Either way, Mark knew he was in trouble.
“You do not have an invitation,” the Asian man said. He was bare-chested and wore a white sarong around his middle. In his hands, he held a flogger tipped in steel hooks.
“I don’t want to be invited,” Mark said. “I just want to take my wife home.”
The Caucasian man-dressed simply in a pair of grey shorts-laughed. “Nobody comes or leaves here without permission,” he said.
He stepped forward and Mark stepped back. This didn’t look like things were going to go well.
The Asian man advanced with his flogger and cracked it once in the air. Mark ducked back, narrowly missing the metal tips.
At the same time, the white man grinned and pulled a steel pole out of a small pocket in his shorts.
He lifted it to hammer down on Mark’s head.
Mark was not inclined to accept the steel and leapt backwards again.
He also wasn’t inclined to keep stepping backwards.
“Wait,” he said.
The Asian man grinned. His teeth were shockingly white against the brown of his skin. “There is no stopping,” he said. “Only movement towards the goal.”
“And the goal is…” Mark asked.
“Pain.”
Mark knew there was no dodging this. He nodded, as if acknowledging his understanding of the situation, but at the same time, he was slipping his fingers in the back pocket of his jeans.
“I can only answer that with this,” Mark said.
He pulled the gun from his pants, aimed at the Asian man’s chest, and fired. A bloom of red appeared as the man fell backwards, away from the gun. But Mark didn’t wait to watch. He turned the gun on the other man who was already in motion. He pulled the trigger again and a spray of warm crimson splattered across his face as the bullet stabbed through the man’s gut and his face registered the pain.
His face said…
Mark began to step around the two, but hesitated, as he looked at their bodies on the floor.
He’d killed them. Two men. He had shot them and stolen their lives. They lay there on the floor of the stone hallway, blood streaming from their chests to the floor. And as he watched, that blood seemed to be pulled away from the corpses…the streams curved and altered to move towards the wall and its cascade of crimson. In seconds, their blood was leaching from their bodies in a straight stream to the steady, bloody waterfall on either side of the corridor.
Mark shook his head. It was all too much.
He looked at the Asian man, whose sarong had loosened as he had fallen to the ground. His genitals were now exposed.
Mark could see clearly that he was only half a man.
Someone had cut his balls off.
A eunuch.
Mark stepped forward and pulled on the shorts of the heavyset white man until they slipped halfway down his thighs.
Damn.
He, too, had been unmanned. Mark felt worse, somehow, for killing them.
But he also knew that he needed to move. Mark shrugged and stepped past the half men towards the hallway that had held so much pain for him. He was moving into the thick of The Red.
The gloomy red hall wound around, past the torture rooms, and then at last he reached the end.
The room that he’d escaped from.
The entrance to The Black.
Chapter Fifty-Two
There was nothing Mark wanted less…and nothing he wanted more…than to push open the door to the room at the end of The Red.
His heart was pounding.
His hands were sweaty.
His eyelids twitched as he stared at the door’s handle.
If he could have said “Father, take this cup from me…”, he would have. But he knew that he had transgressed all God-fearing laws in coming to NightWhere in the first place. Those were not words he could utter, except in complete blasphemy. The only salvation was going to be the one he created. If he created one. That would remain to be seen in the next few minutes.
Mark opened the door.
The Watchers stood in a semicircle just yards from the doorway. They faced away from Mark.
They were watching Rae.
Mark’s wife knelt on a stone bench, prostrate before a man who was laid out on a stone table in the center of the room. Mark didn’t push the door fully open. Instead, he peered in and took in what was going on.
Rae wasn’t just lying down before the large, naked man.
She was fellating him.
With gusto.
Mark could see the muscles in her shoulders move as she bobbed her head up and down atop the man, sucking his manhood inside her mouth and then letting it out again as the Watchers…watched.
Only…the ironic thing about this sex act was…
She was giving head to a man who had…
There was simply a bloody stump above his shoulders. The man’s neck simply…ended. In a clean line of crimson. Mark spied the fat-faced, disembodied head a few feet away from the table. It lay sideways on the floor, its dull eyes staring vaguely off into a distance it would never again see. Mark recognized those eyes. It was the head of the man who had chased him across the bed of hot coals with a whip and a smile.
Gordon. He couldn’t feel too awful to see how Gordon had met his end, yet…
“Jesus,” Mark whispered to himself.
His wife was diligently fellating a corpse.
It was hard to think of giving her a tender kiss and an “I love you, baby” and taking her home to his bed after witnessing that.
Mark closed his eyes and then reopened them, but the tableau remained the same. Rae’s beautiful ass moved faintly back and forth as she sucked the cock of a dead man, who seemed to watch what was happening to his broken body from the eyes of his head that rested sideways on the stone floor of the room. All while a bunch of robed ghouls looked on.
Part of Mark wanted to close the door and back away. Selena waited for him in the car. She was soft and beautiful and loving and…everything he had always wanted in a mate. And he’d left her behind. Alone. To rescue this woman who truly wanted to be beaten ’til she bled. And who apparently liked to suck the sex of the dead.
What was wrong with him?
“I still love her,” Mark said to himself. He couldn’t have explained why. Maybe it was just history. But he felt he owed her enough that he had to try to save her soul.
“Wait,” a familiar voice said.
Mark looked over his shoulder to see the beautiful form of Selena. She stood there in the dark, bloody hallway
