Chapter Twelve
Darkness in The Viaduct
The man on the door at The Viaduct gave them wristbands, a drinks token and a clear plastic bag for their clothes. “You can undress in there,” he said with a turn of the mouth that was part friendly, part lascivious.
Marc and Jason stepped through a doorway into a tiny changing area. It had a low ceiling and two wooden benches. The floors were bare. The maximum dress code for the night was underwear, but the two men in front of them who handed their clothes bag over to the attendant were naked apart from their shoes. One of them looked around twenty, with a slim, pale-skinned body and a flat arse. The other was stocky, fiftyish and balding. His cock was on the small side but when he turned around he had an attractively huge backside.
Jason gave Marc a gentle nudge. “It’s not too late to go back and I’ll catch up with you later.”
Marc ignored the remark. He took off his jacket and pulled his T-shirt straight over his head. He might be na?ve about the world of sex clubs and exhibitionism, but he was no prude. Besides, he exercised enough to keep himself in shape. Better than the average man his age. He wasn’t about to go naked like those other men, but he wouldn’t shirk away either.
“Okay, then.” Jason took off his own jacket and sat to remove his shoes.
Marc stripped to his briefs and put his shoes back on. He was pleased with the underwear he’d chosen, they fit well and supported him in all the right places, but when Jason took off his jeans to reveal a black jockstrap with red piping around the groin, Marc suddenly felt very overdressed.
Jason stooped to stuff his clothes in the bag, giving Marc a pleasing view of his fulsome arse. Fuck . Marc’s pulse raced again. No wonder Jason liked to wear jockstraps so much. With a butt like that, Marc would show it off as much as he could too. Jason straightened and caught him looking. Their gazes locked and held for a moment.
Marc swallowed and found his voice. “Ready?”
“Let’s do it.”
They checked in their clothes and headed into the main bar.
The Viaduct was situated in the cellars beneath Old Elvet Bridge. It was a network of vaulted rooms that had been used as warehouses before being turned into a club. Marc remembered reading an article from when it had first opened. The vaults had stood idle for decades, used only for tourist ghost walks, before they’d been repurposed ten or eleven years ago. There were three levels to the building, but as he walked into the ground floor bar, Marc struggled to imagine what must go on in the upper rooms .
Though it wasn’t yet packed, he figured it would be soon. Low blue lighting illuminated a horde of bodies, most of whom had flouted the underwear code in favour of going fully naked. A lot of the men were on their own, though some pairings had already occurred on the edges of the room. The stocky guy who had arrived before them had already struck lucky with a younger black man who had the frame of a rugby player. He had his tongue down the throat of the older man and both of his hands clamped firmly on those wonderful buttocks. The men who had attained erections already made no attempt to conceal them. There were screens on the walls, playing porn, though no one paid them much attention. Why would they, with so much beautiful raw flesh all around?
Techno music blasted throughout.
Jason put his hand on Marc’s waist. The touch sent sparks all through his body. Jason leaned into him. “You okay?” he had to talk straight into Marc’s ear to be heard.
“I think so. Maybe we should get a drink and find this guy Tyrone.” With so many men in here, he wondered how they would ever find anyone.
“Come on then.”
Jason edged them towards the bar. Marc was glad that Jason didn’t take his hand away from his waist until they were in position. The entry fee had included a drink. Jason took Marc’s token and caught the eye of a bartender. He was a man in his late twenties, white, blond and heavily tattooed. Not Tyrone. Jason had shown Marc a screen shot of the man they were looking for before they arrived. He was younger, around twenty-four, with dark hair and a mean expression. The bartender wore a black G-string. Marc wondered at the hygiene of such an outfit when Jason asked him for two beers.
There was another man working the bar, but he was older. A heavy-set bear in backless trunks. He had a grizzly paw tattoo on his bare arse.
The bartender returned with the drinks. Before handing over the tokens, Jason leaned across the bar and yelled, “Is Tyrone working tonight?”
The bartender looked confused. “Who?”
“Tyrone Lucas.”
“Never heard of him.”
“I was told he works here.”
The bartender turned down his mouth. “Maybe one of the other nights.” He yelled something to the bear that Marc could not hear.
The bear finished the order he was serving and came over. Jason repeated the question.
The man’s face was unimpressed. “Does he owe you money?”
