John Everson - NightWhere

He had made it through the tunnel of blades before the fire caught up with him, but now, he wasn’t sure how long he would actually survive to enjoy the victory. Mark couldn’t move. His eyes were swollen nearly shut, and his hands were thick with blood. The cuts were not closing, and he had nothing to wrap them in. If he could even move enough to bandage himself.

In his mind, Mark pictured Rae as she’d been when they’d first met. A pretty, quick-witted, funny girl. She’d seemed a little shy that first date, when they’d gone to see a bad Nicholas Cage movie and he’d kissed her afterwards in the car outside of her apartment. Her lips had been warm and full against his, and he’d breathed in her breath like the sweetest fragrance. The memory of that first kiss, of the more tentative girl she’d once been…that was the Rae that he still loved with all of his heart. That was the Rae that he knew still existed, somewhere beneath the scarred skin of her back and the demanding sexual creature who simply could never get enough anymore. Of anything.

She’d been descending in a spiral of degradation for years now, but NightWhere had found whatever that last barrier was in her soul…and had stripped it away completely. Mark juxtaposed the image of first-date Rae with the pain slut he’d watched the past few times at the club, and prayed that after all this, there was still something left of the Rae he’d fallen in love with to bring home.

“Having second thoughts,” a high-pitched voice taunted. “Maybe in the end, she really wasn’t ‘all that’?”

Damia.

Mark struggled to lift his head. He blinked one eye open in a swollen squint. The hermaphrodite stood just a couple feet away, hands on hips. Behind Damia, he saw a row of black-robed feet. Kharon stepped to the front. “You’ve passed two of your three trials,” he said. “But the next may be the hardest of all.”

“I can’t move,” Mark hissed.

Damia and Kharon reached down and grabbed Mark beneath his armpits, dragging him upright. He let out a horrible scream as the balls of his feet touched the stone and tried to accept some of his weight. The blisters that ballooned from the skin that wasn’t completely charred black burst and wet the floor around his heels.

They walk-dragged him down a long stone hallway with walls that glistened red in the dim hellish light. Then Damia took him completely into her arms and held him against a stone wall as a shower of water cascaded from somewhere overhead. Where it touched his skin, Mark felt a strange mix of both ice and fire, but his screams of anguish diminished to coughs and moans…his vocal chords were shot. He didn’t even try to open his eyes anymore, he simply hung against Damia’s breasts and let the water wash the blood away.

A few minutes later, he was lying in a bed, shaking so hard his teeth rattled. Mark struggled to open his eyes, but they seemed locked together. The pain screamed inside him, but he couldn’t let it out…he was locked inside himself with the waves of agony.

“Sleep,” a voice somewhere said. “Let it go now.”

Plea

Kharon stood outside in the dark. The shapeless, formless black of nothing roiled all around. Daytime had come, and NightWhere slept. Mostly.

Another cycle of sin delivered. Kharon never tired of the nighttime. He existed to lead people into the dark. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. The air of limbo was chill and heavy. He savored the moment of solitude. They were few for him; he needed to sleep soon to be ready for a new cycle, and once he woke…NightWhere was demanding.

“Let him go,” a voice behind him begged.

Kharon opened his eyes in surprise. Nobody disturbed him at this secret moment between the death of night and the birth of day.

She stood nearby, pale skin aglow in the black.

He smiled and slowly shook his head. “He demanded to be here,” Kharon said. “I explained to him what the toll would be. I offered him the chance to turn back.”

“He doesn’t understand, not really,” she said. A tear glistened on the marble of her cheek. A liquid ruby against the pale marble of her skin.

“He has free will. He made his decision. I cannot make you leave, but you cannot interfere. If you do… Then you lose-eternally. I will make sure you decorate a cross in the pit and no one will be able to stop me. Do not go beyond your bounds. His path is nearly done. For better or worse.”

“You mock those words,” she whispered.

“Yes,” he grinned. “Yes, I do.”

Lesson Three

Mark opened his eyes to a room that glowed faintly from the corners of the floor and ceiling. The room’s edges bled a reddish light, enough to lift the darkness and wreathe the walls in bloody shadow. Everything seemed blurry at first, and he wondered for a split second where he was before he reached up to wipe his eyes.

He realized as he did so that he could reach up to wipe his eyes.

Without help. Or pain.

The events of the last night flashed in his head and he took a deep breath. The pain had been…unbearable. He had been sure that despite making it through the fire and blades, he was a dead man once he reached the other side. So much of his body had been burned, so much blood lost… Hesitantly, he tried to move his legs.

They slid across the cool silk of the sheets without problem. They felt a little achy maybe, but no more so than after any good, deep night’s sleep. He felt rested. As the fog completely cleared, Mark realized that he felt…good.

He sat up.

No pain.

Mark held his arms out, palms up, and studied them in the faint light. When he’d exited the tunnel of blades, his forearms had been covered with blood, and the palms of his hands had been hamburger.

Now? They were clean. The skin unbroken.

Had he dreamed it all? The whole scenario seemed ridiculous when you thought about it. What sex club would really have moats of fire and acid tucked in its back hall…or a tunnel designed to kill you with a thousand cuts by the time you reached the other side?

Had they slipped him a hallucinogenic?

Mark stared closer at his hands. The normal, familiar creases extended from his wrists up to the center of the palm and then slipped across in a double-lined fold at the center.

But there were other marks on his hands as well. A lattice of pale-pink lines. And on his left hand, a faintly puckered circular pattern. As he stared, he remembered putting that hand down right on top of a blade protruding from the floor. He’d only seen it as the edge was slipping past the skin and into his palm. The pain at lifting that hand back off the knife had been excruciating.

The cut was healed. It looked like a scar from years before.

Mark slipped his feet off the bed and stood up, staring down at his legs, which also, on the surface, looked unblemished. But when he bent over, he could see that parts of the skin, where it had literally been burned away, were paler than the rest. He saw the faint pink scars where the blades had cut beneath the dark hair of his legs.

“How long have I been asleep?” he whispered.

Something moved in the other room.

Mark turned towards the sound just in time to see the glint of red light flicker off a couple dozen silver studs and posts decorating the otherwise flawless skin of a hermaphrodite’s shoulders and ears.

“Did you dream about me?” Damia asked with a knowing lilt. “No worries, I’m here for you!”

“No,” Mark refuted. “But how long was I out-last night I was…”

“A bloody mess?” Damia finished for him. “Yes, you were. But a good night’s sleep in NightWhere cures everything. If you survive the night…you’ll be just fine the next morning. One of the perks, you know.”