Whispers on the Wind
“I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.” — Robert A. Heinlein
There was a crack in the drywall where the baseboard and doorjamb met. It wasn’t gaping, but it was a dark fissure through the white paint, a blemish. If you put your ear close to it, you would hear the scratching of insect legs scurrying along the crevices of those terrifying places glimpsed only in nightmares.
That was the real world, breeding horror inside a fragile shell of lies.
It was a realm of vivid discomforts, pain, and heinous obscenities. No one ever trespassed on purpose, for their psyches wouldn’t grant them passage. People deafened their ears, turning blind eyes to cutting truths. Ignorance by choice was the prognosis of the human condition for sanity’s sake.
If it doesn’t affect me directly, then it doesn’t matter—that was the most honest testament ever processed through the subconscious minds of habitual liars.
Vee lay on the other side of the crack, inside the wall with all the horrors. The gifts of innocence and blissful ignorance had passed her over in favor of other people’s children. She didn’t peer out into the light with hope. Her back was to it as she sought only the darkness of what lay deeper within. Something vital resided there at the core of the nightmare, and she needed it to survive.
It had taken Vee precious time to find her destined path in the maze of sickness. One could forget to fight, losing themselves to the degrees of filth because there was comfort in consistency, even in the poisonous web of humanity’s darkest depravities.
The grinning monsters drove their shiny cars, going home to their wives and children at the end of the day behind their pretty, pretty masks. Glittery façades her fingers itched to pick at, to feel the scrape of each tiny grain cut into her skin. They rubbed her raw with their twisted desires, these respected community leaders fucking somebody’s prepubescent daughter through her, if not their own.
It was never enough. Afflictions of the flesh always faded. Wounds healed and scarred. Skin grew new layers, each one deader than the last.
There was a back door to the world of fetishism funded by the black market and the dark web. In a world protected by any god, it shouldn’t exist. Yet it thrived because humans grew diseased with unthinkable cravings under their polished veneers. And where there was a collective of scum, there was always a system covering it up—a complex maze, like plastic hamster tubes, rife with dead ends and pitfalls.
Vee couldn’t recall a life beyond that realm. She had no memory of her earliest years, only that something bad had happened to rob her of them. Her memories began the day she’d arrived at the Clubhouse, a taboo dungeon that catered to wealthy clients with a lustful taste for underage flesh.
Tossed into a cell disguised as a girl’s bedroom, she spent patchy hours sleeping in a cesspool of damning evidence for the crimes committed against her. Agonizing nights had bled through torturous weeks and stretched into merciless months until it all began to lose clarity.
After the first year, one man started blurring into the next. She could no longer see their faces or hear their voices, and everything they did to her body stayed there. Nothing ever sank below the surface of her skin. Vee considered the possibility that she’d died without realizing it, and hell was just her life on repeat without any of the sensations.
In the quiet between the end of business and sleep, she started investigating the people and their routines so she could use them to escape. There was only one way out. A flight of stairs that led up out of the dungeon. It took some time to perfect the route, and she almost got caught several times.
Finally, one early morning in her third year, she made it to the stairs and quietly rushed her ascent. Only to discover the promise of escape was an illusion. A trapdoor covered the exit. It was immovable, no matter how hard she pushed against it.
Mannis Boss caught Vee putting all her weight into the solid wood that morning and proved she was still very much alive when he dragged her back to her cell and raped every last part of her under the constant whip-crack of a camera flash. It was the first time any of the Bosses had molested her in any way, yet one of the most brutal she’d ever endured.
He’d forced Vee’s body into painful contortions, the flash of the camera slapping her in the face, denying her mind its ability to flee into the blur like it usually did. But the most significant punishment came afterward when Mannis discovered how she’d been sneaking out of her cell and fixed it so she couldn’t anymore.
Every week, one of the Bosses loaded a small group of slaves into a van and put them to work cleaning the other businesses they owned and operated throughout the city. That included motels where hookers lived and served in forced prostitution. Motel landlords got to select one of the slaves to use while the rest cleaned.
The motel on the street they’d dubbed Red Light Row was Vee’s favorite. Mainly because the landlord there only liked boys. Also, because of how easy it was for her to sneak off and smoke with the hookers. Lorna and Camille liked her best. They would tuck her into one of the alcoves at the end of the building to hide her from view, then teach her things she’d never heard or seen before.
