Neon Noir

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  The satisfied grin on that lantern jaw helped me gum down the rubbery stalks. Was I supposed to be his dependent? To share this marginal existence? Because I was what? Convenient? Or female?

  My sympathies aside, this guy had to learn that I was not the swoop-up-able female of fiction and fable. Now that we weren’t swinging around the casino and elevator shaft, I had time to examine his unlovely form. That’s when I realized that my kidnapper was just that, a creature of fiction and film. He’d been so grimy and I’d been snatched so fast I hadn’t realized I was dealing with a CinSim, a character from a movie given an extended life after being melded with the “canvas” of a zombie body.

  His one…uh, eye and skin-tones and clothing were not just gray, but shades of cinematic black and white. My earlier “hunch” had been subconscious, but on the track.

  Even as I realized this, I felt a cold snakelike uncoiling at my ankles. My snazzy silver shoe laces were undoing themselves.

  This was not an unheard-of possibility. I was the unwilling possessor of a shape-shifting silver familiar.

  My version of a sidekick-cum-unshakable personal demon made like twin garter snakes and twined free of my shoes’ lacing holes. The familiar relished the drama of being spectacularly present as much as it enjoyed being overlooked at times. Kinda like any private eye since Sherlock Holmes.

  It could take any silver form from sterling to steel, but it never detached itself from my body. Usually it was content to be a fine-chained ankle bracelet when I was sleeping. When I was in danger, it was more adventuresome.

  Now its twofold form coiled up between my rustling skirt folds and into my curled palms, gaining warmth and a supple strength from the blood pounding in my veins.

  I watched a descending elevator glide to touch rock bottom just forty feet from the creature’s makeshift camp.

  My hands swung out in a seed-sowing gesture, casting and releasing the silver familiar into a fifty-foot lariat lashing out to mate with a momentarily still elevator cable.

  Within the coiled tension of my fisted hands, the links of silver shortened and pulled me atop the elevator car like a giant slingshot. I’d become used to the familiar’s sudden shape-shifting, and was glad the only witness to the operation remained behind.

  I gazed down ten feet at a jumping Rumplestiltskin chattering away like Cheetah, Tarzan’s movie chimp co-star. Only from above could I see that my kidnapper hadn’t been an ape or a monkey, but a man. A hunchback. The Hunchback, I realized.

  Now I could translate the sounds he’d chortled from high in the hotel atrium while I’d been hefted over his ungainly head like a trophy. I had a silent movie script to go by, where the word had been shown onscreen. Not “Thank you very,” but “Sanc-tu-ary!”

  That’s the word the Hunchback of Notre Dame had shouted as he swung the kind-hearted gypsy girl, Esmeralda, away from the stake where she’d be burned as a witch and up, up, up…to the gargoyle-guarded stone heights of the famed Paris cathedral. There the hunchback was the strong but deformed and humble bell-ringer. There an innocent scapegoat like Esmeralda could find a triumphant “sanctuary” from the ignorant mob on the church grounds below.

  So. This CinSim had mistaken the crowd of pushy tourists for a rioting mob and me in my full-skirted cocktail dress for Esmeralda.

  I could think of only two black-and-white film era CinSim hunchbacks of Notre Dame, both consummate actors, both not in the running for, and thus despising the Hollywood looks sweepstakes. One was Englishman Charles Laughton. The earlier, silent-film version had starred Lon Chaney, known as “the Man of a Thousand Faces.”

  Something about this bizarre situation was ringing a bell in my head besides the endless vocalizations above. The voice was now segueing from the powerful hymn of “Ave Maria” to the soaring, “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life”—which reminded me of my mission.

  Thrilled as I was to have actually relived one of the most iconic moments in the early film history, I had to escape this scenario and figure out why and how a woman with the voice of an angel would want to haunt a murderous old sinner like Cesar Cicereau. And what the Hunchback of Notre Dame had to do with it.

  I’d begun my escape swinging on a silver cord instead of a bell rope, and now was clinging atop a rapidly rising elevator car. Looking up, I saw enough cables to string a harp and a big dark flat nothing—the elevator shaft top—waiting to brain me.

  I wound the familiar’s shrinking silver cord around my palms. When I had just a garrote-length left, I looped it around the handle on the car’s rooftop emergency escape hatch and pulled…only I wanted in, not out.

