NightWhere

Chapter Thirty-Five

Lesson One

“There are three lessons you must learn,” Damia said. “And to teach you, we will give you three tasks. I don’t think that you will embrace these lessons, as your wife has. But you must get through them if you are going to see Rae again.”

The hermaphrodite led him down a dark hallway.

“Where are we going?” Mark asked.

“To your damnation,” Damia laughed. Her voice sounded like a girl’s giggle, but there was a deeper hint to it as well. The edgy grate of a ghoul’s seduction.

Mark watched the pale globes of her ass walk ahead of him. The grins of skull faces leered at him from her rear, their mouths shifting subtly as she walked. Her entire back was a maze of hellish images, interrupted and decorated by silver studs and rings that pierced her flesh. Thin chains dangled from the studs on her shoulders to hook on to the posts that protruded from the top of her ass. Mark supposed that she probably never wore clothes; they would catch and rip at all the metal on her skin. Damia was attractive; dangerously alluring. He felt himself responding to her exotic pull even as he swallowed repeatedly in fear of what was ahead. He wondered what evil he was being led into.

“Lead me not into temptation,” he mumbled.

Damia laughed uproariously. She/he turned and grabbed Mark’s cock with long white fingers, rubbing the tip of her fingernail across the top. “Don’t give me that shit,” she said. “You love the temptation. And we’re going to lead you into it, through it and beneath it.”

The hermaphrodite reached both hands around Mark’s neck and pulled his lips close to hers. “It’s the damnation you’re afraid of,” she said, as she moved against Mark, making him cringe inside. “And whether you see Rae again or not, you will be damned,” Damia said. She licked his lips.

“You want me right now, despite it all, don’t you?”

Mark gave the faintest nod, unable to deny it.

Damia squeezed his crotch once with her hand to confirm and then pushed herself away from him, still laughing.

“You have no idea the depths to which you can go,” she said. “But I’ll leave that for Kharon to explain. He’s waiting for you there.”

Damia pointed at the flickering orange-and-red light just ahead. It emanated from a room on the left, a beckoning call of light that flickered against the crimson ceiling of the hall. She walked to the doorway and extended one hand towards it, a gesture for him to enter. Mark looked at Damia’s thin cheeks and studded breasts and cock and wet his lips with his tongue. His mouth was dry, and he suddenly felt a paralyzing fear. He couldn’t go through with this. He didn’t want the pain. He didn’t want to give it.

Damia giggled in that girlish ghoul voice again and stretched one of her breasts taut by pulling on the metal bar that pierced its tip. “You can have me instead of Rae if you want,” she taunted. “Maybe you will finally admit to yourself that you’re a pathetic faggot as well as a coward. I’ll give you what you want, I promise you. I can give you things that Rae never could. But first, you have to begin your journey.”

She pointed again at the room’s entry. “Kharon doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

Mark stepped past her, and jumped as Damia’s hand smacked his ass when he passed.

All he could see was the fire. It was like he had stepped into another world. To the left and right, a few yards in each direction, he could see the dark stone of walls that rose to meet a blackened ceiling. A line of fire burned along each wall, and the smell of cinder and smoke permeated his senses. Mark walked down the path in the center, between the guttering flames. His skin instantly warmed, and the stone beneath his bare feet was almost as hot as the midday sand on a beach when the sun beats down hard in summer. Sweat began to trickle down his back and along his ribs as soon as he stepped into the room.

The stone beneath his feet stretched on and on, and Mark walked, as if down a long city street. If city streets had curbs made of flame and skies of blackened stone.

After walking a minute or two, he saw figures ahead. They stood in a circle around something, and part of him hoped it was Rae.

It wasn’t.

The figures stood around a pit. The circle opened as Mark reached them, and he saw that three stairs of rough-hewn stone descended three feet beneath the floor.

At the head of the circle, directly in front of him, stood Kharon.

The man smiled. His eyes looked black against his pale, chalky skin that reflected the orange light of the flames.

“Remember,” Kharon said, “you demanded this. We would have let you go, but now that you are here…there is only one way. You cannot go back.”

“I just want to see Rae,” Mark said.

Kharon nodded. “You want more than that. But you will have what you ask for, if you can pass through the next three rooms.”

He pointed at the stairs leading downward. “First you must be baptized.”

Mark hated to think what baptism might mean in NightWhere, but he descended the steps and stood half underground, only his face and chest still above the floor, as all around him Watchers stood in a circle staring down.

“Let us begin,” Kharon said, and, as one, the group dropped their robes and stepped forward, so that Mark’s head was just below their knees. The ring of pale bodies blocked his view of most of the fire, and as he looked up past their knees, Mark saw that there were an equal number of men and women here. All looked ghastly pale in their nudity, and their skin was all covered in ragged scars. One woman only had one breast, a crooked pink scar stretched across the center of her rib cage where the other would be. One man was missing an arm, and several of the throng lacked fingers; their hands looked like broken flippers. Two women had empty holes where their eyes should have been and one of the men had a white, milky eye. Mark looked away from him; the sight of that blind eye creeped him out more than the strange situation itself. All of the people were thin to the point of starvation, with rib and pelvic bones visible through the parchment of their sickly skin.

Something wet hit him in the back, and Mark turned to see one of the men holding a flaccid cock and urinating, directly on him.

“Fuck!” Mark yelped and tried to step out of range, but something hit him from the other side. A woman, spreading her legs wide and prying her labia open to aim, peed on him from above. “Jesus,” Mark yelled, turning away from her and right into another stream of urine. It was hot and stank and in seconds it was streaming at him from all sides of the pit. He turned to climb back up the stairs, but a black man barred his path, pissing right into his face. Mark wiped the foul liquid out of his eyes. He gagged back the puke that wanted to rise and walked in the other direction, only to be barred by the hot spray of Kharon’s cock.

