Necro Files: Two Decades of Extreme Horror

Painfreak

Gerard Houarner

“Painfreak” was first published in Into the Darkness #1, April 1994.

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Gerard Houarner works in a psychiatric institution by day and writes at night, mostly about the dark. Recent publications include “Tree of Shadows,” in the Crossroads Press electronic edition of the novel The Beast That Was Max, “Mourning With the Bones of the Dead,” Horror Library 4, “The Flea Market ,” Eibonvale Press anthology Blind Swimmer, “Lightning Can’t Catch Me,” Darkness On The Edge: Dark Tales Inspired by the Songs of Bruce Springsteen, and “Dead Medicine Snake Woman,” Indian Country Noir. He also serves as fiction editor for Space and Time magazine.

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Painfreak started as a (slightly) warped view of an elite club scene and the not-so-elite desires such scenes serve to satisfy. The club has since appeared here and there in my work, sometimes as a kind of gateway to hell, other times a crossroads between worlds and desires. It’s not a place where good things happen.

Fear knotted Tony Lambert’s stomach as Lisa hopped out of the cab that had stopped in front of the closed Brooklyn warehouse half way down the block from his hiding place under the Belt Parkway. Once again, she was going to Painfreak.

Lisa, anonymous in her black rain coat and hat, trotted through the night’s light drizzle to the loading docks. Her slim, petite figure danced in and out of the light from the occasional functioning street lamp. He had followed her from her girlfriend’s apartment to the floating club’s latest secret location a week ago, and had watched her enter every night since then. He had not yet gone in after her. The fear in his stomach warned him not to pursue her any further. Guy had said people didn’t always come out from Painfreak.

So far, Lisa had. Of course, Guy had called the both of them tourists, not players, the night seven years ago when he had introduced Tony to the club and they had met Lisa. Players took the real risks. Like Guy, who Painfreak had claimed with AIDS. Tourists just watched, and wished they had the guts to join in the fun. To give themselves up, surrender to their fantasies. Tourists were afraid to go all the way. Guy had been right; Tony and Lisa had given up the club circuit, and Painfreak in particular, after they met. But they were still alive.

Except now Lisa had left him and gone back to Painfreak. Tony didn’t know why. They had started living together the night they met, and had married soon afterwards. In the seven years since, Tony had never been tempted to chase after another woman. Lisa had paid her share of the expenses, never complained or mentioned kids. They had lived quietly, with few friends or family to distract them from their private games. And it was the private games, like the milder ones at Painfreak and the scene to which it belonged, that had kept him faithful to Lisa. They always had sex the way Tony liked it. The way he always thought she liked it. Fantasy not quite over the edge. Love with costumes and devices out of video porn and catalogs; games without points; play with roles and body parts. It had been enough for him and, he thought, for her. He had no idea what other desires had gone unfulfilled in Lisa, any more than he knew the source of the fear that kept him from following her in.

He knew only that he was afraid of finding out.

Tony pressed himself against one of the Parkway’s steel support beams, as if trying to draw strength from the vibration of cars passing overhead. Cold metal stole the warmth from his hands and face. The sussuration of tires on the wet highway pavement overhead whispered urgently to him as Lisa knocked on the steel rolling gate at one of the bays. She waited, perfectly still, looking down. A side door cracked opened. She held out her hand towards the darkness in the entrance for a moment. She nodded and slipped into the darkness beyond the doorway.

Tony shuffled his feet. Thunder rolled in from Manhattan; lightning flashed. Soon, the drizzle would turn to hard rain. Soon, perhaps tonight, Painfreak would move. Vanish from the city altogether, re-settle for a while in Paris, Bangkok, Berlin, Los Angeles, or some other travellers’ city. Guy had said clubs like Painfreak were only an idea that stayed on the mind of a big city for a little while. The various social scenes from which such elite clubs erupted did not have the energy to sustain the kind of activities that went on inside. There were only so many players at any given time, in any given place. Once depleted of energy, the idea simply moved to another mind. Another city.

Lisa might be swept away with the scene and find herself lost in a strange land. Or, driven by whatever pain and desperation that had brought her to the club in the first place, knowing the club might be out of her reach for a long time, she might make the move from tourist to player. And even if she emerged once more, unscathed, and returned tomorrow night to find Painfreak gone, Tony doubted she would come back to him. He would still not know the source of the pain and desperation that had made her suddenly abandon him, refuse any contact with him, and flee to Painfreak. And if he did not find out, then she would be lost to him forever.

