Step Beast Read online

  Tilly found herself watching the video that went with the Silento song—a high school gymnasium full of people doing some sort of dance moves to lyrics that employed about twenty words in total. She felt old and washed up at twenty-two, fearing for the musical future of upcoming generations. But there wasn’t much more to do besides people watch—and she did that, too, watching them dance, bodies moving on the floor like a sea of strange, bobbing aliens. From time to time, Erich would turn to Tilly to include her in the conversation, as would Frankie, but she could tell they were just trying to be nice.

  She searched the sea of faces for her stepbeast, wondering if he was around somewhere. Since Frankie was occupied, she decided to do a little more looking around to see if she could solve the mystery of Beast’s connection with this place. Tilly politely excused herself to go to the bathroom. Frankie, of course, offered to go with her, but Tilly waved her away with a knowing smile, saying she’d be back.

  She made her way down the mezzanine stairs and found the bartender who had talked to Frankie earlier working behind the bar. There were no stools open so she leaned over to talk to him, seeing him glance at her cleavage when she did. He was kind of cute—long blond hair pulled back into a neat ponytail, pierced eyebrow and lip, and when he smiled, his hazel eyes smiled too.

  “Is Conrad working tonight?” she shouted in his general direction, going up on her tip-toes, even in heels, as she leaned onto the bar.

  “Who?” He cupped and tilted his ear towards her, serving up a drink to someone with his other hand.

  “Beast!”

  “Oh, yeah.” He smiled, nodding, and then pointed at the tile floor. “Downstairs.”

  “What’s downstairs?”

  The bartender shrugged, smiled mysteriously, and turned to take somebody else’s drink order. Well, thought Tilly, another man of mystery. At least she’d confirmed her stepbeast’s connection to the place.

  It had occurred to Tilly that Beast might have just made her an involuntary squatter in the office yesterday, counting on no one who belonged there to show up. She’d wondered if maybe he had stolen the keys to the building and the office, but that seemed a little far-fetched. It would’ve been awkward if someone had shown up.

  So it seemed he really worked for The Block after all. But doing what? What could be downstairs, and why would the bartender be so mysterious about it? Plumbing maybe? He had been shopping at a hardware store, after all. And he was pretty handy. But what was the mystery in plumbing? Why would even her secretive brother keep that a secret? He wasn’t a man to give much of a damn what other people thought of him.

  Tilly set about looking for downstairs, but the way was not clearly marked. She thought it might be just another floor of the club—perhaps a slightly quieter, more intimate section—but try as she might, she couldn’t find any entrance to another level. She thought about the speakeasies in the 20s. This was an old building. Maybe there was some secret entrance? Could gangsters be hanging out there?

  Okay, Tilly, your imagination is running away without you again.

  She had just about given up, tempted to stop and ask some stranger for directions to “downstairs”—although she was afraid of getting another mystery response—when Tilly stumbled upon a plain, unmarked door. Probably storage, or the kitchen, she thought.

  She pushed it open and found an ancient, spiral steel staircase. She looked backwards as she went through the door, a little afraid someone would raise an alarm if they saw her. As the door slowly closed behind her, the music faded, and she thought she could hear other music, of a harsher and more brutal kind, coming from below—mechanical, dubstep maybe.

  Tilly tapped carefully down the stairs in her heels and came to a short, narrow hallway, at the end of which sat a burly bouncer—the biggest bouncer she had seen yet—on a bar stool. He was even bigger than Beast, and that was saying something.

  Beside him was a closed door.

  “Hi,” she said, timidly. “Um… I have to see my brother.”

  “Your name?”

  “Tilly. Mathilda Beeston.”

  The bouncer looked over a list he had on a small podium next to him. He flipped a page or two, then shook his head. “Not on the list. Sorry.”

  “But he’s my brother. Maybe you know him. Beast?”

  He smiled with gigantic, irregular teeth. “I know Beast all right, but I’m sorry, sweetheart. If you’re not on the list, you don’t get in.”

  He spread his fingers in apology. His hands looked big enough to crush skulls. Tilly wasn’t about to argue with him.

  Back on the main floor, she wondered what to do next. Not long ago, this club had seemed wild, exotic, even dangerous. But she felt instinctively now as if it was tame and safe compared to what must be just below them. Her imagination ran wild again and she was a little afraid. No, Beast wasn’t just removing pipes down there or installing toilets. What was he up to? And how could she get to him?

  Stymied, Tilly wandered up to the mezzanine where Erich and Frankie were still getting along famously. They were now physically much closer than they had been before she left. Tilly sat down near them and ordered a fuzzy navel, feeling awkward and in the way. She didn’t want to go down to the dance floor by herself, but Frankie was clearly occupied.

  She sipped on orange-peachy sweetness, watching Erich and Frankie out of the corner of her eye. Frankie laughed throatily when he leaned over to whisper something into her ear, giving him a hot look that was probably pitching tent poles in the jeans of all the men watching on the mezzanine of the club. But she only had eyes for one man, and Erich knew it. Tilly could tell. He had her on the hook and was slowly, carefully, reeling her friend in.

