NightWhere

He raised a glass and grinned. “Lost her already?” he said. “That must be a new record…you’ve been inside, what, three minutes?”

“Fuck you,” Mark said, a little annoyed. He couldn’t have said whether that annoyance was more at Rae or Kendrick at the moment.

“Wouldn’t you rather fuck me?” Sin-D asked, slipping her hand inside her spandex white top and pulling it down across the brown skin of her tits until the pink of her nipples began to show. Mark was beginning to think this was her trademark come-on.

“She’s very needy,” Kendrick offered. “She looks good, but they never come back for seconds, you know what I’m sayin’?”

Sin-D stuck her tongue out at Kendrick. “That’s ’cuz people don’t come here for the bar. They’re out there, having a fuckin’ good time,” Sin-D pointed towards the dance floor and the coitus cots that were only half-hidden behind velvet curtains spaced around the perimeter of the room.

“Exactly,” Mark said. “Are you going to show me one?”

“I think I already did,” Sin-D smiled. “But if I have to run you through the paces once more…I guess I could.”

Sin-D winked and went to help another patron at the far end of the bar, as Mark settled onto his stool.

“Really?” a quiet voice said at his elbow.

Mark turned, and met the piercing eyes of Selena. She was sipping a martini, crystal liquor, clear and clean. Just like her.

“Really what?” he asked.

She raised a faint eyebrow and shook her head. “I was hoping after the last time that you might come to your senses, and stay away from the rabbit hole.”

“Not really up to me,” he said. “She’s here, so I’m here.”

“Your loyalty is admirable,” she said, taking a sip of her drink. “But misguided. I don’t see her anywhere. You need to choose your own course. There’s nothing to admire in the lemming.”

Mark could see Sin-D and Kendrick watching them, as the bartendress mixed a drink for a balding businessman-looking character at the end of the bar.

“You’re here for the same reason I am,” Mark reminded Selena. “So what’s your excuse?”

Sin-D finished with her customer and returned to insert herself into the conversation, leaning down on her elbows between Mark and Selena. “How’s it going? Something I can help with?”

“No,” Mark laughed and took Selena’s hand. “We were just about to dance.”

Selena didn’t resist, or question his abrupt shift, and followed him out to the dance floor. Mark could feel Sin- D’s eyes following their every step. There was something the bartender didn’t like about Selena-he’d felt that from the first moment he’d met her. But there was something about Selena that Mark did like, very much. She seemed like a straight girl-she told it like she saw it. She wasn’t appalled by sex, but she wasn’t here to spread her legs for every guy who asked either. She seemed genuinely worried about him, though, and he wanted to find out…why.

The band played a slow goth dirge from The Cure, something about prayers for rain, and Selena wrapped her arms around his neck as she swayed with him. He put his hands around her midsection and realized how skinny she was. But soft. His fingers gripped her waist and she moved gently with him, swaying to the music with a faint, secret smile on her lips.

She leaned her head on his shoulder and whispered in his ear.

“I liked you that first night we met,” she said. “I was kind of wishing you might get out of this.”

“My wife came home from here the last time with a flyer,” he said in Selena’s ear. “All it said was ‘The Red’.”

“Is that why she came back?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. But she made a beeline for the back of the club as soon as we got here.”

“If she goes that way, you’ve lost her forever,” Selena said. “I’m not trying to be mean or anything, I’m just telling you the truth.”

“Where is it?”

“The Red?”

He nodded.

“Back beyond the racks. But you can’t get in there without an invitation. It’s a club within the club.”

“Show me,” he asked.

Selena nodded and led him off the dance floor to the back of the club. They walked past people necking in the corners and then people groaning as the floggers fell.

“Window dressing,” Selena said, pulling him past the handful of nudes on the racks. “This is all just a tease.”

She pointed behind them at the men and women, fat and skinny, naked and clothed in leather…they came in all shapes and sizes. The only constant was that they clustered around the black boards and steel chains that made up the row of racks at the back of the club.

“They’re playing at this,” Selena said. “The real pain artists, the one your wife wants to find…they’re in there.”

She pointed down the wall towards the corner. An arch of grey stones surrounded a double wooden door. The doors were made of dark wooden slats, held together by iron bars that attached to the hinges on one end and curled out into a circular snake design at the other. The center bars were the most ornate, with the snake forming a large circle and then instead of biting its tail, as the usual emblem of NightWhere did, the heads of these snakes slipped upwards from the tail to hold round iron doorknockers in their fangs.

Mark didn’t hesitate. He walked past a velvet-rope barrier to lift the doorknocker. But Selena grabbed his shoulder.

“You can’t!” she said.

“My wife’s in there,” Mark laughed. “I certainly can.”

Instead of knocking, he pulled the door open and caught a glimpse of candle flames and deep-red light in the space beyond. A scream as overwrought as the clincher from a B-grade horror movie escaped from somewhere within.

And then the door slammed shut, pushing Mark back into the main room of NightWhere.

“Can I help you?” a male voice asked from behind them. His hand rested on the top half of the previously open door. Mark turned and saw a pale man with his other hand resting on Selena’s shoulder. Her lips pressed tightly together but she said nothing.

The man grinned, his face little more than a skull with skin and stubble. He looked like a Nazi camp survivor.

“My wife is in there,” Mark said.

The man shook his head in agreement, cocking his chin slightly as he stared hard at Mark’s eyes. “And so…”

“And so I’m going in to find her.”

“Nobody goes into The Red without an invitation,” the thin man said. His bony fingers kneaded Selena’s shoulders as he spoke. Mark saw her tremble in revulsion as they slipped lower across her chest with each motion.

Mark rolled his eyes. “Yeah, whatever. We’re here as a couple, and where she goes, I go.”

He reached out to pull the iron ring of the door again, but a cold grip instantly took his wrist.

“I don’t think you’re understanding the way things work here, exactly,” the man said. His voice was ice. “If your wife gave you an invitation, I will let you go in. Otherwise, the modus operandi of NightWhere is…every man for himself. Your wife has her own itch to scratch. It is not yours, or you wouldn’t be here while she is there.”

The man pressed his skinny, bald chest up against Mark’s shirt. His eyes were slanted and wide, his pupils deep black orbs in a circle of steel. They inched closer until Mark could feel the man’s breath on his lips. “Nobody gets into anything here without an invitation,” he said. “And you are not invited.”

A hand slipped around Mark’s waist from behind. Selena.