The warehouse stood silent in the abandoned business district. No lights escaped its windows. No music, or any other sound, drifted along the street to him. Tony glanced back at his Lexus parked by the service road curb. Water dripped from the highway into shallow pools, splashed on to concrete. The city waited around him, vast and enigmatic, offering neither encouragement nor menace. He had to make his move on his own. Tonight. Or give Lisa up.

He took a step, then another. He left the comforting darkness under the Belt Parkway, crossed the service road, hit the sidewalk at a steady pace. He tried not to think about where he was going, what he was doing. He tried to keep his mind on Lisa: on her strong legs, gentle hands, her wide mouth and full lips, the way she laughed, and sighed, and turned her head away from him after they were both satiated with sex.

Tony hunched his shoulders against the rain and the breeze, which had chilled and grown brisk. Cold rain trickled down his neck. The warehouse loomed over him, but he was still not at the loading docks.

Thinking about her reminded him of the barren apartment that was now his home, the loneliness he felt sleeping alone. He missed her sitting on the sofa, reading, while he watched television. He missed her cleaning up in the kitchen after he cooked their meals, and coming back from the laundry with their clothes bundled in sacks, and pulling out coupons as they shopped in the supermarket. He missed the click of her high heels on ceramic floor tile, the play of muscle under skin when she tightened straps and flicked a crop or whip, the way leather and latex hugged her body. Without Lisa, he was empty. He could not give her up.

He realized suddenly, as he put his foot on the concrete step leading to the loading dock, that it was emptiness driving him into Painfreak.

The hollow feeling within him had been growing since she left him days ago without a word. Each failure to re-establish contact with her had sucked another piece of his inner self away. She had not gone to work in a week; Tony had called her line and waited outside her office building. She had run away from him outside her girlfriend’s apartment building, from which he had followed her to Painfreak. She had the doorman warn him the police would be called it he persisted in trying to talk to her.

He wondered how he had coped with the terrible, raw and aching hole at the center of his being before he met her. It was the pain of that emptiness that was overcoming his fear, making him return to Painfreak to find what he had lost.

On the loading docks, Tony took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Though he was afraid, the desperation of pain was stronger. And now he had something to tell Lisa. He understood there was more than fear inside of him. Surely, she could relate to his emptiness. Perhaps, he thought as thunder rumbled nearby and the rain suddenly began to pour, she felt the same way. Empty. Missing something essential. Perhaps he had failed her in some unknown way. Perhaps he had driven her to Painfreak with his failure.

He had words, now, other than the pathetic: please come back, don’t leave me. He had questions: are you as empty as I? what are you looking for in this place? how can I fill your emptiness, as you’ve filled mine?

Fist trembling, Tony knocked on the gate. The steel rattled. A gust swept rain across the open dock. The side door opened, and Tony approached the darkness.

Shadows stirred, then a tall, wide form separated itself from the deeper blackness and blocked the entrance. A thick-necked, bald-headed man crossed his arms over his chest and looked down on Tony.

Tony reached into his pocket for money, then stopped and stared at the doorman. He had a few more scars on his face and hands, and he was dressed in grey and black instead of the more colorful styles fashionable on his first visit, but there was no doubt the doorman was the same as when Guy had brought him in. It did not seem as if he had aged.

Someone reached out and grabbed Tony’s right wrist while he was pulling out his money. Strong fingers wrenched his hand back and twisted, paralyzing him in a painful joint lock. Tony knelt to escape the agony of tearing muscles and ligaments, then looked up. A slightly built Asian man dressed in a dark suit and turtleneck regarded him impassively while the doorman, his arms still crossed, stood behind him. Tony’s money fluttered away on the breeze.

“Referrals only,” the Asian man said softly. “Please leave.”

“My wife just went in—” Tony began, but then gasped as the Asian man twisted his hand a fraction more.

Wrong answer, but what was the right one? Guy had led him in the first time, talked to the doorman. No money, but what? The hand. Like Lisa, he had shown the doorman his hand. There had been a hand stamp, with invisible ink, to allow patrons to leave and return the same night. Both Guy and Tony had been stamped, but that was so many years ago. Stupid to even think—

“Been here, Guy brought me, long time …”

The Asian man released him, and the doorman gently helped him to his feet. They gazed at the back of his left hand. The faint outline of a bone mark glowed on his skin. Tony searched for the UV lamp, but found only blackness beyond the two men.

The Asian man stepped back while the doorman pressed a stamp down on the back of Tony’s left hand. His flesh tingled, and he remembered the sensation from his first visit. The doorman stepped aside and motioned him to enter.

