Under the Hill Chapter 1
Editor’s note: The following manuscript, found bundled in a subway station, have been traced to a 25-year old freelance writer named Ashleigh Winters. Most of her work before had been movie and concert reviews, interviews and style pieces. If she believed the stories that the interviews recounted seem to imply, she may have believed this would be a breakthrough piece for her. Clearly these aren’t her original notes but a rough draft of a nonfiction book she intended to publish. The original record and audio of the interview has never been found.
Some people have connected some of the subjects of the interviews with other people who’ve disappeared in the city, but it is difficult to believe the interviewees are real without believing in the existence of the club known as Under the Hill, and by extension the existence of the group she identifies as the Kind People or Kind Ones. But no rational person will accept the idea that in the bowels of the city a whole group of people, including Ash Winters herself if hints in the manuscript can be believed, lives even now in psychic slavery so an ancient race can use their bodies as toys. So these notes are merely preserved as evidence of the degree to which a person can follow a delusion.
What really happened to Ash Winters remains a mystery.
“You know they don’t call them that because they are kind,” the woman said.
I knew that, but I was ready to let her tell me anyway. But she didn’t finish. Maybe she could see in my eyes that I had heard this from other people before. Maybe she could tell I didn’t believe her. At the time I was simply tracking what I considered a remarkably persistent urban myth. I might have been lucky in that way; she might not have told the story if she thought I believed it.
I’ll call her Stephanie, though I don’t know if a pseudonym will really help her.
She got up and walked across the apartment. It wasn’t very far to walk. Her place was the plainest drywall coffin. She had a couple of frameless prints of the kind you got at a museum tacked to the wall, that only made them look emptier.
“I was about your age when I first met them,” she began.
I almost laughed at that, because she looked scarcely my age now. She is long and wispy but with cheeks that look like they should have dimples if she smiled. But she hadn’t smiled yet. Whether she was telling the truth or not something about her demeanor suggested the story she told me was nothing to laugh about.
Stephanie’s Story
This short but good-looking guy kept trying to talk us into going to a bar with him. He must have been my height on his tippy-toes but he didn’t look like a little person, just small. That’s not why I blew him off; for one thing I was getting married the next day. Also, he looked like a real freak: wild hair, huge sideburns, dressed in leather & studs. The other two guys and the woman with him were even crazier looking than him. If you wanted to ask someone in the bar where to buy drugs, they’d be the ones you picked.
I’d have forgotten about him if the whole bachelorette party hadn’t gone to hell. I got in a fight with Brian’s sister Tania about the stupidest thing. She was talking about this house that was available near her in Fort Lee; apparently she’d already told him. I wanted to know if she thought he was going to drag me off to the suburbs and turn me into a Real Housewife of New Jersey like her. I don’t think I put it quite that nasty, but she got the gist. Then Anastasia jumped in.
“You’re halfway there, sexy. Why not go all the way?” She tried to take the edge off with a laugh, but she was drunk as I was, so it came off bitter.
“This isn’t about you, Nasty,” I said. “I didn’t act jealous when you moved in with Steve. It wouldn’t kill you to be happy for someone. ”
There isn’t time to get into how many lines I crossed with that. I had called her Nasty between the two of us since tenth grade, but never in front of anyone. Also Steve dumped her a few weeks ago. She was staring at me like I’d knifed her. And Tania was staring at us both wondering exactly what was going on with the two of us.
Let her wonder. I left the table before Nasty could recover. I couldn’t come back then so I went out front, only to find the wild foursome smoking out front. That was unusual then; this was back when you could still smoke in a bar.
I guess I needed to prove that just because I was married I didn’t have to be boring. I walked up to the short guy.
“Hey, are you guys still going to that other place? Wonder Hill or whatever it was?”
He looked at his three friends. They were all taller than he was, but seemed to treat him as an unofficial leader.
“I don’t know, Tina, we still going to the Wonder Hill?”
Tina had long limbs and long hair that was greenish black like the back of a Mallard duck. She was holding the joint they’d been passing around but hadn’t taken a hit. She was studying it like it was going to do something.
“Is it that time already, Rob?” she said.
Then she looked at me again, like she hadn’t really noticed me before. I remember her eyes now; they were so green. Her skin was the color of a new penny, and when she looked at me that way I couldn’t move. She walked over and pushed a strand of hair out of my eyes, then smiled. You remember that feeling when you’re just a kid hanging out with your friends and someone pulls out a cigarette for the first time? That thing in your gut like you’re looking over the edge of something, and you want to run home and hide under your covers but you need to go over and see what’s on the other side? I want to say I did what I did because I was drunk, but her look sobered me up in an instant.
“You’re right, Rob,” she said. “This one’s different. I hadn’t noticed. Bill, do you see it?”
Bill had the darkest skin I’d ever seen, with silver eyes and fine silver short hair. Instead of a cigarette he was smoking an old-fashioned pipe, the kind Sherlock Holmes smoked in the movies. But the smoke coming out of it was greenish and smelled neither like pipe tobacco or any drug I knew about. He was wearing a black velvet smoking jacket that reflected silver from some angles.
“Stephanie,” he said, though I hadn’t told him my name. “What is the cruelest thing you ever did to anyone?”
He wasn’t looking at me; his eyes were vaguely focused on the pipe. But I felt like it was important that I answered his question right. If you asked me if I ever did anything deliberately cruel I’d have said no. But as soon as he asked I remembered a girl named Kristen, who’d been my friend for the first few years of elementary school.
Some friends and I had convinced Kristen she was exchanging notes with a boy that she had a crush on. Well, I was the one that had convinced her. I worked with some other girls to make the notes get nastier and nastier, just to see how far she’d go. She’d gone pretty far. This was before everyone had AIM, back when notes were still mostly written on paper. But the gossip network among fifth grade girls is far more resilient than the internet protocol, and soon everyone in the school knew what she’d written.
