man’s neck.
Mark’s erection suddenly went away, and his face craned closer to the small TV screen, as he watched what enfolded next. He had a horrible feeling about where this was going.
And he was right.
The blood welled up around her blade, but Rae still moved her body on top of the man, slowly grinding her ass up and down on him as she pressed the knife to his throat. She leaned down and her body hid the knife for a moment.
Mark could tell she was kissing the man, and when she straightened her body again, the man’s face had quieted. He no longer looked afraid and wasn’t saying no.
And that’s when Rae brought the knife down really hard against the soft skin of her lover’s neck.
The man’s mouth opened wide, but no sound came out. She’d severed his vocal cords.
And then she lifted the knife and brought it down again.
And again.
Mark could see the crack of her ass clenching and moving, the faint creases of cellulite across her ass growing pronounced and then smoothing; he knew those motions and muscles from years with his wife-and years watching his wife.
Mark realized that as Rae was killing this man…she was cumming. Hard.
“You have got to be shitting me,” he breathed, as he watched her grind and stab, grind and stab.
And then the camera shifted, and Kharon reached down to the table and grabbed the man’s head by its hair, lifting it into the air, as Rae still moved in her own final throes on top of the body.
“NightWhere,” Kharon yelled, as he held the head high. “Descend.”
And a moment later, all of the people in the room leaned in to touch Rae and the man she had brutally murdered. Mark’s wife was covered by two dozen arms and faces and heads and backs as they surrounded and massaged her and the dead man…
Her eyes turned to stare at the camera with a dull sheen of distance; she could be drugged or in ecstasy, Mark couldn’t tell.
And then a voice came from the dark behind him. Mark turned away from the TV screen for a second to locate the source. There was a hole in the black-painted wall of the booth, and he could see the liquid glint of an eye and hear the steady rasp of heavy breathing.
“She is happy now,” a voice said from the hole in the wall. “This is your last chance-leave now and both of you will be happy.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Mark insisted.
He looked away from the glistening eye, to see his wife, his beautiful Rae, bending down to lick the blood off the chest of the man she’d killed, before she kissed his motionless lips.
She looked up again towards the camera, with her eyes half rolled back in sensual pleasure. With one hand, she massaged blood into her own naked breasts.
Mark turned away from both the screen and the eye behind him, suddenly feeling sick. He stared at neutral ground, the peep show booth door.
But nothing in a porn shop was neutral.
The door opened, and Dan stood there. His face showed no expression, but he asked one question.
“Do you still want to go back to NightWhere?”
From the corner of his eye, Mark saw the image of his wife covered in both blood and the bone-white hands of the bystanders near her.
“Yes,” he said. “I do.”
The man nodded. Something pricked Mark’s naked thigh.
Mark looked down and saw a hand withdraw through the hole between the peep show booths. The eye he’d seen before had been replaced briefly by a hand with a needle…
Mark wondered what the hand had injected him with, but suddenly he also felt increasingly slow…lethargic. The air suddenly swam with colorful spots, as the dark grew strangely darker. He knew it was nothing good.
Mark realized he couldn’t move.
And then his legs gave out beneath him, and Mark collapsed naked on the cold tile of the dirty porno booth.
Only then did two men suddenly swoop in to the narrow space to wrap him in a blanket. Part of him still was conscious of what was going on, but Mark couldn’t stop them as he was rolled back and forth on the floor into the blanket. Then the world disappeared when his face was covered by a black silk gag.
His body was lifted off the cold floor and Mark was escorted silently from the club, leaving all of his clothes, wallet and car keys behind.
His captors didn’t expect that he’d be coming back.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Mark woke with something holding his arm down. He tried to move it, but…nothing happened. So he tried the other arm. And had similar luck.
His legs, also, refused to move from their place on his bed.
A bed that felt strangely cold.
Mark’s eyes blinked, but those seemed to be the only muscles currently working. He’d just have to work with what he had. He focused on the shadows, moving his eyes around the room, taking in every detail.
The ceiling was red as blood. Mark’s eyes traveled all along it, following the swirls and cascades. It ran darker and lighter in places, but it didn’t fade away. And the more he looked at it, the more it seemed as if the color wasn’t simply painted and static; it seemed to…move. To flow. The color bled down the walls and into the shadows near the floor. Mark’s head slowly tilted to one side, and he realized his neck muscles were working, as well as his eyes.
That’s when he saw that there was more than simply red on the walls. In the distance, there were people. People hung from hooks on chains. People who were naked and bloody.
Mark wondered if he looked like that. He wasn’t quite sure
Bone.
He looked down across his chest and saw that his midsection was restrained by huge curved struts of ivory as well. He looked as if he was being held prisoner inside a giant’s rib cage. He was trapped in a cage of bones. But how had he gotten here? And where was
“You just couldn’t stay away from us, huh?” a voice said from behind him. “You wouldn’t join us, not really, but you couldn’t stay away. Quite the conundrum, really.”
Mark struggled to turn his head to see the source of the voice, and out of the corner of his vision on the left, he finally saw the pale flesh of someone standing nearby.
“Who are you?” Mark asked.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?”
“Well, yes…I would.”
A figure moved into view. Pale flesh covered by faint, downy hair. Two legs and a flaccid cock, right in Mark’s field of vision. The skin of the man’s cock glinted with silver-it was pierced in multiple places, as was the belly button above it.
Mark struggled to move his head back upwards, and saw the chest and neck and chin of the man. Or