“Always show the mark,” the Asian man said reproachfully before melting into the darkness.

Tony nodded and hurried into the warehouse, his heart beating fast and his wrist still throbbing. All those years he had worn Painfreak’s mark without knowing it had been burned into his flesh. Lisa had worn it as well. He had no doubt she had known about the invisible bone on her hand, just as she had always known how to find the club. A pair of secrets she had kept from him, like the unfulfilled dreams that haunted her, like the pain that was driving her back to Painfreak. He wondered how many marks she wore on her hand.

The narrow corridor he followed was dimly lit at the opposite end by a single bulb over a tight, winding set of metal stairs that led down. Seeing no other way to go, Tony descended the stairs. Bass pulsed up the stair well from the club’s speakers, sending tremors through the steel hand rails. A repetitive, mechanical tune echoed through the wider hallway he found at the bottom of the stairs. He headed towards another distant bulb, and the music became louder, bass beating inside of him like a second heart; cold, synthesized notes drawing his thoughts into an endless, pointless loop. At the steel double doors under the bulb, Tony shook his head, wiped his palms against his thighs, and pushed a heavy door.

The music washed over him like a cold wave of water. Something in the music, like the combination of electricity crackling and a faint feedback whine, made the short hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. Things had changed since his last visit. The music was different, for one thing. And he didn’t remember seeing so many cages.

Seven years was too long away from Painfreak to return.

Tony walked to the long bar—battered tables of different heights and widths set end to end, behind which two naked barkeepers patrolled—and found an empty storage drum to sit on. Something whimpered inside the drum as his weight made the walls pop. He shifted uneasily on the warm metal. Nails or claws scratched feebly at the barrel walls. A new variation in Painfreak’s perversions, he decided.

The male barkeeper came to him and set down a tall styrofoam cup of what looked like frothy fruit punch. Tony reached into his pocket and remembered he had lost his money. He turned to hold his empty hands up in a gesture of apology. The barkeeper shook his head, wiped his palms together in a gesture of dismissal and moved away. Tony didn’t remember paying for any drinks the last time, either.

He took a careful sip of the concoction, aware from news reports that drugs might have been mixed in with the punch. The sweet scent of tropical fruit masked for a moment the warehouse basement’s stale odors. Tangy flavors danced on his tongue, before a slightly bitter aftertaste and a spot of cold numbness told him there was a potent spell hiding behind the drink’s seductive enticement. Shaking his head, he put the cup down. Cocaine had been the drug of choice in his day, when things had seemed simpler.

Tony scanned the bodies jumping, gyrating, hurling, convulsing spasmodically on the dance floor. In single cages suspended at varying heights from the ceiling, naked women and men, some locked two and three to a cage, writhed and sweated and rattled the bars to their prisons. Colored lights flashed stroboscopically over the crowd, illuminating for an instant individual faces contorted by ecstasy. He was not surprised Lisa was not among them. They were both too old for this nonsense. How could Lisa stand it? Over thirty, now, and slowing down, neither one of them had the energy or the stamina anymore to throw themselves into such a bacchanal. In fact, meeting each other had been a graceful means of exiting the world of clubs and scenes and parties for both of them. Was it the adventurousness of youth that she missed? The daring? Was she trying to recapture the feeling that came from being young and living life on the edge? His appetites were no longer as keen or as sharp.

Watching the frantic motions of the dancers and the twisting cages, he understood that now more than ever he had limits. He did not want to abandon himself to music screaming around him or drugs humming from within, or join in tired, panting games that tried to capture dreams of sex and power and life and death. He did not want to dance on the edge. He wanted only Lisa.

The emptiness twisted inside of him as he imagined her as weary of the scene as he was, but wanting something else, something more. His grip on the cup tightened as he imagined her feeling that she had made the wrong choice in leaving with him that night, that she should have stayed, and gone deeper into Painfreak. He shut his eyes against the moment’s vertigo when he imagined her needing to go over the edge, to fall into the emptiness. To enter Painfreak and never come out.

Without thinking, he took a long swallow from the cup, then quickly put it down when he realized what he was doing. He wiped froth from his lips and pushed the cup away. When he looked around, he noticed an older couple standing against the wall, watching him. They were both stout, dressed in formal evening wear, and glittering with jewelry. The woman smiled and nodded to him, a hungry glint in her eye.

