Kiss Of Darkness

“She said to stay at the bar,” Jeremy repeated firmly. “And to always know the way out.”

Mary giggled. “Maybe they’re worried about police raids.”

He had a sickly feeling the dominatrix had been worried about something far more serious.

“Look, Jeremy, that woman is gone, and we can’t just sit here all night,” Nancy said.

“We need to split up,” Mary added. “No one is going to talk to us if we stick together like the Three Musketeers.”

“We should stay together,” Jeremy warned uneasily.

Mary laughed softly. “You shouldn’t want us hanging on to you. Our hostess seemed to be pretty into you.”

Jeremy didn’t know why, but he had the feeling the dominatrix had quickly assessed him and found him too young and far too naive. He looked over the heads of the Frenchmen and saw that she was back at the bar. She was behaving casually, chatting with the bartender, speaking to people as they came and went from room to room, and yet…

She seemed to be watching.

For what?

“I don’t know about you two, but I’ve got to see the pleasure rooms,” Mary said, sliding off her bar stool.

“I’ll check out the movie room,” Nancy said.

“I don’t know about this,” Jeremy protested. “I can’t be with both of you.”

But they ignored him, already moving. He saw the dominatrix. She had noted their movements, and she didn’t seem pleased.

Jeremy immediately lost sight of Mary, who must have run up the stairs. He found Nancy hovering at the back of the movie room. He stopped where he was, taking the overstuffed couches and the haze in the air from cigarettes and pot. On a large screen, a porno flick played. Two women were seducing one man—and each other. As he watched, one woman held the other down while the man bared his teeth and bit into the immobilized woman’s neck. She seemed to go into instant throes of ecstasy. Blood lust apparently led to wild arousal.

Despite all the flesh on show, the movie didn’t begin to arouse him. He realized he was far too tense to feel anything other than an unsettling sense of alarm.

A girl rose from one of the couches and approached Nancy, taking her hand. Nancy followed her back and sat down.

Jeremy decided that Nancy could fend for herself. The woman who had approached her was slim and not more than five two. Nancy was giggling and over twenty-one. If she wanted to live on the wild side in pursuit of her craft—or using her craft as an excuse—it was completely her call.

He made his way to the stone stairway and hurried up.

They should have stayed together at the bar, as they’d been told, and just watched.

He reached a long hall lined with doors.

The hall itself seemed far longer than it could possibly be. Perhaps it was the dim lighting and the way the far end of the hall was almost completely dark, adding to the illusion that it went on forever.

On and on…as if in an impossibly long shot for a horror film.

Except this was real.

He told himself that he was only giving in to fear and letting his imagination run wild. Look. All he had to do was look.

No one was in the hallway. He had no idea which door Mary might have chosen.

As he stood there, he felt rather than saw a shadow. No, not a shadow, exactly, a sense of greater darkness. As if something large had cast a pall over the meager light offered by the candles that burned in medieval sconces every ten feet along the walls.

A lump formed in his throat. He was tempted to turn, run back down the stairs and out into the night. Of course, if he did, he had no idea of where he would actually wind up. They had been driven through a dense, fog-shrouded forest, and they hadn’t passed another living soul until they had reached this place, which, from the outside, had appeared to be nothing more than a ruin on a cliff. Yet the urge to run, escape, flee to any other place on earth, tore at him with an urgency that defied all logic.

He would not yield to it. Mary and Nancy were here, and while they were welcome to whatever pursuits they chose, he couldn’t abandon them to this…

“This danger,” he whispered aloud.

Because somehow he knew that his unease was justified. He felt a raw sense of instinctive panic taking hold in his gut.

The shadow was there, real, palpable, evil and malignant.

It was just a shadow, he tried to tell himself. A result of the candlelight, the intense darkness of the night…

“Where are all those psychologists when you need them?” he mocked himself out loud.

He felt the most intense desire to keep looking over his shoulder. There was something there. Something pursuing—no, stalking—him. Slowly, playing with him. He could feel it. Feel the danger, like a gazelle on an African plain suddenly aware that a lioness was silently slipping up behind it….

He spun around. He was alone in the hall.

It was simply the time and place, he told himself. He was in the land of legends, with a bunch of no-life idiots who liked to play at being vampires. It was silly; it was sad.

But fanatics could be dangerous.

And still he felt he was facing something that didn’t remotely resemble a human danger.

He turned back, staring at the doors.

And felt it again. There was a shadow, something…evil.

It was laughing at him, he thought. It knew his fear, thrived on it, and laughed….

They had to get out of there.

“Mary?” he called aloud—almost screaming it. He no longer cared what anyone thought, what ridiculous expectation the girls had for journalistic success. They had to get out.

“Mary?” he called again, and opened the first door.

It was simply too fascinating. Mary was pretty sure she was standing there in wide-eyed wonder. No matter how sophisticated she might have considered herself to be in her own world, she knew she must appear like a lamb in a forest here. Still, this was the kind of thing that made for a great story. People loved to share such wanton and carnal experiences—vicariously. They wanted to be shocked and appalled. They were curious, and satisfying their curiosity sold print. And she? She intended to sell. People were always intrigued by sex and violence. It was unlikely that she would be traveling to any major war zones, so that left sex.

Well, sex and fantasy. The vampire fantasy. It kind of made sense that some guys wanted to act like they were vampires, because vampires had power over women. And some women loved the idea of being taken, dominated….

There was certainly fantasy here, combined with masks…and sex….

First she had stumbled on an intimate mеnage ? trois. They hadn’t noticed her in the doorway at first, they had been so…involved. Then a husky voice had suggested she join in. Certain her face was a thousand shades of red, she had apologized and moved on.

Another door had led to an empty—but prepared—chamber. And chamber was the right word, not room. The space had been decorated to resemble an ancient dungeon, with shackles on the wall, and whips and chains laid out on a table, ready for use.