I’d buried Kristen in my mind; it was easy enough to do since she’d moved to a different school not long afterward. The worst part was that my betrayal had benefitted me for a while. The popular girls let me be part of their crowd, until they grew tired of me and excluded me in some similar act of humiliation.
I cast around for a different story in my mind; I couldn’t bear to tell them that one. But Bill just looked at me with his silver eyes, smiled and nodded. Somehow he knew exactly what I was thinking of.
“Yes, that will do,” he said. “Tom, are you ready to go?”
The man he called Tom was doing something with a golden rope that matched his blonde hair and tanned skin. Tom had long hair, eyeshadow and blush, but it didn’t make him look effeminate.
“Look at this one,” he said; he didn’t seem to have heard Bill.
He held the rope up and began twisting it into fantastic knots in the air. It didn’t look like he had to hold the rope up, though he never entirely let it go. But when he ran pulled a cord or ran a loop through a knot it seemed to stay in place in the air for him. The knots were hypnotizing; the gold rope shone in the streetlight like neon twisted in ancient glyphs.
“Come on, Steph,” said Tina.
She put her hand on the underside of my wrist, which had been turned up. Two long fingers ran down to my palm, the rest wrapped gently but firmly around my upper arm. Rob grabbed my other hand; his fingers were rough as old leather.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I think maybe I should go back inside. My friends will wonder where I was.”
Tina laughed; her voice was like a frozen stream on old stones.
“They left a long time ago, Steph,” she said.
I looked back at the bar. It was closed, and dark; when I’d stepped outside it had been been bright and loud. What’s a regular person say when something like that happens? I don’t remember what I said. Stammered like an idiot, I guess—what, how, who, the usual. Tina and Rob weren’t holding me tight, but I couldn’t have twisted free from their grasp.
“Ah, there’s the car,” said Bill.
They were already pulling me in by the time I’d known the vehicle was there; I hadn’t heard it because it didn’t make any noise whatsoever. It was a Land Rover, I think, solid white, but it looked like it was made of something besides metal. I didn’t get a good look before I was inside. There was too much room in there, more than a vehicle of that size could contain. It had facing seats like a stretch limo, but instead of car seats they were modernist couches. An ivory-topped table was in the middle. There were no seatbelts, but then I didn’t really feel the car moving.
There was a woman sitting on the floor next to the table with slender pale legs curled next to her. She was wearing nothing but a long, white, men’s shirt. She was beautiful but a little older, maybe forty, with a little bit of gray in her long hair that ran down to the floor.
“Elizabeth,” said Tom. “Can’t you see we have a new guest? And you haven’t offered her a drink. How rude.”
He poked at her under the shirt with one of his oxblood wingtips. She blushed and rose to her knees. The shirt was very thin, and she wasn’t wearing a bra. I made myself look at her face.
“Miss, I’m so sorry,” she said, and touched my hand.
I was embarrassed for her. Did she just sit in the car like this and wait to serve them drinks?
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’ll just have...”
But she wasn’t listening to me. She turned her back on me and reached in a small bar on one door of the vehicle. She pulled out a tall glass vial full of something white. Then she took out a glass.
It was a martini glass like a smooth, uneven hyperboloid. The stem was smoked crystal, but the bottom of the glass and the rim were made of gold. Somehow the smoked crystal was connected seamlessly to the gold of the rim and the bottom, fading smoothly from glass to metal in a way that shouldn’t have been possible.
Elizabeth put the glass on the table and opened the vial. She poured a pearly white fluid in. She held the vial incredibly carefully, and the stream from the vial to the glass looked like stretched spider silk. Her eyes were locked on the pool that was collecting in the bottle of the glass. Her other hand, the one that wasn’t holding the vial, was shaking.
“Um, I think that’s enough, Elizabeth,” said Tom, and everyone laughed.
She blushed, tipped up the vial and sealed it. Then she got out a smaller bottle. This one was made of brown glass with a metal top. The label looked like something that would come from an old-fashioned pharmacy. She tipped the small bottle over the drink and poured in a tiny dash of something bright green. The green didn’t combine with the pearly liquid but spun in distinct green strands through it until the drink looked like the surface of a fancy bowling ball. She sealed the small jar, then held the glass out toward me. The luminescent substance was filled so high that it was raised in a convex lens from the top by surface tension. She was trembling all over and staring at what was in the glass, but somehow held it completely steady. I didn’t see how I could take the glass without spilling it over the side.
“Um,” I said. “I don’t know. Maybe I had enough back at the bar.”
“Tina, she doesn’t trust us,” said Rob. “Give it here, Elizabeth, we’ll drink first.”
She handed it to each of them and they took a long sip. Instead of passing it around they each passed it back to her, and she gave it to the one afterward. The whole time her eyes were locked on the stuff in the glass. After they’d all drunk, Elizabeth offered the glass to me again.
“That’s okay,” I said.
Elizabeth put the glass back on the table, then looked at it longingly. There was half a jigger’s worth left in the glass. She gave Tina a questioning look.
“Elizabeth,” Tina said, and cupped her chin with her long hands. “You look like a desperate little puppy. Aren’t you on the clock?”
She looked down.
“I’m sorry Miss Tina, I just...”
“Oh, give the poor thing a break,” said Rob, and dipped his finger in the drink.
The green-tinted pearly drink clung to his fingertip. He held it teasingly up over his lap. She knelt up higher toward him with her head back and her tongue out. I could see down her shirt now. Her breasts were flat on top and slightly round on the bottom. They’d kept their shape in spite of her age, probably because they were small.
“Enjoying the view, Stephanie?” whispered Tina in my ear.
I blushed and looked out the window. I didn’t recognize the part of town we were in. There were fine-looking brownstones but a little worn. It could have been Bed-Stuy, but I think I’d have noticed if we’d crossed a bridge into Brooklyn.