Nothing they’d ever taught her was as significant as the day she learned about the Destroyer. She’d rounded the corner, heading for her hiding spot as usual, and passed Camille, huddled with another hooker along the way.
No one eavesdrops on purpose if they value their life. Vee’s crime of that was unintentional. The wind happened to be blowing in the right direction at that precise moment, carrying their voices.
“The Destroyer. Man, she all fucked up now. I saw her over at County Psyche. Said, ‘Tiff, Tiff,’ a hundred fucking times. The girl said nothing. Just stared at the wall and rocked herself like some freak-show horror shit,” Camille said.
“I told her not to go looking for him. Why don’t she listen?” The other hooker hissed. “Only the devil himself could make the Bosses piss their beds at night.”
“Who’s the Destroyer?” Vee asked before she could think better of it.
The unknown hooker spun on her heels with her hand pulled back, ready to strike. Camille caught her arm and shot Vee a dark scowl.
“You done been hit upside your head one too many times, Vee. Ain’t no one talking about no disruptor or whatever,” she snapped, then hauled the other woman away before Vee could call her bullshit.
“Just let it go, girl,” Lorna warned, lighting Vee’s cigarette for her when she huffed into her little alcove. “Don’t go stirring up trouble you don’t need.”
Vee tried to heed her advice, but a fire had lit inside her, and she couldn’t let it go. Just that fragment of detail about the Destroyer had licked along the edges of all her deepest, darkest longings. To know there was a being capable of inflicting the Bosses with nightmares was too delicious to ignore.
As with every week, the following evening saw them at a different motel across the city. It had never been Vee’s favorite. The landlord was mean, and the hookers were not only less friendly as a result, they tended to get replaced more often.
There was only one who’d been there for as long as Vee could remember, and she tracked her down the second Gavo Boss disappeared into a different hooker’s room. The Bosses were never afraid of the slaves bolting in their temporary absence because the whores would stop them at the threat of their lives.
Dahlia sat at the vanity in her room with the door open, listening to her beloved opera, which hurt Vee’s ears. She was brushing a wig on its head-shaped holder with her long legs tucked daintily to the side. In her short satin robe, it was easier to tell that she’d been born a man. But Vee had seen her in full drag, and the transformation was the most fascinating thing she’d ever witnessed.
“Why do you dress like a woman when you can’t have a baby planted inside your belly?” Vee had asked her years before when they’d first met.
“Because I like the way it feels when a man tries his hardest to do it, anyway,” Dahlia had responded before actually looking at her. The moment she did, her face had soured, and she’d put the hand mirror down to face Vee. “You’re a bit young to worry about babies getting planted in bellies, darling.”
Vee had shrugged. “The older girls are always growing babies in their bellies in the dungeon. Ria Boss said that’s all they’re good for once they’re too old for clients.”
She hadn’t understood the look on Dahlia’s face at the time but now knew it had been shock. The same way Lorna and Camille had looked when they’d asked if anything else happened at the Clubhouse aside from the obvious.
It was strange to think of how many years had passed since that first meeting. In all honesty, Vee expected she’d be dead by now, or at the very least, Dahlia would be long gone. But they were both still there, trapped in the weekly recycling of their hated lives.
Vee peeked around the edge of Dahlia’s open door, trying not to wince from the aria piercing her eardrums.
“That one’s pretty,” she commented, watching the brush glide effortlessly through the wig of brunette shades layered in waves.
Dahlia’s mouth lifted into a genuine smile when she glanced over, excitement sparking in her soft green eyes.
“My first real one,” she explained after turning the music down. “I finally saved up the money. Come feel this.”
Vee set her cleaning bucket inside the door and entered the single room with its bed against the opposite wall, standing parallel to the vanity. She stroked her fingers over the wig, which felt exactly like real hair rather than the plastic strands of Dahlia’s other wigs.
“It’s real?” she asked.
“Every last expensive-as-fuck strand.” Dahlia beamed, then set the holder aside to start applying her makeup.
Vee watched her for a moment. Cosmetics weren’t something she’d ever been allowed to wear, so she was intrigued by the process.
“Have you ever heard of the Destroyer?”
