by P. N. Elrod
“My double. Right. That’s why he hires me: look, but no need to touch. Just use me to save his ass.”
“It’s a job,” Sansouci consoled. “Like mine.”
“There are jobs and there are jobs. Are you willing to walk Little Red Riding Hood through the woods?”
“This hokey ‘attraction’? If it will stop that woman ghost upstairs from howling, sure.”
“She gets to you too?”
“Nothing gets to me.”
“We’ll see.”
The woodland walk was too new to attract many tourists. No gaming, no glitz. We were alone.
“You realize,” Sansouci said after a while, “you’re Little Red, and I’m the Wolf.”
“Not this time. And don’t let my devoted wolfhound know that.”
“He’s not here.”
“He could be in two seconds flat,” I said with a grin.
Just then we heard a fierce canine growling in the woods. I shrugged complacently before rushing toward it. Sansouci held back a bit.
The growling ended with a piercing wail of surprised pain that rose up in a weird chorus with the ghostly soprano.
I crashed thorough the carefully planted underbrush to find a blunt-featured, perfectly respectable middle-aged man writhing on the forest floor.
“It bit me!” he cried. Then he spotted me. “Oh, are you all right, miss? You haven’t been bitten too? I tried to divert the wolf from hurting you.” He glowered over my shoulder at Sansouci.
I was no longer the accused witch Esmeralda outside of the great cathedral of Notre Dame, but the werewolf-threatened young woman Larry Talbot had saved from a werewolf bite in the forest, making himself the werewolf-to-be.
I knelt beside him, another CinSim, yet still wounded in spirit and fact. “I’m fine,” I told him. “You saved me. What’s your name?”
The distant trills above made him gaze up through the canopy of leaves. “What beautiful music I hear. It’s like a lullaby.”
“You mustn’t fall asleep,” I said, shaking him. “Concentrate. What’s your name?”
“Name? Creighton. No, Larry now. Not Creighton. I was walking in the wood to visit the Gypsy camp and saw you. An enormous wolf was threatening to bite you.”
“You stopped it,” I reassured him.
Meanwhile, my mind was on overdrive. Something was wrong here. His name was Creighton? There went my house of cards of a theory. The movie hero, Larry Talbot, had been played by the son of the Hunchback and the Man of a Thousand faces, Lon Chaney. I was now comforting Lon Chaney Jr., CinSim.
I’d now met both father and son CinSims, both famed for playing multiple roles, multiple monster roles. I should be bringing these events to a conclusion, but the scenario and cast were just getting more confused.
And who the hell was the ghastly, ghostly soprano still commanding the upper reaches of the Gehenna Hotel?
* * *
I had no trouble persuading Sansouci to leave the troubled man in the woods to his own devices.
“What a wimp,” Sansouci declared when we neared the main concourse. “I got ‘bit’ for eternity too and you don’t see me moaning around about it.”
“You’re not the angsty protagonist of a movie classic.”
He snorted derision.
“Scoff all you like, but Lon Chaney Jr. knew what his father knew, that a likable monster under the mask is much more intriguing than an evil being through and through. Cicereau would be more fully rounded if he’d actually regretted having his daughter killed.”
“No sell,” Sansouci said of his boss. “You can handle these schizophrenic CinSim shape-shifters?”
“I’ll have to. Give me the printouts you made for me. Lon Chaney Sr. mistook me for his movie leading lady. Most CinSims are leased in a single role, but this pair were known for metamorphosing. Maybe I can convince Larry Talbot I’m his love interest.”
“You’d do all this for Cicereau?”
“Heck, no.” I snatched the folding papers Sansouci produced from his inner jean jacket pocket. “I’ll do it for getting these helplessly entangled CinSims’ house in order. Whatever’s gone wrong has to do with the actors’ private lives. You’d better leave me to it.”
I stood there and listened after Sansouci left. The voice was still singing, although familiarity bred dismissal. It was becoming just more casino background music. Yet, Larry Talbot had been right. She’d been singing a lullaby while we’d talked in the ersatz woods, Brahms’s famous one, in fact, and it had almost put Larry Talbot to sleep.
Suddenly, I had a plan.
I headed back to the theater area. It was “dark” now, even during daylight, since only two evening shows played there. I knew my way around theaters, and had almost been an indentured attraction here, so I raced down the empty aisles and up the steps at the side of the stage, then into the dark and curtained wings at stage right.
Large light-board and special-effects layouts filled the area. Matching installments were set up at the back of the “house.” I wanted under, not up, so I scrabbled around in the dark until I found a set of narrow, steep steps down to the subbasement.
Before I descended, I turned on the pinpoint light and punched the button on one of two dozen labeled sound and visual effects: lightning, thunder, parade … there! Just what I needed. Wedding processional.
