She’d left him for pain.
Mark went to bed, but couldn’t fall asleep. Instead, he played back all of the times he’d told Rae that she could do whatever she needed. He just wanted to keep loving her. He just wanted to be the one she came home to in the end.
At 3:25 a.m., she still had not come home.
At 6:00 a.m. he got up and showered, and then sat for an hour at the kitchen table in his robe, sipping his coffee alone. Finally, Mark pulled on a polo shirt and went to work.
Mark had called home every hour during the day, and the answering machine just kept picking up, with Rae’s cheerful voice asking him to leave a message.
When he got home from work that night, Rae still had not come home. Nor had she called or e-mailed. Mark walked every room of the house, as if she might really just be hiding in a closet somewhere, and all he had to do was find her. Hide-and-seek.
Mark didn’t know what to do.
Over the course of their admittedly nontraditional relationship, Rae had stayed out until the next morning once or twice with other men. But in the past, it had always been with his permission, and she’d never stayed out the whole next day.
He couldn’t go anywhere to look for her, and he didn’t really want to call the police to report her as a missing person either. What was he going to say? “My wife went to a sex club-I have the envelope from the invitation right here. She went to a place that has no address and she hasn’t come home since.”
What would they say to that? Aside from politely gagging back laughter, there wasn’t much to be said. “Sorry, dude, you left your wife up for grabs. Obviously she decided to shack up once and for all with someone else.”
Mark didn’t know where to turn for help. But somehow, he had to find her.
First though, he had to find NightWhere.
Chapter Twenty
Where did you start to look for a place that only appeared once a month? And never in the same spot.
Mark had never returned to any of the other sites where NightWhere had been held, but he decided to drive back to the first one, down on Riverside Avenue in the South Loop. He knew he could get back there easily-it wasn’t too far off the expressway. Maybe there’d be some kind of clue there. What kind of clue that might be, he didn’t know.
All he did know was that he was grasping at straws.
An hour later, Mark was walking down the cracked sidewalk of Riverside, noting how much more run-down the area looked in the light than it had at night when he’d walked with Rae here. The door to the place was unlocked. He stepped inside, and the room stretched out ahead, long and empty. There was no furniture, and the industrial, grey carpet was stained with brown circles in a variety of places. Looking up, it was easy to see why. The white panels of the drop ceiling were also stained in rusty circles. The roof leaked, and nobody was here to care.
He walked through the place and saw the crumpled, yellowed sleeves of used condoms here and there in the corners. On the floor in the hallway, he found a black postcard that had the familiar self-devouring snake logo around the gothicly styled letters
All it said was:
There was no phone or address. It was a calling card-something to say “we were here” but not who
Mark folded it up and slipped the card into his back pocket. Then he began to move towards the exit. There was nothing there. Hell, he couldn’t even figure out how NightWhere had fit into that space. It had all seemed so much bigger the night he’d brought Rae here.
Thinking about that, he walked back along the south wall to follow the layout he knew that the club had. He pointed to the right and could imagine the bar and the stage set over there, though it still seemed a bit tight. But then he got to the end of the room, where the “Intro to Flogging” racks would have been…and he wasn’t sure how they could possibly have fit here.
He understood that things always looked different when they were empty, compared to when they were filled but…even if the racks could have been set up back here…where was the door to The Red? They hadn’t gone through it that night, but it had been there.
He walked along the back wall and then in the far corner found a small white steel door. It was certainly no ornate wooden medieval arched doorway, but he turned the handle anyway. The door opened, and Mark stepped through it.
Into a back loading dock.
Okay. Wrong door?
He stepped back inside and walked all along the back wall but found no other doors.
A chill gripped his stomach.
This was absolutely where he had brought Rae the first night. And yet, it was impossible for NightWhere to have existed in that space.
Mark walked out of the old building and got in the car to drive to the last place that they’d held NightWhere. In an industrial park.
It was easy to find-of the three locations he knew of, probably closest to his house. He even remembered the address-someone had changed the real address to NW13. The piece of paper that had marked the building as NW was gone now and the doorway was simply 2303-13. Mark could see through the dirt-streaked windows that the place had been vacant for a long time.
He tried the door and, just like the last place, it was unlocked. He stepped inside and instantly shook his head.
There was no way NightWhere could have been held here.
The three times he’d been there, he’d noticed that it was impossible to tell the difference between the locations once you walked inside. While the places hosting NightWhere were all radically different, the inside layout of each had been identical. Always there was a walk through the entryway and a long gap until the bar where Sin-D held court to the right. And then the stage just in front of that, and the whipping area way down the aisle towards the back. And then darker areas that he hadn’t traveled to the left, including the door to The Red.
When he walked into the industrial park building that he’d seen Rae enter (twice!), he didn’t see any way that NightWhere could ever have existed there. The room beyond 2303-13’s door was about twenty feet long and maybe forty feet deep. And that was it. The stage and Sin-D’s bar would have taken up virtually this entire space.
Mark walked the entire room, searching for a doorway that would have opened onto some other aspect of the club. But the only other door opened to a back parking lot.
After circling the room twice, Mark left and went back to his car. There was one other person who could vouch for what NightWhere had been that night. Who might have some information about Rae, in fact. He remembered the route she had taken, and he thought he could find his way back. He’d followed Ridgely Street east until Pontrain Avenue. And then had headed north.
Mark walked back to his car and started it up. He pulled into traffic and began to retrace his route of that night, as he’d followed Rae. He remembered turning at the main streets. Because he’d been so curious about where she