  Moments later, just as the elevator shaft top loomed above like an iron hat, I jerked open the hatch to drop down into the brightly lit car, taking my weight on my bent knees. I straightened as the hatch overhead banged shut, smiling at the startled tourists into whose midst I’d so abruptly appeared.

  “Whew. What a wild private party on the penthouse level,” I complained. “Do not accept any of those slot machine invitations. It was ballistic.”

  They eyed me with mixed suspicion and envy.

  Meanwhile, I noticed the Muzak filling the plummeting car. More of that impossibly sugary soprano. What was she singing now? “Send in the Clowns?” No need to get personal!

  “Oh, that voice is unearthly,” a woman said as the elevator doors finally opened on the main floor.

  Yeah! Probably a ghost.

  At least I was back where I began, even though my laceless shoes were useless after my catapult atop the elevator car. At least my wrist was now wearing a silver charm bracelet dangling place-appropriate wolf heads.

  I decided to restart my investigation on the main floor. First, I made a limping detour down the shopping wing to a shoe store called Two Cool Tootsies. Considering myself one cool tootsie, I had to deal with the fact that my dressy spike heels were buckling sideways. So I charged a pair of Steve Madden leopard-print flats with a rose on the toes to Cicereau’s account.

  Unfortunately, the gushing saleswoman took me for Cicereau’s latest moll, not an employee whose wardrobe had suffered in his service

  “Such a shame about your mangled Jimmy Choos,” she cooed.

  I’d explained I’d caught one high heel in an elevator door and broke the second while wrenching the first loose.

  “Are you sure the boss will like you as well in flats?” she asked. “I hear he runs hot and cold.”

  “Oh, Cesar is quite a runner, but he dotes on anything that reminds him of dead Big Cats,” I said. “That old Starlight Lodge hunting urge, you know.”

  She shuddered as she rang up the new shoes. “I’ve heard what gets chased down by the pack at that place. Just stay on his safe side, honey. Cringing is good.”

  Shod again, I cruised the main entertainment area with a fresh eye. The building’s gigantic wooden tree architecture mimicked soaring Gothic cathedral columns. No wonder the Hunchback had replayed his heroic rescue scene here with me as a stand-in.

  Tourists strolled leaf-patterned parquet paths around forest scenes of ferns and flowering plants and thick clustered trees. The scale made you feel as small and helpless as a chipmunk skittering near the trickle of hidden streams, hearing the rustle of bird life in the leaves above. Sensing silently stalking wolves in the shadows. At least I did.

  I was glad to break into the brightness of a skylight-illuminated mountain village square with a half-timbered inn called “The Huntsman’s Haven” that broadcast scents of fresh-baked bread, beer, and bratwurst.

  A gypsy-wagon camp drew children to the tri-colored wagon ponies and juggling, knife-throwing, and fortune-telling attractions. I’m not an outdoorsy girl. One enforced summer at a mosquito-ridden Minnesota camp during my group home days had been enough for me.

  I really should check out the hotel’s theater stage. The Gehenna’s big contracted show starred Madrigal, the strong-man magician, and his creepy pair of female fey assistants. Picture two-foot high Barbie dolls with glitzy war
drobes, webs, and venom.

  My captor had been an escapee from an old silent movie. Had the Gehenna been adding new attractions?

  Sure enough. The slick marquee advertising Madrigal and his fey accomplices had a smaller satellite now, a film theater showing London After Dark.

  This was definitely a black-and-white silent film. As a vintage film junkie, I was drawn toward the marquee like a mesmerized bride-to-be of Dracula. This 1927 silent classic had been lost, burned in a fire in the sixties. How could London After Dark be shown here?

  Before I could get close enough to the booth to barter my shoes or my soul for a ticket—so much for refusing to carry a purse—a sinister figure, all in black, stepped into my path.

  He wore a top hat over a clownish, frizzled, chin-length hair-do that framed a vintage gray face with popping eyes and ebony-lipped mouth grinning to show every tooth filed into a point. I didn’t know whether to scream with laughter or fear, and aren’t those the yummiest theatrical moments of all?

  Spotting me, he spun with a demonic grimace and lifted the arms of his calf-length cape…to display the bat-winged spines visible underneath.

