NightWhere

Chapter Five

Return

Mark barely had the phone to his ear when Rae’s voice announced: “It’s tonight!”

Mark knew what she meant without asking. For the past month that’s all Rae had talked about. Her interest in pain which had long been bubbling near the surface seemed to have exploded into an obsession after their first trip to NightWhere. She’d bought books on bondage and submission. She’d tried to get Mark to flog her and when his slaps disappointed, she’d tried to turn the tables on him. She cornered him in the bedroom one night with thigh-high black boots, a leather corset, black gloves and a long, wicked-looking leather whip. He escaped from that with a couple of well-placed spanks and a deep kiss. She’d given in quickly and with energy-sex had not been that good with her in a long time, he’d thought at the time.

But it had only been the foreplay for what she truly desired.

“It’s tonight,” she repeated. “Are you almost home?”

Mark opened the garage door a half hour later and stepped into the house to find his wife lounging back on the couch, clearly posing for him. He did a double take.

“Do you like?” she asked.

Rae leapt up and did a twirl. The chains connecting the two small leather cups of her bra rattled as she did. Small chains hung in twin silver waterfalls across her bare belly. A curtain of ill-concealing metal.

She also wore a short black leather skirt and black fishnet hose beneath it. Chains looped from the waist of her skirt, and she wore silver bracelets of chain as well. Around her neck, she had a collar of chain bound to leather. She had painted her lips black and wore dark shadow around her eyes. Rae was darkly, dangerously stunning.

“Have you been watching Rocky Horror?” Mark asked.

She stuck her tongue out. “You have an hour to hit your wardrobe and attempt to keep up with me.”

“And then?”

“We have to drive to the north side.”

“I’m no Tim Curry, and anyway, I don’t think I restocked my fishnets,” Mark joked.

Rae pursed her lips. “I don’t think those would look good on you anyway. I picked you out a shirt upstairs. See what you think.”

Mark grinned. “Now you’re dressing me, huh?”

She slapped him on the ass. “Hurry up!”

“Don’t wear out your wrist before we leave,” he warned, hurrying away from her towards the stairs.

“I could say the same thing to you,” she laughed. “Better not take too long up there.”

While the last edition of NightWhere had been housed in a run-down section of the city, tonight’s invitation took them to the upscale part of town. The Evanston neighborhood was lined with tall, old trees, and the building they pulled up in front of looked one hundred years old. It was a grey-stone high-rise with ornate limestone accents and watchful gargoyles surrounding its roof. They walked into the U of its courtyard, Rae holding a black mesh cape around her bare midriff as they hurried to enter and get out of sight of any bystanders in the neighborhood.

Mark opened the heavy wooden front door and they stepped inside. The lobby floor was all black-veined, creamy marble, and a gilded elevator hugged one side of the wide room. A set of slowly curving steps led away from the street to their left. They stood there in the lobby, lost for a minute.

“Are you sure…” Mark began, but Rae interrupted him.

“There!” She pointed at the gold antique top of the elevator, which used a needle to show the floors. On the right-hand side, right after the number 12, a small black oval was pasted on, right over the place where 13 should have been. In the center of the circle, two letters were limned in grey: NW.

“It’s upstairs,” she said, moving towards the elevator.

“On the thirteenth floor,” Mark said quietly. “Of course.”

They got on the elevator and pressed the black button that was also obscured with a small black disc reading NW.

The elevator creaked and ascended, each floor ticked off by the slow clockwise ascent of an arrow above the door. And then the needle stopped, and a bell chimed, and the gold doors opened onto a long, dark hall. They stepped out and saw a handful of dark doorways along either side of the hallway. But their destination was clear. At the end of the corridor, they could see flickers of blue light from beneath a door, and the throb of a bass-and-drum groove echoed dully in the air. They walked quickly down the hall. Rae clutched their invitation for the night like a life preserver.

Mark raised a fist to knock, but the door opened before he touched it.

