Hex Appeal

by P. N. Elrod

  My bedroom isn’t located in any fairy-tale joint, but in a replica of a 1940s honeymooner’s nest from a movie named The Enchanted Cottage. Inside it, the film story line went, true love had overlaid movie star looks on a plain old maid and a disfigured war hero.

  I awoke to the sound of repeated gunfire and sat up, blinking like a gothic heroine in my filmy-curtained four-poster bed, and immediately scanned for intruders.

  One of my two casement windows was open and banging against the wall. The light sweat of alarm on my skin didn’t detect so much as a breath of night air, never mind a window-sash-crashing wind.

  Checking the bedroom floor, I saw no sign of my devoted rescue dog. Quicksilver was known to enter and exit the cottage windows at night, though discreetly and without drama, but never on the second floor.

  Next I noticed that the creepy “bugs-moving” feeling along my thighs wasn’t my nightshirt riding up. It was the crocheted bedspread slowly ebbing to the bed’s foot.

  Since this is post–Millennium Revelation Las Vegas and not your father’s Sin City, but one crawling with supernaturals, I had immediate suspects. The first were the often unseen domestic “helpers” that came with the Enchanted Cottage. The second most likely suspect was a first on my list—a genuine ghost.

  I grabbed the absconding coverlet with both hands and jerked it up to my waist again.

  It jerked back down.

  I leaned forward to jerk harder.

  Something grabbed my T-shirt front and tugged even more. I fell facedown on the foot of the bed as that unseen “something” outflanked me to pinch my now-exposed rear.

  This indignity ruled out a disembodied ghost, but not the mischievous pixies, gnomes, and poltergeists that abound in the borders between the paranormal and natural worlds. My house “spirits” so far had been as good as two-thousand-dollar-an-ounce gold. Something you could count on.

  They’d never resort to anything as crude as this spectral horsefly bite.

  I rolled over and off the bed, my slender ankle bracelet thickening as I went into uproot-and-expel mode. In seconds, my silver familiar had migrated to my rear and transformed into a really heavy and cold metal fanny pack.

  That form was Vegas-appropriate, sure, but not helpful. Nothing would pinch my butt again, but I didn’t need a rear anchor right now either.

  My yell and karate kick were meant to clear my immediate space.

  Instead, the unseen Something grabbed my extended ankle and jerked again.

  I would have gone belly-down on the floor if I hadn’t caught hold of a bedpost, spun around it, and kicked my legs back onto the bed to crawl over the crumpled coverlet and jump off the other side.

  “Show yourself, coward,” I shouted from the floor as a diversion.

  I launched myself at the wall near the door, hoping to run into my invisible visitor. I detected a momentary brush with something so elusive, I ended up plastered against the wallpaper, a floral design with blossoms bigger than my hands.

  I heard a high-pitched, self-satisfied … giggle.

  “Little Miss Muffet sat on her tuffet,” a crazy voice sing-songed.

  It came from the open, gently tapping window.

  I charged the sound. When I got there, something lifted my hips so only my toes touched the floor. A forceful push could catapult me past whoever or whatever was there, through the open window to the flagstones below.

  My unseen dancing partner released the dangerous grip with a patronizing pat on the fanny pack that had me cursing. I’d already curled my fingers around the closing window frame and swung inward with it to the wall. Once my feet were flat on the floor again, I slammed the window shut and held it closed with my back, sealing in my tormenter.

  “… and she began to cry,” the disembodied voice taunted.

  By now I was panting hard but hardly tearful. The silver familiar had finally got the message that I could defend my own rear better than eight pounds of solid sterling (would that my glutes were that pumped). It looped around my bicep as a funky designer cuff … a lariat-in-waiting.

  I surveyed the room. Everything was dead still, even my airy bedpost curtains. The shut window was no longer a point of entry or exit.

  My glance fell on the stainless-steel water bowl against the opposite wall, kept in my bedroom for Quicksilver’s midnight security rounds when he was home. It was ten inches across because I’m talking a 150-pound dog, part wolf, part wolfhound. I sometimes thought his nights out might be spent chasing his own tail.

  Great! Just when I could use him guarding my besieged tail here at home.