“Nothing to be embarrassed about,” whispered Tina in my ear. “It’s normal to appreciate the form of a beautiful woman. Here, I’ll give you a better view.”
There was something on Tina’s breath, a smell that made my head swim. Was it jasmine? Juniper? Some subtle combination of rare flavors. It was the smell of the drink, I realized, and I began to understand why Elizabeth was acting the way she was. The woman didn’t even notice that Tina was unbuttoning the top of her shirt, she was just stretching her tongue out toward Rob’s finger.
Just as Tina slipped the shirt off, Rob stuck his finger in her mouth. Elizabeth’s nipples grew erect and she shuddered all over. I looked down and saw that Bill’s foot was between her legs. Her pubic patch was kinky and bushy with a few strands of grey. I squeezed my legs together.
“No, nothing to be ashamed of at all,” whispered Tina, the flavor of the drink intoxicating me further. “But you already know, don’t you? You’ve put your hands on a woman’s body before.”
I had, but that was different. Anastasia and I would come home after a night’s drinking, when neither of us had met a guy worth going home with. We’d laugh, and pretend to wrestle with each other. Then we’d get in bed naked, hold our bodies against each other, and sometimes pleasure each other with tongues or fingers. But we only did it quietly in the dark, under thick covers. And we had never spoke about it, not even between each other.
I squeezed my legs together again, and opened my mouth a little. Before I knew what was happening Tina had locked lips with me. Her tongue, coated with the flavor of the drink from the golden cup, filled my mouth. I put my hands on the seat and arched my back up. This had gone far enough. I had to get home. But her mouth tasted so good. And her hand was under my ass. I was wearing my favorite knee-length sleeveless black dress, and she started to tease the dress up under my hip. I found my legs starting to drift apart.
She pulled her mouth away from mine, but I still smelled the intoxicating flavors. I opened my eyes and saw she was holding the last of the drink in the cup a few inches from my face. Her other hand had just pulled the dress out from under me.
“Stephanie,” she said. “You’re torturing poor Elizabeth leaving your drink in the glass like this.
Actually Elizabeth had other concerns now. She was leaning over Rob’s lap, and her head was moving up and down. Her hands were behind her; Tom had grabbed them was tying the rope into an elaborate knot up her arms. Bill was still teasing her cunt with her foot as he leaned back and sucked on his pipe tentatively.
I took the glass from Tina and looked in the emerald-swirled pearly drink.
“What is it?” I asked Tina.
“Nothing special,” said Tina. “Moon’s tears with essence of spring. But you’ll never get another chance to drink from that cup.”
Bill opened his eyes and sat up.
“Rob, we’re here,” he said, and looked down at Elizabeth working at his crotch. “You might have to finish off inside.”
“I’m good,” said Rob, and Elizabeth coughed and choked a little.
Tom threw open the door and slid out with Bill. Tina’s hand had been right between my legs and slid out from under me as she exited the car; I found myself wishing it was still there.
Rob was on the other side of me. Elizabeth fell backwards, her eyes glazed, breathing deep. I thought Rob was just fixing his pants, but then I looked and saw he was staring at me. I realized there was only a door on one side, and I was blocking his way.
“You need to finish that now, Steph,” he said, pointing at the glass in my hand. “We aren’t allowed to bring it inside. Even Under the Hill has some rules.”
I had already taken the cup in my hand. Putting it down would probably be rude. Rob was getting impatient.
So that’s how it happened. That’s how I drank from the Golden Cup. I’d like to say I didn’t know what that meant, but I’m not so sure now. Elizabeth was blissed out naked on the floor in front of me. So I must have had a clue.
Stephanie — Inside Under the Hill
I guess you’ll want to know what Under the Hill looked like on the outside. Not that there’s much point. If you ever find it, it will be somewhere else. That night it was a side entrance by a small parking lot, the kind that have a frame in the back where they lift the cars up three on top of each other. There was a little red velvet rope between two poles and a big guy out front, but if you’d been walking down the street you might have gone right by it.
Everyone else was already inside. Rob was leading me to the door by my arm, but he stopped.
“Wait a minute, you can’t go in wearing that,” he said, and then nodded a little bit. “That’s more like it.”
I was wearing a silver evening gown. I mean, I think it was really silver, made of miniscule connected links. It ran down from just above my breasts, supported by a small strand around my neck, and clung to my figure from my ankles. My back was exposed, and I wasn’t wearing any underwear.
I was feeling a lot of things when we went in. I was guilty, okay? I was going out on my fiance the night before the wedding. And another part of me was looking at the dress thinking this is more like it. The thing I wasn’t thinking is what a guy who can change your clothes by snapping his fingers might do with that.
Then I was inside Under the Hill. It was dance music that night, house music I guess. Everybody was dressed in designer clothes you couldn’t afford with a year’s salary. Everybody that was wearing anything at all, I mean. The servers were all in the same outfit, men and women: a pair of sequined short-shorts, cuffs and a bowtie, no top. One of them approached us as soon as we came in, a slender blonde boy with eyebrows so light they looked like they were barely there.
“Mr. Rob, welcome, I’ve already seated your friends. I’ll be serving you tonight.”
“Hmm, what were they calling you?”
The boy blushed.
“My name is, I mean, sorry, they’ve been calling me Sandy.”
“That’s boring. Look, Steph, he’s blushing. How about Pinky? Here, I’ll help.”
The slight blush in the boy’s cheeks spread down his neck to his shoulders and chest. His breathing sped up, and his eyes fell down to my chest. Rob, who was shorter than him, reached out and grabbed him hard on the ear.
“What are you looking at, Pinky? Did you think she was here to meet you?”
“No, Mr. Rob, I’m sorry.”
Pinky’s shorts were tight, and I could see his package straining against them. I should have felt for him, but instead I twisted in the dress so the fine silver chain rubbed against my skin.
