Gordon pulled the tablecloth back and stared at the congealed blood across his wife’s face. The silver blade of that fateful knife was spotted in red above where it protruded from her eyeball, and the white of that eyeball was also spotted in her blood.
Gordon had rocked Freddy to sleep in the next room, and now he was going to take care of some outstanding business with the boy’s mother.
Actually, he’d already taken care of business when he’d pulled out the knife and silenced his haranguing wife once and for all. But sometimes taking care of one problem only led to others.
Like a body.
And child care.
Damnit.
Gordon wrapped Miriam in the tablecloth, after pulling the knife from her eyeball. Something creamy oozed out from the hole as he did, but Gordon didn’t wait around to consider what it was. He pulled the cloth over her mouth, silent for the first time in all these fucking years.
He wouldn’t miss her.
But Freddy would. Gordon was going to need some child care.
He’d deal with that tomorrow. After he tucked Freddy’s mom’s body in the basement. He slung her corpse over his shoulder and clumsily twisted the doorknob to the basement. He maneuvered her weight (slight as it was) through the opening and then carried her down the wooden plank stairs.
“You ain’t ever gonna yell at me again,” he whispered. And then he dropped her body to the sand of the crawl space and shook his head.
“Nope, never again.”
Gordon smiled, in a crazy, I-have-finally-gone-over-the-rainbow way and walked away from her without burying the body or saying any other last words.
Sometimes, you were just done.
But for Gordon,
In the meantime, he had things he wanted to do. Things that would hurt. Not himself. But someone else. Like that Amelia chick. In fact, after sticking the knife in Miriam’s eye and then feeling the way she had jerked and trembled as he held her while the life bled out of her, and then laying her down on the floor, still kicking… Well, after experiencing that, he had a feeling that he could finally do something to satisfy Amelia’s desire for pain. He was looking forward to the next invitation from NightWhere, more than ever.
Of course, this time, he was going to have to find a babysitter.
Chapter Thirty-Two
The time passed slowly. Mark worked every day at his job-sometimes to the extreme-burning the midnight oil because it was somehow comforting to throw himself into a project. Of course, in the back of his mind he also knew that the only reason he was doing it was because he was desperately trying to avoid something else. Something that was poisoning his soul.
The weekends were endless, but in the end, two weeks did pass. And finally, the day came that had seemed as far away as Christmas to a kid in June. And Mark stood in front of the porno shop where he had tackled Kendrick. It was October 18.
Mark wasn’t sure where to go when he got to the shop. Should he stand around and paw through DVDs until someone approached him? Loiter in the alley?
After standing outside of the paper-obscured door for a minute, he decided to call the phone number that Kendrick had given him the last time and “announce” that he was here waiting. On the third ring, a voice answered.
“We’ve been waiting for you.”
“I’m at the porn shop, like you said.”
“Good,” the voice answered. “What do you want from us?”
“I want to come back to NightWhere,” Mark said. “I want to see my wife again. My wife and I were coming together, and then she started going without me.”
“Perhaps she was the only one invited.”
“I’d like to come back,” Mark said again. He tried to stifle the nerves in his voice.
“You’d like to find your wife, Rae,” the voice corrected.
“Well, yeah,” Mark said.
“My name is Kharon,” the voice said. “I will let you visit NightWhere one more time, to satisfy your curiosity. But you will need to stay with me; I will be your chaperone. And this will be the last time.”
“That’s fine,” Mark said. “Can you tell me…is Rae okay?”
“Rae is doing exactly what she has always wanted to do,” Kharon said. “And if you ask me, I think you should leave her to that. But since you are so persistent…I will give you this last chance to talk to her. But you must do one thing first.”
“Anything,” Mark promised.
“Then here is what you must do,” Kharon said. “One of my people is waiting for you downstairs by the peep- show booths inside the building. His name is Dan, and he will be near Booth 13.
“You must go downstairs and do exactly as he says. He will show you a film. At the end, if you still want to come to NightWhere, Dan will escort you to me.”
The line abruptly clicked off.
Mark pocketed the phone and looked at the door to the porn shop again, as he took a deep breath.
“Here comes one now,” Mark said, and reached out to open the door.
It was warm inside the store. After standing around in the chilly night air outside, the smell of Pine-Sol and the warmth of humid heat were good. A thin guy with crazy hair and rectangular glasses stood behind the bar scratching a lamb-chop sideburn repeatedly. Mark nodded at him and walked down an aisle of Amateur DVDs, browsing idly at the pale breasts and pink nipples that flashed out at him from all of the covers. On the back wall of the store was the sign for downstairs.
“Going down,” Mark murmured and headed towards the stairs.
The stairs had once been white tile, but now they were just grey. Smears of mud and scuffs from black heels all but obscured the original color. But it was the smell that really told Mark he was descending into the bowels of a porn shop.
The stairwell smelled of old cum and mildew. At the bottom of the steps, Mark turned a corner and the fluorescent glare of the upstairs shop cut off. The hallway below was like another world-a slumbering place. The light was dim, the shadows long. Mark walked to the end of a short hall and found a display with a small lamp aimed over the glass to illuminate the movies that were on display in the booths that lined the adjoining hall. Behind the glass were rows of DVD cases with channel numbers listed above them. If you went into a booth and plunked in your money, you could tune the TV to watch titles like
Mark looked behind him, down at the line of open doors. The peep-show cellar was oddly quiet tonight. Odd because the evenings were usually when these kinds of places filled-with guys stopping into the porn shop for a quick stroke or blow job after work before they returned home to their harpy wives. Everyone needed an orgasm once in a while. Even if it was a solo flight.