“No. I just need to speak to him.”
“He rip you off?”
Marc leaned nearer to hear what was said.
“It’s nothing like that. I’m an investigator. I need to ask him about someone else. Tyrone’s not in any trouble. I just need his help.”
The man took in Jason’s bare chest and smiled wickedly. “An investigator? Never seen one like you before.”
“Well,” Jason asked. “Does he work here?”
The man scratched his chin, giving it some thought. “Ah, fuck it,” he said at last. He gestured to the hatch at the end of the bar. He stepped out where he could speak to them without shouting so much. “He might not be in trouble with you, but the boy is trouble himself.”
“So, he does work here?”
“Not anymore. I fired him last month. I suspected he was thieving. A lot of the staff did. A bottle of beer here and there, I can turn a blind eye to that. And I’m sure that little bastard had his hand in the till. But one of the customers complained that he was hustling them for money. A couple more told me he was dealing on the premises. I can’t have that. The council are looking for the slightest excuse to close us down. If we get done for dealing, then that’s it. Licence cancelled. A scrawny little bastard like him doesn’t give a fuck about the bigger picture. He just cares about himself.”
As he spoke, Marc caught the way the man’s eyes skimmed over Jason’s body, checking him out. It was obvious that he fancied him. Jason seemed to notice too and leaned into him. “I don’t suppose you could help me out and tell me where I could find him?”
“Give you his address, you mean? That would be another breach I could be shut down for. Sorry, handsome. You’re hot, but not enough for me to break the law.” He hesitated a moment, before reaching behind the counter and bringing out a mobile phone. He reached again for a note pad and pencil. “But fuck it, I owe that little shit nothing. I’ll give you his phone number. You can call him and track him down from there. But don’t tell him you’re a detective, he’ll block you. Let him think that there’s something in it for him first. Then he’ll speak to you. Money is the fastest way to that fucker’s stony heart.”
“What do you think?” Marc asked when they had moved away from the bar .
Jason folded the note with Tyrone’s number on it and tucked it inside his shoe. “I think I want to speak to Tyrone even more now. The big guy’s story tallies with what Roaul told me about Theo and Tyrone arguing over his fee.”
“And the phone number?”
“Worth a call. He’s already told me to get fucked on Messenger, but I might be able to appeal to his nicer instincts over the phone.”
Marc rolled his eyes. The more he heard about this guy, the worse he became. A hustler, a thief and a drug dealer. Could he add killer to that list crimes? Was Tyrone the kind of person to steal a car and turn his brother down over their earnings? And to stab Dan Blumel at the gym in cold blood?
“You need to be more careful, whatever you do,” he said to Jason. “This is getting shadier than I imagined.”
Jason gave him a reassuring pat and swigged his beer. “I’m always careful. Except when I allow you to talk me into letting you tag along with me. When I finally track down Tyrone, that won’t be happening.”
As Jason tipped his head back to drink, Marc couldn’t resist an illicit scan of his hairy chest and tight belly. That body was insane. In room full of naked men, Jason was hotter than any of them.
Marc took a swallow of his own drink. People continued to pour in the front door, though the bar didn’t seem any busier than it was before. He was pleased to see a handful of other guys had kept their underpants on, so he didn’t feel completely on his own about that. A few more wore jockstraps or backless briefs, but the majority of the customers were fully nude apart from their shoes .
“That’s as much as we’re going to learn from this place,” Jason said. “Why don’t we get dressed and call it a night?”
Marc hesitated and Jason picked up on it immediately.
“You want to stay?” Jason’s lips twitched in amusement.
Marc was glad that the redness in his face would not show under the blue lights. “We’ve already paid the door charge and stripped off. It can’t hurt to stay a while and find out what this place is really about.”
“Okay.”
“Theo was a regular here. I want to find out what he liked about the place…so I can understand him better.”
“If you’re sure.”
“I am.”
“I’ll leave you to it then.”
“No.” The word came out too loud. Too panicked. “Stay with me, please. Just for ten minutes, while I look around. Then we can leave.”
Jason’s eyes twinkled in the artificial light. “Why don’t we explore the place together?”
A narrow set of stone steps led to the first floor. Marc allowed Jason to show him the way. He watched his fine, hairy arse as he climbed in front of him. That jockstrap was such a simple thing, but it was outrageously sexual on a body like Jason’s. Marc adjusted his hard on in his briefs, laying it along his hip to be less obvious.