Rob let go and slapped him a couple of sides on the cheek.
“Who am I kidding, I love watching you poor sons of bitches squirm. Good thing I’m me and you’re you. I’ll find the table; just bring another bottle of whatever they already have, and a glass for each of us. And tell Tam I have someone for her, would you?”
That should have worried me, but I was distracted by looking at the rest of the place. There were naked dancers, boys alternating with girls, in cages along the walls. I don’t mean the kind of fake cages you see in some clubs; each one was in a circle of ceiling-high bars separated by just a few inches. Their arms were above their head, and the cage was so small they wouldn’t have had room to lower them. Some were twisting themselves against the bars, some jerking like they were getting electric shocks. But they might have had it easy compared to the people hanging. At random places between the tables naked men and women were hanging by golden ropes of the type Tom had been playing with stretched to the ceiling. The complex knots allowed them to twist into different poses, upside down or hanging on their backs, legs spread or pulled up under their armpits. The ropes seemed to be moving of their own volition, putting the hanging dancers into various postures.
Rob ducked under a rope dancer, reaching up absentmindedly to pinch her nipple hard, making her yelp and bounce in her bounds. Her eyes met mine and I saw desperate need in there; she pushed her body down into the ropes and groaned. She looked like she was just about to come.
She looked like she’d been just about to for a long time.
“See that?” chuckled Rob. “We keep them hanging more ways than one.”
Our table was under one of the caged dancers, but I stopped before we got there. There was a group of women sitting around a table with a naked boy bent backward in an arch over it. A woman was sliding a needle through his nipple; he had a whole crown of them in a circle around it already. There was a naked girl standing at the table next to them holding a tray full of needles and other things I didn’t like the look of. Another woman gestured, and the naked girl handed her another needle. The woman started another wheel of pins on the other nipple. The girl holding the tray of needles quietly grasped the hand of the boy being tortured and winced, the way you do when you see someone you love suffering. Was he her boyfriend? Husband? Brother? Whatever she was, the cruel women knew it.
“What do you think, Missy?” said one. “When we’re done with this should we do his cock?”
The girl just nodded and whispered something. I knew that this should have horrified me. I pulled back from the table a little bit.
“This isn’t right,” I said. “None of this is right. It’s wrong for me to be here.”
Rob ran his hand up my back, and my knees felt weak. He held me by the waist.
“Right? Wrong? Do you think those words mean anything in here?”
I turned away from the couple being tortured and saw a girl in a server uniform kneeling in front of a table while a man traced over her small breasts and small torso with something like a cat’s claw where his pinky nail should have been. Her whole chest was covered with a web of raised red lines lightly bleeding. She closed and opened her fists and ground her teeth, but held her body still.
“Maybe not,” I said. “But that’s why I don’t belong here.”
I said that because I could still think, and in my head I knew it. But I was thinking about something else, too. About what that meant to be someplace where there was no right and wrong. Was it even possible?
“Let me tell you something,” he whispered in my ear. “Everyone that comes to Under the Hill gets what they were looking for. And so will you.”
I looked back at the naked girl helping to torture the man she loved. As the harridans waited she was sliding her hand up and down his cock to make it hard. It couldn’t have been easy given the amount of pain he was in, but she seemed to have succeeded. As soon as his staff was erect, however, one of the women pulled the girl’s hand away and pulled a tight band around the base of the helpless member, turning it a darker shade of purple. I looked away, not wanting to see what came next.
“Who could enjoy...” I winced as he cried out. “Who could enjoy that?”
Rob’s hand had slid into the low back of my gown, and was feeling my ass. If he went any further down he would be able to tell what my body felt about this place, which was something different from what my mouth was saying.
“Oh, they might not be having much fun right now,” he said. “But this is what they came for. This is what they need. Sometimes what you need isn’t what you say you want. Do you know what I mean?”
I swear I decided right then I was going to walk out of there. I didn’t care that I didn’t know where I was, I’d find a subway stop, a gypsy cab, a bus. It was my legs that wouldn’t turn around, my body that wanted to fall on his hand that was sliding between my legs.
“Let’s sit down,” I said instead.
They were drinking some kind of champagne that seemed like it had more fizz than liquid, and lifted you a little off your seat every time you drank it. Tom and Bill were sitting on either side of Tina, and they were leaning over her lap to make out with each other.
“Cut it out, you fucking pervs,” she said, but she was laughing so she didn’t seem to mind so much.
Bill pulled her skirt up, and Tom put his arm in the front and grabbed her breast. After that she didn’t complain.
“Mr. Rob, your other bottle,” said the boy they were calling Pinky. “Can I, um, can I get you anything else?”
His eyes kept drifting to me. Rob laughed.
“Aaw, Tina, look. Little Pinky has a crush.”
Tina opened her eyes and looked at him. Pinky was looking away from me now, but he would have been blushing even if Rob wasn’t making him.
“We’ll see about that,” she said. “Come over here, oh, what did he call you? Piggy?”
“Pinky, Miss Tina,” he said, shuffling closer to her.
“That’s perfect, Rob!” she said. “I insist that from now on you tell everyone to call you that. Now let’s see what’s going on down there.”
She stuck her hand inside his shorts. It sounded like someone putting his hands in a pocket full of change. Pinky yelped, clenched his teeth and clenched his eyes shut.
“Ow!” said Tina, pulling out her hand and putting her finger in her mouth. “Well, Pinky, I don’t see how you’re going to be able to put your thing in her with that tackle box they’ve got it in, do you?”
Pinky shifted his hips a little bit, as if trying to adjust himself to a more comfortable position. He opened his eyes, but he was clearly still suffering.
“No, Miss Tina, I won’t.”
“Well, there’s more than one way to skin a cat, or a pussy in this case. Come here and open your—Bill, Tom, will you get a fucking room and get out of my way, I’m trying to do something here! As I was saying, lean over and open your mouth.”