Dahlia’s hand froze in the middle of sponging concealer on her face. “Where did you hear that name?”
“The Row girls were whispering about him,” Vee answered. “They said he turned a woman crazy.”
Dahlia made a short sound that could’ve been a laugh but lacked the necessary humor. “Just forget you ever heard anything, Vee.”
Deflated, she huffed and crossed her arms. “You’re just like Lorna.”
“Then, Lorna’s smart.”
Vee leaned closer, dropping her voice. “They said he gives the Bosses nightmares so bad they piss their beds.”
“That’s because he’s not a man, Vee. He’s the devil,” Dahlia said with irritated impatience. “He’s the monster capable of plaguing men with night terrors and wet dreams simultaneously. Do you understand?”
“I can’t live there anymore, Dahlia,” Vee said so sincerely it altered something in the woman’s eyes. “It’s not like here. I could feel things here.”
Dahlia stared at her reflection for a few seconds before releasing a heavy sigh and grasping Vee’s hand. “It gets numb here, too, baby girl. We’re just better at pretending.”
When her cell phone lit up on the vanity, it gave Vee an idea. “Can you search for him on there?”
Dahlia snorted. “I doubt the devil takes out personal ads, Vee.”
“What about the crazy woman’s story? Tiff?” she pressed.
Though Dahlia gave her an exasperated look, she picked her phone up and started typing away on it. She seemed mildly surprised to find something and touched the screen. Vee could tell she was reading by how her eyes moved back and forth.
“What does it say?”
“Tiffany Holt, age twenty-two, was rescued by a passerby who saw her walking the tracks toward an oncoming train. She started attacking him viciously while screaming the word ‘Master’ but was catatonic by the time police arrived at the scene. She remains in that state at the county’s mental health clinic, where they’re holding her under suicide watch,” Dahlia began.
She read quietly to herself for a moment before sharing out loud again.
“Her estranged family saw the news report and rushed to the station to identify her. They claim to have had no contact with Holt for six years but verify she had no history of mental health illness before that. The officials haven’t found conclusive forensic evidence to answer the mystery of where she’d been... blah, blah, blah.”
Vee almost rolled her eyes with an impatient groan when Dahlia returned to silently skimming.
“Holt is a known runaway with a record listing numerous arrests for shoplifting and prostitution,” Dahlia continued. “According to police and known associates, she’d disappeared without a trace four months before the incident. That’s it.”
There was a fever pitch in Vee’s body fueled by the proof that the hooker’s words hadn’t just been empty gossip.
“There has to be something about him on the dark web,” she implored. “Please, Dahlia? Can’t you just look?”
One of the other slaves suddenly appeared in the open doorway. “Gavo’s out.”
“Shit,” Vee swore.
Dahlia stood quickly and grabbed a bottle of soda off her dresser. She poured some of the contents on the carpet near the door.
“Clean that up,” she ordered Vee before waving her hand dismissively at the other girl. “Thank you, now, shoo.”
Vee grabbed her cleaning bucket to scrub the fresh stain while Dahlia took her makeup to the bathroom instead.
Less than five minutes later, Gavo Boss paused outside the open door. Vee glanced up to see him searching the room for its usual tenant. Slaves weren’t ever supposed to be alone in rooms with the hookers.
“Where’s Dahlia?” he asked.
“Bathroom.”
“Then why are you in here?” he demanded.
“Emergency,” she lied with all the confidence of a pro because that was the first skill they’d forced her to hone fast and sharp. Vee could cry, tremble, scream, and beg on cue, for there was no crime more punishable in the eyes of the Bosses than a pissed-off client demanding a refund. “She’s got a John coming soon and needs this cleaned before he shows up.”
That eased the tension in his expression and stance. “Scrub fast, then,” he ordered, then left to finish checking on the others.
Vee slowed her scrubbing motions when she heard the bathroom door open. She peered over her shoulder to see Dahlia leaning against the doorjamb.
“I honestly do have a John coming, so if you could hurry it along, that would be great.” She smiled.
“What about the—?”
Dahlia held her hand up. “I’ll poke my nose around the dark web to see what I can find,” she said, then looked to her new wig on the vanity table and sighed. “I guess we’ll know if I’m successful if one of us comes up missing before next week.”
