All the Inside Howling (Hollow Folk #2)(32)
“I’m this close,” I said, fingers an inch apart. “Like this close.”
“Don’t be so dramatic,” she said with another massive eyeroll. “We’ve got some bottles of top shelf stuff that are almost empty. I’ll put a box together for you. Is this for a party?”
I nodded.
“You’re going to be a very popular young man. Even in spite, I’m guessing, of your reputation for destroying the moral bedrock of this town.” She whipped her phone from her pocket and winced. “Christ, Sally’s on his way. Got to hurry. Stay here.”
Before I could ask who McMeg was, Remy plucked the cash from my hand and sashayed down the hall—and it was a definite sashay, so definite that Remy looked like she was about to split her jeans and just keep walking. As soon as she was out of sight, I counted to ten and ran to where the hall branched and headed the other direction.
Learning about the fight, and seeing Remy’s strange reaction to my shot-in-the-dark question, had been interesting, and getting some booze for tonight’s party was a definite win, but I had come to Jigger Boss for another reason. A few weeks before, when I had first come to Jigger Boss and met Remy, she had asked me to help her unload some crates in the storeroom. While I helped her, I had discovered a room built behind a row of shelving. A secret room. A room intended for one thing, and only one thing: causing pain.
Right now, I headed as fast as I could to that room. I flew past the rows of metal shelving, past boxes of condoms and plastic barrels of pretzel mix and mountains of toilet paper so thin you could print the Bible on it and have room for another testament. At the back of the room, the shelves were stacked with things that never got a second glance: half-emptied bottles of cleaner, an old mop, a box spilling packets of ketchup, and so on. But one section of shelving was different. You wouldn’t notice it if you saw it from a distance, but up close, and with enough time, it was hard to miss. There was no dust, none of the debris of plastic ties and broken cardboard and crushed potato chips that accumulates in places like this. I ran my hands along the racking and flipped the clasp. Silently, on hidden hinges, the shelving rolled open to reveal a black patch.
I stepped down, into the room, and flicked a switch. Banks of light tubes sprang to life, and their wan glow revealed the room as I had remembered it: wooden sawhorses, padded benches, slings, chains, ropes, bolts and hooks, whips, paddles, and on and on. Some of the stuff—much of the stuff—I didn’t understand, and although a part of my brain knew what all of this was meant for, recognized the mixture of sweat and sex that had settled into the leather and vinyl and become a permanent fixture of the space, I noticed something that I hadn’t realized before. Yes, this was a place for causing pain. But nothing looked . . . dangerous.
No knives, for example. No saws, no pincers. Sure, you could beat the hell out of someone with what was hanging on the walls here, but none of it looked like it was actually intended to cause permanent damage. Lawayne’s torture dungeon, in the wash of the fluorescent lighting, looked less threatening and more, well, silly. Like catching an adult playing a child’s game.
Reaching for the lights, I let out a frustrated sigh. If River had been killed or hurt at Jigger Boss, as the discarded denim jacket seemed to indicate, then I had assumed it would have happened here, in Lawayne’s special place of hurting people. But now, staring at all the toys and tools, I doubted it. What I had seen in that dream, what had been done to River’s body—the mutilation of the face, in particular—it hadn’t happened here. There were no real weapons, no signs of a struggle, no blood—
No blood. And as soon as the thought crossed my mind, it was like electricity ran through me, locking my muscles in place. My hand hovered an inch from the bank of switches, and then it dropped. The tubes overhead flickered, and shadows danced across the room. Suddenly the corners of the room were dark, a heavy, pitchy dark, like someone had cupped all the light between their hands and it couldn’t spill out of a tight ring at the center of the room. Something was moving in that darkness, stirring the shadows like running a finger through paint, the waves thick and opaque.
In the center of the room, that narrow ring of light grew brighter and brighter, until I had to squint against its brilliance, until that white-hot column threatened to char my corneas and burn all the way up to my brain. Someone was screaming. A high-pitched scream, so high that it made my head ring. So high that it didn’t seem possible a man could make that sound, and it kept going higher and higher, this long, silver blade that went from ear to ear inside my head. Someone was dying in here. Someone was screaming to death in here. And, in some foggy part of my brain that still was rational, I realized that I might die too if I didn’t escape this memory.
I staggered, tripped over the single step that led up and out of the room, and sprawled flat on the cement pad. As soon as I left the torture room, as soon as my chin connected with the cool floor and the click ricocheted up my teeth and into my brain, the vision, or the memory, or whatever it was, stopped. Sudden, perfect silence surrounded me like a vacuum. The weak light of the storeroom replaced the terrible brilliance I had seen. I swiped a shaky hand along the side of my head, over my still ringing ear, expecting blood, but my fingers came away clean.
That was some kind of hell, some kind of craziness, some kind of evil that I wasn’t prepared to deal with. With the room swimming around me, I got to my feet and shook my head. I wanted out of here, as fast as I could, and to hell with Remy and the booze and anything that got in my way.