Tony remembered seeing their kind the last time. They were not tourists or players, Guy had said when Tony asked about the ones who looked so completely out of place in the club. They were the ones who paid the bills, made the arrangements, worked the bureaucratic magic that enabled Painfreak to appear and disappear without a trace. They were the part of the urban mind that sensed the need for Painfreak in the fabric of the city’s life. They did more than just make arrangements and watch; they filled their own emptiness when others danced on and over the edge. They fed, and when there was nothing more to feed on, they arranged for Painfreak to move on.

More and more, Tony remembered why he had abandoned the scene. He shuddered and looked away.

And found Lisa.

He saw brown hair cut short, a head bobbing up and down in a familiar rhythm, a quick profile that showed the long line of the forehead and nose. Lisa, slicing through the crowd, heading towards a door on the other side of the club floor.

Tony was up and on his feet, shouting her name. The music drowned his voice. Lisa vanished for a moment and he pushed his way through the dancers, frantically searching for her. He caught a glimpse of the older couple standing against the wall; they were laughing and talking to another elderly pair while pointing in his direction.

Someone who might have been Lisa went through the door. Tony staggered as a teenaged girl slammed her body into his back. Her raw-edged howl bored through his mind before hands dragged her back into the dancing pack, lifted her into the air, and carried her to the center of the floor. Tony cast a final quick glance for Lisa, then went through the door.

He passed through a series of sound baffles made of strips of plastic and material hanging from ceiling pipes. He emerged into a darkened cavern lit by hazy fires. Tony froze, looked up, expecting to see stars through the thin smoke. Street grating set into the vaulted ceiling reassured him he had not been transported to some alien world. The place must have been a municipal storage depot at one time, like the ones inside bridge supports and off subway tunnels. Abandoned, the cavern had been transformed into an incubator for Painfreak’s more serious games.

Tony coughed from the smoke tainted air, and he massaged a tearing eye. The music was absent; in its place, human voices cried out, wailed, shouted, screamed, singly and in small groups. Their rhythms were random, the volume nowhere near as high as in the club’s dancing area. Other noises mingled with the voices; metal grinding on metal, chains rattling, water splashing, the hiss of escaping gases, the soft thump of crashing bodies, wood splintering. Or bone. The sounds chilled him, though the cavern was hot and stuffy.

A few people ran past him, their naked feet slapping on the concrete floor. They faded quickly into the gloom, but he had seen enough to know none of them had been Lisa. Tony began trotting to the nearest fire.

He had almost reached the flames when he became aware of someone running alongside of him. Startled, he turned, anticipating seeing Lisa.

The tall, thin man was naked, and his long, white hair trailed behind him as he kept pace with Tony. His face was bony, beardless, and his eyes were black in the dim, flickering light. He smiled, acknowledging his discovery. “I never had the chance to show you the back rooms,” the man said, and his smile broadened. “You and Lisa hit it off so fast the first time you came here.”

It wasn’t Guy. Guy was dead. The toothy smile was his, as was the jutting jaw and the body that had been flesh draped over bones even before AIDS claimed it. The man’s voice sounded like Guy’s, sarcastic and dry, on the edge of a caustic observation. But it couldn’t be Guy. The cavern spun once around Tony, and he nearly fell.

Tony stopped beyond the fire’s inner circle of light, and the man coasted to a stop a few steps later. They faced each other, the man putting his hands on his hips. Through his body, Tony could see the flames jump as if through a translucent curtain.

“See anything you like, sailor boy?” The man wiggled his hips.

“Who the fuck are you?” Not believing, never, it wasn’t possible.

The man pouted. “I could understand you forgetting me if we’d fucked, Tony. But damn, after two years of rooming together, I figured the sexual tension between us would’ve made me memorable.” The man exploded into hysterical laughter, holding his arms across his stomach and stamping a foot repeatedly. “Nothing like unrequited lust to bring back the dead,” he said after catching his breath, and laughed again.

Tony circled around the man and approached the fire. It was Guy. Alive, or dead, but still Guy. Not possible, but real. Suddenly, the world did not feel so solid or tangible.

“College was a long time ago,” Tony said, measuring his words carefully. He glanced at the figures at the periphery of the fire’s light, trying to deny the fact that he was talking to Guy as he searched for Lisa.

“Oh, please, stop acting like a tourist bitch,” Guy said, his good humor gaining an angry edge. “I’m the fucker that’s dead, asshole.”

Tony wandered to the other side of the fire, trying to put distance between himself and the apparition. Guy strolled languidly around the fire after him. Tony glanced at the cavern entrance, a distant grey splotch in the darkness. He thought of emptiness, and Lisa.