A hand reached out, its fingernails glittered obsidian, its wrist was encircled by the dark ink of a symbol they both recognized from their last visit: a self-devouring snake tattoo.

Rae handed over the invitation, and a moment later they were inside. The volume of the music was overpowering inside of the doorway, and when the doorman leaned in to say something, Mark found himself yelling back, “What?”

The tall man grinned and motioned them to walk behind a curtained area on the other side of the door. The black-velvet draping deadened the sound of the band a little, and the man took Rae’s hand in his own, at the same time reaching out to grab Mark’s.

“You came back,” he said. “We are excited to have you as part of our secret family. The first time…we let you look and decide if this is really what you want. Some don’t return. Most do, because we don’t give out invitations lightly. But those that do come back to us a second time…almost never leave.”

The man held out a long hand that looked paper white against the black curtains. Rae took it, and the man pulled her closer, raising her arm to kiss her knuckles with exaggerated slowness. When his eyes caught Rae’s, she felt instantly weak. As if the connection literally sucked the energy from her soul through her eyes and fingertips.

She drew in a breath as his eyes held her own. His face was thin and drawn, but his eyes…they were like black holes. His eyes were wide, and in the dim light she could only think that they were pools of black. Pools of electric, magnetic black. She couldn’t look away. Seconds seemed like minutes, and she could almost hear him speaking in the silence between their eyes. The words were nonsense, but they sounded important. Like ancient knowledge. Secrets lost. Then without warning he broke the connection and held out his hand to Mark, still keeping his eyes on her.

“My name is Tailor,” he said. “They call me a Watcher, because I’m here to watch! But not just as a voyeur-though I am one.” He laughed. “I’m also here to make sure the night goes well for everyone. NightWhere can be everything you’ve ever wanted…or everything you were ever afraid of. Let me know how I can help you find what you need here.”

“Thank you,” Rae said. “I think I found what I needed here last time. I just need to find her again. She told me that she’d see me, um, in a place called The Red?”

Tailor’s lips spread. “All in due time,” he promised. “Until then…” he motioned towards the moving green and blue spotlights and the band playing on a stage before them, “…go in…and sin!”

The doorman slid away from them, still smiling with some hidden humor. Rae leaned up and kissed Mark hard on the lips after Tailor passed. “C’mon,” she said. “Let’s get some sin!”

She pulled him by the hand out onto the dance floor. The band-dressed in requisite black-was in the midst of a gloomy rock set. The singer crooned almost in monotone, as he picked a heavy Stratocaster. Next to him, the bassist practiced androgyny and boredom, standing stock-still in silk sleeves, black eyeliner and lipstick. His hair was kinked and hung on his shoulders, but only his fingers moved, throbbing a steady thunder on four thick strings. Behind him, the drummer’s mascara ran across bloated cheeks as he pounded out a challenge to the rest of the band. Off to one side, behind a wall of smoke, a tall, bony man who reminded Mark of Ric Ocasek hung intently over his keyboards, filling the spaces between the beats and the guitars with strings and fuzz. He wore sunglasses in the dark.

It shouldn’t have worked, but it did. They were hypnotic. And energizing at the same time. The small crowd on the dance floor didn’t stop moving. Mark and Rae had to edge their way in to find a place to dance to the hypnotic, hazy groove. They ended up between an androgynous couple who both appeared flat-chested beneath their ripped T-shirts, but who both wore fishnets and eyeliner (were they both women? men?).

On either side of the stage metal stairs led to cages suspended in the air. A line of men and women ascended and descended the stairs in a slow but steady procession while the band played. They took turns above the dance floor, fondling and fucking the gyrating cage prisoners before returning to the floor.

Beneath the cages and against the black metal walls, a dozen men were down on all fours, collared and chained to hooks on the walls as women strode back and forth fondling riding crops in their hands.

Periodically people slipped away from the strobing blue lights in twos and threes, and sometimes fours, to claim the only partly public cots that were strung out around the place beneath velvet tents. Many of them returned from the tents without even bothering to pull their clothes back on, driven by the beat of a favorite song to dance clothed solely in the sweat of their bacchanalian passion.

