The entryway was barely the size of a broom closet, painted solid black, with an aging queen in sloppy drag sitting behind a mesh and glass window. She wore a dark off-the-rack dress from the ÜberBargains clearance section and elbow-length gloves that matched for color but clashed for texture. Her pillbox hat had a fine black veil attached. I wondered who or what she was trying to mourn and whether it was in the booth with her. There was a metal grate in the window and a gap at the bottom for money to change hands. It was like walking up to a bank teller in a Soviet propaganda film.
“Back again, darling?” She purred at Roderick and batted her lashes in the manner of overripe schoolgirls the world over.
Roderick greeted her with a smile like a sunrise. “Miss Emilie,” he crooned, “You know I cannot stay away from your…” Roderick fished around for a moment imperceptible to mortal senses. “Considerable charms.”
“You shameless flirt. It’ll take more than that to get you in, dear.” Miss Emilie leaned close to the metal grate, her voice gravel against its stainless steel. I could smell chicken wings. “Ten buck cover for members and you’ll need to sign for your guest.”
I chuckled at my cousin. “Member? You’ve been in town less than a week and you’ve got a membership at the gay bar?”
Roderick waved it away with a few fingers. “North Carolina weirdness about dance clubs,” he said. “It’s a fig leaf of exclusivity.”
Miss Emilie was quick to correct him. “It’s no fig leaf,” she spat. “It’s for real. Nobody gets in without a membership or someone to vouch for them and we can throw out anybody we like. I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to let some frat boy looking to make trouble into this place if I don’t fucking feel like it.”
I blinked back, stunned. Were she not another underdog out of place in the wider world I might have been a little offended at the brusque service but I always respect someone trying to defend their own turf. I remembered how precious those cramped bars and tiny dance floors of the ‘40s had been to those of us who sneaked in and out back alleys to find half-hidden doors with passwords required to enter. Miss Emilie looked thirty years younger than I am but twenty years older than I appear. She probably got off on getting to remind one of her juniors that things haven’t always been as good as we have it now in some times and some places. I took it in stride. “Whoa,” I said, “I get it.”
Miss Emilie sniffed once, exchanged moneys with Roderick and held out a rubber stamp with a flourish. “Slide your hand through the slot to take the mark of the beast, boys,” she said with the air of a magnanimous monarch. “Your heart’s desire awaits through my humble opening.”
Roderick threw me a glance that said, quite clearly, Christ but I hope not. As the door buzzed to indicate we could go through a hastily-installed metal detector and the blast door beyond it, I gazed with serenely frozen features at the stamp on my hand: a smeared representation of a cartoon heart with an arrow through it and the words “GET SUM”.
The club itself was a three-story affair with different flavors of environment on each level. The main dance club was right there where one walked in: a couple of long bars made out of glass and metal and framed in neon served as bookends to a vast expanse of light-up floor covered in dozens of people in various states of dress all grooving together. The music sounded like someone waterboarding a chorus of robots but the patrons seemed to be into it. Some danced alone as though for some unseen audience; others for fun; and others still ground against one another in what clearly qualified as foreplay. Roderick exchanged a couple of waves with other patrons and I chuckled at the realization he was here often enough to make friends with the regulars.
I unwillingly thought of his Last Gasp, the power to make us all forget his victim ever existed, and wondered how many of them I would remember by the time he left.
Roderick had ditched the bag at his hotel and traded outfits for a tight-fitting t-shirt with a picture of a catcher’s mitt and the words BOSSY BOTTOM in faded text. He writhed lithely into the crowd on the dance floor with one glance back to yell something only a vampire could have heard in all this racket: go make a friend. I motored off around the dance floor, then, in search of a drink and a bowl of pretzels to munch on. I didn’t see it as very likely I’d actually meet someone to talk to in a place like this but I was glad to see Roderick doing something normal for once. Every time I’d taken him into public, or he me, he’d always given people a weird vibe: a slight off-centeredness radiating from the almost insectoid view with which he seemed to behold most of humankind. He loved to move among them, yes, but in the same way a cat might dive joyously into a box of happy little mice.
“Withrow Surrett,” said a voice from off to my left as I bellied up to the bar. “I didn’t expect to see you out.”
I turned surprised eyes on Seth. He was in his usual leather punk gear but the liberty spikes he sometimes wore were smoothed down and cemented into place as a stalactite of hair draped over the right side of his face. The clothing was a little more gussied up and a little less angry than usual, too, and whereas he normally showed at best a reserved and subtle smile when pleased, he was at that moment almost grinning. “I didn’t expect to be seen,” I replied. We shook hands like old friends and, all things considered, I supposed we were. “Shouldn’t you be tending bar at your normal joint in Raleigh?”
He rolled a shoulder at me in response. “Seems like all the action’s in Durham these days.”
I smirked. “Doesn’t it just?” The bartender wandered by and I flagged him down. “Bourbon and Coke,” I said, “Heavy on the lime. Plus whatever my friend here is getting.” Seth waved it off and the bartender whisked my card into whatever holding area was set aside for open tabs.