“I’m sorry about what happened to you, Guy.” Was he really talking to a ghost? “But I’m here looking for Lisa.” Tony started turning away, desperately pushing the idea of Guy, of talking to a ghost, out of his mind. Lisa. He was after Lisa. That was his anchor to what was real.

“You always were looking for a bitch, Tony,” Guy said in a mocking tone. “That’s why you liked rooming with me. Didn’t give a shit about what the guys said. I was a good bitch to you, even if you never touched me, even if you never let me touch you. And I made your other bitches feel good when they came over. Mister sensitive and self-confident, so masculine you could relate to a homosexual,” he said, rolling his eyes, shoulders, hips, and snaking his arms up and down, “and not feel threatened. Ooooo, they really ate it up, didn’t they?”

Tony’s face flushed, and he turned back quickly as a flash of anger washed over his fear. “Why don’t you spare me the helpless faggot routine, Guy.”

“And if they freaked when they met me, you knew they weren’t going to be any fun, right? Too uptight and serious. They’d start in on your image and reputation, like I was going to drag the both of you into a social gutter. And I would’ve, too.” Guy laughed, but kept his gaze fixed on Tony. “No, you liked the ones who asked if you ever watched me have sex with my lovers, who were curious about how gays did it, who’d listen to you talk about leather and cock rings and fist fucking.”

Tony jabbed a finger at Guy. “I used you, and you used me. You liked it when your little studs played seduction games with me, or when the two of you sat back and made fun of me while I was in the house. And you knew things were wrong when your prick got jealous and macho around me. You didn’t mind it when I got some of those wackos off your tail, either.”

“You know how I love it when you get angry, Tony. Sure you don’t want to find out what the real thing’s all about?”

“Go fuck yourself.”

“Only as a last resort.” Guy waited a moment, then smiled. “Just like old times, right?”

Tony’s anger evaporated. Guy was right; he had fallen right into a petty argument they had re-hashed hundreds times, a standard eruption of the pent-up frustrations that built whenever two people chose to live together. Only now he was arguing with a ghost. His fear returned, stronger than before. To fight it he had to close his eyes and picture Lisa, on his bed, waiting for him with a seductive smile. He had gone too far to run away. He was too close to her to give up, just because a ghost from his past chose to haunt him in Painfreak.

His fear would not go away.

Drugs. Hallucinogens in the drink, in the smoke from the fires, giving life to memories brought up by his return to Painfreak. A bad trip.

Reason calmed his fear to a manageable level. He took a deep breath, let it out slowly. He could handle what was going on. It wasn’t real. Just play along, he told himself. Remember Lisa.

“What a pair of predators we were, Tony,” Guy said, stepping to the fire light’s edge and sitting cross-legged on the floor. “To tell you the truth, I can’t even give myself a good fuck anymore. Why don’t you sit for a while and help bring back the good times? It’s the only way I can get off nowadays.”

“I can’t,” said Tony. “Lisa left me, came here. She’s looking for something, I guess, but I need her. I have to find her, make her come back.”

Guy shook his head from side to side. “I know where she went. I can lead you to her, if you sit with me for a few minutes. That’s not too much of a price to pay, is it?”

Tony hesitated. He listened to the sounds, stared into the darkness between the fires. There were exits at the far end of the cavern, and Tony imagined a network of tunnels spreading out under Brooklyn and the rest of the city. Lisa could be anywhere. Real, or unreal, there was a chance this vision of Guy might help.

He sat down next to his old roommate.

“You look worse than a tourist, Tony,” said Guy, with a touch of sadness. “You look like prey. What happened to you?”

Tony sighed and passed a hand over his face. His palm and fingertips came away slick with grimy sweat.

“Please, don’t tell me,” Guy continued, breaking into a chuckle. “Please don’t tell me you fell in love.”

“Not quite. Not in love. But I fell into something.” He searched for words to capture what he had with Lisa. “Safety, companionship. Maybe I just fell into sex. But there’s nothing now, there’s just emptiness.”

“That’s all there ever is, especially for people like us. You just don’t realize it. You don’t know the emptiness, how deep it runs. That’s why you never made the move to being a real player. But don’t feel bad. Even I didn’t understand the emptiness completely when I was alive, and I was a player there, towards the end. We thought that empty feeling we had was a hunger for something other people could give us. It didn’t bother us most of the time ’cause we thought we were filling ourselves up every time we came. What a pair of sharks we were, cruising our own little scenes. You know what it was that let us live so well together? We were the same kind of people underneath all the bullshit. Predators. We went after the same kind of people. Hollow little nobodies who didn’t know their asses from their pricks, or cunts. But the beauty of us being together was that we had our own little territories. You went after the cunts, and I went after the pricks. Tell me about those times, Tony. I want to remember, I want the details. There’s nothing inside of me anymore. No feelings, no memories. It’s all shadows and emptiness.”

