The Never List (13 page)

Across from what I could only imagine were medieval torture instruments, a row of booths with tables lined one side of the bar. Adele led me over to an empty one, weaving her way through a sea of dark bodies. As we walked deeper into the club, my senses were taken over by the stale smell of the place: the odor of sweat, lubricants, and indeterminate bodily fluids mingled to overpower the underlying scent of commercial-grade disinfectant. My stomach turned, as I imagined microscopic particles of these elements penetrating my body through my nose and mouth and skin.

When we finally reached a table, a decade later it seemed, I started to ease onto the bench across from her, but Adele motioned for me to sit next to her instead. I assumed this was part of the ritual here between master and slave, and I followed it almost mindlessly, slipping into that role with a disturbing sense of familiarity.

I looked at Adele hard. She still had not explained what made someone gravitate toward this particular form of perversity, whether as role player or scholar. Was studying this world as much a twisted fetish as being a part of it? Was it just a form of voyeurism that happened to have the stolid edifice of a university to support
it? Or was she, as she claimed, merely trying to understand the near miss of her youth, to plumb to some strange depths to overcome the fear of how close she had come to personal destruction?

“Well? How are you doing?” she said, looking at me curiously.

“Just fine,” I managed to mutter, and I looked away, remembering that in real life it wasn’t polite to stare like that.

Then I saw a couple approaching us. The man was tall, with a long mustache and beard, and a perfectly bald head, glistening with sweat. In his hand he carried a black leather leash, at the end of which was a thin woman, clad entirely in black leather from head to toe. Only her eyes peered out at us from a slit in her tight-fitted hood. Her mouth was covered by a flap that was zipped closed. She was stooped, shuffling along with irregular footsteps, almost as though she were injured. I squinted in the darkness, trying to determine if there was, in fact, something physically wrong with her.

The man waved pleasantly to Adele. She greeted him equally cheerily, “Hi, Piker.”

They hugged, and I could have sworn I saw an air kiss. It was hard for me to accept this benighted place as a locus of some kind of community, even a deviant one.

Adele leaned over and whispered to me, “Perfect.”

“Have a seat,” she said to him.

He ambled over to the other bench and slid in. The woman waited silently for his command. He ignored her and sat down, leaving her standing there at attention. Adele didn’t blink.

He turned calmly to us.

“Who do we have here?” He looked only at Adele, never making eye contact with me. I figured that unless she identified me as someone worthy of speaking to, he would treat me like an object.

“This is … Blue, for tonight, anyway.” She smiled. “She’s doing some research on Jack Derber.”

A look of scorn crossed the man’s face. “Oh, him.” He turned to me then, meeting my eyes for the first time, as he realized I wasn’t Adele’s slave after all. “I hope you’re covering how he set our movement back twenty years. That bastard.”

“Movement?”

“BDSM. When that story broke, everyone assumed that he was a BDSM practitioner. That couldn’t be further from the truth. I mean, he had been, but we kicked his ass out of here years before he had those girls. I hope you get the truth out there about him. He was not like the rest of us. He never obeyed any rules.”

“What kind of rules?”

“Well, for starters, he didn’t respect safe words. Just blew past them. None of this”—he waved his arms in a sweeping gesture of pride—“works without safe words. That’s what it is all about. This is about love and intimacy too, you know. He never understood the importance of trust. That’s the only way to achieve TPE.”

Adele turned to me. “Total Power Exchange,” she explained, rather inadequately, I thought. “You are in luck, tonight,” she continued, “meeting Piker and Raven. Raven was Jack’s slave years ago.”

Piker winced. “I hate to think what he did to her. It really breaks my heart.”

I could see tears welling up in his eyes for real now. He turned to Raven, who was clearly agitated by the discussion, though she stayed perfectly still.

Then some kind of inner force broke through, and a small cry escaped Raven’s lips. Piker yelled, sharply and abruptly, “Silence!”

I jumped, the command was so sudden and loud, but Raven simply fell silent, her head bowed down in ultimate servitude. I felt sick to my stomach.

I hated to pursue this topic, but I had to ask the next question.

“What did he do to her?”