“Gotten anywhere with either this El Diablo guy or The Bull’s Eye?” Seth always knows how to get down to business.
I smiled. “That transparent, huh?”
He grimaced. “I keep thinking of all the home security systems they must sell. They’re a problem for us and solving our problems is your job now. You’re the boss.”
“So I keep hearing,” I grumbled. “You sound like Old Shoe. No, I haven’t gotten anywhere. I had a run-in with El Diablo. Two of them. I couldn’t bring him down either time.”
Seth’s eyes widened a fraction of a millimeter. “What?”
I dithered with my body language and my wording. “I ran into him once and he caught me by surprise but he moved fast. Too fast. The second time it was chance. I…” I couldn’t see myself saying this to any vampires in the world other than Roderick or Seth. “He managed to run from me. I tried to take him down in a straight fight and he got away.” I sighed. “Why, you looking for him, too?”
Seth took his time studying the bottled liquors on the lighted shelves behind the bar before answering. “Not out of any desire to have your job,” he finally replied.
I nodded. “Good. I don’t want trouble.”
“Nobody does,” Seth replied. He looked back and met my eyes with his. “Least of all me. I like you, Withrow, and I don’t want to see anybody come along and try to knock you out of the big chair.”
It was the closest to a direct oath of fealty I’d ever gotten from any vampire – anyone other than Roderick, anyway. I nodded at him after a moment, and then held out my hand. He took it and we shook again. “Thank you, Seth. I’m relieved to say I believe you.”
Seth smirked. “What lives we lead,” he sighed. “We rush to escape the ones we’re given, and for what? So we can spend forever feeling paranoid?” He gestured at the crowded bar, the people all around us, the air full of human wants and denied desire. None of them could hear us. Our voices were low and the music loud. Vampires often spoke like this, I’d found: openly addressing secrets we’d be scared to whisper in the quiet of a mausoleum but easily expressed when surrounded by the thrum of life. Sometimes I think the smothering blanket of throbbing humanity insulates us against them and them against us and we both benefit from it. To stand like this
, in a public house, and simply be a part of the world for a moment was both a good thing and a pathetic rarity. That was perhaps most of why I so appreciated Roderick coming here to be with me: the being with me.
I nodded at him. The drink arrived and I took a moment to sniff it: harsh and sweet and acidic from the lime. “Roderick thinks I need to find a boyfriend,” I blurted out. I didn’t look up. Seth did me the favor of not laughing until I did. When I chuckled, he gave one little gust of amused breath.
“Maybe you do.” Seth regarded me with that half-shadowed passivity he so excelled at: something distant and reserved in his eyes suggesting Seth’s brow were the roof over a deeply recessed veranda at the absolute back of which sat his hidden true self.
I stirred the cocktail with the swizzle stick and looked back at him. “You and Beth…”
He nodded. “Of course.”
“How does that work?” I didn’t know how to broach the subject. “I mean, do you, um.” I paused. “What do you do?”
“We keep each other company,” Seth said. He was holding an empty beer bottle as a prop and he gestured minutely with it to form an arc encompassing the realm of all possible answers. “It keeps me sane sometimes.” He hesitated. “You’ve seen how she can get, too. She needs someone to watch out for her as badly as I need someone to look out for me.” Another little pause. “It’s more than most people get: togetherness, I mean. Remember that, Withrow. Remember the Bobs. Ask yourself where they came from. Ask yourself how they got that way.”
I blinked at him. I didn’t quite follow where this was going, and it showed.
Seth went on. “No,” he said, correcting himself. “Let me put it this way: ask yourselves what made them that way.” This seemed fraught with subtext I just wasn’t getting.
“’What made them’?”
“Exactly,” Seth said. “Exactly.”
I didn’t understand, but I also had a feeling I would sooner or later if I just let it rest. We stood in silence for a couple of minutes as I took sips of my drink and savored them. The alcohol would never affect me again but I loved the taste. Seth looked around, eying the crowd in the way of bartenders everywhere, even off the clock. I was so lost in thought – uncertainties about whatever Seth was trying to say and about the notion of vampires keeping each other company and about The Bull’s Eye and El Diablo and the demon Ross and my own sudden confrontations with the capacity for a kind of desire I’d long since forgotten – I didn’t even notice when a tall, slender guy in beige linen shorts and a blue polo shirt strolled up and settled in next to me. Eventually our elbows bumped and I made some mumbled apology but he caught my eye and smiled.
“No need to be sorry. I hope I didn’t disturb your drink.” He was over six feet, with deep black skin and a jaw that could cut glass. I found myself stammering a bit. He was an extraordinarily fine specimen of a mortal. I had no idea what to say. “I don’t suppose you have the time, do you?”
I stared at him, looked at my wrist – I was not wearing a watch – and said, “No, I do not.”
Seth stifled something from behind me but I didn’t notice it for a long time.
“Well,” the guy said, “My name is Marc. Let me know if you get a watch. I might still want to know the time.” He winked at me – at fat old me with my floppy hair and my big black trench coat and my beat up old boots and my unfashionable jeans – and turned to go. “I love a daddy bear.”
