the more he looked at it, the more it seemed as if the color wasn’t simply painted and static; it seemed to…move. To flow. The color bled down the walls and into the shadows near the floor. Mark’s head slowly tilted to one side, and he realized his neck muscles were working, as well as his eyes.

That’s when he saw that there was more than simply red on the walls. In the distance, there were people. People hung from hooks on chains. People who were naked and bloody.

Mark wondered if he looked like that. He wasn’t quite sure what was holding him, or why he couldn’t move. Was he chained and bleeding to death? He panicked for a moment. What if they’d cut his limbs off entirely, and drugged him so that he couldn’t feel the pain. He struggled to turn his head all the way to one side, and breathed a sigh of relief when he saw that his arm and hand were intact. Then he realized what the cold white struts were that his wrist was chained to.

Bone.

He looked down across his chest and saw that his midsection was restrained by huge curved struts of ivory as well. He looked as if he was being held prisoner inside a giant’s rib cage. He was trapped in a cage of bones. But how had he gotten here? And where was here? The last thing he remembered was standing naked and aroused, watching the video of Rae, literally fucking a man to death and then…

“You just couldn’t stay away from us, huh?” a voice said from behind him. “You wouldn’t join us, not really, but you couldn’t stay away. Quite the conundrum, really.”

Mark struggled to turn his head to see the source of the voice, and out of the corner of his vision on the left, he finally saw the pale flesh of someone standing nearby.

“Who are you?” Mark asked.

“Wouldn’t you like to know?”

“Well, yes…I would.”

A figure moved into view. Pale flesh covered by faint, downy hair. Two legs and a flaccid cock, right in Mark’s field of vision. The skin of the man’s cock glinted with silver-it was pierced in multiple places, as was the belly button above it.

Mark struggled to move his head back upwards, and saw the chest and neck and chin of the man. Or woman.

Yes, the stranger had a cock, but…he/she also had the ultimate fair-skinned, pale, sensual-looking body, with a pair of gorgeous, perfect breasts, full and prominent. Mark was instantly aroused as he stared. Each nipple was erect and piercings connected them with a thin chain. His/her lips were full and sensual, if almost colorless, below a thin, patrician nose and eyes so startlingly blue, they were captivating.

He wanted to stare into them without speaking for hours.

And then he remembered…despite the gorgeous tits, there was a cock dangling below. She/he was a hermaphrodite.

What the fuck?

Mark struggled to open his mouth and make his vocal cords work. When they did, they croaked a faint, ragged question.

“Who are you?”

“You can call me Damia. I’m the guy you don’t want to know,” the man/woman said. “I’m the girl you don’t want to know too. Because…I like sex, but even more, I like…blood. Lots of it.”

“What do you want with me?” Mark asked.

The creature laughed. “Sex and blood, for starters!”

“Kharon said I could see my wife if I came here.”

Damia put one hand on the rib bones enclosing Mark’s chest and swung her leg up over the table. He/she straddled Mark, leaning forward on the bones until her breasts pushed through the gaps. Mark felt the cold of metal studs against his thigh, as Damia leaned down to stare hard into his eyes. She cupped his cheeks in her hands and opened her mouth to kiss him.

He tasted metal as her tongue forced its way inside his lips, and as he stared into her eyes, her face suddenly grew fuzzy. As her edges blurred and she faded away, he began to see other things.

He saw:

…The blood spurt of a headless neck, as the openmouthed face of a bearded man lay below it, on a stone floor. His arms still twitched in death throes as Damia’s grinning face came into view to lick the gory stump of the man’s neck as if it were a sensual delicacy…

…The entrails of a woman hung from a hook being gently lifted by four hands from the long slash in her abdomen and draped around another woman’s shoulders. The guts glistened wetly and the woman who wore them as a bloody boa stroked them gently, as if she were stroking the fur of a pet. The woman had beautiful breasts and a long cock. Damia…