  The man clearly had the moves, but Tilly didn’t exactly get the appeal. It all felt a little too orchestrated for her taste. But she didn’t begrudge Frankie her fun. The girl had been through enough with Dante. She deserved a little attention after that fiasco.

  “Hey, guess what?” Frankie leaned in, talking over the music, right against Tilly’s ear. She smelled strongly of alcohol. “Erich owns this place!”

  “You do?” Tilly perked up, elbow on the table as she eyed Erich. “Well then you must know my brother! Conrad Beeston?”

  “Beast,” smiled Erich. “Of course. Everybody knows Beast here. I didn’t know he had a sister.”

  That comment only made Tilly more determined to find out what Beast was up to. It was like he had totally segregated this part of his life, whatever it was.

  “I wanted to see him,” she explained, putting on her best sad puppy-dog face. “But I couldn’t get past the bouncer downstairs.”

  Erich nodded. “That’s good. Ed was doing his job. Don’t worry about it. You’d need to fill out too much paperwork to go down there.”

  “Paperwork?” Tilly raised her eyebrows.

  Erich smiled mysteriously, turning to say something to Frankie. Tilly saw her friend’s expression, knew she was torn between Erich’s clearly desired attention and the fact that he had ignored Tilly’s desire to see her brother.

  “But—I need to see him,” Tilly insisted, leaning across Frankie so Erich couldn’t possibly ignore her. She was practically in Frankie’s lap. “Please?”

  “Wouldn’t it be okay, Erich?” asked Frankie with a winning smile. “He is her brother, after all.”

  “One moment.” Erich smiled indulgently, pulling out his cell phone. He made a quick call, nodded his head and put the phone away, turning to the girls. “It’s done. Just follow me.”

  The office he took them to turned out to be the very one Beast had locked Tilly in the day before. She recognized it instantly, silently mouthing this fact to Frankie while Erich had his back turned, getting some papers out of the desk drawer.

  Erich handed them each paper and pen.

  “These are waivers,” he told them. “No one goes down there without signing one.”

  It wasn’t the first time she’d signed something without looking at it—the Appl
e Terms and Conditions came to mind—but it gave her an uneasy feeling as she signed her name on the dotted line without really perusing the contents of the document at all.

  “What’s so dangerous down there, Erich?” Frankie asked, signing her name in a fat, loopy scrawl. She had the signature of a twelve-year-old girl. Tilly noticed that Frankie was making a point of using Erich’s name as much as possible. It was something she did whenever she was really interested in a guy and Tilly found it annoying.

  Erich merely smiled.

  Then he motioned them out of the office, leading them downstairs.

  Chapter 5

  As the bouncer unlocked the door Tilly had been denied access to just a few minutes earlier, Erich smiled as if telling them a joke. “We’re quite proud of this place. We call it the Bottom Floor. Come in, come in, don’t be shy. I’m sure you’ll enjoy yourselves.”

  “The Bottom Floor,” Tilly mused, feeling Frankie squeeze her hand. Hers were cold. “That makes sense.”

  Erich smiled, nodding to himself.

  He led them down a narrow hallway toward a much larger room. Tilly could definitely identify the music as dubstep now—buzzy and dark, rubbery and electronic. The rhythms shook Tilly’s body, even though the music wasn’t loud. She smelled oil and citrus, like when she went in to have a massage.

  Erich talked to them about the club, but he was really talking to Frankie. Her friend let go of her hand, letting Erich take her arm. Frankie hung onto his every word, and Tilly should have been paying attention to what he was saying, but the look on Frankie’s face bothered her. Tilly thought that, when she had the chance, she might caution her friend to go a little more slowly. Frankie had a tendency to go crazy over a guy way too fast.

  Erich seemed nice enough, but they’d only known him for about an hour.

  At the end of the long, narrow hallway they entered a larger room. It was a secret bar, Tilly realized, as they stepped into the crowd. The pace was just not quite so frenetic as upstairs.

  But what struck Tilly—and confused her—was the way people were dressed.

  Or not dressed.

  This was nothing like the club upstairs.

  Her very first impression came from a woman she saw from behind dressed in what was clearly a Playboy bunny suit. My God, thought Tilly, have they reproduced Hugh Heffner down here? I mean, the bunny costume was kind of cute, she thought, but wasn’t all that kind of sexist? Then Tilly noticed the bunny suit was made of latex, which she thought was kind of racy even for a Playboy bunny. At that point the woman turned towards a large, muscular man wearing nothing but tiny leather shorts—with not so tiny contents—and some kind of leather harness over his torso. Tilly now saw the woman in profile and realized with a shock she had a large, red ball gag stuffed in her mouth. It seemed to be strapped around her head. The man looked down at her commandingly and took her hand. They went out onto the dance floor.

  And that was only the beginning.

  The whole room was filled with leather, latex, and a lot of shockingly naked flesh. Straps, buckles, harnesses, chains, gigantic monster platform boots, belts, corsets, riding gear, all these things crossed her field of vision. She thought of Blade Runner again, and then the remake of Total Recall. Could there by a triple breasted sex worker nearby?

