He stared down into the shadow and could see a faint but clear motion below. He could see the runoff from the gutter that had cut through the rows of bodies he’d just exited, streaming red and thick down the wall of the large channel. It splashed as it joined the moving tide below.
A moat of human blood.
It was a good six feet wide. He couldn’t tell how deep.
Behind him the Watcher cleared the field.
Mark swallowed hard. It was no ordinary Watcher. This one wore a black hood and carried a long scythe.
It was the Grim Reaper come to life.
Mark stepped back and then took a quick running leap across the moat. When he landed, he turned and looked back at the Field of Flesh. The Reaper stood there on the edge of the moat, but did not follow. The arms and legs of some of the bodies behind him moved and shifted, and a faint sound still whispered from them, though Mark could no longer make out any distinct words. It was truly like a farmer’s field, shifting and moving in the breeze. If the breeze was the fetid, torturous breath of hell. And the harvester was the Grim Reaper.
Mark kept his eyes on the black figure and backed away from the moat. He moved slowly towards the dark wall ahead, searching for an exit. Or perhaps…an entrance.
There was an alcove to his left, and Mark walked towards it. Set two feet within its arched top was the wood of a door. He put his hand on an oval iron ring in the center. He held it there for a minute, afraid to pull. What was on the other side? Would the Watchers leap out and capture him instantly?
The only way to find out was to open the door.
He did. It creaked towards him with a horrible sound. Mark was sure the noise had given him away, but the hallway ahead remained empty. He could see the faint glow of crimson reflecting from the surface of the walls, thanks to the tongues of flame that guttered from wall sconces set every few yards amid the red stone. It glistened and moved-a waterfall of blood that kept the hallway moist and humid. It was like a rain forest, only instead of the air being ripe with life, it was cloying and thick with the irrigation of death.
Mark knew this hall. It was the passageway that led to the various rooms of torture and defilement that made up The Red.
He took one last look back, and the Reaper had disappeared. The field of bodies looked still. Mark didn’t want to hang around to find out where the harvester had gone. He stepped through the doorway and pulled it tight behind him. He stood there a moment, catching his breath. Then he headed to the right, unsure of where exactly he was in the labyrinth of NightWhere. But when he reached the end of the hall after a couple of turns, he knew right where he was.
He’d found the antechamber of The Red, which received visitors from the Blue Room. Its walls were aglow with the light of scores of candles, all set in small arched alcoves in the walls.
He pushed one of the heavy oaken entry doors open slightly and peered into the crowd of bacchanalian fornicators beyond. He saw men in leather chaps and women dressed only in silver chains dancing to the heavy somnolent strains of the live band. He didn’t recognize the song, but it sounded like a dirge, despite the drums and electric guitars. The dance floor shifted and swayed to the music, while a handful of the NightWhere denizens took a time-out at Sin-D’s bar. Beyond them all, he saw the bartendress mixing drinks and laughing. She wore next to nothing; he could see the X of black tape covering the free-hanging globe of one breast. He thought he recognized the thick shoulders of Kendrick on the far end, tilting back a glass on his usual stool.
Already there was a line at the front door of people exiting the club. The night was almost over. At least for those who thought of NightWhere as a club.
For those who knew that it was more than that…the darkness never ended.
Mark pulled the door shut.
Rae was not out there. That was the room of dabblers and their keepers. Rae was serious. More than serious.
He feared she was already damned.
Mark turned and headed back the way he had come.
Two men waited for him in the hallway, smiling.
This was not going to be easy.
They were large men. Both. One looked to be Asian, and the other looked as redneck as any boy in a middle-of-Indiana bar on a Tuesday night.
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…damn…but before he could actually utter a word he had fallen to the ground.
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
Rae of Dark
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.