  Sinister or comic? Early films walked that very thin line. Sometimes life did too.

  Before I could interrogate this weird would-be Dracula, he turned to leave.

  “Wait!” I shouted, my voice lost in the echo chamber that is a casino concourse’s everyday clamor. Tourists love the sounds of crowds and action.

  The bizarre figure vanished behind a clot of fanny-pack-wearing sight-seers.

  Frustrated, I froze in place.

  “Don’t you look sooo darling, dear?” A grandmotherly tourist in a Jimmy Buffet T-shirt, Bermuda shorts, and varicose veins accosted me.

  “Love your vintage rag-doll look and Hello Bad Kitty shoes. Are you one of those living statues? You can’t fool me! Where’s the bratwurst bingo line?”

  I wordlessly pointed in the direction farthest from where I was standing, and the troop of seniors trekked on past.

  Yup, my freaky vampire vision had disappeared just as I’d been about to put a few bizarre pieces together. I was beginning to feel like Alice in a Wonderland of horror films. Since when had Cesar Cicereau’s Gehenna Hotel and Casino been anything but an old-style establishment with only one miserable Peter Lorre CinSim on site?

  Since before Sansouci had been sent to get me. And where was the handsome non-dog, anyway?

  I sighed, audibly, surprised when a monocled English gentleman in a tweed suit, bearing a silver-headed cane, stopped to address me.

  “Pardon me, miss. Perhaps you can help me catch and unmask a foul vampire. I’m a Scotland Yard detective, but I’m quite lost among all these odd, loud, milling people.”

  Would Sherlock Holmes hesitate? Could I throw this guy Sansouci?

  He was all in subtle shades of gray from his eyes to his lips to his tweedy Norfolk jacket, another CinSim, yet not another CinSim if you knew the film. The vampire in London After Midnight had been the detective in disguise. Lon Chaney had played a role within a role.

  So…I had met both personas now.

  The scales were falling from my eyes (and also from the trilling woman’s voice above all the Vegas hotel hullabaloo).

  I needed to get to Cesar Cicereau, fast, which meant I had to snag a conventional elevator ride to the penthouse level. I streaked through the crowd, glimpsing the top-hatted vampire again, offering to escort a troop of local Boy Scouts into the wood. Not good.

  On the concourse in front of the elevators, people were pushing toward every lit Up arrow, chattering and checking their fanny packs for cash and credit cards.

  The melee was so huge and loud that the haunting singer could no longer be heard. No one even noticed the Hunchback of Notre Dame grinning down at me as he swung back and forth against the bank of elevators like the weight on a grandfather clock’s pendulum.

  AT LAST I’D BATTLED onto an Up elevator all the way to Cesar Cicereau’s forty-third floor-penthouse. And he’s the one who wanted this appointment.

  A carved wood tree design on the mirrored elevator car walls made riders feel claustrophobic, as if your reflected image and the frame of trees extended into infinity. Since I’d been known to mirror-walk, I kept a firm grip on myself to avoid being drawn into Wereworld.

  The elevator opened on the foyer to Cicereau’s penthouse.

  This high, the soprano was coming in loud and clear, singing “My Blue Heaven.” I rather doubted it, having visited here before.

  Two half-were bodyguards bracketed the elaborately carved wooden doors to Cesar Cicereau’s personal lair. They had frozen at man-height in transition to wolf. I imagined the chatty wolf from “Little Red Riding Hood” would look like them—hairy, predatory beasts with snouts like crocodiles standing on two shoeless feet but otherwise clad.

  These weren’t the fully human Cicereau pack members who usually faced the public. These were his paw-picked bodyguards, the weres who never fully reverted to human for some reason, like the half-were biker gangs on the Vegas streets.

  In fact, I wished I was facing a tormented, self-hating werewolf like the “Larry Talbot” persona actor Lon Chaney Jr. had pioneered in 1941. The Wolf Man was a classic horror film, and Junior had portrayed the title character as all angsty dude.

  But, no, it was the Big Dawg I needed to see. No one half-human.

  “The boss is expecting me,” I said.

  The guards eyed me for a long moment.