I was afraid to hear the answer, because I knew only too well
what he was capable of doing to her. Here was this strange woman beside us with whom I shared this awful connection. I wanted to tell her I understood, explain that we shared something unique and terrible. But I sat perfectly still instead, immobilized by fear, overwhelmed, waiting for her to speak.

Piker turned to Raven. “Raven, you may sit.”

She moved to the seat of the banquette in an instant. She watched his face carefully, waiting for the next command.

Piker reached over and unzipped the flap covering her mouth. “Speak.”

I could tell from the circles around Raven’s eyes that she had to be in her forties at least. She had fine lines around her mouth, and one of her front teeth had a silver cap. The other was chipped. Battle injuries, I supposed.

Raven’s eyes moved back and forth between Adele and me; she seemed unsettled, whether from being granted permission to speak or because of the subject matter I couldn’t tell. But as she began her story, the answer became obvious.

“I met him here in this club. This was over fifteen years ago. We didn’t know each other’s real names then. No one did.” She stopped and turned back to Piker. He nodded for her to go on. He wanted this story out. Jack Derber was bad for the “movement.”

“The club was only a few years old, and the members were still nervous about the cops. Even though nothing we did was strictly illegal, we knew they would find a way to shut us down. So we kept it very word of mouth.”

She shifted to face Adele as she explained, “This was before the Internet made things easy. Back then there were a few chat rooms and alt.net sites we used to communicate, but all of it was spotty.”

Raven paused, took a deep breath, and looked over at Piker again, who lifted his hand in a gesture of impatience, motioning for her to keep going.

“We met here, as I said. He was very charming. He went by the name Dark—we used some of the private rooms in the back.”

She pointed in the direction of an unmarked door I hadn’t noticed before.

“Eventually, he wanted to take things a little further. He asked me to meet him at his house in the mountains. I said yes. I was young and stupid, but so far he had followed the protocol, so I believed it was all under control. And I was having fun, not realizing how seriously he took it. So I said okay to going off premises. I didn’t tell anyone what was going on. Hardly anyone even knew we were getting together.”

Then she was quiet, looking up at the ceiling, tapping one finger slowly and rhythmically on the table. When she looked back down, she clenched her hands tightly and settled them in her lap. From then on, the timbre of her voice changed. She spoke quickly and softly, in a monotone, reciting the facts, just as I had done during difficult sessions with Dr. Simmons. I figured that meant this memory hurt.

“I went to his house late one Saturday night. As I drove up that long, winding driveway, I thought it looked haunted. It excited me. I went up to the front door and knocked, timidly, of course. He opened the door, and the first thing I saw was a huge gloved fist coming at my face. He punched me, then dragged me into the room. I was kicking and screaming but still thought this was just a more extreme scene than I was used to. I was confused, though, because we hadn’t agreed to this in advance. Then he pummeled me, relentlessly, over and over again. I tried to get out my safe word—it was ‘yellow’ then—but I couldn’t before I passed out from the pain.”

Raven stopped for a minute and closed her eyes. I was surprised because I thought this was what the “masochist” part of BDSM would want. This world made no sense to me. Piker rubbed her arm lovingly and told her to take her time.

“I woke up, and I was hog-tied in the middle of this big library.”

At this, I had to close my eyes. Images of that room spun in my head. The color. The light. The smell of it hit me suddenly. I gripped the table edge and forced myself to focus.

“I was there for three days. No food, very little water. Lots of pain. And he … he …”

She couldn’t go on.

Piker leaned closer to her, “Don’t say it, honey. Just show her.”

Raven stood up beside the table and pulled the side of her leather pants down so we could see her hip. There it was, in twisted flesh. A brand. It looked very similar to my own, though it was hard to make out in the dark. I looked away, blinking back tears.

At just that moment, the MC announced the next act. I glanced over and saw three hooded men pushing a large contraption onto the stage. I could not believe my eyes as they slowly and carefully rolled a rack to the center of it. It was different from the one in Jack’s library, but the purpose was clearly the same. I felt a wave of nausea rising up inside me. Raven saw it too and turned to Piker, her eyes pleading.

He stood. “Let’s get out of here. I don’t like this show.”

