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“My State Bar number is 503612. Look me up.”

“If you’re a cop, you have to tell me. Otherwise, it’s entrapment.”

That wasn’t true, but I wasn’t going to disabuse him of that notion just now. “My firm’s website is www.carwoodallisonlaw.com,” I offered. “My mug shot’s on it. Fire up your laptop and take a look.”

He folded his arms and regarded me with eyes that narrowed in suspicious appraisal. Whirs and clicks sounded as he tried to decide whether I was telling the truth or not. After another look at my suit—one of my expensive ones, perfectly tailored to my figure—he must have decided that I dressed too nicely for an undercover cop. His arms unfolded. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the glowing red curtain behind him.

“Come on,” he said. “I’m going to show you the VIP section.”

I honestly didn’t want to see what kind of things the owners of a store like this considered too spicy to set out with the S&M and anal material. And I didn’t want to stand in that red light. I didn’t want that at all.

But I went.

Cory hadn’t answered my question. He hadn’t indicated whether Pinnix or Ramseur rang a bell.

Because they don’t, I thought. Because they weren’t born and didn’t grow up with sexual desires that could deform like the branches of some twisted tree in the black heart of the forest. They had no lives before the Bald Man gave them air. They had no thoughts other than his.

Impossible. The video store, these membership cards, they proved that. Golems didn’t like porn, because they couldn’t; ergo, the fact that Pinnix and Ramseur had possessed membership cards indicated that they weren’t golems at all and I needed to stop thinking that stupid bullshit right now.

Or not, Bobby mused. He conjured men, but maybe he can’t conjure clothes

What the hell are you talking about? I asked.

I’m saying that maybe the membership cards belong to the people they killed to get the wallets and clothes.

Before I could process that last thought, I had followed Cory through the curtain and found myself in the exclusive VIP section of Ryan’s News & Video.

The light burned dimmer in here, lengthening the shadows and removing the shine from the magazine and DVD covers. I didn’t get a great look at those, because the merchandise on the wall grabbed my attention first.

Chains. Rope. Rolls of tape. Blindfolds.

Handcuffs.

“Good material isn’t all about big titties and tight asses,” Cory said. “I mean, if that’s all it was, we could all get off on Playboy, you know what I’m saying? The good stuff is situational.”

Right next to the handcuffs hung a clear plastic package with what looked like garbage bag ties inside. A handwritten label on the bag proclaimed these to be FLEXICUFFS.

“The good stuff gets to the heart of what you want. Your center. Digs deep into those places that you don’t want to admit exist but are running things anyway. Under every skin is a nasty, nasty son of a bitch. This section is for him.”

I tore my eyes away from the restraints and found myself looking at a DVD showing a girl in what looked like an evening gown. She looked young, probably too young to have her face on a DVD cover in a place like this. The title read simply Prom Night. Next to that, another girl, blindfolded and gagged and chained to a wall. This one was called Please Don’t.

I felt my immortal soul in danger just by being here.

There was another doorway beyond the one I’d just stepped through. Solid metal, with a double lock, it looked like an exterior door. This, logic said, would lead to the outside of the building.

That part of me that believed in golems piped up again. No, it said, it doesn’t. It goes somewhere else.

The thought hit me like a bucket of ice water.

This building isn’t big enough for a room this size, let alone another one behind it. Think about it.

I did. The general merchandise section of the store took up almost its entire width. The old gas station sat on a relatively narrow lot and the builders had structured it accordingly. The room I stood in right now shouldn’t have been here.

Where am I? I asked.

No answer. Oblivious to my thoughts, Cory continued.

“The thing about most bondage material is, the girl is actually okay with it. She’s part of the game, or she’s getting paid, or whatever. Even in your so-called rape videos, what you’ve got is a couple of actors. But in the best shit, they don’t want it. Like this one.”

He picked up a magazine in a language I couldn’t decipher. It looked like Spanish. He flipped it open to reveal a Hispanic woman in her mid-twenties bent over a table, a desk, some nameless piece of furniture. A set of hands pinned her arms to its surface. Behind her stood a man in a ski mask, naked from the waist down. He was

Leering

smiling, I felt this even though the mask covered his face. The woman was crying.

“You can get away with things in other countries that would get your ass sent to prison here,” Cory said.

I looked back at the door. The edges glowed now, like someone had turned on the lights in a room on the other side. I couldn’t ask about this, though, because my throat had closed up.

Where am I where the fuck am I where does that door go if it goes to the outside how are the goddamn lights on because it’s DARK out there

You wanted to see where those two fuckers came from, Bobby said in my head. I think you found it.

My throat unstuck enough to where I could say, “Thanks. I appreciate you showing me this.”

“Anything in here you like?”

“No, thanks.”

“You sure, man? Hey, I got more than just this third-world bullshit. If you’re only into white bitches, I got stacks and stacks of that.”

“I’m good to go,” I said. “Thanks.”

Before he could say another word and before my eyes could take another look at that other door, I turned and walked out as fast as I could. By the time I hit the front door to the building, I was running.

22.

Cory didn’t follow me. I point that out because when I hit the night air outside, it took awhile for the crazy thoughts to subside, and it struck me that Cory could have been a golem, too. He could have chased me out into the parking area and dragged me back inside.

And so I ran. I actually ran past the BMW, because even as my mind yelled hey, wait a minute, my arms and legs seized on this idea of Cory The Porn-Peddling Golem and so they pumped up and down, up and down, continuing long past the point where my heart and lungs could supply them with air. By the time all my systems reached the mutual understanding that Cory wasn’t chasing me, I had left Ryan’s News & Video—and my car—several hundred yards behind. My adrenaline boost spent, my legs first slowed and then stopped. I bounded to a halt and rested my hands on a lamp post, bending over and gasping for breath. I felt more than a little dizzy.

Effective immediately, Bobby said, you are to begin a program of intense physical training with the goal of burning all that candy off your ass. Jesus, man, look at you!

My heart rate slowing now, I straightened up and stretched, feeling my vertebrae pop and crack as I surveyed my new surroundings. The streetlamp under which I stood had burned out—or shot out, as evidenced by the broken glass at my feet—and the city hadn’t gotten around to replacing it yet. Consequently, I found myself in the darkest section of a street that didn’t have much light even on the best of nights. Down the street, a lamp on the curb outside Ryan’s Video marked the outer boundary of my present darkness. Another lamp down on the other street corner in the opposite direction petered out a hundred yards or so from where I stood, dribbling its miserly electric glow over rows of close-together houses built in the Craftsman style, with rambling front porches and angling rooflines. People paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for architecture and character like this in Burlington, but Durham’s elite had moved on to greener pastures years ago and now their old homes stood in neglected disrepair. Shadows of indoor furniture stood on sagging porches. Several windowless units shouted abandonment, while others with lights glowing in the few windows that weren’t boarded up spoke of residents so far down on the food chain that even their landlords couldn’t afford new glass.