The band slipped into a dreamy interlude, with something like a sitar punctuating the still-urgent beat as the singer suddenly opened up and showed he could sing more than two notes. And he could sing…with a charisma that melted inhibitions.

The couples on the floor surged closer to the stage, bodies pressing against each other indiscriminately as the singer hugged the mic. You could taste the lust in the air at that moment. Mark felt himself growing erect from the scent of sex all around him, as much as from the sight of it. Rae shook the chains of her leather bra against Mark, and then twisted to the right to rub her barely concealed breasts teasingly against a man’s biceps with a smile at the man and a wink back at her husband.

A thickset redhead with a wide face and too-bright eyes shoved into Mark and Rae’s circle and leaned closer to Mark, as she kept an eye on Rae to gauge the other woman’s reaction to the intrusion. Rae only smiled and slipped her arms around the biceps guy to make space for the woman to move in. And she did…leaning forward to make sure Mark saw that her freckled chest was braless beneath the thin red dress she almost wore.

Mark shot Rae an evil look-she knew he was not into big girls-and humored the woman with a couple of short hip sways together, before he put his hands on her shoulders and excused himself.

He could almost hear Rae laughing as he escaped to the bar. He wasn’t worried about leaving Rae…she was eager to explore. An obligatory dance with her hubby was a nice gesture, but…he knew the score-he was only holding her back.

The band stepped up the energy and launched into something gothic behind him, maybe Bauhaus…or Joy Division…Mark wasn’t sure. He just knew it sounded like the growlingly ’80s club scene he vaguely remembered. Hell, the singer even looked like Ian Curtis from his brief Joy Division heyday-wan, thin face and close-cropped hair broken by two intensely wide eyes. He looked angry as he sang, but the sound was comforting somehow, regardless. Mark watched for a minute and then turned away to the bar with a smile, ready to order a Jack and Coke. His eye was caught by a blonde woman who sat alone, at the far end of the bar, so he didn’t notice who was mixing drinks until she spoke.

“Just couldn’t stay away, could you?” Sin-D said. She leaned forward across the wood, the intricate tattoos on her bare shoulders exposed. Finely detailed, her left arm showed a witch star in a clouded sky and the hands of the dead rising from the earth beneath it. A broken tower faded into the horizon of her biceps beneath the low-hanging strap of her black tank top.

“Once you’ve had black, there’s no going back?” Mark joked.

“You better be talking about my shirt, not my skin, baby. This is a hard-core tan! You want black, you’ll have to hit the floor some more,” Sin-D said. “You want hot, fast and naked white girl with a shot of tequila…get your ass back here.”

“I warned you last time, she’ll do anyone, and usually does!” A broad-shouldered man in a red-and-grey-checkered shirt held out his hand. “Kendrick, remember?”

Mark took the hand and nodded. “Sure, I remember. Only my wife gets to call you Ken.”

“Gotta separate the men from the toys,” Kendrick winked. Then he made a big show of peering over Mark’s shoulders and looking beneath his bar stool. “Huh. Looks like I’m too late here. Someone’s already cucked your goose?”

“I told you she wasn’t normally shy,” Mark said.

Sin-D pushed Kendrick’s shoulder away from the bar. “Git!” she said. “Can’t you see this boy needs a stiff drink from a soft bartendress?”

Mark smiled. “How about just a Jack and Coke for now?”

“You want Jack’s Cock? Has this place turned you that fast?” She exaggerated a roll of her eyes. “How disappointing.”

Mark rolled his eyes. “Liquor?” he pleaded.

“Ah, so easily swayed. Now he wants to lick her.” Sin-D reached down and lifted her skirt, unveiling the smooth-shaven bronze skin he still remembered very clearly from the last time. Sin-D was hotter than hell. Mark wasn’t embarrassed easily, but Sin-D’s completely overt sexuality made his face warm.

