Then the phone rang.
“Mark?” a thin, high voice asked through the line. “Mark, it came!” she said. “It’s what we’ve been waiting for.”
“It came?” he asked. “What is…it?”
“The invitation.” Rae’s voice trembled. Mark’s heart clenched.
“Did you open it?” he breathed.
“No,” she said. “I didn’t want to open it without you.” Her voice sounded a thousand miles away.
“Then how can you be sure?”
“I just am,” she said. “The envelope is plain but there are red letters on it that say ‘To Mark and Rae’.”
Mark shrugged. “Uh huh. Anytime I see an invitation that’s addressed to both you and me, I think utterly crazy thoughts too.” He cleared his throat. “But you don’t even know who it’s from.”
“Mark, there’s only one place this could be from. I think our names are written in lipstick, and there’s a big cock drawn in between them. I don’t think this is an advertisement from Macy’s.”
Mark smiled. “I’ll be home in fifteen.”
The invitation was simple. When you flipped open the folded front page, the inside read: “You asked for it. You have one chance to get it. Come to 2367 Riverside Ave. in Chicago tonight at 9 p.m.”
Mark held his breath as he read the words a second time. “How can we be sure this is it?” he asked. “I mean, it could be someone from another club we’ve been to.”
Rae smiled, and the blue of her eyes seemed to stretch into a silent laugh that always warmed Mark’s groin.
“Hold it up to the light,” she said in a voice barely above a whisper.
He did.
As he did, he breathed in sharply. “Damnit, Janet,” he whispered.
The invitation was watermarked. Just enough to be visible in the light. Across the paper in nearly invisible letters it read: “NightWhere”.
Amelia
Amelia Hammond held the invitation in one hand. With the other, she fingered the scars on her chest. She could still feel the burning sensation of the night those trails had been etched in her skin; just the touch of her nails brought back the memory. Her skin shivered.
It remembered…
Illicit kisses and tawdry teases and…
…pain.
She peeled off the bra and continued to trace the white lines that fractured her breasts. She looked like a porcelain doll that had been glued back together after a fall from a tall shelf. Her nipples grew hard as she followed the map of her past. She loved the sensation as they contracted and pulled against the wide brown silver dollars of her areolas. There was a tension that filled her veins, a need.
And in the air of her darkened bedroom, she could hear a voice whisper.
The Red.
She knew the voice wasn’t in her mind. It was in the room with her. Invisible, but present. It spoke to her every night when she turned out the lights. Sometimes she left them on, hoping to escape into sleep before the whispers began.
The Red.
She shivered again, but this time not in pleasure.
In fear.
The truth was, she needed what lay beyond the heavy wooden door of The Red. But it took something from her every time. It was like a drug. She needed the pain, the degradation…she needed to let herself go all the way down. The lower she crawled, the better it felt. There was a snake inside her, and it twisted the humiliation and pain in her head to become a bitter, honeyed pleasure.
The Red was her cocaine.
Every morning after, she promised herself that she would not go back, that she would save some piece of herself from defilement. She picked up her acoustic guitar for the next few nights after and wrote songs about salvation and finding strength.
And every time the invitation came, she stripped out of her work clothes to stand naked and wanting in her bedroom, asking herself if she could do it again. She fingered the scars she’d earned the last time she broke her promise. And then she always went to her closet, pushed the blue business suits and conservative blouses aside, and pulled out the clothes she yearned to wear everyday from their shelf in the back. The trappings of fetish. She rolled on her black stockings and slipped her silky legs into her leather boots and sucked in her belly to tie up her black lace corset. Within the hour she would be at the address, whatever address, that was on the invitation. Amelia was a junkie for the flesh, for the pleasure, for the pain.
She needed NightWhere. The Blue Room had just been the beginning for her. It was child’s play now. Now…Amelia needed the heat and the bite and the blood of the labyrinth of The Red.
Though she wasn’t sure how much longer she could survive it.
Amelia set down the invitation and pulled her black stockings on.
Gordon
Sometimes Gordon Hayworth thought the whole fucking human race oughta be taken out, lined up against a wall and shot. He’d pull the trigger, if need be, but damned if he was going to go through the work to round them all up. Bastards would die with or without him anyway; the whole lot were stupid as shit.
Gordon enjoyed the images of these violent musings while sitting in traffic on I-355. He watched as a black Camry pulled out of the left lane and shot forward on the gravel shoulder, trying to barrel past all of the other hopeless idiots also trapped on the highway.
The Camry suddenly swerved and a sharp pop cut the air. Tire blowout, probably due to road debris. “That’s why you don’t drive on the shoulder, asshole!” Gordon yelled. The Camry jagged wildly and the driver overcorrected, plowing right into the door of a blue Dodge pickup.
Gordon laughed. “Now that…” he said, “…is justice. Asshole.” He turned up the radio and started singing along to a Boston song. It calmed his nerves.
The ride home sucked. It always sucked, but tonight…it was especially sucky. And Gordon was still in an especially foul mood when he stepped up the walk to his two-bedroom bungalow in Glendale Heights a half hour later.
The front screen door was unlocked (and it wouldn’t have mattered if it had been locked, since the giant rent in the screening rendered any lock a pointless formality).
Something crashed from inside as the screen creaked open and Gordon tossed his backpack to the floor. “Helloooo?” he called.
From the back bedroom, a thin, bedraggled woman hurried out, shaking her head. Her thin white tank top was plastered to her thin white form with sweat, and the straps to her black bra were tackily obvious across her shoulders.
“I hope you’re ready for something good,” Gordon said and cupped both hands around her waist. She squirmed in his grasp and tilted her head away as he bent to kiss her.
“Bitch!” he complained.
From the back bedroom a child cried.
“Don’t waste it on me,” she warned. “I got nothing left for you tonight, and you got one of them fancy invites again to your favorite club. So go do someone who cares. Or doesn’t care, I guess.”
She slapped an envelope against his chest and then pushed herself out of his grasp as he took it.
“I can take you with me,” he offered, for the umpteenth time.
The thin, angry woman shook her head. “Go beat and fuck whoever you want. Just pay the rent and feed your kid when you’re done, okay? I don’t care about the rest.”
From the room behind them, the crying escalated.
“What’s the matter with Freddy?” Gordon asked.
“He needs love,” she said. “Just like the rest of us. Not that you would understand that.”
With that she turned and disappeared back to the child’s room. Gordon poked his head in and looked at his baby, quiet now that it had its mother’s full attention, mouth on her breast. There’d been a time that the same act-only his mouth on her nipple-would have quieted the noise in Gordon’s head. But that time was gone. He needed more than just a tit now. A lot more.