I started to feel my throat constrict. I couldn’t get any air. The room was spinning. I saw a door toward the back marked E
XIT
, and without a word to Adele or the others, I got up and ran toward it, nearly tripping along the way over a man in chaps crawling on the floor behind his master.

I pushed open the exit door and ran over to a secluded spot behind the Dumpster, leaning back against the building, panting for breath. Up above, the sky was filled with stars that to me were whirling ominously. Trying to right the world, I took several more deep breaths, my hands on my knees, and slowly slid down the wall. I thought of how similar this was to Tracy’s escape from the club in New Orleans, and a wave of fear washed over me. How had
I gotten myself into this situation? How had I thought I could be ready for this?

I tucked myself into a small indentation in the building, where no one could see me. No hooded men, no zippered women, no leather-clad minions. I wished I could will myself to be invisible and hide out here until morning. I could be still. I could be quiet.

No one need ever know I was here.

     CHAPTER 16     

It was a warm evening, and I could still hear the thumping of the music through the club’s walls. The door creaked open, and Adele called for me, careful to use the name, Blue, that she’d assigned me for the night. When I didn’t reply, the door slammed back shut.

I don’t know why I didn’t answer her at that moment. I just needed a break to clear my head and process, even if only a little, what I’d heard. I’d planned to go back into the club in a few minutes, but it didn’t work out that way.

Car headlights shone into the woods behind the building. An engine revved up and then began to idle a little farther away, closer to a second back door about thirty feet to my left.

Two men got out, and I peeked around the corner just enough to see that it was a large van. They were talking in low voices. I couldn’t hear their words distinctly, but I thought the low rumbling
voice of one of them sounded familiar. I crawled out a few inches from my hiding place, intending to sneak back inside, when I saw the taller of the two pass in front of the van’s headlights.

I almost rubbed my eyes in disbelief. It looked like Noah Philben. It couldn’t be. I had to get closer, if only to prove to myself I was mistaken. I had to be letting my imagination run wild in the midst of my fear.

There was a cluster of bushes a few yards away, and the low rise of a hill ran along in between. If I could make it over there, I would be able to see what was going on and still be hidden in the dark shadows of the back lot. My pulse was racing, but I had to know if that was Noah Philben or if my mind was playing tricks on me.

I took a deep breath and pushed myself on.
You are stronger than this
, I thought, willing myself to be so. Slowly, I eased down onto my stomach and crept over to the bushes.

The men’s voices got louder. They were laughing about something. I heard the door of the van open. There was a little scuffle and a loud thud. Then the door slammed again.

I reached the bushes, which were dense and prickly. I stepped back from them and peered through the leaves. The men were now clearly within sight. The first was of average height, heavyset, with what looked like reddish-blond hair and a goatee. The second man was tall. He walked unhurriedly, at ease, along the side of the van. Then the headlights shone on him just long enough to reveal his face. There was no doubt about it: it was Noah Philben.

I went cold. Why would a religious leader hang out at a remote S&M club in the middle of the night? The very one where Jack Derber used to go, no less. Was Noah looking for Sylvia, the lost lamb from his fold? Or did he have something to do with her disappearance? Whatever it was, this could be it, the lead I was looking for.

It was now two-thirty in the morning. I hadn’t been awake this late in years, but I had a feeling this night was far from over.

I sneaked around behind the building in the opposite direction of the van. Crouching down in the parking lot, I ran over to my car to wait for them. As quietly as I could, I opened the door and slid in behind the wheel. I was sweating, but my skin was cold and my mouth had gone dry. This was more than just fear of night driving. This was complete terror.

The van finally pulled around the corner of the club, toward the exit of the parking lot. At that moment my hands felt like lead on the steering wheel.

I was back on the battleground in my head. I wanted to keep going—to follow that van—but my entire body was tensed up against me, and my thoughts were garbled. It was as if I could hear the sixteen-year-old Jennifer whispering in my ear,
Stay away, go home, go back to your fortress
. But the part of me that was searching, that knew this was the only way, countered that the young Jennifer would never have been able to understand the stakes here. She wouldn’t have understood how I needed to find her now. That if I was ever going to get past it, I had to put her memory, and my memories, to rest.