Kendrick laughed and shook his head. He clapped Mark on the shoulder. “Take a flashlight if you hit that, so you don’t get lost.” He held a drink up in the air in Sin-D’s direction before walking off towards the dance floor. Sin-D flipped him off and then rested her head on her elbows on the bar, blinking doe-eyed at Mark. When he didn’t react to the innocent pose, she slid one finger down the front of her tank top until a nipple popped free.

“How ’bout a li’l nip of a nip?” she offered.

“How about you just pour me a drink from the bottle for now?” he suggested with a smile.

“I was good enough for you last time,” she pouted. “Fuck ’em and leave ’em, I get it.” She poured a long stream of Jack and then squirted a shot of cola on top. “I like the fuck ’em part though, you know?”

“I do know,” Mark grinned.

Sin-D pushed the long-discussed drink across the bar just as a couple came up, hands groping each other with almost embarrassing freedom. Sin-D moved down the bar to help them, and Mark took his Jack and Coke with a smile, pulling himself up on a stool. He turned to look at the band, who, beneath the fog and the blue-green lights, seemed to be channeling something from an early Cure album. The keyboards hummed beneath a dark but steadily moving bass.

“So, do you cum here often?” the woman on the stool next to him asked. Mark turned to take her in and was struck by the intensity of her ice-blonde hair and pale, high cheeks. She was stunning and delicate, in a Nordic kind of way. If she’d been lying on a white sheet, he thought she might have looked the lighter.

“And I meant cum with a U,” she added.

“That’s kind of a personal question, isn’t it?” Mark smiled.

“No, it’s kind of a bad cliché,” she answered. “But that’s what you’re supposed to do here, right?”

“Speak in clichés?” Mark asked.

“More like cum in clichés, I think,” she mused. “Look at them.” She waved a hand at the girls on the dance floor. The band had revved into “Blue Monday” and the black fishnet and teased hair of the women in the crowd moved faster, the sexy goth trappings just window dressing; they all knew they’d be nude in one corner or another of this place within the hour.

“They’re just having fun,” Mark answered.

“It’s always fun until somebody loses an eye.”

Mark cleared his throat. “Ahem…I think you’re the one with all the clichés.”

She didn’t answer him right away. Instead she took a long drink on a glass filled with something clear…and ice. Mark didn’t believe that it was water. He stared at her fingers circling the glass. They were long and creamy white, with unpainted nails. The soft look of her skin made him yearn to reach out. As soon as he looked at her, he ached to touch her. She looked as naturally beautiful as anyone could. Her eyes flickered wider then and met his own over the top of the glass. Still, she sipped. Finally, she set the glass down and stared at him straight in the eye.

“Why are you here?” she asked quietly. “Why did you come to NightWhere?”

“Why does anybody come here?” he asked. “To have fun.”

“That’s not why anybody comes here,” she said. “NightWhere is not about fun, it’s about obsession. If you follow that rabbit into its hole, you will become a very lonely man.”

“That or a man trapped in a hole.”

“I’m serious,” she said. “You don’t want to really be here, I can tell. And that means you’re not only going to get lost, you’re going to get lost without reason.”

“Hey, you hitting on my customers?” a chirpy voice piped up from behind the bar. Sin-D propped her head on her hands and nodded at the blonde. “She’s a downer, man. I’ve listened to her before. Maybe it’s all that Russian vodka she drinks. Want to come over here and give me a hand behind the bar? I could use a little help right now.” She made a visible play of looking down the cleavage showing in the V of her skintight tank top and then pressed her arms against her sides to accentuate it. “Please?” she asked, in a patented little-girl voice that made Mark grin.

“Rain check?” he asked and patted Sin-D’s arm. “I’m just getting to know…um…” he turned to the snow-white woman beside him.

“Selena,” the woman whispered.

“…Selena here.”

“You’re sure?” Sin-D asked, pouting, while dragging one long black fingernail under the swell of her tank top and again pulling the material down as far as it would go. Mark saw the pink hint of her nipple before she rolled her eyes beneath the raccoon coat of mascara, licked the tip of her tongue to her lip, and then faded back from the bar.