  Perhaps what was most striking was a shirtless dark-skinned man in jodhpurs and riding boots. Or rather, he was not the most striking thing—though he was himself quite imposing—it was who was at the end of the reins he was holding that startled Tilly.

  She was the tallest creature in the room—black latex cat suit head to foot, huge breasts that looked like they were inflated over a tight-laced leather corset covered with straps and buckles. As her broad hips moved lazily and she moved one foot forward, Tilly noticed with a shock that it was actually a hoof. The woman was wearing boots that were actually horse hooves. Likewise, she had hoof gloves—if that’s what they were called—over her hands. There were straps and harnesses all about her, and a bit and bridle in the realistic latex horse head mask she was sealed inside. There was a great red plume mounted on her horse head.

  “Sweet mother of...” said Tilly, who was not usually prone to religious exclamations. The place struck her as being like nothing so much as a kind of evil zoo.

  But what really sent Tilly over the edge, what disturbed her most, was a naked man by a table on all fours, with a leather collar around his neck and a kind of leather dog mask over his head. He was posed there in a docile way, while a chain ran from his collar to the hand of a woman sitting at the table. She was talking to two other women and a man and wore red leather pants and a black leather corset over a flowing white shirt. She smoked a cigarette in a holder and her hair was done in what Tilly would later learn was Betty Page style, though at that moment she had never heard of Betty Page.

  As the woman talked, from time to time, she would take a bit of food from the plate on her table and almost absent-mindedly hand-feed the dog-man on the floor at her side.

  Tilly remembered the dog chain she had seen amongst her brother’s purchases from the hardware store, the dog collar in the office desk...

  Tilly was completely astonished.

  There was no lack of naked butts, both male and female, leather chaps, riding crops, and all shapes and sizes of people sporting neck corsets, hoods, handcuffs, and ropes.

  Then Tilly looked a little further, to the far wall of the dark club. Lining the wall were alternating human sized vertical cages and “X” beams. People were in the cages and on the X beams. One woman on an X was being flogged by a man, while two other women looked on. One had a drink in her hand while the other seemed to be reaching up the back of her pleated leather skirt to stroke her intimately.

  It was like a scene out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. Tilly remembered that medieval artist clearly from the short fine arts course she had taken as an elective while getting her business degree. His paintings were strange, disjointed, surreal. This place was a medieval nightmare, and Tilly felt sick and dizzy. She knew it wasn’t the alcohol. She hadn’t had that much to drink.

  There was a voice in her ear. “Are you all right?”

  It was Erich, smiling at her knowingly. “Some people get a little dizzy the first time. With some, it’s fear and revulsion, and with others it’s just good old fashioned lust. Sometimes it’s a little of both.”

  “I... ah... I just have to go to the bathroom,” she lied. She didn’t think he believed her for a moment. She knew her shock must show on her face.

  Erich pointed the way, and Frankie, looking concerned, asked Tilly if she wanted her to accompany her.

  “No, no, I’ll be right back,” Tilly assured her, trying to put on a brave face. Frankie didn’t even look phased by the strange sexual context they’d suddenly walked into, but she probably just wanted to look sophisticated in front of Erich.

  Erich and Frankie walked towards an empty table, Erich pointing at it for Tilly’s benefit so she’d know where they were when she got back and she nodded, waving to them.

  Then she practically ran to the bathroom, suppressing the urge to put her hand over her mouth. Not out of revulsion exactly—more because she was so utterly shocked. She vaguely noticed the icon on the door of the women’s room was a full, majestic-looking figure, squatting with her hands on her knees, spreading them wide apart.

  She blinked at it, stopping, stunned.

  Oh God, where am I?

  Pushing the door timidly open, she thought, please let there just be the normal, natural bodily functions going on behind this door...

  Even in her panic, Tilly avoided the first, larger stall—for the handicapped—just in case someone might need it. But the next stall was the same. And the next. All the stalls were unusually large.

  Tilly hurriedly locked herself into one. She found herself shaking, trying not to freak out too much. What the hell was going on out there? In the bathroom’s oasis of sanity, everything seemed to be normal. She heard the ge
ntle hiss of plumbing. Someone turned the water on and off. Paper towel was yanked out of a dispenser. There was a rustling sound and the creak of a garbage can lid. A pair of heels tapped across the ceramic floor, the door opened and closed.

  Oh please, Tilly pleaded silently, don’t let some kind of dog woman come crawling in under the stall door.

  She didn’t understand this place, just like she hadn’t understood Bosch’s paintings. At least, at first. But it was strange, she found, the more you looked at those images, even if you felt crazy thinking it, the saner they appeared. Even when things were bent, twisted, they somehow became real. Maybe this place was like that?

  Her mind was filled with imagery. Leather and latex. Straps and gags and harnesses. Oh my! And so much flesh! The last time she’d seen anything even remotely like it, she’d gone with Frankie to a midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. But this place was the Olympics compared to the kiddie-pool of something like Rocky Horror, where she saw men wearing lipstick and corsets and holding newspapers over their heads.