The entire building smelled of damp. However thick the stone walls were, they held the clammy history of hundreds of years. He couldn’t remember the exact age but was sure the bridge dated back to the late seventeen-hundreds. The builders who had toiled on its construction all that time ago couldn’t have imagined what it would be used for now.
On the next level, the light changed from blue to red. Marc realised why it was not as busy downstairs as it should have been given the number of men who came through the door. He couldn’t count how many there were in here, but the scent of their sweat, combined with poppers and sex, almost overpowered the dampness.
It took a few moments for his brain to catch up and make sense of what he was looking at. The main floor was one large play area. There were several slings, all of which were occupied by naked men getting their arses filled. The rattle of chains and the crack of flesh against flesh transcended the obligatory techno music. A man in his thirties with the honed body of an Olympic athlete was bent across a leather bench. His wrists and ankles were bound to all four legs of the bench. His muscles glistened with sweat as they took up the strain of the position. His arse was spread and open, his cock and balls had been pulled down to rest against the edge of the counter while a slightly built Asian man worked him over with his hand, alternating slaps between his butt cheeks and his genitals.
“Jesus,” Marc gasped as he realised what was happening.
“I tried to warn you,” Jason said in his ear. “This place is a lot.”
He wasn’t kidding.
The heat was intense. It had to be from all those bodies. Jason took Marc by the wrist and led him onwards. “You wanted to see what it was all about. Well, this is it. ”
A young blond man was laid out on some kind of vinyl-covered table, which spun like a lazy Susan turntable. His ankles rested on the shoulders of a muscle bear, who was giving it to his arse with long, well-controlled strokes. The boy’s mouth was filled with the dick of a handsome Hispanic man. The man licked his lips in ecstasy. Marc could clearly see the bulge in the boy’s throat with each inward thrust. And then both men pulled out of him and spun the turntable to swap his arsehole and mouth.
It was impossible not to think of Theo on that table. And as soon as the image was in his head, Marc wanted rid of it. He knew his brother would have revelled in every base pleasure The Viaduct had to offer, but he didn’t have to like the idea.
Jason seemed to sense his discomfort and led him away.
His was aware of people watching them wherever they went and understood why. They might be in their thirties and forties, but for the men in here, they were fresh meat.
The heat and the smells intensified as they wandered deeper into the vaults. Jason guided him down a passage with a low ceiling. Along one wall was a series of small, separate arched rooms. Within each one was a plastic-covered booth. Every room was occupied by groups of two, three or four. He saw blow jobs, fucking, rimming, spanking. In one room a man lay on his back while another cleaned his feet with his tongue. The corridor was thronged with watchers and people waiting to take their turn.
At the end of the corridor stood a man, naked except for a black leather mask and boots. He had a well-built, powerful physique, but it was not his body that drew Marc’s attention, it was the mask. It was like a prop from a horror film. The soft leather mask covered his entire head and face. In place of the mouth was an open zipper. Sharp eyes peered from two narrow slits. They bore into Marc as they approached and caused a shudder. The man wet his lips and gripped his substantial cock at the base, causing veins to pop along its length.
If the effect was intended to be arousing, it had the opposite outcome. He was like a creature from a nightmare, an agent from hell.
Marc stopped and gripped Jason’s wrist before they could go any further. Jason turned to him.
“Everything okay?” he mouthed.
“Let’s go back,” Marc said. Despite everything he had seen, the stranger in the mask had freaked him out the most.
In the main room, he saw the stairs that led to the next floor.
“What’s up there?” he asked.
Jason drew level. His hand came around Marc’s waist. “More of the same. Only it’s darker up there. Pitch black in some areas.”
Despite the heat, he shuddered. “I don’t think I need to see that.”
“No,” said Jason. “I don’t think so either. You ready to go?”
“I am.”
As they headed for the stairs, he took a last look around. The slings were still in action. The athlete was getting his balls slapped on the bench and the blond boy was still turning on the lazy Susan. Marc struggled to make much sense of it. It was far removed from his own experiences of sex and the things that turned him on. There was a darkness here he did not understand.
He had to adjust his cock again as he followed Jason to the exit.
Despite everything, he was harder than ever.