He turned to Selena and shifted the conversation back at her. “What are you doing here, if you’re so down on the place?”

“I’m waiting for someone,” she said. “Hoping he’ll leave with me. If not…well, I’ll at least get to hear some music and have a couple of drinks, right?”

“I guess,” Mark said. “Though this isn’t exactly the typical destination for a casual drink.”

“Look who’s talking?” Selena laughed. “What are you doing sitting in the back at the bar?”

He smiled and took a drink. “My wife is really into this. I don’t really mind it…hell, how could a guy mind, right? Coming here is like she gave me a Free Sex card, for chrissake. But yeah, I’m kind of in the same boat as you, I guess… At this point…I’m just waiting for her to come back.”

Selena’s ice-blue eyes narrowed. “Has she mentioned The Red yet?”

Mark shrugged.

“If she goes in there, you will never have her back, I’m just warning you.”

Selena leaned towards him to whisper something, but just then a man walked up to the bar. He was tall and rail-thin with a shaven head and hairless chest. He showed it off in a black-mesh shirt. Effete would be the word for him, Mark thought.

“Is there a problem with the music?” the man asked with a thin grin. “We could have the band perform a striptease, if that would help you get in the mood.”

Mark laughed. “No, I don’t need to see that drummer naked!” The drummer in question was bald and looked fiftyish and about 200 pounds overweight. “We were just talking.”

Selena didn’t say a word…she just stared at the man, as if by staring she could wilt him.

“The night moves fast in NightWhere,” the man said with a crooked smile. “I wouldn’t want you to miss the pleasures of the club because you lost track of time. Do consider taking a walk around, before it gets too late.”

“Got it,” Mark said. He nodded, but made no move to leave his stool. The man stood still in front of him for a moment, searching for something to say. And then he leaned across the bar, said something to Sin-D, and walked away.

“Kharon,” Selena said quietly. “A Watcher.”

“C’mon,” Mark said. “Let’s you and me take a walk.” There was something about that guy he just didn’t like.

Selena slipped from her stool and together they moved to the dance floor, swaying slightly in time to the bass-and-drum combo.

Rae hated to admit it, but she’d felt relief as her husband had walked away towards the bar. Part of her recognized that they had reached the divide; NightWhere was her ticket into the places she had only dreamed of before…places that, honestly, she was afraid to admit that she’d dreamed of. It was not the place for Mark; he didn’t have the need burning inside his bones like she did. He couldn’t follow her here, not now. In the most private place, Rae walked alone.

She let the dark, pounding beat of the band sink into her bones as she slowly moved to the back of the club, back to where the slaps of leather on flesh resounded, even above the echo of the drums. Fingers reached out from the crowd to trail across her bare arms as she passed by. She welcomed their touch, but didn’t slow to answer their invitations. There was only one thing she wanted now.

The feeling of surrender.

The feeling of the dark, welling up through her skin.

“How can I help you?” a voice said from next to her. “My name is Kharon.”

Rae looked up and saw a man with large eyes watching her intently. His head was shaved, his face pale, his lips barely pink. The faint stubble of his beard looked like salt and pepper against his skin, and she found herself instantly imagining how it would feel rubbing against the soft skin of her breasts. He had that magnetism-that weird electricity that in just a moment of speech made you want to be closer to him. In the strobes of the dance floor, his features jumped and jagged, sharpened and smeared-he was both extreme and soft as the light shifted.

“I was looking for a woman,” she began, but stopped as he began to laugh.

“Aren’t we all?”

“She was here last time, right here in this room. I met her at the racks…she made me feel deeper than I ever have before. She whipped me…”

“This is not narrowing it down much,” Kharon said, again with an audible trace of humor in his voice.

“I need to find her again.”

The man stared at her until the silence between them was filled with nearby cries. Rae could almost count the pores of his forehead as she stared back at him, daring him to hold his game longer than her.

