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 The icy artificial air-conditioning up top had been replaced by a subtle subterranean chill.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 chortled 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 o
verhead 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 now-plummeting car. More of that sweet and impossibly sugary soprano voice. 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’d begun, even though my newly laceless shoes were useless after my catapult atop the elevator car. At least I was now wearing a silver charm bracelet dangling place-appropriate wolf heads.
I decided to restart my investigation on the main floor. First, a limping detour down the shopping wing brought me to a store called Two Cool Tootsie’s. 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.
“Shame about your mangled Jimmy Choos,” she consoled me.
I’d explained I’d caught one high heel in an elevator door and broken 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 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 best 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 and camp drew children to the tricolored wagon, ponies, and the music and color of juggling, knife-throwing, and fortune-telling attractions. I am 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 needed to check out the hotel’s theater stage. The Gehenna’s big contracted show starred Madrigal, the strongman magician, and his creepy pair of female fey assistants. Picture two-foot-high Barbie dolls with glitzy wardrobes, 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 Midnight.
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 Midnight 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 hairdo that framed a vintage gray face with popping eyes and an 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.
“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 sightseers.
I froze.
“Don’t you look sooo darling, dear?” A grandmotherly tourist in a Jimmy Buffett T-shirt, Bermuda shorts, and varicose veins intercepted 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.
But 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 nondog, 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 him 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 had been the detective in disguise. Lon Chaney had played a role within a role.
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, watching the top-hatted vampire offering to escort a troop of local Boy Scouts into the wood. Not good.
In 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 my way into an up elevator all the way to Cesar Cicereau’s forty-third-floor penthouse. And he was the one who wanted this appointment.
A carved wood tree design on the mirrored elevator car walls made riders feel claustrophobic, as if their 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 Cicereau’s paw-picked bodyguards, the weres who never fully reverted to human for some reason, l
ike the half-were biker gangs on the Vegas streets.
In fact, I wished I were facing a tormented, self-hating werewolf like the Larry Talbot persona actor Lon Chaney Jr. had pioneered. The 1941 classic horror film The Wolf Man portrayed the title character as all angsty dude, with my devoted CinSim and all-around character actor, Claude Rains, playing his father figure.
But, no, it was the big boss I needed to see. No one half human.
“The boss is expecting me,” I said.
The guards eyed me for a long moment.
My adventures had finally made me look the part of the accused witch and Gypsy girl, Esmeralda. I was rumpled and bruised, with my ballerina-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 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 handlike 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’s monster, 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.
Chicks Kick Butt - Rachel Caine, Kerrie Hughes (ed) Page 24