Guy stared at him without blinking, as if ghosts forgot to blink. His mouth hung open, his hands lay in his lap, palms up. He looked like a child waiting to be fed.

Tony closed his eyes and trawled for memories, eager to put Guy to rest. The specter’s talk of emptiness and predators had only made his own need for Lisa stronger. And if this ghost could not help him find her, at least its guilty presence would not distract him while he caught up to Lisa and tried to win her back.

Names from his own adventures as well as Guy’s returned to him, and their faces. Anne, Shanelle, Kiko. Thurman, George, Larry. Episodes he hadn’t thought about in years came back: sex on the dorm roof, in the closet while others listened and commented outside, using the early model video recorders the college owned. There were the games of humiliation, the games of pain, and the entertainments in costume. Simple and complex, he had repeated them all with Lisa. But he had discovered them first with the disposable partners he and Guy had enjoyed. He began to talk, and as the memories rushed out Tony opened his eyes and looked up, letting the words flow, the past catching up to him.

And as the past flooded him, the darkness beyond the fire seemed to lighten. He began to see what was happening between the fires. He looked away, at first. He spoke quickly, felt as if he were babbling, but Guy did not interrupt or ask him to be clearer, only sat and watched him with his blank expression, his dull, lifeless eyes. The more he talked, the clearer the air became, until he could not help but see the expression on the face of the squirming woman being hauled by giggling men up to the ceiling on a hook and length of chain; until he could see the sweat running down the body of the man suspended at an angle by his outstretched arms and legs, desperately thrusting his erect penis into a fat, laughing woman dancing wildly to the electronic howl of a band that had just started playing; until he could see the broken bones pushing against muscle and skin, warping the smooth lines of the bodies of the two wrestlers fighting and screaming in a pool of water to the cheers and jeers of a few people standing near.

Blood spurted from a nearby atrocity and sprayed across his face, tickling his lips. Shocked, he raised his arm to wipe the blood away, to spit and rub his skin and shield his face from any more splattering. A sudden impulse made him stop. The blood was hot on his flesh, like Lisa’s sweat mingling with his own when they made love. His tongue darted out like a snake’s, licked his lips as he would Lisa’s body. He tasted coppery saltiness, then swallowed. Surprised by his act, he shuddered. The emptiness within him yawned, threatened to take him. Expecting a surge of fear, he was even more surprised when he became excited by what he had done. His erection pressed against his pants’ zipper, as if he had just heard the click of Lisa’s heels on ceramic tile.

Blood. He worried for a moment that it was contaminated, tainted by Death. Death’s blood. He thought of Guy, dead, a ghost, and of the times he had given in to Guy’s nagging and participated in his sex games by disinterestedly watching him with his lover. Kissing, stroking, mouthing, they had ended by swallowing each other’s cum.

An electric shock of pleasure passed through him as he described the scene he had just remembered to Guy. He put himself in Guy’s place, and in the scene his lover was not another man, but Death. Death’s bloody cum was on his lips, in his mouth, in him.

The stream of his words faltered, his memories stumbled over one another. The emptiness that had driven him to follow Lisa into Painfreak blossomed with the promise of secret fulfillment. He saw clearly into the void around which he had lived his entire life. The games, the costumes, the mix of pain and pleasure he had pursued with such desperation were suddenly nothing more than shimmering veils hiding his true desire. He did not want to fill the emptiness with sex. He did not want to master, or be mastered by, pleasure and pain. He did not want to feed the hollow hunger with experience, sensation, life. He wanted to surrender to the emptiness. He wanted to be consumed by Death.

Tony stopped talking. Moments later, the electronic howl of music changed, became louder, erupted with sudden energy as if the band had found its groove. A roar like a raging beast echoed through the cavern, deep and raw and edged with the ragged wail of electric guitars. Buried in the roar like a dim heartbeat was the frantic pulsing of drums and bass. Feedback screeched, pierced ear and mind and thought. Tony doubled over in pain, pressing his palms to his ears. Through tears, he saw the elderly couple nearby, pointing to him and laughing. They looked away. He followed their gaze to a crude cage construction surrounded by a frenetic mob trying to tear down the walls to reach the band playing within.

