Nightmare Messiah

Monday IV

         Gage found nothing about the party relaxing. When he returned to the parlor he still felt out of place. Isaac and Maddy were having no problems at all mingling with the crowd, chit-chatting and slipping business cards into pockets and purses. Gage circled the crowd like a little boy at a holiday gathering, listening to all the grown-ups talk about subjects that didn’t make any sense to him whatsoever. He smiled and he nodded and he let people talk his ear off every now and then. After three glasses of champagne, a glass of cognac, and a glass of whiskey he had confiscated from the bar, he was only partially relaxed. His tolerance for alcohol had built up over the years. It took a lot to get him drunk. After an hour he was only mildly numb, and that feeling did nothing to defeat the binding sensation of being trapped. He felt like the only rabbit in a den full of foxes, and only one of them was sizing him up as a potential meal.
         After an hour, he followed Gideon Langston’s instructions. He stepped out of the crowded parlor, into the hall, and took the first flight of stairs on the left. It didn’t really matter which flight of stairs he took, he realized. Both of them lead up to the second level that looked down over the front foyer. He followed the hall to the left, passed by several doors without wondering what was behind them, and into the last room at the end as instructed. There he found Isaac Delaney pretending to be interested in the collection of books on shelves that were a part of the very walls. The room was an office of some sort, probably where Gideon Langston did his finances and kept everything in paper-filed order. It reminded Gage of a room that should have a special book on the wall that when tugged on opened a secret passage-way, something he had seen in movies of all sorts.
         Directly across from the door was a desk, a large mahogany desk with a green rectangular lamp and a large square of green velvet centered on top. The design of the room itself was far too typical of what anyone could imagine a rich bachelor to have. It all seemed rather cliché actually. The gold box sitting on the desk he suspected was full of cuban cigars. That would have made the entire scene picture perfect, particularly if Gideon had been sitting in the leather chair behind it cutting off the end of a cigar and lighting it. But Gideon wasn’t present when he arrived.
         Isaac turned to smile at the boy when he stepped into the room. He was holding a glass of champagne in one hand that Gage imagined was the same glass he’d picked up an hour earlier. Everything Isaac ever did was all for show. “I half expected him to pick Maddy,” he said, stepping closer to the boy. “She’s been showing amazing confidence tonight, and I was convinced she had him hooked. But then he asked me about you.”
         “And you told him he could find me on the balcony, right?”
         “That he did,” said another voice. Gideon Langston stepped into the room only a few minutes behind his own schedule. He smiled wickedly and crossed over to the desk. He reached under the desk for something that Gage hadn’t bothered to notice, a black briefcase. The man set the briefcase down on top of the desk and opened it. Then he turned it around to show them both the stack of bills arranged neatly inside. Gideon wasted no time in getting down directly to business. “Fifty thousand dollars,” he informed them both. “In small bills.”
         If Gage had a drink on hand he would have choked taking a sip just then. He glanced at Isaac and noticed that he was just as stunned as Gage was himself. Gage had never seen the man’s eyes widen that significantly before. Fifty thousand dollars was a lot of money, too much to pay for a whore for one night! They both looked back at Gideon, too astounded to speak. Gideon’s lips peeled back in a savage grin. “Fifty thousand dollars for one week,” he clarified.
         Holy shit! One week? No one had ever bought Gage for any longer than a night, and they never paid nowhere near that much. He tried to do some quick math in his head. Fifty thousand dollars was what he generally made in thirty or fifty days, a month or more, never in a single week. He and Isaac were both speechless still.
         “I want him for one week. Seven days. If I’m pleased with his services in those seven days, I’ll give you another fifty thousand at the end of the week.” Isaac did choke, on his champagne. Gideon only smiled and shut the briefcase with a click.
         Gage was horrified by the offer suddenly. His imagination ran wild with all manner of possibilities consisting of what Gideon Langston might want him to do. Some people had had him do some strange things before, but never for a hundred thousand dollars and that long a period of time. He started to think, then, that his previous assessment of this man hurting him was justified. He immediately pictured Gideon Langston as some sort of sadistic psychopath. His spinal chord felt as if it became encased in ice. Then Isaac spoke, and that chilling sensation smothered him, instantly sobered him.
         “That sounds like a fair arrangement,” he said. Fair? Hell. It was more than fair. It was the best business deal Isaac Delaney had ever made. None of his whores had ever banked in that much money!
         “Good,” said Gideon. He turned the briefcase on the desk and picked it up by the handle. After stepping out from behind the desk, he walked over to offer the case to Isaac with a pleased smile. It was an expression that belonged on the face of a butcher who was preparing to cut apart and section a freshly killed cow. “Thank you for coming, Mr. Delaney. We’ll see you at the end of the week.”