She leaned forward and Bill and Tom obliged by making out behind her back instead of in front of her. She grabbed Pinky by the chin and pulled his mouth open as he leaned over the table. She reached her long fingers and grabbed his tongue, and began pulling out out. His eyes were wide, and I screamed a little bit, though no one was even looking at me. I thought she was going to rip his tongue out, but that’s not what she was doing. She was pulling on it but it just kept on coming. She pulled all the way down to her chest, and his tongue came out until it was long enough that he could have stuck it in his ear. She pulled it down inside the top of her dress and groaned a little bit, but then pushed him away.
“Mmm, that’s perfect, but I was thinking of our guest.”
He stood over the table with his long tongue waving in front of his face. He tried to pull it back in his mouth, but it didn’t fit.
“Whoops, I hope I remember to fix that,” said Tina. “Now let’s get to work. Oh, wait, one more thing.”
She ran her hand along it the tongue and it grew little bumps. They seemed hard, but also were moving of their own accord. Then she grabbed the back of her hair and pushed him under the table.
“Wait a minute,” I said.
But he was already trying to get up my dress. I felt the long thing climbing up between my knees, inside my thighs, the impressions on it teasing and poking at me. I involuntarily felt my legs try to drift apart. But the dress was too tight, and he couldn’t get inside.
“Let me help you with that,” said Rob, and he ran his finger up one side from my ankle to just above my hip, and the dress grew a slit that allowed me to open my legs.
Then he was inside me, and I wasn’t thinking of anything much. I couldn’t have thought, couldn’t have opened my eyes or closed my mouth. The magically altered tongue was everywhere, all the way up to my cervix and pushing every button along the top of the inside of my cunt. There was a bump moving on my G-spot and another one on my clit, and the whole thing seemed to be growing in girth, stretching me so wide I felt like he could have stuck his whole head inside.
I felt something on my nipples and opened my eyes a moment; Tina and Rob had pulled the evening dress down and were each sucking on one nipple. Tina bit down hard, and then Rob bit down on the other one. I knew that it hurt like hell, but I couldn’t quite get myself to care. They could have probably bit them right off and I wouldn’t have minded then.
I didn’t reach an orgasm, because that would mean I had somewhere to get there from. I was there the whole time. I guess I was going off like an air raid siren, loud enough you could’ve heard me over the music.
When I looked again I was at the table alone. Pinky was gone, and so were Rob, Tina, Bill and Tom. There was a different server standing in front of me, a round-hipped red-haired girl.
“Hi, they call me Red,” she said. “Do you want anything else or are you ready to pay your tab?”
“I, um,” I managed to say.
I didn’t see a single person I recognized. I stood up and tried to see if any of them were around. My dress, which had been shredded, fell to the floor and I was naked. I grabbed for it and tried to cover myself, but it was nothing but a disordered shred.
“I came with some people,” I said.
She didn’t say anything, just waited. The assholes had stiffed me with the bill. I would have to use a credit card; in a place like this the one bottle of champagne would probably be my whole credit limit. I reached for my purse.
I didn’t have my purse.
I hadn’t had it for a long time, now that I thought about it. Had I left it in the car? Or even back at the bar with Deanna and Anastasia?
For that matter, would a place like this even take a Citibank MasterCard?
Two tall men appeared in black suits, presumably responding to some invisible signal from Red. They were polite and quiet and implacably stern looking. They looked the same, but one had white hair and the other black.
“My friends ordered the champagne,” I said. “I just had one glass. Maybe two. You probably know them. They come here all the time. They were, um...”
I can remember their names now. But while I was sitting there at the table they’d been stripped from my mind. I couldn’t even remember what they looked like. Had there been one woman or two?
They can do that do you. They can make you forget something you saw, or remember something you didn’t. That’s what you need to remember if you deal with the Kind Ones. You can’t trust anything you saw. For all I know everything I’m telling you is just some story they inserted in my brain. I wish it was.
But I didn’t know then they could steal memories from my brain as easily as they probably stole my purse.
“Ask, um, the guy who was, I mean the last waiter.”
“What was his name?” asked the suited bouncer with white hair.
“It was...” I turned to Red. “You saw! He was eating me out. I was screaming my head off, the whole place must have seen.”
Red looked at the two suited bouncer.
“Mr. Cole, Mr. Burke, should I...”
“You get back to work, Red,” he said, and slapped her on the ass. “This one can talk to Tam.”
“Wait,” I said. “Wait. Can I look for my friends? They must be around here.”
Mr. Cole grasped my arm. He didn’t grab tightly, but his hand was firm as granite. He pulled me out from the booth. I still was holding the remains of the evening dress in front of my naked body. But it was coming apart in my hands. Little links of silver were coming off it onto the table and the floor below like brilliant pieces of snow.
“Please, first can I just have something else to wear?”
Mr. Burke took my other arm. They were holding me just a little too high off the ground, and I had to stand on my tiptoes if I didn’t want to hang from their grasp. The dress caught on the table and a huge section of it ripped off, leaving my crotch exposed. I lowered the fabric I was holding to cover it, and my breasts were exposed.
They had long legs, and I was scampering to keep up with them. I tried to stretch the fabric to cover my whole body and it tore apart. Now I was just holding two distinct pieces of fabric, and those were coming apart as well. So I dropped them; I just looked stupider trying to cover myself.
Everyone was dressed so beautifully. Everyone except the people who weren’t wearing anything. Now I was one of the people who weren’t wearing anything. People weren’t staring at me; there was plenty enough naked flesh around to ogle. I thought I heard giggles and murmurs when I passed.
“Stay here,” said Mr. Cole. “Tam will see you soon.”
I looked around; I didn’t see where ‘here’ was any different from anyplace else.
“Wait, I’m naked,” I said.
