Tabula Rasa(29)

“Mrrrawr?” she said.

I might be going crazy but I was half-convinced she wanted to finish watching the movie. Maybe the white cat understood French, too.





***





The following night, we had dinner early. Shannon brought home Chinese take-out. At five minutes til six, he took my box of food away from me, closed it, and calmly placed it in the fridge.

“What?” I was only halfway finished.

“It’s almost six.”

“So?”

“So, my guests will be arriving any minute. They’re very punctual. You have to go to your room.”

“But...”

“You can finish dinner when they leave.” Shannon never allowed food out of the kitchen for any reason. He’d said something about attracting bugs—as if bugs got together and conspired to find the houses where people ate in more than one room.

“I still don’t understand why I can’t just...”

Shannon loomed over me and pointed upstairs.

“Okay! When will the party be over?”

“I don’t know. Late. Go. Don’t come out of your room. And keep your door locked.”

What the hell?

But I didn’t fight him on it. I went upstairs as instructed and locked my door. I heard people come in, but I didn’t hear any growing noise or loud music. It seemed pretty quiet for a party. What the hell was going on down there? Were they playing Scrabble? Was it a hit man mixer? Very low key. Cocktails. Discussion of strategy—like best body disposal techniques—while Schubert played in the background.

By nine o’clock, Shannon hadn’t come up to tell me I was free to go downstairs, and I was getting hungry again. I’d only had half my dinner after all. Finally, I just decided f*ck it. I was hungry, and whatever was happening downstairs, it couldn’t be worse than all the things I was imagining might be going on.

I unlocked the door and took a peek down the hallway. Nobody up here. Except the white cat. She sat just outside my door giving me that look again. Was she my guard cat? Would she report to Shannon that I’d been bad? I kind of wanted to kick her down the stairs. I was convinced she was the most disagreeable animal in the world with everyone except for Shannon. And I think he liked that about her.

As I started toward the stairs, she began a loud howling meow as if she were in heat. It sounded like she was sending out her own emergency broadcast signal.

“Will you shut up?” I hissed back at her. This cat definitely wanted me dead.

The main level was silent as well. Some party. Maybe they’d relocated to somebody else’s house, and Shannon hadn’t bothered to tell me—or he’d forgotten about me. I still couldn’t fathom what he’d even do at a party besides brood near the punch bowl. He just didn’t seem like the social butterfly sort. As time had passed, it seemed increasingly ludicrous that he had friends to explore abandoned theme parks with, let alone to throw parties for.

I went to the kitchen and heated the rest of my lo mein and chicken and vegetables and sat at the table. As I ate, I kind of faintly heard—but really more felt—the throbbing of music below me. The sound vibrated against my bare feet.

So Shannon had a basement. I suppose I should be grateful I hadn’t been locked in it. I couldn’t believe it hadn’t occurred to me that one of those locked doors might lead to a basement level, which made it all the more suspicious that the door remained locked all the time.

I finished my food and put the cartons in the trash. I’d planned to go back to my room, but I went down the hallway on the main level instead. One of the mystery doors was cracked a fraction of an inch, the music drifting ever so slightly up and out to my ears.

The temptation was just too great. I had to know what the hell happened at a party this man would host. As soon as I took a peek down the stairs, I discovered I was wrong about yet another thing. Shannon’s elevator did go up to the sex floor.

The deviant sex floor.

The basement was a big finished space like an open floor plan apartment. It stretched fully from one end of the house to the other, creating a complete underground level.

There were maybe thirty or more people downstairs, every single one of them naked. There was no pretense of lingerie or underwear for either the men or the women. But the freaky part about the whole thing was that they all wore masks. Not masquerade masks that just covered your eyes, and not those creepy white masks that made you look like a mannequin, either.

No, these were the kind of masks you’d wear for Halloween. Maybe it was a costume party, though I was pretty sure it wasn’t Halloween. There were gorilla masks and monster masks and wolf masks and alien masks—even a few freaky cartoon character masks that were way age inappropriate given the circumstances down here. The only requirement seemed to be that the mask had to be full coverage, not one that only hid half the head or face.

The only thing not going on at the party was oral sex—for obvious mask-related reasons. The guests partner-swapped so fast it nearly gave me whiplash. I couldn’t even begin to guess which one was Shannon. Or was he hiding somewhere watching it all and not participating?

The rule of the night seemed to be that anyone could f*ck anyone—no holds barred—because no one resisted. No one said no, no matter how many people they were passed around to. And the whole thing was utterly and completely anonymous.