  No wonder. My adventures had finally made me look the part of the accused witch and gypsy girl, Esmeralda. I was rumpled and bruised, with my ankle-length taffeta skirt as ragged and bedraggled as my shoulder-length hair.

  Their elongated lips curled. “The boss don’t entertain skags like you.”

  “Skags like me can save his hairy ass. Tell him Delilah Street is calling.”

  They reared back as one recognized me. He clawed at his buddy’s furry forearm to impart a fearsome and hoarse message. “This is the dame who killed that Frankenstein dude who plunged out the boss’s windows.”

  “He was dead to begin with,” I pointed out. “Unless you yearn for the same condition, either let me pass or announce me. I won’t touch a hair on your matted bellies, but Cicereau wants to see me.”

  Their hand-like forepaws clawed at their shaggy, upright ears as the soprano reached the top of her four-octave range and held the note for an eternity. I could see the fur around their jaws was scabbed with blood. The high-pitched sound of music really did torment the poor misbred creatures.

  “Please,” I added.

  My alto-pitched voice must have been soothing. They panted in doglike relief and opened the doors for me. Or maybe nobody here said “please” without begging for his life.

  “Forty-three stories, dude,” one whispered to the other behind my back. “A wild-woman. Almost as merciless as the boss.”

  That was a bad rap, but any reputation in this town can’t hurt. The creature I’d tricked into that suicidal leap had already torn apart several tourists and even a few werewolves. Like the real Frankenstein, he had been more of a victim of his makers than bad to begin with. I’d done what was necessary to save lives, even supernatural half-lives. That didn’t mean I wasn’t sorry I’d had to do it. Hopefully, this assignment would have a happier ending, but I doubted it.

  I knew the suite’s layout from my previous visit, especially the paired guest bathrooms bracketing the entry hall like guard-wolves, so that welcome and not-so-welcome guests could clean off blood and gore, coming and going.

  Inside, I felt nervous. Outside, I’d acted like The Girl Who Had Offed Frankenstein’s Monster. Inside, I was just another mob hireling.

  Cicereau sat ensconced on a lavish spread of Swedish modern furniture, all woodsy and leather. He was wearing furry earmuffs and clutching an icepack to his shaggy head. The moon was recovering from being full, but Cicereau still looked like he had a hunting hangover.

  I’d considered the
Hunchback of Notre Dame a grotesque figure at first, but Cicereau, although in his non-werewolf form, was a sort of human toad whose broad, rapacious face lacked half the intelligence I’d seen glimmering in the mostly mute hunchback’s one eye.

  “Street. So you’re really here,” Cicereau crowed, “and so is the screeching siren I want you to eliminate. About now the sound of your scream after my men hurl you through the window would be worth the momentary overriding of the screaming Mimi in my hotel.”

  “Wronged women do seem to have it in for you,” I commented. “I need some information before I wrap up this case.”

  “Really? You plan to wrap up something besides your own life and career?”

  “You recently invested in some new CinSims, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah, but none who sang. My accountants say I need to up the main floor attractions. I’m old school. I think a couple thousand rooms, a big theatrical show, a shopping mall, a bunch of bare boobs here and there, and a casino crammed with gaming tables and machines should do for the stupid tourists.

  “And do you know what those CinSim things cost? They’re leased, like freaking vending machines. What a racket. Worse than that freaking supernatural soprano. You pay over and over for the product, like any sucker who visits Vegas. Not Cesar Cicereau. I figured out how to beat the Immortality Mob at its own game.”

  “Let me guess. You leased only one CinSim. ‘The Man with a Thousand Faces.’”

  “Well, that’s exaggerating what the dead dude has to offer, but yeah, that particular deal was attractive. The CinSim people assured me that this Lon Chaney actor would be a freaking chameleon. At least ten for the price of one.”

  “I’ve never heard of a CinSim being leased to play multiple roles. It could turn the actor underneath the characters schizophrenic.”

  “Stop the schmancy-fancy words. ‘CinSim’ is hard enough for my electronic dictionary. I’m experimenting with the Gehenna’s tourist attractions, okay? I happen to think this CinSim craze isn’t here to stay, but I’ll try something now and then if it seems to fit my theme. I mean, this guy is the whole freak show put together, a vampire, a clown, the hunchback, the Phantom. Whatever, he’s got the monster chops down, and I like that.”