“Be quiet until Tam speaks to you,” said Mr. Burke.
So I stayed there, and was quiet. I had to. Do you know how terrifying that is? I’d like to say I’m used to it now, but I don’t know if you ever are. Two complete strangers had told me to do something, and I just had to do it.
And all around me were people drinking, talking, kissing and laughing. There was a naked rope dancer bouncing to the music about three steps away from me, if I’d been able to take any steps. She spun and threw her legs in a ‘V’, then stared at me through them. I looked away and wiped my eyes. I wanted to scream at her to look away from me. I was nothing like her.
A fingernail made of mother of pearl flicked at my nipple.
“Oh, look Cheri. I think it’s a deadbeat.”
I covered my breasts and shook my head. I wanted to tell them I was not a deadbeat. A hand covered with brilliant jeweled rings grabbed my hands and put them on top of my head. I couldn’t seem to get them off.
“Oh, do you think we’ll get to play with her, Michelle?”
Michelle was painted silver around her eyes and down her cheeks in a way that faded gently into her dark skin. Her teeth seemed to be coated with mother-of-pearl to match her fingernails and the footlong cigarette holder she held. She put her other fingernail under my chin and tilted my head back.
“Not right away. They’ll probably punish her before they put her to work.”
I think I managed to whimper a little then. Given what I’d seen going on as routine in this place, I couldn’t even imagine what they’d consider a punishment.
“Well, no one’s doing anything with her right now.”
Cheri was either an exceptionally pretty boy or a boyish girl. The kind one had jewels everywhere, rows of earrings and bracelets and necklaces. One of the jeweled hands went between my legs and tugged playfully on my pubic hair. It shouldn’t have hurt much. But when someone is doing something to you and you can’t make them stop, you can’t tell them to, it’s different. It’s different when you realize they can do anything to you and you can’t stop them.
“That’s true, but I don’t think we should hurt her,” said Michelle. “Tam can get so angry if she thinks someone’s trying to do her punishments for her.”
Cheri’s eyes rolled.
“She is too sensitive. I know! Let’s look inside. I love seeing what’s in their little heads.”
I was breathing quickly. I tried to remember how to run. Cheri moved her hand deeper between my legs, and slipped a finger in my cunt. I couldn’t believe I was still wet after the way I’d come before, but it still went easily. I instinctively moved on it. Cheri’s eyes were neon blue, and they locked mine in place. The finger seemed to go way up. Not the way the boy’s long tongue had, but a different way.
I remembered the one time I took a pack of cigarettes from my aunt’s purse as a kid. Why did I remember that? I smoked one and got sick, puked all over the place. I remembered an embarrassing love poem I wrote to some boy I had a crush on as a kid and then burned because it was so bad. I remembered when Troy Peterson kissed me and then the next day became Connie Balazar’s boyfriend.
Cheri gave a little smile and dug her finger in deeper. I wasn’t calling up these memories, Cheri was. Those blue eyes and that long jeweled finger were rifling through my memories like they had broken into my underwear drawer.
“Oh, look at this one, Michelle,” said Cheri. “She shoplifted a hundred dollar dress, and she actually got it out of the store. But she felt so bad about it she left the dress on the street and ran away.”
I could feel Cheri in my mind, rooting through my thoughts. Compared to that, having her finger in my cunt was nothing at all. I wanted to escape, but I couldn’t get out of my own head. I couldn’t think anything Cheri couldn’t see.
“Hmm, let’s see,” said Michelle, and I felt her finger, long nail first, slide up in me. “Oh, look at this, how she used to play with herself. See, she rolled the towel up on the ground and then squatted down and rubbed herself on it. Oh God, her first college roommate saw her doing it! No wonder she stopped.”
“Let’s look at her sex fantasies,” said Cheri.
“Oh, those are always so boring,” said Michelle. “Oh! Professor! You can’t control yourself, you’re throwing yourself on me...”
“Wait a minute,” said Cheri. “Look at this. Oh, this is a twisted little girl.”
Back then I didn’t think about my fantasies that much. I mean, I had the whole script memorized. But it was way in the back of my mind, usually even when I played with myself.
“Oh, yeah, that’s original. The security guard caught her shoplifting. He took her in the back office. Oh, no! What do you think he’ll do to her?”
What I mean is that when I go to my fantasies I don’t have to play them all out in my head. Usually just the opening reel will get me there. I guess you could call it pragmatic.
“Look at where it goes, though.”
But it’s not just pragmatic. Because I know in the back of my head where my fantasies going. And I can get off on knowing it subconsciously without having to think about what my fantasies really are. I don’t usually want to think about it, not unless I’m desperate to get off.
“Big deal. Let me guess, that’s an auction block. She’s been sentenced to sexual slavery and anyone can bid on her helpless naked body. Oh, what will happen? Surely the handsome boy of her dreams will never show up in the crowd and...”
But now I was having the fantasies I usually hide even from myself being thrown up on a movie screen and enjoyed by these two emotional monsters. And because they were my fantasies, they were making my hips twist on their hands, my breath come in interrupted gasps.
“Pay attention, girl! That’s not an auction block, it’s a TV stage. No, like a public stage on TV, somehow she’s locked up there in stocks or something and anyone can just fuck her or whip her or whatever, and it’s all on TV! Then somehow, and this is a big part of it, she knows she has to stay up there as a fucktoy for the rest of her life.”
“Wouldn’t she need to go to the bathroom? And wouldn’t she get old and ugly eventually? She is a mortal.”
“Yes Michelle, I’m sure she put a lot of thought into those details while she’s bouncing her cunt on her little rolled up towel or whatever. But look, they all end up with the same kind of situation. Where she has to spend the rest of her life as some kind of...”
A soft, melodic but masculine voice interrupted Michelle.
“Ladies, I can see you’re having fun. But I need to talk to that one now.”
Michelle withdrew her finger, but Cheri didn’t.