“I want to show you something,” Kharon said and began to walk away. Rae wasn’t sure what to think…but she began to follow. He stepped through the aisle of whipping racks, where five pasty-white men had volunteered to be flogged and cried out like wounded kids with every light blow.

Rae stepped past them in disgust. She could tell with a glance that they were dabblers-they flirted with the pain but, really, they craved the humiliation. She had no use for them and hurried to catch up to Kharon, who slipped into the shadows of NightWhere as easily as paper slipped away on the breeze. Something inside her demanded that she not lose him.

Her eyes found him again, just ahead, and she quickened her step. He opened a black door hidden in the black wall at the back of the club and Rae ran across the intervening space to follow. She caught the door before it closed and darted inside to join him in wherever it was he was going. But on the other side of the door, she realized that she had left…everything…behind.

When the dark door shut behind her, Rae felt suddenly alone in a room of shadow. The air seemed to glint with some kind of floating light… But it was a hazy, cottony illumination. The strangest, most ethereal beams bled from random holes in the dark. Rae stepped forward and a dozen bells chimed, announcing her walking presence. She felt nothing touch her. Even her feet seemed to move across air. But with the movement of every muscle, the room sang, betraying her feet.

Not so far ahead, she could see the man, still walking.

Bells chimed and sang as she followed, the cacophony growing louder the faster she walked. Rae couldn’t see what was causing the bells…her skin seemed to touch nothing as she walked through cool black air. But with every step, the echoes of chimes and other shadowed sounds flared painfully in her ears.

Finally she stopped and the cacophony also stopped. The man she chased turned to face her, a look of amusement in the crack of his lips.

“If you want to follow me,” he said, “you must learn to walk between the shadows. You still have much to learn.”

With that, he turned and disappeared into the dark.

Rae ran forward, trying to find him, but as she moved away from the club, the noise grew so loud that she stopped and held her hands to her ears. She couldn’t see anything…the room was black. Now that he was gone, she was totally in the dark. An orchestra of angry sound assailed her ears.

“Wait!” Rae called, trying to be heard above the din, but nothing answered.

“Shit,” she said to herself. She put her hands out, crying again, “Wait,” and the air chimed.

“I will not be afraid of noise,” she promised. But she no longer walked ahead. Rae retraced her steps through the dark, hoping that her feet were truly following the same path and not leading her in circles. The sound inside her head pounded until she felt her eyes swell. She wondered if her ears were bleeding. But little by little it began to diminish. And then her hands met a wall.

She moved along it, a little to the left, and a little to the right, looking for the door. Her hand knocked against something cold and metallic, and Rae grinned, curling her palm around the knob and turning…and then she was suddenly out of the stark aural pain and back in the blue haze of the club. The bell screams turned to human cries of pleasure and pain. Rae smiled. The cries of passion sounded like home. She moved towards a man with a riding crop, and when he favored her with a grin, she bent over and offered herself to his hand.

She accepted his slaps with interest…but as his hand touched her, she felt cold. Bored.

There was sting in his spanking, but something wasn’t connecting with her. He didn’t give her what she needed. Rae began to look around at the other subjects being spanked and whipped around her, and realized there was more to her need than simple pain.

Her chest was filled with a horrible void. Rae found herself struggling not to cry.

“Were you looking for me?” a voice asked. Rae looked up and Kharon stood behind her, a riding crop in his right hand.

“Yes,” Rae admitted. The relief flooded her voice as she wiggled her hips for him to see. She needed him.

He leaned down and pressed his lips to her own as his left hand slid from her bare shoulder, down the velvet skin of her back, to finally cup the soft skin of her ass. His hand squeezed.

“There are things that you must learn if you are to follow me,” Kharon said. “And the first is this.”

He stepped back and raised his hand. Then brought it down.

In moments, Rae’s cries joined the moans that reverberated above the band in the Blue Room.

Cries of wanting.

Cries of ecstasy.

Cries of pain.