Mark let out one last yell of disgust and then, in surrender, stood still, closing his eyes and bending his head. He couldn’t escape and there was no place to run. There was nothing he could do but accept it. He knew there were those who got turned on by being pissed on, but all it did for Mark was make him feel disgusted. But he knew that it couldn’t go on forever. All rain must end. Especially human rain. So he waited.

And finally, the streams did stop, and he was left standing in a three-inch puddle of two dozen people’s urine.

He looked up at Kharon and again wiped the drops of piss from his face.

“Is that it?” he asked.

Kharon shook his head and pointed back towards the stairs. “Now you have to drink,” he said.

Mark looked at the man who stood one step down in the pit with him. He recognized his best friend from college. Richard Crest. The only guy he’d ever really worried about losing Rae to. Because he almost had. That had been back when Mark first realized that he could not hold her on a leash, not tightly. She had been sleeping with Richard on the side for six months during their senior year. When Mark had walked in on them one night, he had almost broken it off with his two best friends at once.

But Rae had slowly talked him down. She loved him. She wanted to stay with him. She just needed…a little more sometimes. And, well, Richard had it. Actually he had…

Mark looked at his old friend now, standing naked and stroking his penis erect on the stair. Yeah, Richard had a little more. He had a lot more.

“How ya doin’, buddy?” Richard asked. “From what I hear, I’m not the only one who had to take care of Rae for you.”

Mark shook his head. “No, but it has always been me that she loved.”

Richard nodded. “I see. So then, enlighten me, where is your lover girl right now?”

The words hit Mark right in the softest part of his chest. Where was she indeed?

“She’s here at the club,” he said.

“Seems like she’s not here saving her faithful lapdog from getting pissed on,” Richard observed. “Very telling.”

“Nice to see you too,” Mark said.

Richard laughed. “It will be,” he said. “You have no idea.”

Kharon’s voice rang out across the pit. “Drink, or drown,” he said.

Mark looked back at Richard. His friend was smiling, but his smile held very little humor.

“Here’s the thing, ol’ pal. You’re kind of a pathetic loser, and I don’t know why I ever hung out with you. I should have taken Rae away from you just to save her a lifetime of grief. But, you know, 20/20 vision and all that. At the moment, I’m looking forward to one of the best blow jobs of my life. And you’re gonna give it to me.”

Mark shook his head and laughed. “I don’t think so.”

Richard crossed his arms, letting his hard cock poke straight out at Mark’s face. He shook his hips to make it weave in the air, pointing…

“Drink, or drown,” Kharon said again.

“Here’s the thing,” Richard explained. “Unless you suck the cock that Rae really loved, you’re not getting out of here. And Kharon’s got a hundred other followers who would be happy to come and piss on you for the rest of the night.”

Mark turned and looked back at Kharon. The Watcher’s lips twisted down, in a sneer. He said nothing, but his head nodded, slightly.

All around the pit, the naked guards stood close, not allowing any place for Mark to pull himself up and run away. Not that he knew where he could run to anyway. Behind them, a dozen more white legs walked into position. And behind those, he saw another line begin.

“You don’t have a lot of options, my friend,” Richard laughed. “But you better do a good job. Otherwise…Kharon’s just going to make you do it again. And you know, I’m the judge. So…make it count.”

Mark felt tears gathering at the corners of his eyes. When he’d come to look for Rae, when he’d insisted that he be allowed to see her, he’d never thought that he’d have to endure shit like this. And now…Richard was right. He didn’t have a lot of options. He bent down until his face was eye to eye with Richard’s crotch. Then he closed his eyes and opened his mouth. Something smooth and yet hard entered his lips. And pressed against the top of his mouth. It moved against him.

Something inside Mark died at that moment.

“Rae did it a lot better,” Richard remarked.

Someone in the onlooking crowd began to laugh, and soon the rest joined in.

Mark refused to open his eyes, but tears leaked from their edges. They streamed down his cheeks, cutting through the wetness of his humiliation.

And then he heard his mother’s voice.

“Oh my goodness, Mark, I never knew.”

He opened his eyes. He pulled away from Richard and stared in complete disbelief. His mother stood with the crowd of Watchers, naked as the rest of them. He cringed at the sight of her low-hanging breasts and grey thatch of crotch hair-things he never wanted to see.

But worse, his father stood naked next to her. Dad looked just as he had the last time Mark had seen him, five years before. Just before he’d had a heart attack and died in the bathroom. A year before his mom had ODed on sleeping pills.

They were both dead and couldn’t possibly be here now. Yet…

“I never thought a son of mine would be a cocksucker,” his dad said. The disgust dripped from his words. “Look at you! Look at what you’re doing. Is that what your mother and I taught you? No wonder you can’t keep your wife happy. Poor thing. She deserves better. You really are disgusting. I don’t think I can ever look at you again.”

His father turned away and took Mark’s mom into his arms, slipping his arms around her wide back and waist. Mark had to look away when they began French-kissing, and his mom began to grab his father’s wrinkled, hairy ass with clear intent.

But looking away from his impossible parents only put him back to the hard dick in front of him.

“You either make this cum, or you’re going to get another shower,” Richard reminded. “And if you don’t get busy, you’re going to have to start on me all over again.”

Sure enough, Mark saw that Richard’s steel was turning to taffy.

Mark closed his eyes once again and pushed everything from his mind. The thing in his mouth, the sounds of his parents fucking nearby, the laughter of the surrounding crowd. He forced himself not to throw up and pictured Rae’s broad, welcoming smile.

He had to see it again.

That would make all of this worth it.

He hoped.

Mark opened his mouth.