“Oh Tam, come on, just a few more minutes. Look, I almost made her come.”
“Cheri, you know how impatient I get when I have to ask something twice. I hope you didn’t think that just because you’re a Kind One I can’t strip you of everything you have and chain you up naked with the goblins in the basement for a few decades.”
“Oh, Tam, you make all these sexy promises and you never follow through,” said Cheri with a giggle, but she complied and released me.
Then they were gone. In fact, the whole area around me had cleared away except for the person in front of me, Tam. I couldn’t really see him, but I knew he was there. Maybe it’s that when he’s there he’s never all the way there. I don’t mean you see through him, it’s more like you see around, like you can only get him in your peripheral vision. I picture him as a tall, thin, pale man with long black hair in a ponytail. But I think that’s just something my brain made up to fill him in, because to other people he looks totally different.
“Come upstairs please. This way, good girl.”
Stephanie — Meeting with Tam
I hadn’t seen any stairs. But he put his hand on my shoulder and guided me forward, and I was climbing a spiral staircase. He was coming up behind me, or at least I thought he was. When I got to the top he was sitting behind an elaborate oak desk. The desk was supported by sculptures of eight naked women and men kneeling, and supporting it on their shoulders and raised hands.
Only they weren’t sculptures. Neither were the naked boy and two girls kneeling on either side and behind to support the chair he was sitting in. Or the woman leaning immobile slightly over his desk holding a shaded lamp illuminating his desk. He was reading something on the desk, and reached up absentmindedly and grabbed one of her nipples to pull her forward a bit more, and she bent just like an adjustable lamp. But I saw a wince in her face as he pulled, and there was sweat on her brow.
There was no place for me to sit. I think that was the point. So I stood in front of his desk.
“Please, I am sorry about the bill, I swear I’ll find a way to...”
He waved his hand in annoyance, and then I couldn’t breathe. Do you have any idea what that’s like? He probably didn’t cut off my air for more than ten seconds, but it’s a long ten seconds when you don’t know when you’re going to breathe again. When he let me reopen my airway I got the point and kept my mouth shut. He kept looking at what he was looking at on the desk.
They were pictures of me. Pictures I had never seen from my daily life. Me shopping, me on the computer at work, me showering. But they weren’t like pictures from some hidden spy camera, they were magazine-quality. They weren’t all recent, either. There was a picture of me reading in bed in an apartment I lived in two years ago, and another of me in my volleyball uniform in college. There was a picture of me giving a guy a blowjob in a party when I was nineteen. There was text too, but I couldn’t read it. I don’t think it was in English anyway.
Then he was studying me. Then I knew that what Michelle and Cheri had done to me was nothing, barely skimming the surface. He saw right through to the middle.
“Stephanie,” he said. “Tell me what brought you here.”
“I came with some people. I don’t know why I don’t remember their...wait, one was named Bob, or was it...”
He waved his hand impatiently again and I lost my air again, this time for fifteen seconds.
“I don’t care about those fools, as you well know,” he said. “What brought you here.”
He was right, I had known. I knew that he wasn’t asking me who had brought me to the club. I knew this didn’t really have anything to do with an unpaid bill, that whatever I’d done I’d have ended up standing naked in front of Tam’s desk. Rob had said when we arrived that he had brought someone for Tam. And I knew that Tam already knew the answer to my question; he knew everything about me in one glance. He was making me say it for my own benefit.
“I wanted to get away,” I whispered. “I’m not what he thinks I am. I can’t be what he wants me to be.”
He waved a hand and I was afraid that he’d cut my breath off again. Instead a forty-inch television screen came on. The screen was being held up by a naked man and woman, of course.
I saw Brian and Anastasia sitting on a couch together. No, they weren’t just sitting together, she had her head in his lap. And she was in her underwear. I choked at the betrayal, but resisted saying anything. I didn’t want him to stop me breathing again.
“You shouldn’t be angry at them,” he said. “It’s been eight months, and they haven’t seen or heard from you. It can’t last, of course. Anastasia doesn’t even really like men. They don’t love each other, they just both loved you and this is the best substitute.”
“Eight months? But how...”
That must have been thirty seconds I couldn’t breathe. I was crying in terror when he let me inhale again. I was not going to make that mistake again.
We just sat there awhile and watched Nasty and Brian. She mechanically unbuttoned his pants and started giving him oral sex. He waved the screen off again.
“Now you can ask questions. Choose them carefully, because you won’t get many.”
“You, I mean, the people here, the people who brought me, you’re not ordinary people. Those girls called me mortals. Which means you’re not. This is not an ordinary place.”
He waited a moment after I finished.
“That’s not really a question, Stephanie. It’s an answer you already know.”
I shouldn’t have expected he’d make it easy.
“Why did they bring me? I mean, I know what I was looking for. But lots of people want to get away from their lives. Why me?”
He was slow to answer.
“They weren’t always what they are now. They were like you once. I mean, not like you, because it was centuries ago, millennia for some. But most of the Kind People were mortals once.”
He hadn’t really answered my question, but what position was I in to complain? He didn’t say anything else, so I had another question coming. But I was pretty sure it was going to be my last. I decided to keep it simple.
“Can I have something to wear please?”
I couldn’t see it, but I knew he was smiling. He gestured and something appeared on the desk, something that brought new tears to my eyes. I wouldn’t wear those, I wasn’t like the people that wore those.
But I could tell the sequined shorts were just my size, the bowtie and cuffs exactly the right diameter.
“There’s another option,” he said, and gestured again.
I saw my wedding dress on the desk. I touched it, not believing it was real.
“If you put it on you’ll go back to the morning of your wedding. You’ll forget this happened, all you’ll have is a bad hangover.”
Could it be that easy? I picked up the dress and held it uncertainly. I looked back at the TV, not daring to ask the questions in my mind. But I didn’t have to.