…The wide eyes of a dark-haired man whose head was locked down to a table with a steel band. A sensual hand with long nails held the sides of the man’s head as her thighs clenched and pressed her groin against his face, but when she drew back, Mark saw that, again, it wasn’t a she. The man beneath her spit pearly white froth from his mouth, but Damia’s beautiful, cruel face laughed, and she picked up a small dagger. She stroked his forehead with her free hand for a moment, before she took the blade and cut just above his chin and just below his nose. His lips slid down his neck to the table as a torrent of blood suddenly ran across his ears and pooled in the hollow of his neck. He screamed, and his teeth looked more red than white. Then her thighs covered the man’s lipless mouth again…

…A nude woman hung from a stone wall by two chains. Hooks gouged through the soft flesh of her hands, and chains wrapped around her wrists and looped around the hook, ensuring that the flesh wouldn’t give way and allow her to fall to the stone floor just a foot beneath her feet. On either side of her, twelve black-robed men and twelve black-robed women held smaller chains that each ran to six-inch hooks whose barbs were buried in the woman’s body, starting just above her breasts and ending in the space between her thighs. Damia stepped into the picture. She knelt before the woman and licked at the bloody mess that had been the lips of the woman’s sex. Her tongue then left bloody trails as she worked her way up to the woman’s breasts and then finally her neck and lips. Mark could see her excitement, as her cock thrust outward and her hands moved faster all across the woman’s flesh, smearing the woman with her own blood. Then she stepped onto the stool and pressed herself past the hooks and into the woman’s sex. The woman screamed as the motion pulled at the hooks in her hands and torso, but Damia’s thrusts only increased in intensity until at last he/she yelled above the din, “Pull!” And with that, the twenty-four robed people pulled on the chains hooked into the prisoner’s body at once, and the woman’s flesh peeled back beneath her as Damia’s own moans suddenly grew louder than the screams…

“Stop it!” Mark finally screamed and the horrible visions suddenly were replaced by the steel-ringed eyes of Damia, just inches from his own.

“What’s the matter?” she asked in a voice both sweet and husky. “Don’t you have a taste for The Red? Your wife does, you know. She may turn into one of my best students at the rate she’s going. There is a bloodlust in her so deep…”

“Lust, yes,” Mark interrupted. “Rae could never get enough. And she liked things to get kinky, but she’s not mean and horrible like this…”

Damia laughed. “You saw the film. That was real. We granted her deepest, darkest wish-she was able to fuck a man literally to death, and she came with the heat of his blood dripping across her chest and down her thighs. Don’t tell me she is not ‘horrible like this’.”

“You did something to her,” Mark insisted. “You drugged her or something…”

“We did nothing but open the door to who she has always been,” Damia said. She leaned forward to lick a steel-studded tongue across his lips. Then she pressed herself up from the bones that trapped Mark to a sitting position.

“You were never enough for her,” Damia pronounced. “You are barely Blue Room material; you could never survive an hour of The Red. You should have just let her go.”

“I can’t,” Mark said. “She’s my wife. I love her. I have to see her again.”

“There is only one way that Kharon will allow that,” Damia said. “You have to take your own journey into The Red. If you can perform the tasks set for you in the first three rooms, you will find Rae waiting for you in the next.”

“And if I can’t do what you ask?”

“Then Kharon promised to give you to me,” Damia smiled. The hunger glowed in her eyes. “You will become another one of my memories,” she said. “Shall I slice off your parts, one by one, as we make love? Or would you prefer the hooks and chains? Or something more original?”

She reached beneath the table and released something there with a click. Then she lifted the cage of bones from pinning his chest and opened the locks that held his wrists tight.

Mark felt sensation rush back to his limbs in a fire of pins and needles, and he struggled to sit up. The room spun around him as he did, and he almost cried out at the sensation returning to his hands and legs. He stifled that, knowing that it would only earn him more taunts from the hermaphrodite.

Damia held out a long, thin arm, and Mark accepted her hand out of reflex. She pulled him from the table, and he almost fell. But Damia propped him up with an arm across his shoulders. Mark could feel the cold steel of studs on his skin; Damia’s arms and shoulders were pierced in a line of steel and her back was dark with a maze of hellish tattoos.

“Let us begin,” she said as he staggered towards a wooden door.