  I caught a glimmer of something in the mirror over my dresser. Mirrors have been doors for me ever since I came to Las Vegas, so I see more in them than most people. Is it me or Sin City? Or a combustible combination of both? Watch this space.

  Right then, I realized my filmy bedpost curtain was gathered into a fan of folds about … five feet six inches above the floor. Something clutched the fabric.

  I jumped onto my bed again—most solo fun I’ve ever had on it—bounced and caromed off the opposite wall, bent to grab the dog’s water dish … and flung the contents at the empty space between me and the bedpost.

  For an instant, a wet figure took weird negative shape, like a strip of old-time camera film soaked in developing fluid.

  “Strip” is the word. I ripped the coverlet from my bed and leapt on the being playing peekaboo behind the bedpost. My pounce encountered, and drove back, a solid form. I pushed forward until I pinned it to the wall.

  “Ow! My eye,” the voice howled. “Jack put in a thumb and pulled out a plum—”

  “Enough with the nursery rhymes! If I wanted a naked man in my room,” I told my unseen prisoner, “it wouldn’t be the Invisible Man. Now, get decent, then explain yourself.”

  Releasing mushy biceps—mad scientists aren’t much for working out—I folded my arms under the message on my sleep T-shirt—KICK SASS.

  “Nice pecs,” Dr. Jack Griffin, aka the Invisible Man, commented on my posture with another giggle.

  Where’s Fabio when you finally think you need him?

  I stepped back a stride to watch a reverse strip show.

  My abused crocheted coverlet, probably made by pixies, or possibly even Madame Defarge, began to elevate like a cobra from a basket. It twisted around and around as it went higher, making my visitor seem to be donning a Roman toga.

  “Here.” I tossed a rhinestone-banded fedora from my dresser top to his approximate middle. “Put this on. I like looking people in the face, even when they’re invisible.”

  “Snazzy hat,” he cooed, giggling as my hat levitated over the room scenery between the togaed shoulder and his forehead.

  My uninvited guest was no threat to anything but my patience. He was a rogue Cinema Simulacrum, or CinSim. Old black-and-white movie characters filmed on silver nitrate could be overlaid on illegally smuggled zombies from Mexico. The mysterious Immortality Mob leased them to Vegas attractions, where they were chipped to remain in suitable settings. My personal affinity for silver made me their champion. They, in turn, were my best confidential informants in town.

  “Say, Miss Street,” the Invisible Man cajoled. “I just had to have a little fun with you. Can’t you take a joke?”

  “Why now? And how’d you escape the Inferno Hotel on the Strip to get all the way over to Hector Nightwine’s Sunset Road estate and my digs on it?”

  “I’m an invisible man of mystery.”

  “You’ll be unseen chopped liver if you don’t start talking.”

  He adjusted the hat to the jaunty angle I used when I wore it. Ruin it for me, why don’t you?

  “I’m the only unchained CinSim in Vegas, darlin’ girl. I can go where I want because nobody can see me.”

  “Why would a major Vegas mogul like Snow let one of his valuable leases go wandering so far?”

  “I’m not as visibly valuable as the Inferno Hotel’s other CinSims. Nick and Nora Charles are chipped t
o the Inferno bar with that darn dog, Asta. The noir CinSims have their own custom sets on the Limbo level. The bordello CinSims like Errol Flynn and Marilyn Monroe inhabit the Lust level right below.”

  Mention of Limbo and Lust “levels” didn’t faze me. The Inferno sat atop a re-created Nine Circles of Hell.

  “I’m just an off-balance oddball,” Dr. Jack said, “as I was in my film life. Mr. Mad Scientist, always considered more smart and crazy than sexy. An invisible CinSim gets no recognition. You, at least, put up with me. I thought you even really liked me.”

  He sounded pouty now.

  “I like you fine. At the Inferno Hotel, not in my bedroom.”

  “That’s what I broke even my long-distance bonds to come and tell you. Things aren’t fine at the Inferno Hotel. It’s haunted.”

  “The house muscle, Grizelle, is tiger enough to handle it.”

  “My dear lady. Grizelle is … no longer … what she was. No one or nothing at the Inferno is.”

  “What’s new about that? Snow is just doing his usual control-freak act.”

  “Snow’s no longer in control. Look at me!”

  “I can’t.”