“What you saw wasn’t a premonition, that path is drawn. It’s best not to try to figure out if six months have passed or a few hours. Time doesn’t work like that for us. And I can’t show you what it will look like if you go back and marry him. That path isn’t drawn. I can tell you, though, more or less. You’ll be about as happy and sad as you mortals usually are. Things will go well sometimes, badly others. You’ll do your best for a while and then you’ll die. It’ll probably be just about what you were afraid of when you ran away, but then maybe you’ve changed your mind.”
He gave me some time then. But I didn’t put on the dress.
“They picked you because they saw something. A potential. It’s just that, potential. They recognized it because it’s something they had once, long ago when they were mortals.”
I looked at the shorts and cuffs. I sensed him nodding, and I knew he was giving me permission to ask another question.
“If I put those on, then I’ll become a, a Kindly One or whatever. I mean someday?”
“Probably not. You’ll probably spend the rest of your life as a playtoy for the Kind People. Most of the people we own die slaves, though they don’t age like normal people. Very few find the secret. It’s a fool’s chance, really, no sane person would take it. But Rob seemed to think you would.”
I held on to the wedding dress for as long as I could. He gestured and I found a tissue in my other hand. I didn’t realize I’d been crying.
“I love him,” I said.
I think I really did. Like I said, it’s hard to remember. He didn’t answer, because he knew that had nothing to do with it.
Did you think they made me what I am? I wish they had. But the bastards gave me a choice; that was the cruelest thing they did.
But like I said, they don’t call them that because they are kind, but because...
She trailed off, and I could see that was as much as I was going to get. Again she didn’t finish the explanation of their names, so I did it for her.
“...but because we hope that sometimes they will be.”
She nodded, then stood up and paced back and forth across the sparse one room ground floor apartment. She looked out the window impatiently. Did she go out? Could she? It didn’t matter, I realized with a chill. They owned her wherever she went.
“Do you have to work, I mean,” I said, but calling it ‘work’ like it was just a job didn’t seem right. “How often to they make you go there?”
She jumped, like she’d forgotten I was there. She’d been waiting for something else.
“I served tables that night,” she said. “Of course they made me serve Rob, Tom, Bill and Tina first. The first thing he said was ‘what do they call you?’ like he didn’t know who I was. But that was easy compared to the next two times when they had me dance. The last time was the worst, though. I played with some guys at a table. I mean, they played with me.”
“Wait, you’ve only been down there four nights over the last ten years? I mean, I’m sorry, I don’t want to minimize what you...”
She laughed.
“I worked four of their nights. The first time I came out of the club it had been two years since I’d gotten in the car with Rob and his friends. I didn’t believe it, of course. I tried going to Brian. I was wearing the sequined shorts and a little t-shirt they gave me to wear over it. I had bruises on my ass because they’d still punished me for the check. He acted like he didn’t know who I was. Maybe he really didn’t; who knows what the Kind People can do. To me it felt like I’d kissed him over breakfast the previous morning, and he was looking at me like this ghetto scamp in stripper shorts. Sorry.
“I begged enough for a single residency, got a little cleaned up and got a waitress job. I got my own apartment. I tried to decorate it and make it look nice, not like this one. Four months later they brought me back to dance; that ‘night’ lasted a year and a half, and I’d lost everything again. The next time I was only up for six weeks. I lived with a guy for awhile then. He loved me so much and I selfishly let him. I didn’t have the heart to warn him. The third time I tried to run away; I saved up for a bus ticket and went all the way to Los Angeles. But it wouldn’t have mattered if I’d gone to China. So you can see why I live how I do. I just keep it simple and wait. There’s nothing else to do.”
“How long has it been since the last time?” I asked.
“Five months. It should be any day now. Or not. Our time means nothing to them; they could leave me here for five years. Not knowing is the worst part.”
If what she was saying was true then in the last decade she’d barely experienced a whole year, at least in our world. I thought about how distant she was. For a person like that our world would barely seem real at all.
I looked at my watch and saw I had to go. Neal was opening for Win Bishop, a pop-punk diva that had become the favorite local rock singer of almost every reviewer in town except for me. But it was a big show for Neal in any case, and it would not be good if his girlfriend missed his act.
“Do you know anybody else who’s like y—I mean, anybody who’s had the same...”
“No. I mean not, you know, on this side. I get to talk to other hostlings down there sometimes, but I couldn’t tell you who they are up here.”
“Hostling, is that...”
“Yeah. People like me. Fairy sex toys, you know. Like I said, I don’t know any up here, but I know of someone who has, who’s met a lot of them. Hughes Nicholson. But he wouldn’t talk to you.”
“Is he...a writer?” I said nervously.
It would be just my luck that someone else was trying to write a book about this and had started before me. But if he had some sources I at least had to try to talk to him.
“No. He’s a perv. He gets off on it. He asks hostlings to tell stories, but only so he can beat off to them later. Of course if he can fuck a hostling, boy or girl, that’s even better.”
“Did you...”
“Fuck him? Or tell him my story? No and no. He tried to talk to me, but I’d been warned about him by other hostlings when I was at UtH. I may be their playtoy over there, but I’m not going to give that to somebody here so they can...”
She looked at me suspiciously.
“What are you really trying to do? Do you actually think you can get somebody to publish a book about this?”
I hurried to assure her I was serious about it, and I was. I tried to explain that maybe people wouldn’t believe it at first, even the people who published it. Some people would think it was mostly made up, like that girl who wrote the thing about the people that lived under the subway. But if someone broke the story, maybe other people would find out more. I told her I knew it was a risk but one that I was willing to take.
I kept explaining and explaining into her doubtful, cynical gaze. I didn’t want her to think I was like Hughes Nicholson, chasing down a sexual fantasy. I didn’t want to think I was like Hughes Nicholson.
By the time I was done I think I’d at least convinced myself.