NightWhere

Chapter Forty

Afterburn

Mark picked his way through the tunnel, struggling to put his hands and knees down on ground that didn’t hold razor edges. The more he focused on keeping his hands safe, the more his back and shoulders and thighs ended up getting nicked and bit by the blades that also pierced the walls and ceiling.

He knew now that he was going to make it. He could see the opening of the tunnel just a few feet away.

Mark wanted to sprint there, but he held himself back, carefully picking his way past the knives that jutted out of the stone on all sides of him. And finally, he arrived-bloody, shaking-at the exit.

He hesitated before putting his hand over the threshold.

Was there some last trap, some guillotine blade that would swing down to punish the foolhardy who leapt over the gap?

Mark felt his body tremble. He couldn’t remain on his hands and knees for much longer. Willpower alone had kept him from collapsing before now. But willpower was running out.

He took a deep breath and extended his hand through the opening, gritting his teeth as he anticipated…something.

Nothing happened.

“Fuck it,” he whispered. “If it kills me, I’ll be better off.” Mark pushed himself out of the tunnel and onto the flat, cool grey stone of an open, empty room.

Nothing happened.

He lay his entire body down on the cold stone and cried. Actually, he did more screaming and swearing than actual crying. His body was an open nerve. His legs and arms sent nonstop, white-hot pain to his brain. The skin felt as if someone held a flame to it, without pause. It hurt like hell to move and hurt even worse to just lie there and feel the throbbing, blistering complaints of his dying flesh. Add to that the flaying he’d received on the way to the fire pit, and the dozens of nicks and deeper cuts that covered his back and legs and arms where the tunnel’s obstacle course of blades had beat him, and there wasn’t any place on his body that didn’t scream from abuse.

He had made it through the tunnel of blades before the fire caught up with him, but now, he wasn’t sure how long he would actually survive to enjoy the victory. Mark couldn’t move. His eyes were swollen nearly shut, and his hands were thick with blood. The cuts were not closing, and he had nothing to wrap them in. If he could even move enough to bandage himself.

In his mind, Mark pictured Rae as she’d been when they’d first met. A pretty, quick-witted, funny girl. She’d seemed a little shy that first date, when they’d gone to see a bad Nicholas Cage movie and he’d kissed her afterwards in the car outside of her apartment. Her lips had been warm and full against his, and he’d breathed in her breath like the sweetest fragrance. The memory of that first kiss, of the more tentative girl she’d once been…that was the Rae that he still loved with all of his heart. That was the Rae that he knew still existed, somewhere beneath the scarred skin of her back and the demanding sexual creature who simply could never get enough anymore. Of anything.

She’d been descending in a spiral of degradation for years now, but NightWhere had found whatever that last barrier was in her soul…and had stripped it away completely. Mark juxtaposed the image of first-date Rae with the pain slut he’d watched the past few times at the club, and prayed that after all this, there was still something left of the Rae he’d fallen in love with to bring home.

“Having second thoughts,” a high-pitched voice taunted. “Maybe in the end, she really wasn’t ‘all that’?”

Damia.

Mark struggled to lift his head. He blinked one eye open in a swollen squint. The hermaphrodite stood just a couple feet away, hands on hips. Behind Damia, he saw a row of black-robed feet. Kharon stepped to the front. “You’ve passed two of your three trials,” he said. “But the next may be the hardest of all.”

“I can’t move,” Mark hissed.

Damia and Kharon reached down and grabbed Mark beneath his armpits, dragging him upright. He let out a horrible scream as the balls of his feet touched the stone and tried to accept some of his weight. The blisters that ballooned from the skin that wasn’t completely charred black burst and wet the floor around his heels.

They walk-dragged him down a long stone hallway with walls that glistened red in the dim hellish light. Then Damia took him completely into her arms and held him against a stone wall as a shower of water cascaded from somewhere overhead. Where it touched his skin, Mark felt a strange mix of both ice and fire, but his screams of anguish diminished to coughs and moans…his vocal chords were shot. He didn’t even try to open his eyes anymore, he simply hung against Damia’s breasts and let the water wash the blood away.

A few minutes later, he was lying in a bed, shaking so hard his teeth rattled. Mark struggled to open his eyes, but they seemed locked together. The pain screamed inside him, but he couldn’t let it out…he was locked inside himself with the waves of agony.

“Sleep,” a voice somewhere said. “Let it go now.”