Free The Passenger by Jack Ketchum

them, chains ringing in her ears like
strange dull wind chimes and the scent of oil and metal on her hands as she
touched them, stepping onto the porch hung with mobiles—inverted bone crosses
and rusted knives and studded belts and weathered leather collars—where six
wooden barrels filled with what looked like old automobile and motorbike parts
stood in an orderly row to her left and a smashed-in Wurlitzer jukebox lay on
its side to her right beside a broken plough propped up against the siding, its
handles carved into knobbed human phalluses and flanked by two painted wooden
signs— TREE FROG BEER and DWARF SNUFFING STATION NUMBER 103.
    Somebody around here’s got a real strange
sense of humor, she thought.
    She saw Emil hesitate at the door and
heard the black man behind them tell them to go on in, folks in his calm soft voice and so they did.
    They walked into a fucking party is what they did.
    She could feel her heart thud all of a
sudden fast and heavy, making her tits tremble, was aware of her eyes going
wide and her lips pulling up into a smile she had nothing to do with at all.
    Daddy, she thought, if you could see your little girl now. You’d be fucking floored by
this.
    Beyond the heavy oak door was an enormous
open space and the goddamn place was swarming. Motorbike headlights slung from
the rafters handled the lighting, streaming down on them like spotlights. She
saw bikers, skinheads, longhairs straight out of the goddamn Sixties, men in
tuxes and women in gowns all mingling and laughing. She saw a male tattooed
hand go to a female pearl-draped breast.
She saw steroid freaks dressed for combat and guys naked and limp- dicked and emaciated all to hell. She saw martini glasses
and Budweisers and joints and in the comer to her
left, the sharp glitter of needles. She saw crude prison tattoos and elegant
multiple piercings. They had weapons all over the place. Handguns in shoulder
holsters. Shotguns and automatic rifles propped against the wall while their
owners roamed and drank and did whatever the hell they were doing.
    The whole first floor had been completely
gutted, the walls knocked down to expose rough support beams that reached
twenty-five feet all the way to the ceiling—a ceiling draped and webbed thick
with a canopy of chains. At intervals they dangled to the floor. Six feet or so
up one of the support beams a naked brunette dangled too, suspended by ropes
wrapped around her wrists and elbows. She looked drugged out of her fucking
gourd and like she’d been up there quite a while. There were bloody welts along
her tits and thighs and the blood was already drying. Everybody just ignored
her.
    They moved through the crowd toward the
bar, Emil first with her behind him and then Ray and then Billy behind Janet
bringing up the rear. Some asshole head- banger music was pouring off the
speakers. The floors were long wide slabs of polished hardwood, expensive as
hell she bet. By contrast the bar was crude and cut of rough naked oak with the
bark still attached where it wasn’t planed down smooth and it crawled the whole
length of the room all the way to the open staircase in back like a living
thing. The six beefy guys who were working it were dressed in formal white
starched shirts and black ties. Directly
across from the bar a fire blazed in an open stone grate cut into the wall like
the huge open mouth of hell. It must have been over a dozen feet across.
Considering its size it didn’t seem to throw much heat, just the smell of wood
smoke.
    She guessed that on the air-conditioning
bill alone this place could probably buy and sell her.
    She saw bright primitive murals on the
walls, scenes she recognized right away from Revelations. Daddy? Momma? You’d just love this shit! The Dragon. The False Prophet.
The Great Whore. The Beast. The Woman in Scarlet. Religion? In this joint? Between the murals meat
hooks polished to a high sheen, dozens of them, substituted for what—in
someplace less bizarre than