         Isaac took the case by the handle and tipped his head in a nod to the man. That was the quickest agreement he had ever seen made. “Thank you, Mr. Langston,” he said, emphasizing the you delightedly. Gage didn’t even want to think of what Isaac had planned for that much money, though he suspected he wouldn’t see very much of it himself. Isaac turned then and walked toward the door. There was no sense in him sticking around. He paused, though, to whisper confidingly to the boy before he departed entirely. “Make me proud, Gage baby, and half of this will be yours.”
         Half? Holy shit! Was Isaac serious? Did he mean half of the fifty or half of the hundred? Either way, that was a shit load of money, more than the precentage he was used to. He found himself incapable of speaking at all and only watched as Isaac Delaney stepped out the door and into the hall. He watched the man, his pimp, disappear down the stairs at the end. That was the last he was going to see of Isaac Delaney for an entire week. Seven days! Frozen dread landed in his gut and kept him rooted to the floor, staring at the empty space through the door at the end of the hall. He needed a cigarette.
         “Nervous?” That single word question from Gideon had the boy turning quickly to look at him. For a moment he had forgotten the man was there, or maybe had been trying to forget he was there. A swiftly shivering breath slipped over his lips as the subconscious but obvious answer. Gideon smiled still and stepped over to a cabinet that was part of the book wall. Opening it up, Gage noticed that the cabinet acted as a small wetbar. There were a few unlabeled bottles of liquor inside and snifters. “Cognac?” he asked without waiting for an answer. He poured the amber liquid into one of the glasses and turned back to hand it over to the boy.
         Gage reached shakilly to take the glass from the man. He was still in shock and couldn’t control his nerves. A hundred thousand dollars! “Th-thank you,” he managed to whisper. He would’ve preferred whiskey, but his preferences weren’t of any importance now. He’d just been bought for fifty thousand dollars, maybe a hundred. Now wasn’t the time to be himself. Now he could only be what Gideon Langston wanted him to be, and he trembled thinking about what that might be.
         “You’re welcome,” Gideon replied. He talked as if they were simply two men standing in a room discussing sports or the weather. Gage couldn’t detect anything seductive or deceptive about the man, but that only made him more uneasy. “I’m sorry if I startled you, Gage. I imagine you’ve never been bought for that much money? Let alone for longer than a single night.” There was a cushioned chair in the corner of the room. Gideon pulled it over in front of the desk. “Sit down and relax. You look like you’re going to fall apart on me. We can’t have that, now can we?”
         It was that obvious. Gage felt like he was going to fall apart. He was trembling too hard and he couldn’t control it. He sucked in a shivering breath and nodded. It was all he could manage to do, nod. It took quite a bit of effort, but he did also manage to step over to the chair and sink down into it. Only when he was sitting down did he realize how dizzy he’d become. “N-no,” he said, sounding like an idiot child that someone had dressed up in a nice suit and taken to a party. “No I haven’t. Thank you.”
         Gideon smiled and stepped around to lean against the front of the desk, sort of perched on the edge of it with his arms crossed casually over his chest. “I want you to be as comfortable here as you would be anywhere else, Gage. Make yourself at home. There’s a room set up for you at the other end of the hall. You’ll have your own room, your own bathroom, and fresh clothes every day. I’m sure you’ll think of it as a small apartment when you see it.” The man chuckled quietly.
         “I’m sorry,” Gage said. Another shivering breath slipped out on the exhale. “I am nervous, yes.” What he didn’t say is that he’d never been this nervous before, except perhaps for the first time he’d been dressed up and sold for an evening of sex with a strange man. That had been four years ago. He should have been used to it by now.
         Again Gideon chuckled. There was something frighteningly calming about his entire demeanor. Gage almost felt as if the man were reading his mind. Was he that easy to read? “Don’t be,” the man said reassuringly. “Do you smoke?”
         There again he felt as if his mind were being read. Gage looked up and blinked, watched the man lean back to procure a large glass ashtray out of a desk drawer. He set it on the edge of the desk closest to Gage and only continued to smile. “I do,” Gage said. “You don’t mind?”
         “Not at all.”
         That was a relief. At least he could get his nerves calmed down somewhat. He set the glass of cognac on the desk and reached into his suit jacket to pull out the pack of smokes he had bought earlier with the money Isaac had given him. While Gage peeled away the wrapper and pulled out a cigarette, Gideon leaned back again to retrieve an expensive lighter from the same drawer. It was a thin lighter that looked more like a pen than an actual lighter. Gideon flipped open the lid and pressed a button on the side that looked like a shirt clip. Gage pressed the cigarette between his lips and Gideon lit it for him. He drew in a deep breath of the cancerous smoke and held it in his lungs for several long seconds. When he exhaled, he was pleased to feel a slight relief of tension tingle through his veins. “Thanks,” he said, sounding calmer.
