With that, Kendrick sprinted towards the entry door of the porn shop. But when he reached it, he kept going, turning the corner with his fist in the air, his middle finger extended.
It might have been useful to follow him, to find out where he lived in case the man on the phone had lied. But Mark let him go. He had talked to someone at the club, someone who claimed that their next meeting was two weeks away. He hoped the man kept his promise. He hoped the man met him here.
A chill gripped Mark’s stomach then, as he thought…but how did the man even know where here was? The man had identified that he was at Dreams without Mark saying anything. Maybe Kendrick had called NightWhere after Mark had left the place?
He heard Kendrick’s voice in his head, “You’re going to get more than you bargained for.”
Who were these people, Mark wondered. It was as if he’d stumbled into a secret society that met in the catacombs and traded secret passwords and handshakes. And based on Kendrick’s warnings…potentially got rid of people who crossed them.
Permanently.
Mark swallowed hard and tried to tell himself that he was being ridiculous. The club was secret because it had to be-otherwise the cops would bust it. But NightWhere weren’t the Mafia. They weren’t going to kill him just for insisting they let him see his wife again. He just hoped that, when he did see her, Rae would come back home with him. He couldn’t imagine what he would feel like if she said no. If this really was the end.
He walked slowly back out of the alley and down the busy street to his car. The next two weeks were going to take forever to pass by.
Mark got in his car and started the engine. All he could see in his mind’s eye was an image of Rae gagged and chained against a rack.
He wanted to have the key to free her. To be the key.
To bring her back home with him.
Mark whispered to himself in the silence of the cab of his car: “I’m coming, baby. I’m coming.”
Chapter Thirty-One
Gordon
There are moments in everyone’s lives that they wish they could change. That insult you hurled at your father just before he had a heart attack. That moment when you were drunk and leaned over to kiss your best friend’s girl. Or that moment that you took a steak knife out of the wooden block by the kitchen sink and plunged it into your wife’s face. Actually, her right eye.
Gordon wished he could have taken all of those moments back, but mostly, he wished he could undo the last. He could live with his dad going to the grave hating him. He could live with the broken nose his friend had given him for tasting his dumb slut’s tongue when they were both drunk.
He was going to have a hard time living with Miriam’s corpse, though, which was currently bleeding all over the linoleum. He hated messiness. So this only pissed him off further. Gordon pulled the tablecloth off the dining room table and threw it over her. He had to go take care of Freddy, who was crying in the back bedroom again. Then he’d decide what to do with the naggy bitch that bore the boy.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. He had loved her once. Before Miriam had turned into a nag. An endlessly bitching, whining shrew. He didn’t know exactly which word had finally broken his bubble of protection. Was it pathetic, dickless, loser or joke? One of those words had made him drop the piece of leftover ham in his fingers and pick up a knife. It was all a red blur in his mind now.
Gordon pulled the tablecloth back and stared at the congealed blood across his wife’s face. The silver blade of that fateful knife was spotted in red above where it protruded from her eyeball, and the white of that eyeball was also spotted in her blood.
Gordon had rocked Freddy to sleep in the next room, and now he was going to take care of some outstanding business with the boy’s mother.
Actually, he’d already taken care of business when he’d pulled out the knife and silenced his haranguing wife once and for all. But sometimes taking care of one problem only led to others.
Like a body.
And child care.
Damnit.
Gordon wrapped Miriam in the tablecloth, after pulling the knife from her eyeball. Something creamy oozed out from the hole as he did, but Gordon didn’t wait around to consider what it was. He pulled the cloth over her mouth, silent for the first time in all these fucking years.
He wouldn’t miss her.
But Freddy would. Gordon was going to need some child care.
He’d deal with that tomorrow. After he tucked Freddy’s mom’s body in the basement. He slung her corpse over his shoulder and clumsily twisted the doorknob to the basement. He maneuvered her weight (slight as it was) through the opening and then carried her down the wooden plank stairs.
“You ain’t ever gonna yell at me again,” he whispered. And then he dropped her body to the sand of the crawl space and shook his head.
“Nope, never again.”
Gordon smiled, in a crazy, I-have-finally-gone-over-the-rainbow way and walked away from her without burying the body or saying any other last words.
Sometimes, you were just done.
But for Gordon, done was just a temporary thing. He couldn’t just leave Miriam here like this. But she would keep for now.
In the meantime, he had things he wanted to do. Things that would hurt. Not himself. But someone else. Like that Amelia chick. In fact, after sticking the knife in Miriam’s eye and then feeling the way she had jerked and trembled as he held her while the life bled out of her, and then laying her down on the floor, still kicking… Well, after experiencing that, he had a feeling that he could finally do something to satisfy Amelia’s desire for pain. He was looking forward to the next invitation from NightWhere, more than ever.
Of course, this time, he was going to have to find a babysitter.
Chapter Thirty-Two
October 18
The time passed slowly. Mark worked every day at his job-sometimes to the extreme-burning the midnight oil because it was somehow comforting to throw himself into a project. Of course, in the back of his mind he also knew that the only reason he was doing it was because he was desperately trying to avoid something else. Something that was poisoning his soul.
The weekends were endless, but in the end, two weeks did pass. And finally, the day came that had seemed as far away as Christmas to a kid in June. And Mark stood in front of the porno shop where he had tackled Kendrick. It was October 18.
Mark wasn’t sure where to go when he got to the shop. Should he stand around and paw through DVDs until someone approached him? Loiter in the alley?
After standing outside of the paper-obscured door for a minute, he decided to call the phone number that Kendrick had given him the last time and “announce” that he was here waiting. On the third ring, a voice answered.
“We’ve been waiting for you.”
“I’m at the porn shop, like you said.”
“Good,” the voice answered. “What do you want from us?”
“I want to come back to NightWhere,” Mark said. “I want to see my wife again. My wife and I were coming together, and then she started going without me.”
“Perhaps she was the only one invited.”
“I’d like to come back,” Mark said again. He tried to stifle the nerves in his voice.
“You’d like to find your wife, Rae,” the voice corrected.
“Well, yeah,” Mark said.
“My name is Kharon,” the voice said. “I will let you visit NightWhere one more time, to satisfy your curiosity. But you will need to stay with me; I will be your chaperone. And this will be the last time.”
“That’s fine,” Mark said. “Can you tell me…is Rae okay?”