John Everson - NightWhere

“Have you been watching Rocky Horror ?” Mark asked.

She stuck her tongue out. “You have an hour to hit your wardrobe and attempt to keep up with me.”

“And then?”

“We have to drive to the north side.”

“I’m no Tim Curry, and anyway, I don’t think I restocked my fishnets,” Mark joked.

Rae pursed her lips. “I don’t think those would look good on you anyway. I picked you out a shirt upstairs. See what you think.”

Mark grinned. “Now you’re dressing me, huh?”

She slapped him on the ass. “Hurry up!”

“Don’t wear out your wrist before we leave,” he warned, hurrying away from her towards the stairs.

“I could say the same thing to you,” she laughed. “Better not take too long up there.”

While the last edition of NightWhere had been housed in a run-down section of the city, tonight’s invitation took them to the upscale part of town. The Evanston neighborhood was lined with tall, old trees, and the building they pulled up in front of looked one hundred years old. It was a grey-stone high-rise with ornate limestone accents and watchful gargoyles surrounding its roof. They walked into the U of its courtyard, Rae holding a black mesh cape around her bare midriff as they hurried to enter and get out of sight of any bystanders in the neighborhood.

Mark opened the heavy wooden front door and they stepped inside. The lobby floor was all black-veined, creamy marble, and a gilded elevator hugged one side of the wide room. A set of slowly curving steps led away from the street to their left. They stood there in the lobby, lost for a minute.

“Are you sure…” Mark began, but Rae interrupted him.

“There!” She pointed at the gold antique top of the elevator, which used a needle to show the floors. On the right-hand side, right after the number 12, a small black oval was pasted on, right over the place where 13 should have been. In the center of the circle, two letters were limned in grey: NW.

“It’s upstairs,” she said, moving towards the elevator.

“On the thirteenth floor,” Mark said quietly. “Of course.”

They got on the elevator and pressed the black button that was also obscured with a small black disc reading NW .

The elevator creaked and ascended, each floor ticked off by the slow clockwise ascent of an arrow above the door. And then the needle stopped, and a bell chimed, and the gold doors opened onto a long, dark hall. They stepped out and saw a handful of dark doorways along either side of the hallway. But their destination was clear. At the end of the corridor, they could see flickers of blue light from beneath a door, and the throb of a bass-and-drum groove echoed dully in the air. They walked quickly down the hall. Rae clutched their invitation for the night like a life preserver.

Mark raised a fist to knock, but the door opened before he touched it.

A hand reached out, its fingernails glittered obsidian, its wrist was encircled by the dark ink of a symbol they both recognized from their last visit: a self-devouring snake tattoo.

Rae handed over the invitation, and a moment later they were inside. The volume of the music was overpowering inside of the doorway, and when the doorman leaned in to say something, Mark found himself yelling back, “What?”

The tall man grinned and motioned them to walk behind a curtained area on the other side of the door. The black-velvet draping deadened the sound of the band a little, and the man took Rae’s hand in his own, at the same time reaching out to grab Mark’s.

“You came back,” he said. “We are excited to have you as part of our secret family. The first time…we let you look and decide if this is really what you want. Some don’t return. Most do, because we don’t give out invitations lightly. But those that do come back to us a second time…almost never leave.”

The man held out a long hand that looked paper white against the black curtains. Rae took it, and the man pulled her closer, raising her arm to kiss her knuckles with exaggerated slowness. When his eyes caught Rae’s, she felt instantly weak. As if the connection literally sucked the energy from her soul through her eyes and fingertips.

She drew in a breath as his eyes held her own. His face was thin and drawn, but his eyes…they were like black holes. His eyes were wide, and in the dim light she could only think that they were pools of black. Pools of electric, magnetic black. She couldn’t look away. Seconds seemed like minutes, and she could almost hear him speaking in the silence between their eyes. The words were nonsense, but they sounded important. Like ancient knowledge. Secrets lost. Then without warning he broke the connection and held out his hand to Mark, still keeping his eyes on her.

“My name is Tailor,” he said. “They call me a Watcher, because I’m here to watch! But not just as a voyeur-though I am one.” He laughed. “I’m also here to make sure the night goes well for everyone. NightWhere can be everything you’ve ever wanted…or everything you were ever afraid of. Let me know how I can help you find what you need here.”

“Thank you,” Rae said. “I think I found what I needed here last time. I just need to find her again. She told me that she’d see me, um, in a place called The Red?”

Tailor’s lips spread. “All in due time,” he promised. “Until then…” he motioned towards the moving green and blue spotlights and the band playing on a stage before them, “…go in…and sin!”

The doorman slid away from them, still smiling with some hidden humor. Rae leaned up and kissed Mark hard on the lips after Tailor passed. “C’mon,” she said. “Let’s get some sin!”

She pulled him by the hand out onto the dance floor. The band-dressed in requisite black-was in the midst of a gloomy rock set. The singer crooned almost in monotone, as he picked a heavy Stratocaster. Next to him, the bassist practiced androgyny and boredom, standing stock-still in silk sleeves, black eyeliner and lipstick. His hair was kinked and hung on his shoulders, but only his fingers moved, throbbing a steady thunder on four thick strings. Behind him, the drummer’s mascara ran across bloated cheeks as he pounded out a challenge to the rest of the band. Off to one side, behind a wall of smoke, a tall, bony man who reminded Mark of Ric Ocasek hung intently over his keyboards, filling the spaces between the beats and the guitars with strings and fuzz. He wore sunglasses in the dark.

It shouldn’t have worked, but it did. They were hypnotic. And energizing at the same time. The small crowd on the dance floor didn’t stop moving. Mark and Rae had to edge their way in to find a place to dance to the hypnotic, hazy groove. They ended up between an androgynous couple who both appeared flat-chested beneath their ripped T-shirts, but who both wore fishnets and eyeliner (were they both women? men?).

On either side of the stage metal stairs led to cages suspended in the air. A line of men and women ascended and descended the stairs in a slow but steady procession while the band played. They took turns above the dance floor, fondling and fucking the gyrating cage prisoners before returning to the floor.

Beneath the cages and against the black metal walls, a dozen men were down on all fours, collared and chained to hooks on the walls as women strode back and forth fondling riding crops in their hands.

Periodically people slipped away from the strobing blue lights in twos and threes, and sometimes fours, to claim the only partly public cots that were strung out around the place beneath velvet tents. Many of them returned from the tents without even bothering to pull their clothes back on, driven by the beat of a favorite song to dance clothed solely in the sweat of their bacchanalian passion.