Tony got up, but the music kept him hunched over. Had Lisa wanted to play in a band? Had that been her fantasy? The band members were shadow forms prancing and miming and sawing the air with their instruments, lost in the passion of the moment. He had no idea if she was among them, or their audience. He took a step towards the cage.

A cage wall fell, bringing down one musician. The mob spilled into the stage space as the other walls collapsed. One by one, the instruments died. Last to go was the pulsing bass, quivering with a life of its own before drowning in the squeals and cries of the mob fighting for any morsel of meat.

He heard bones crack, flesh tear.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Guy said, standing beside him and looking at the orgy. “It’s all so … romantic, don’t you think? Art and death and, hell, even audience participation.” He giggled.

Tony took another step towards the mob, then stopped when he felt Guy’s touch on his arm. It was not a solid touch; Guy’s fingers felt like a cold breeze blowing against his skin.

“She’s not there,” he said, suddenly serious. “That’s not her game.”

“What is?” Tony asked.

“Is that what you want to know? Or do you want to find out what yours is? I can show you that, too.” He stroked Tony’s arm, and the cold tightened his skin, seemed to burn in the bone of his arm. “Want to be a player, Tony?”

Tony groaned as the emptiness reached for him. He wanted it, he wanted Lisa. “Lisa,” he croaked, trying to hang on to the crumbling edifice of his past desires and pleasures while his future called to him.

Guy tsked. “Well, you never really were the truly adventurous type, Tony. You would never have found Painfreak on your own. Not like Lisa. She’s been on the scene since she was fifteen. She never told you? I used to see her around, when I was still around. Surprised the hell out of me when she latched on to you. Last chance romance, I think. One final try at a normal life with a guy who could give her at least a little action. Oh, what would my old therapist say? An abused child, obviously. Running away from something terrible, running back into it from the long way around. Dear, dear, the story of all our lives, I’m sure.”

Tony pulled his arm away. “Fuck you.”

Guy came up next to Tony, careful not to touch him. “Say something like that again,” he whispered into Tony’s ear, “and it might come true.”

Tony stepped back and glanced to his left and right, looking for a direction to walk in. He shivered from the cold Guy had brought with him, and the cold in his words.

“No? Turned down again? Right. I really tried to seduce you once, didn’t I? After we graduated?”

“You tried to move in with me when I got my own place,” Tony replied. He remembered the panic in Guy’s voice as he had offered himself, promised to do whatever Tony wanted, just so they could continue being together, continue playing their games. Fear had leaked from every pore in his body, as raw and powerful as Tony’s own when Lisa left him. Graduation, expectations of the adult world, Tony moving out had all sharpened the edges to Guy’s panic. “I kicked you back into the elevator,” Tony continued. He had had his own panic, his own burgeoning emptiness, to deal with. “To make up, you took me out to Painfreak.”

“My shrink’d say that was a very hostile move. Couldn’t get to you, so I brought you here for Painfreak to seduce you. Damn, but I wish I could remember that elevator scene. I wonder what I used on you. No, no, don’t tell me. Imagining it will entertain me to no end, at least until your next visit. Maybe then I’ll ask you to tell me about it.”

“I’m never coming back here after I get Lisa out.”

“Of course you’ll be back. What else are you going do when Lisa’s gone?”

Tony recoiled, looked away from Guy. He moved off in a random direction, searched out the next fire, headed for its flames. Guy caught his arm, and the cold staggered Tony. Painfreak’s bone mark glowed on Tony’s hand.

“Don’t go off half-cocked, lover. You’ll miss her moment as a player. Here, let me show you.”

Guy pulled on Tony’s arm, dragged him past women pounding on the bodies of men stretched out and tied down to the floor with wild, dancing steps; past a woman bound, blind, gagged, being raped by another woman with a dildo strapped across her sex; past men wrestling one another in shallow pits, breaking each other’s limbs, biting off pieces of flesh, licking the blood spilling from their mouths; past a man with a bloody machete across his stomach, reclining among the severed heads of women and busying himself with pulling out the tongue from one head’s mouth and running her blue lips across his skin.

Lisa was not among any of the women.

Guy stopped before another pit, but held fast to Tony’s arm. Below, two naked women approached a nude fat man whose spread-eagled limbs were held fast by manacles to stakes. One woman sat behind his head and secured it between her thighs. Her leg muscles bulged as she applied pressure, and he twitched and choked as his eyes widened. The other woman settled herself on his face, covered it completely, and began to move her hips.

