Free NightWhere by John Everson Page A

it was spinning, but Amelia hadn’t had anything to drink.
    Drunk on pain.
    She needed water. Her lips were dry, and something inside her felt wrong. Broken.
    Amelia pushed off the couch again, and this time managed to stagger to the kitchen where she downed two glasses of water. The pain in her lower back grew, and she realized she had to make another stop on the way back to lie down. The bathroom.
    She managed to get herself to the toilet without falling, but when her water came it burned…and when she staggered to her feet she saw the water was dark. She refused to think about that. She flushed and downed another glass of water before she fell back onto the couch.
    “You’re broken,” she whispered out loud.
    The last time she’d come home bleeding on the outside, but this time…she was bleeding inside. That was probably a worse thing, she considered.
    Her eyes fluttered closed as she focused on the pain, tasting it, enjoying it, living in it…
    “Wake up Amelia…”
    The voice was soft, but firm. Amelia opened her eyes and saw Kharon before her. He was just as she remembered, bare-chested and pale, but with his crotch sheltered in black leather and silver chains. He smiled at her, and his teeth looked as hungry as happy.
    “You can’t let go here,” he whispered. “You must come back, and enter The Black.”
    Amelia tried to raise her head, but failed. “The Black?”
    “There is more to the journey than The Red,” he said. “Come back one more time. For The Crossing. Wait for NightWhere.”
    “Yes,” Amelia whispered, just before passing out.
     
     
    AC/DC on the stereo. “Back in Black.” Because nothing that went before or after was quite as transcendent.
    Vanilla incense burned in a candleholder on the kitchen counter. Maybe it was girlie, but he liked vanilla.
    He liked bourbon too, and he filled a snifter with Pappy Van Winkle 15-Year. Hard to find. Hard to afford.
    He was going to drink it down, slowly. And when it all felt right…
    …the knife that killed his father.
    Perry Pierce didn’t have a lot to live for anymore, but he knew what he liked. Good music, good smells, good buzz. And then he’d use the same knife that he’d killed his father with and let the blood out. It had been beating within him for so long, wanting to leave…it was time to let it go.
    Mike was out tonight, and that was part of the plan. He knew Mike had a thing for Tony—they were at a game and, if Mike came home, he’d come home drunk. But more likely, he wouldn’t come home at all. He’d end up at Tony’s and claim that he was too drunk to get back.
    Perry knew better. He was being cheated on, and Mike was too much of a chickenshit to cop to it.
    Perry didn’t know what Tony had that he didn’t have, but there you go…people just fuckin’ suck, in general. And not in a good, gay suck way. Just sucked. In a kick-’em-in-the-teeth-’cuz-it’s-every-ass-for-himself kinda way.
    There wasn’t anything you could do to hold the ones you loved close. They were yours for a little while, and then they slipped away. If you didn’t kill them, or cancer or AIDS didn’t kill them, they killed themselves. Or at least the love you had. Everyone moved on, whether you were moving or not.
    Perry was tired of moving.
    He took a sip of the bourbon and felt the heat spike across his tongue and then trail down the back of his throat. It was hot like a good blow job, he thought with a smile.
    “Fuck me,” he whispered and took another sip. He wanted the world to spin, but he didn’t want to waste the bourbon. It was powerful stuff, the kind that should be savored.
    He let it lay on his tongue and thought about all the times he’d let Mike tie him to a wall and whip the shit out of him. He thought about the dungeons they’d gone to together, Mike showing him off like some trophy fuck.
    He thought about the time he’d gone to that secret club. The invite had come when Mike was out of town, and Perry had checked it