As he strolled away I turned slowly towards Seth. “I don’t know what a daddy bear is,” I said, “But I would give a hundred bucks for a watch right now.”
Seth smirked with one side of his mouth. “Hang on.”
There was an odd metallic hum, like the dying of a gong, for just a split second. Seth looked like he’d shifted positions in a nanosecond, like a lousy edit in a movie. I stepped back in surprise and Seth – the slightly shifted-off-center Seth – held out a watch. “Here you go.”
Two things occurred simultaneously to me: I had no idea what Seth’s Last Gasp power was and I had no idea where he’d gotten the watch. I looked from it to him and back and then to him again. “What just happened?”
“I can explain it later. Use this moment. Right now.” He put the watch into my hand and closed my fingers around it. “For fuck’s sake, Withrow, go, before the guy disappears into the crowd.”
I turned around, crossed the bar and tapped the guy on the shoulder. He looked at me, eyebrows raised in surprise. I held out the watch and, after working my jaw for a second, said, “Found one.”
Marc smiled down at me. “Did you? So what time is it?”
I blinked. “I have no idea.”
Fifteen minutes later we were making out in the bathroom. Marc tasted like vodka and sweat and thin blood. I left him passed out – but living – on the floor of the handicapped stall. When I walked outside, Seth and Roderick stood nearby. They stopped whatever conversation they were in to raise their drinks to me in a silent toast.
10
The phrase “as above, so below” seemed like the better of the clues I had available to me regarding El Diablo. I mean, Duke University is a big place. A lot of people pass through there in a year and a lot of those people are paying big money but making precious little for their trouble. It wasn't hard to imagine a whole mess of them being pissed off at the place at any given time. They're all pretty smart, too; well, all but the really rich ones, I reckon. That made a hell of a haystack to start off in. It seemed like the easier thing to narrow down was that line about quantum sympathies. I didn't get all that but I recognized some of what he said it as the lingo of a physicist and some as the lingo of a modern-day ritualist. I figured there weren't that many people hanging around in the overlap area of that particular Venn diagram.
The phrase “as above, so below” is a line from a spiritual practice called “sympathetic magic.” It's the theory behind sticking a pin in a voodoo doll or cursing someone using a lock of their own hair: affect something reminiscent of your target and you affect the target. An image or a component of something is supposed to have a supernatural resonance with the thing itself. Stab the doll in the arm and the person gets tennis elbow. You've seen sympathetic magic a million times in movies and on TV because it's the most visually appealing way to depict wizards and witches and all that jazz. You also see it every time you go into a Christian church, especially if it's a Catholic one: people praying to a crucifix are using sympathetic magic just the same as any witch doctor shaking a shrunken head.
It's also used by people who are into the reinvented paganism thing. It's not for me, but no significant spiritual belief system is. I wouldn't have a god who would take me, to be honest. I think we're in this all on our own and it's up to us to make the most of it. Every vampire agrees with me, deep down, no matter how many nights of the month they dress up like Marie Laveau or Jerry Falwell or my Aunt Myrtle and claim to tune in some higher power. Oh, sure, some vampires fall into the religion trap. I think it’s a weakness, though. It’s hedging a bet when they’re already cheating to win. We’re supposed to have successfully eliminated the after-life as a concern. Religious yahoos, on the other hand, obsessively engage in publicly performing the qualifying lap for their preferred version of the sweet-by-and-by. Bible-thumping vampires may say it’s all about saving their soul or whatever other bullshit reason they can gin up to look sad, but let’s get real for a second: they don’t regret what they became. If they did, it would be easy to correct the mistake. Guaranteed suicide is never more than a sunrise away.
So, I don’t buy into the ceremonial claptrap myself. Beyond its psychological power to shape someone's intentions and maybe ignite a little confirmation bias when they search for results of their work, I think it’s just a game of dress-up. I know some people do really believe in it, though they weren't exactly physicists. They were more like really interesting librarians. Still, you start with the contacts you have, not the contacts you wish you had, and lucky me, it was a book sale weekend at the libr
ary in Chatham County.
The Book People. That's what they called themselves. I originally thought that meant they were Muslims. There's this concept in Islam of “people of the book,” which is a fancy way of saying Jews & Christians are kind of special because technically they all worship the same god, but they just meant they were people who were crazy into books. There were seven of them, two men and five women, mostly older. One of them was a young Latina who told me she was the first person in her family to be literate in English. Her accent was absolutely undetectable. It was impressive. The rest of them are various shades of cracker white except for a black guy named Warren who teaches the occasional poetry class at a historically black school in Raleigh. He's a retired sports writer or something. He doesn't talk much, and I've never spent much time around them because the Book People give off kind of a weird vibe. It’s like you're really seriously the hell harshing their vibe when you're speaking to them because that's time they could have spent nose-deep in a book.
They haunt book sales. I don't mean they're just there all the time, drifting around. I mean they show up at night when the venue is closed and they do things. I still don't really understand it, but it strikes me as a fancy form of coin flipping; the only difference is their coin is a library and it has a different face for every sentence of every book.
Deal with the Devil (Withrow Chronicles Book 3) Page 14