         “Think nothing of it,” Gideon said, closing up the pen lighter and tucking it into his suit jacket. “Most people probably prefer you not to smoke I’m guessing?”
         Gage actually managed to smile, and he nodded with a very short and abrupt chuckle that bled into the drifting smoke. “No,” he said. “I usually save it for afterwards. When they’re sleeping.”
         “When you leave them.” The man nodded as if he understood the boy’s situation completely. “You’ll be staying with me for an entire week, Gage. As I said, I want you to be comfortable. I want you to do what you would normally do when you aren’t in the company of a stranger using you for sex.”
         Gage had started to wonder if Gideon Langston even intended on having sex with him at all in the next seven days. That statement verified that it was likely he did. He shouldn’t expect anything else but sex, but certainly there’d be other things to do in the times in between. Seven days. He sucked in another breath of smoke and only nodded to indicate that he understood. The exhale of those cancerous fumes mingled into another sigh. As addictive and unhealthy as smoking was, it really did help calm his nerves significantly.
         “While you’re staying with me, I am going to ask that you stay upstairs, though. Unless, of course, I say otherwise.” So there were stipulations. Gage’s suspicions were confirmed when he heard that. “You probably never heard of me until tonight, but I’m a very important man in this area. I have a lot of important guests come to visit me. I’m sure you understand why it’s imperitive for you to stay out of sight.”
         Gage chuckled half-heartedly and nodded. “Oh yeah,” he said. “The tabloids would probably have a field day if they found out Gideon Langston had a strange boy living in his house with him, right?”
         Gideon grinned appreciatively and nodded as well. “I’m glad you understand. That’s exactly right. For my sake, and for yours, it’s best that you stay out of the limelight.” The man tapped the corner of the ashtray, and Gage realized that his cigarette was about ready to drift ash on the rug. He smirked and tapped the bar of ash out into the receptacle as silently instructed, then pulled in another breath. “Speaking of important guests,” the man continued. “There are quite a few waiting for me downstairs. Now, I know they’ve seen you wandering about, so tonight you’re free to join them again and mingle as you’ve been doing before. If you like.”
         With another nod, Gage sucked in the last dregs of nicotine he could get from the cigarette and leaned to smash it out in the ashtray. On the exhale, he lifted the glass of cognac and took a long drink. He was finally starting to feel more at ease now that he’d had a cigarette and the alcohol in his system was being processed. Maybe after another drink or two he’d be drunk enough to not be nervous and concerned about the entire arrangement.
         “The party will probably continue for several hours hours,” Gideon said, continuing on without much of a pause at all. “They usually drag on into the early hours of the morning. I throw a lot of parties. Sometimes every night. You don’t have to be present for all of them, but you’re more than welcome to be. If anyone asks, as I expect they will, simply tell them you’re a friend visiting from out of town helping me get my finances in order. You can do that can’t you?”
         “Of course,” Gage replied. He even grinned with a sense of pride. Acting, lying, playing a part. That was all part of the game, part of the trade, the business. It’s what he did best.
         “Good. Now here’s what I want you to do tonight.” Gideon pushed away from the desk and stood. “Whether you decide to go back downstairs and mingle or not, at three o’clock I want you to be in your room. From here, walk down the hall to the opposite end. It’s the last door on the lefthand side next to my room. Yours is decorated in neutral colors, and there’s a terrace straight through the sitting area. At three o’clock I want you to take a bath. The bathroom’s to the left. You’ll see it.”
         “You want me to take a bath,” Gage repeated, interrupting the man.
         Gideon smiled. He wasn’t at all perturbed by the interruption. “Yes,” he said. “I want you to take a bath and I don’t want you to dry off when you get out. At three thirty, I’ll meet you in your room. Be waiting for me.”
         A bath. Don’t dry off. It could have been much worse than that. Gage only nodded again. Still, Gideon smiled. He stepped toward the door in preparatin to leave, but he stopped as if he had forgotten to tell the boy something. “Oh. You’ll also find a wetbar in your room. If there’s anything you want specifically other than cognac, let Julia know.”
         “Julia?” Gage almost choked on his cognac!
         “She’s my butler you might say. My more permanent servant.” Gideon bared his teeth in that alarmingly dual-sided way, the expression that made him look lethal and alluring at the same time. “She speaks rather highly of you, Gage. It was her recommendation that had me chosing you instead of Madeline.” The man only lingered for another second longer in silence. “I’ll see you in a few hours.” Then he turned and left Gage alone in the office.
         Gage stared at the glass of cognac in his grasp with utter disbelief. He couldn’t believe it. No wonder he had felt so displaced all evening long. Julia, the mystery girl, the girl with the voice that created silence, the girl he had become inescapably enamored with. She worked for Gideon Langston! Could things get any worse? He needed another cigarette.