  “Oh, sure, Miss Street, I like to give girls at the bar the occasional fanny pinch, but when did I get into serial assault on asses? Tonight. Then, heading here, I almost ended up way down the freeway in Laughlin. All us Inferno entities are possessed. Haywire. Any minute, the news will hit the thousands of tourists trekking in and out of the hotel. And now Snow’s nowhere to be found.”

  “Small loss,” I muttered, shaken despite myself. “Since when am I backup security for the Inferno?”

  “It’s all so horribly wrong, Miss Street. The slot machines are spitting out razor blades. At the Inferno bar, your white-chocolate Albino Vampire cocktails are pouring out as dead dark as Black Russians. The ‘perfect film wife,’ Nora Charles, has runs in her silk hose, and hubby Nick Charles is out of gin!”

  Dr. Jack’s last complaint alarmed me the most. Thirties booze-hound detective Nick Charles running out of Boodles was like the film Casablanca running out of doomed lovers. Sheer travesty.

  While I stood there wondering what suit of armor I should wear to a cursed Las Vegas hotel, my casement window slammed open again. This time the cause was all too visible.

  A huge wolfhound-wolf-cross dog with vampire hearing and fangs and a bloodhound sniffer—wanted to know who’d been tipping over his water dish and messing with his rescuer from a fate worse than death … euthanasia. I grinned approval at his superdog two-story jump. No need to play nice and use the first-floor doggie doors tonight.

  Quicksilver’s bounds abused my bedspread again. He landed by the upended bowl, skidded through the spilled water, and scented the unseen intruder. As I stepped away from confining Mr. Elusive, Quick leapt with paws extended at the exact shoulder height to pin the Invisible Man to the wall.

  “Thanks, partner. Keep him busy while I get ‘decent.’ And no peeking,” I warned Jack Griffith, “even if you are a doctor.”

  “I’m not that kind of a doctor and Rin Tin Tin here seriously needs a manicure. Ouch!”

  “I know. He likes his nails long, and I don’t ever argue with that muzzle.”

  * * *

  Living in an Enchanted Cottage has its benefits. I slipped into my endless closet, still wondering what to wear to an unspecified widespread haunting, and closed the door. A hovering pixie made herself into Tinker Bell so I could see in the dark.

  I sighed. Deeply, madly, truly. Snow and I had cherished a heavy-duty mutual loathe-hate relationship since I came to Las Vegas several months ago in search of my double, my possible sister, Lilith Quince. She was my mirror image, and mirrors had turned out to be my medium after the Millennium Revelation pulled back the curtains on the supernaturals coexisting among us.

  Call me one weird sister, but I wasn’t high on bailing out the Inferno, or its owner. I’ve never been into male sex symbols. I’m not talking about the planet Mars with the provocative little arrow. Blatant onstage booty calls for screaming female fans and profit insult my intelligence. Elvis would have swiveled in vain. Justin Timberlake would have to get his screams and squees from some other chick.

  Cocaine, aka Snow, played Pride incarnate as lead singer in his Seven Deadly Sins band. He ended each show by enslaving his mosh-pit groupies with a post-concert Brimstone Kiss that had them swooning and coming back again and again—and never getting another smooch.

  What a racket to sell tickets. The least he could do was sleep with the poor lovesick fans, but he never did, just teased them and left them panting.

  Jerk!

  This was not about Snow, I reminded myself while squirming into the steel-studded vampire-fighting catsuit I owed to the Inferno security wardrobe. The shiny black fabric was supernatural Kevlar, suppler and stronger than leather and up to facing down any unknown but wayward supernatural capable of turning an entire hotel and all its contents … well, upside down.

  My silver familiar, a souvenir of my ongoing war with Snow, left its default position as a thin hip chain under the James Bond–ish wet suit and eeled down a tight sleeve. It emerged clamped on my left wrist as a pair of handcuffs locked onto the same arm.

  Cool look. I hoped the familiar would schedule a rerun the next time I was out for dinner with my investigative partner and dead-dowsing significant other, Ric. That would keep his mind on dessert.

  I stuffed my feet into Ed Hardy motorcycle boots and emerged through the closet door as the pixie winked out. The Invisible Man, a learned scientist in his day, gave a piercing wolf whistle.