“Lisa,” Tony whispered. He leaned forward, but Guy’s cold grip kept him frozen in place.

Lisa looked up as her hands massaged her breasts and she thrust her hips harder into the face trapped under her. Her eyes saw through Tony, as if he were as much a ghost as Guy. Sweat filmed her body. A smile, sweet and self-involved, danced across her lips. The fat man’s body jerked, spasmed. His hands grasped at something elusive in the air. His back arched and a desperate, muffled moan escaped from the pit. Lisa threw her head back, gasped. The fat man collapsed, and his body slackened. Lisa jerked forward and cried out. She slid off the man’s face and fell to the ground, eyes closed, smiling to herself. The other woman raised her hips, twisted her legs over until the man’s neck cracked, then released him. She moved over Lisa, straddled her, closed her thighs over Lisa’s face.

“Lisa,” Tony called out. His voice was still a whisper, Guy’s hand still served as a cold anchor.

Lisa’s hands fluttered in the air. Her legs twitched like caught fish thrown on a dock. The woman bore down, hunched forward, used her hands to keep her thighs pressed closed over Lisa’s face. Lisa’s struggles weakened until her last feeble movements finally subsided. The woman remained over her, locked in a tight embrace.

“Lisa,” Tony cried out as he fell to his knees.

The woman rose, took Lisa by the feet and dragged her up a ramp. She was heading in the direction of the machete man when Tony lost sight of them. He realized then that Guy had released him and had vanished. There was only the cold ache in his bone and muscle to remind him of the ghost’s hand.

“Come along, dear,” an old woman’s voice said behind him. Someone tapped him gently on the shoulder.

“I think you’ve had enough for one night, young fella,” an old man said, slipping his arm under Tony’s and helping him to his feet. “Time for you to go home. There’s always tomorrow night, you know.”

The old, well-dressed couple who had been watching him throughout the evening bracketed him as he stood up. They each hooked an arm around him and helped him walk away from the pit. The woman’s diamond bracelet bit into his flesh. Tony felt like a child being taken home from a hard day at the playground by his grandparents. Would there be milk and cookies in the kitchen? Bedtime stories tonight?

Tony tried to remember his grandparents, and found that he could not.

The elderly couple guided him back to the cavern entrance, took him through the sound baffles, helped him maneuver through the dancing crowds in the outer club. At the steel double door entrance to the club, the couple released him.

“You come right back when you’re feeling better,” the woman said. She smiled, and cracks widened in the caked make-up covering her face.

“We’ll be here another couple of nights,” said the old man. He patted Tony’s shoulder in an amiable, fatherly way. His breath was stale, like the air in a den abandoned by a predator. “Of course, you can always come along when the place moves. There’s always a need for help. Lots of turnover, you know.”

The couple looked to each other and laughed as they gently pushed him to the doors. Tony leaned against metal, felt it give, and found himself in a hallway under a single bright light bulb.

There was the taste of ash in his mouth as he made his way back to the loading docks. Exhaustion made him rest for a few moments on the stairs, but the faint echo of Painfreak’s dance music finally drove him on. He passed no one on his way out to the loading dock, where the rain had stopped and dawn had lightened the sky. The ground was still wet, the air humid. Tony glanced over his shoulder at the warehouse entrance. The two doormen returned his gaze. Behind them, Guy hung upside down, suspended by his feet on a length of chain, swinging back and forth like a clock pendulum.

“Do you feel it?” Guy asked, his voice pitched high, almost hysterical.

And in that moment, the emptiness within him opened up like a bottomless well. Tony felt himself standing by the well, leaning out over the edge, wind whistling by his ears. He licked his lips, searching for the taste of blood. His erection strained as if it wanted to break out of its confines and search for satisfaction.

“You want it?” Guy teased. “Tell me what that’s like, to want it. To want the nothingness. The extinction. Tell me first, what that emptiness is like. It’s so hard when you’re in it to understand. Tell me what the void is like, from the outside. Then tell me what it feels like to want it.”

“Tomorrow night,” Tony answered, his voice quavering. After you show me the games I’ll really like. After I become a player.

“Tomorrow night, sir,” the Asian doorman replied, with a slight bow. Guy was gone.

Tony went back to his car and drove home. He did not bother picking up his mail or answering his telephone messages. Though his fear was gone and he was tired, he still had trouble falling asleep. Excitement kept him up, until he began to relax as he gently stroked the back of his left hand with his thumb. Slowly, he fell asleep while caressing Painfreak’s invisible marks on his flesh.