by P. N. Elrod
“But you’re still his top enforcer.”
“Because I can still outkick werewolf pack butt. Just because my … dining partners are voluntary doesn’t mean I can’t unleash the vampire bloodlust that kept me alive, so to speak, for seven centuries or so.”
“A real Jekyll and Hyde.”
Sansouci nodded. “The best … and worst … of both worlds. Don’t forget that, Delilah, while you admire my designer sunglasses.”
Sansouci had pulled out opaque black Gucci shades with titanium frames. Dark glasses began to be commonly used only during the Great Depression, when some vampires learned that keeping their eyes shaded allowed them to stroll around unsizzled by broad daylight. Once unhumans went public after the recent Millennium, the vampires were even more eager to live “normal” lives without being labeled serial killers, which tended to get them hunted down, staked, and beheaded.
“Let’s take a trip down the Strip,” he suggested.
“Cicereau’s still got it in for me, and I’m not dressed for work.”
Sansouci eyed my party getup. “The boss is so many decades behind the times, that outfit will lull him into thinking you’re a nice girl. This looks to be another corporate exorcism job. He’ll pay you well to get the freaks off his back.”
“Like the teenage daughter he murdered back in the forties?”
“Like Loretta, yeah. With werewolves, alpha pack power is thicker than blood.”
“I’ll do a meet with Cicereau,” I said, “but that’s not saying I’ll take the job.”
Still, I wondered what fresh “ghosts” were bugging the Vegas mogul. And I knew my carotid artery was safe in Sansouci’s company, if not much else.
* * *
“You want your car ?” asked Manny, my Inferno parking valet buddy, as his goatish yellow eyes sized up Sansouci. “The visiting Gehenna Hotel fur-back owns wheels?”
“At least I don’t leave scales on the leather upholstery.” Sansouci eyed Manny’s case of all-over orange psoriasis. “Off-black Porsche Boxster with terra-cotta leather interior,” Sansouci spit out, handing Manny a claim ticket.
“Shallow and overrated,” Manny sniffed. “Figures.” He jumped into an idling Lamborghini and raced it up the ramp.
Vegas supernaturals can get edgy with each other. Being in an entertainment venue usually keeps that under control. I could charm or bribe the lower-order supers to my investigative causes. Manny, formally known as Manniphilpestiles, was a demon who’d made it all the way to “pal,” like the Invisible Man CinSim, who’d also saved my skin. I wouldn’t trust Manny with my soul, though, a recognizable commodity in Vegas long before the Millennium Revelation had brought the supers out of the closet.
“Minor-order demon punk,” Sansouci muttered.
“A poor thing, but mine own,” I agreed. “Your red-orange car interior color screams über-carnivore. Manny will certainly know whose name to shout around if I turn up missing.”
Sansouci shook his head. “I’ll get you back here in one untoothed piece, if Cicereau’s newest problem children don’t do you in.”
* * *
The Gehenna was a sprawling hotel-casino that rose from the flat landscape, a dark, glassy tidal wave frozen in midcrash. It seemed poised to devour, like huge wolfish jaws.
Inside, an elegantly dark and menacing forest theme prevailed, interpreted in green marble, wood tones from black to gilt, and lurid lighting glittering like migratory flights of fireflies in the casino areas. There was where Theme Décor met Taking Care of Business.
Even in 2013 you can’t enter a Vegas hotel without the raw sights, sounds, and smells of a casino assaulting your senses from the common business areas of the registration desk to the theater and restaurants.
More than drink glasses sweat in these dark, icy mazes of flashing lights and chiming slot machines spread across acres of puke-patterned carpeting. Greed is the color of money in Las Vegas. The overpowering smell is well-salted deodorant.
Over the clanging, chiming, whooping, coins-colliding noises programmed into the slot machines came a faint, high, sweet trilling that made me look up to find the source.
I backed out of the casino’s clang into the aisle to hear it better, so mystified and eager to trace the sound that Sansouci had to jerk me out of the way of an oncoming luggage cart.
“So you’ve noticed it already,” he said.
“Noticed what?”
“That’s what you’re here to tell Cicereau.”
I also noticed that even slot machine patrons were looking up for the source of the singing after every button push, not staring at the reeling blurred icons that would tell them whether they’d won or not.
“That sound is … oddly angelic,” I said, “for an enterprise sporting the hellish name of Gehenna.”
Sansouci shrugged. “That sugary-sweet high pitch drives the werewolves crazy. Their hearing is acute and this stuff never stops.”
“And you? You don’t find it … mesmerizing?”
“ I do the mesmerizing,” he said with a modest smirk. “Besides, I dig smoky altos. Coo ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’ at me and I’ll listen. Otherwise, it’s all noise.”
