Necro Files: Two Decades of Extreme Horror

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.