  “Quicksilver, leave kitty!” I called my dog off just as his very visible fangs neared Dr. Jack’s very invisible throat.

  “Toss me my fedora,” I told Dr. Jack. “I like to look professional going to a job.”

  “My work here is done.” His voice was a rasp. “May you and the very big doggie live long and prosper.”

  Quick let his forelegs click to the floor. He picked up one wet paw and wrinkled his muzzle.

  “Not your mess,” I told him. “we’re walking into a much bigger one. What’s your position on anyone or anything who mucks with our CinSim friends?”

  He lifted a rear leg and did nothing more.

  I nodded. “That’s right. You took out that Kansas weather witch’s TV tower with one well-placed piss during her electrical storm. Let’s go see what’s shaking at the Inferno Hotel and find out who needs pissing on now.”

  I looked around. My bedspread was a pyramid of folds on the floor, topped by my slightly used fedora. I decided I could leave home without it.

  * * *

  Just driving up to the Inferno in my vintage Cadillac convertible, Quicksilver riding shotgun in sunglasses, almost shocked the catsuit off me … not that anybody on the Vegas Strip would much notice a naked woman these days.

  They sure couldn’t miss the hotel’s drastically altered façade. I parked on the curved driveway well before the entrance canopy, so I could gaze up. Neon was busting out all over up and down the Las Vegas Strip.

  Not at the Inferno. Tonight it was less the Technicolor erupting volcano and more the smoldering ruin. The usual exterior fireworks had faded to cold, colorless flames the shades of ashes … the gray and black and white of a vintage film, like the CinSims inside.

  Tourists elbowed in and out of the massive front doors, eyes on free-offer flyers, oblivious to the racket, bustle, and anyone else, as usual.

  So I was only secondarily shocked almost out of my butt-stomping booties when my parking valet pal, Manny, opened my Caddy’s driver’s side door.

  Good grief! Manny’s usual vibrant orange demon scales were dolphin blue-gray instead, and his mood was as subdued as his color.

  “Dolly’s looking a bit lackluster, Miss Street,” he said.

  “Well, sure. Her paint job isn’t reflecting the neon-bright flames ringing the hotel for sixty stories up. You look a bit down in the forked tongue and tail yourself.�
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  Manny shrugged as he slid into her red leather upholstery. “Something’s different about the hotel? You got me.”

  Beside me, Quicksilver whimpered his suspicions.

  “You’re right,” I told my dog. “The Invisible Man wasn’t wrong.”

  We left Manny punked out behind the steering wheel as we hoofed it along the crowded sidewalk. I looked back to see the speed-demon valet putt-putting Dolly’s three hundred horses up the parking ramp. I’d never let Manny floor it like the regular leadfoots, but that exit was seriously lame.

  Every hair on Quicksilver’s body stood on end the moment the hotel’s entry doors whooshed shut behind us. My studded wet suit felt warm and cozy, but the skin of my exposed face and hands tightened as if plunged into ice water.

  The usual over-air-conditioned casino atmosphere had gone even more arctic.

  Quick clung to my left hip, Mr. Service Dog incarnate.

  I plunged through any crowd openings, heading straight for the Inferno bar, where my favorite tipsters hung out. I was relieved when a tall, dark-haired man in white tie and tails caught my eye.

  Nick Charles, the famous detective, was still at his CinSim post. My relief trickled out in a sigh. If Nick Charles was on duty at the Inferno bar, all was right with the post–Millennium Revelation world.

  He turned to greet me, a quizzical eyebrow arched toward his receding hairline of wavy hair. “Miss Delilah Street, as I don’t live and breathe. Aren’t you a treat to see in your upscale long johns?”

  He hoisted his constant prop, a martini glass that was perpetually half-empty or half-full, depending on your life philosophy.

  “I’m so glad to see you.” I actually gushed I was so relieved to find Nick being his normal self.

  “That goes double for me, as my vision often does. I have a mystery to solve that has me hammered.” He uttered a puzzled complaint. “There is swill in my glass.”

  “There’s always expensive swill in your glass,” I pointed out.

  “This stuff is undrinkable, and from me that’s saying something.”

  I leaned forward to sip from the rim that swayed to and fro with his well-oiled sense of balance. We could have been on the QE II. A wavelet washed into my mouth.