“I can’t even pick up a tune as a hitchhiker,” I said. “My tin ear tells me we’re hearing a heavenly … soprano.”
“Thin soup. Sopranos always sound to me like they’re being throttled,” he added.
“That’s because most guys don’t like opera.”
“Do you?”
“Uh, no,” I admitted. “But I have to admit I find this endless … aria-like perfume in the air addictive.”
“Good,” Sansouci said. “Find out where the sonic Chanel No. 5 is coming from and end it. You’ll get Cicereau’s eternal thanks—for about five minutes and a few thou—and I’ll be glad to have him off my back, totally nonhairy, despite the demon parking punk’s jibe.”
“As if I’d care to know. This … sound isn’t coming over the hotel sound system?”
“First place I looked. No. And I checked the security control room too. You pioneered those routes when Cicereau’s daughter’s ghost took over the hotel audiovisual systems until you exorcised her.”
“Loretta had good reason to haunt her murderous father, and I’m no exorcist. I just figured out how to make some other supernatural gag her. That’s what I am, a lowly human problem solver. Who is this … superb-voiced siren?”
“Someone or something that will shortly drive the paying customers away and the Gehenna’s wolfpack mad. I wouldn’t care, but the vampires aren’t ready to move on Cicereau yet.”
“Some are planning to?” This was hot news in the old town tonight.
Sansouci’s grin was wicked. “That’s for me to know and you to find out. You’re the paranormal investigator. Investigate.”
He gave me a little shove in the taffeta bustle, so I was propelled back onto the marble-floored hotel concourse. Sansouci. Always the gentleman vampire muscle.
I hopped into line behind another bellman-propelled luggage cart, protected from the milling crowds, and headed for the main atrium circled by elevators to the Gehenna’s various hotel floors and condo towers.
The haunting soprano voice kept me gazing up and around like a geek at an electronics exposition, tripping over my own feet, even though being gauche enough to tangle your killer heels is a Vegas mortal sin.
Being tone deaf doesn’t make for musical expertise, but this eerie, sweet as Heavenly Hash voice had me hooked. Since I’m also Black Irish, I was a Celtic woman deep down. I didn’t even notice that I’d slowed to a stop to listen until a couple dozen tourists dragging wheeled bags jammed up behind me, screeching annoyance at my back.
Before the rude crowds could mess my crinolines, they suddenly stared upward too, shouting and pointing and hitting the marble floor all around until I was the only upright long-stemmed rose in the garden.
That’s when I spotted a large, dark blot streaking down toward me. An ape in a Mad Hatter outf
it wearing a fright wig of coarse hair instead of a top hat swung down on a bungee cord. Before I could duck away, a huge hairy hand snagged me around the corseted Audrey Hepburn waist and swung us both up, up, up several floors to the sustained high-note accompaniment of the heavenly voice and my furious alto scream of protest. In seconds, my powerful captor used the upper-body strength of a circus strongman to perch us like gargoyles atop the highest railing of the Gehenna Hotel’s towering atrium.
First, I checked his grip on the thick brass rail. His feet curved like talons around the metal, but wore soft leather shoes curled up at the toes and down at the heel, slippers Santa’s elves would wear. My gaze inventoried the odd bits of wardrobe clothing his squat distorted body, then studied a pale bony array of bulbous cheeks and forehead and forked chin, every feature somehow pulled off center like a melted plastic mask. One eye was entirely missing. Rather than a mouth, the creature had a broken-toothed maw. A bushy eyebrow over that bright malicious single eye finished off a face twisted into a grimace a gargoyle would flee, shrieking.
Even at this suicidal height, I’d have pushed off from my captor just to avoid an inescapable double jeopardy of death by asphyxiation: the mixed reek of garlic and onion breath. While I calculated how to tip us backward onto the safety of the balcony fronting the elevators, the powerful arms spun me sideways to lift me like a trophy above the misshapen head.
While my stomach made an imaginary drop of forty stories and the siren’s voice soared to higher melodic peaks up here, my captor’s terrifying maw shouted something over and over to the crowd below.
“Sank you, Harry!” or some such gibberish spewed from his harsh throat. He snarled down at the gaping crowd below, repeating the word or phrase as boast … or challenge. I clung to the sleeves of his long arms as my personal King Kong shook my helpless torso like a weapon.
Then he swept me down again, clasping me doll-like to his barrel chest. In a moment his apelike feet had pushed off the railing as he swung us out over the gaping crowd on the hard marble hundreds of feet below.
My stomach did another swan dive.
Death by implosion was not on my adventure-travel wish list. I clung to the wide lapels of his organ grinder’s monkey jacket. He seemed eerily at home swinging on a rope, and was still gabbling that guttural challenge to the gawkers below.
