The walls of her familiar room have been destroyed, have fallen down like toy blocks, replaced by a light that is not the sun, a sick light, a light that crawls. And then the darkness. The rest of her room is still there, even though everything beyond it is black. The bed with her laptop on the bedside table right next to it, for her to watch movies on. The ratty hand-me-down sofa. Her guitar, which she used to write songs on, before she couldn't do it anymore. It sits on the sofa, two strings broken. She hasn't used the sofa that much these days either, it's mostly for when friends come over. But Niki isn't looking at any of that, she's looking at the figures which have emerged from the darkness, which stand out against it in sharp relief.
The man, much taller than her and forbidding, encased in leather robes which make Niki think of a butcher's apron, that same facility with blood and dead flesh. His head is covered in nails, no, pins, inserted on a grid in precise intervals, like an acupuncture session gone wrong. Electricity seems to shiver between them. His nipples are exposed and bleeding. The effect is erotic. The eroticism of it terrifies her, it's a foretaste of what they probably want.
The woman, her leather butcher's robes cut open at the stomach, a metal cage around her neck holding the bleeding wound at her throat open, above it an expressionless bald doll's head with sunken eyes. Her robe is cut open again at the crotch, revealing blood. Not normal blood. Something was done to her down there.
The...the thing. Impossible to tell its gender, it's too scarred. Its whole body is nothing but a mass of scars: burn scars, scars from cutting, scars from...something. Its head is an eyeless mass of dead flesh. The only human-looking thing about it is the mouth, its teeth endlessly chattering. When she stares too long she thinks she can hear it talking, whispering things she can't decipher.
The...other thing. Its body encased in leather like the others. Its head pure light.
"Who are you?"
No answer.
"What do you want?"
"Your pain," the man says.
"Your pleasure," the woman adds.
Niki tries to run. She gets less than a foot away. A hooked chain flies out at her from nowhere and sinks itself deep into her side. It starts dragging her towards them, slowly. The pain is excruciating. Then another chain appears. This one sinks into her inner thigh. She screams.
An incongruous thought comes to her, in the midst of the pain: They look cool. The man and the woman at least, the ones with genders and faces. They look like some of the people she used to see at the Goth nightclub, after going to normal clubs full of happy party people had become too painful, but before she'd given up and stopped going out entirely. Devotees of leather and extreme body modification. They look like the type of people she'd want to compliment on their outfits if she saw them on the street, maybe even try to hit on if she saw them at the club.
Another chain hooks into her shoulder, and there is no more room for stray thought.
They are going to tear her apart. She can feel the chains pulling at her in three directions. She is going to die, right here, in a way more bloody and painful than she ever imagined possible. She is going to die! Niki wants to feel relief. Instead she feels the all-consuming blind terror of an animal in a trap.
And yet, on some level, she is relieved. She is less terrified of these beings than she once was of her father.
"Did you really think we weren't going to rape you?" the woman says. She curls her lips upward in the barest hint of a smile.
Two more chains fly out at Niki, so fast she can barely see them. One has a multi-pronged hook on the end that rips her pants off her. The other has a large chrome cylinder on the end, too large. It plunges inside her. She screams again, then starts to sob.
"Is this...what you meant...by pleasure?" Niki can only gasp the words out, in between the rhythmic thumps of the cylinder within her, its sharp jolts of internal pain. She's coming, against her will. She wants to throw up. She has already, she can taste the vomit in her mouth and feel it dripping from her chin. She wants to throw up again.
The motion stops.
"This is only a start," the man says. "Come with us, and you will know pleasure beyond your current comprehension."
She knows they are probably lying. And yet... I've read self-help books, gone on too many internet dates to count, tried four different religions plus atheism, two illegal psychadelics, went through three talk therapists and five or six legally prescribed antidepressant drugs. I'm running out of things to try.
If she refuses to come with them, they might leave. If they leave, she will be safe. She will remain in her safe room where no one touches her and it is completely silent.
"All right," she says. "I'll go with you."
The motion, the pain, starts up again. The rest of her room crumbles into gray ash. She is dragged by the chains through the corridors of an ever-shifting labyrinth, or is that a hallucination?
Semi-random words and melody flit through her brain, a snatch of a song she used to dance to at the Goth club. Get on your knees...you won't survive the night...
"Oh, but you will survive," the man says. "We have an eternity to know your flesh."