In times of unthinkable danger, the mind decides to sweat the small stuff. All I could focus on was that the crowd sure could see up my full skirts and crinolines to … my—good thing I’d been brought up to anticipate a sudden car accident and always wore underpants.
Only then did I see what we swung from … not a Cirque du Soleil bungee cord, but an … untethered … steel elevator cable. Oh, Lord. Were some innocent civilians also dangling from a broken steel thread in one of this row of a dozen elevator cars?
My position remained completely helpless, so, for motivation and an adrenaline surge, I ramped up the indignation of it all. I’d been swept off my feet before by far more attractive and supernaturally powerful forces than this scruffy tent-show acrobat.
I grabbed tight to the nearest long powerful forearm and twirled like a trapeze artist. That spun us into a tangled bundle. I hadn’t expected the creature’s response.
Instead of dropping us to the nearest balcony like any rational madman, he swung us back over the railing, past the exposed solid ground of the hallway … through a pair of open elevator doors … and into the naked elevator shaft. No enclosed car awaited inside … only empty space.
Screeching triumph, the creature swung from one rising or lowering elevator cable, ducking under or sailing over the stately sinking and rising cars, his rhythm sure and athletic. He Tarzan of the Apes, me Jane.
A distracting fantasy, but this still put me in mortal danger, and I was one of the few mortals still left around this town since the supernaturals had come out to play. Visions of imminent collision with the speeding elevator cars made me clutch the demented monster for dear, if questionable, life.…
At last we descended to the deserted equipment bays below the elevator shafts. Here, all was as dark and empty and cold as the hotel casino’s public spaces had been bright and well lighted. The icy artificial air-conditioning up top had been replaced by a subtle subterranean chill.
Solid ground was the ancient limestone that underlies the desert sand.
As I caught my breath, I still heard the unknown siren’s unearthly song, trilling madly. I now thought of it as a melodic scream for help. Soon I might be making such noises myself.
While rows of elevator cars clanked continually above us as they came and went, I spied some pine-scented Gehenna bed linens nudged into a nest on the hard ground, and room-service plates and food stockpiled by the same limestone wall.
“Safe. You. Here,” the creature grunted. “Thank-you-very.”
Thank-you-very. Was that the gibberish he’d bellowed from the peak of the atrium?
Somehow, I suspected that his mumbled signature phrase was a clue. This mind-boggling, impulsive creature must be a key to the mystery I’d been hired to solve.
So it was only a hunch. That’s what I’m paid to follow.
Right now, he was shoving the trays of room-service leavings at me. I realized this was what he subsisted on, poor inarticulate thing. I eyed the fag ends of cocktail shrimps and the abandoned crescents of gnawed cheeseburgers and pizza crusts. I supposed other handicapped persons on the fringes of the Las Vegas Strip survived on such leavings of the rich and famous.
His huge hands thrust a tray of the “choicest” pieces at me.
I’d only just been kidnapped. I’d had no time to develop the hunger of the truly needy.
But I always had time to understand the generosity of the easily ignored.
“Thank you very,” I said, smiling and nodding, as I plucked a couple brown-edged celery sticks from the array and nibbled politely.
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. And then I realized that my kidnapper was just that, a creature of fiction and film. He’d been so grimy and things had happened so fast that I hadn’t realized I was dealing with a CinSim, a character from a movie given an extended life attached to the “canvas” of a zombie.
His … uh, one eye and skin tones and clothing were not just gray, but shades of cinematic black and white. My earlier “hunch” had been vague, but on the track.
Even as I realized this, I felt a cold snakelike uncoiling at my ankles. My snazzy silver shoelaces were undoing themselves.
The 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. Kinda like any private eye since Sherlock Holmes.
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 sowing gesture, releasing and casting 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 its sudden shape-shifting, but the only witness to the operation remained below.
I gazed down ten feet at a jumping Rumpelstiltskin chattering away like Cheetah, Tarzan’s clever movie chimp costar. 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 had chort
led from high in the hotel atrium while I’d been hefted like a trophy over his ungainly head. 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 kindhearted Gypsy girl, Esmeralda, away from the stake where she was to be burned as a witch and up to the gargoyle-guarded stone heights of the famed Paris cathedral, where a hunchback was the humble bell ringer and where an innocent scapegoat like Esmeralda could find a triumphant “sanctuary” from the ignorant mob storming the church grounds.
This guy had mistaken the crowd of pushy tourists for a rioting mob and me for Esmeralda.
I could think of only two black-and-white-era CinSim hunchbacks, both consummate actors, both despising the Hollywood looks sweepstakes. One was Charles Laughton. The earlier, silent-film version had been Lon Chaney, “the Man of a Thousand Faces.”
Something about this bizarre situation was ringing a bell in my head besides the endless vocalizations above, now segueing from the soaring hymn of “Ave Maria” to “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 history of film, I had to lose 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.
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.