Sansouci was right. I was making the ultimate sacrifice to pursue this case.
Glad for my flat-heeled shoes, I backed down the ladderlike steps into the dark. Above, I heard the house above fill with the thrilling notes of “Here Comes the Bride,” aka Wagner’s operatic Bridal Chorus from Lohengrin .
The music was ponderous, slow, churchy organ music. I’d never expected to waltz down the aisle to this famous, formal organ music, but it was crazy appropriate for the past and the present I needed to meld into one big postmortem family reunion to end the haunting of the Gehenna and put restless human spirits and silver-screen stars to bed in Lullaby Land. I hoped it would conjure the most famous monster of all.
And, with the vibrations of that thunderous march shaking the stone roots of the subbasement, I stopped and listened for the thin soprano trill that never stopped.
Yes! Faint, but still discernible.
I stepped forward to the march’s beat, clasped my hands at my demure Audrey Hepburn waist, and mouthed the words “Here comes the bride, all dressed and wide.” Well, those were the lyrics we had used at Our Lady of the Lake Convent School.
“Beautiful,” a thrumming male voice added to the cacophony.
A face from a nightmare leapt in front of me. “You? You, girl. You sing like a chorus of angels emerging from one throat. I’ll teach you, shape you, make you even more magnificent.”
I simpered at the grotesque face with the eyes circled in black paint and the blackened and ragged teeth. I couldn’t sing, but I could hear, and I mouthed along with the distant siren, while the Phantom of the Opera closed his lids over those mad, blasted eyes and swayed to the song echoing above.… “Think of Me,” as it is sung at the Las Vegas Venetian Resort Hotel Casino performance of The Phantom of the Opera every night, by Christine, the beautiful soprano the Phantom loves and longs for.
Finally, the female phantom of the Gehenna finished a long, sustained phrase, and … stopped.
The automatic organ melody had died even earlier.
I stood alone in the darkened silence with the Phantom of the Opera, 1927-style, Lon Chaney’s greatest transformation.
“My love. My Christine,” the Phantom said, words Chaney had mouthed on the 1925 silent-film screen. He’d never uttered an audible word until his last film in 1930, and, dying, this son of deaf-mutes had not been able to speak at all. “Only you can sing my soul to rest.”
Yes, that was true. To accomplish that, I had to lead him on a merry chase.
Up the stairs I sprang on my brand-new leopard-skin rose-toed flats, feeling the CinSim clutch at my ragged taffeta hem.
Onto the stage
and up the aisles to the bright artificial light of the concourse I flew like Cinderella eluding her Prince. Tourists paused to observe and ooh and chuckle. Just part of the performing mimes Vegas hotels are famed for. Then I ducked into the carefully landscaped wooded area and hoped my high-pitched screams befitted a frightened girl fleeing a werewolf.
Larry Talbot, now fully furred and fanged, rose from the underbrush, growling, determined to stop my pursuer.
I stepped aside like a bit player trying to save her acting wardrobe as monster met monster.
* * *
The Phantom ruled his understage world, but he was an emotional and intellectual monster.
The Wolf Man bared his fangs and his wild, white-eyed look and pounced on the disfigured maniac opera buff.
I couldn’t have the Immortality Mob’s property tearing each other gray limb from black limb, so I jumped between them.
“You want to save me, noble suitors,” I cried in what for me was close to a swooning soprano, “do not destroy each other. I love you both.”
Well, there. I’d introduced a logical impossibility into the plot of every film either “man” had ever acted in.
In confusion, Lon Chaney Jr. morphed into his Mummy persona.
“Oh, Karis,” I said, pressing a restraining hand on his blood-smudged chest wrappings. “He is but an old man, a figure of fun, not a rival.”
At which, Lon Chaney Sr. obligingly changed into one of his demented clown personas.
This is when I discovered that the female love interest is the queen of the board, the key to every plot of every originally cheesy melodramatic script these film legends had appeared in. She was lovely, she was engaged, she was a swooning wimp, and they ached to own her love, but always lost out to a fine, stalwart, handsome, ordinary human man.
In some ways, the life and loves of Lon Chaney and his son Creighton, who would resurface as Lon Chaney Jr., much to his embarrassment and shame, were as much at stake here as any misunderstood film monster’s fate.
I was getting a lot of melodrama whiplash keeping these legendary actors and their roles apart when a woman’s voice came to my rescue.
* * *
“Stop. Stop! I won’t be caught between you! I won’t be the maiden victim again and again. I won’t be silent. I will sing. I’d rather die than be torn between the two of you. Monsters! I am a nightingale and I will not be caged.”
A pretty woman wearing a pale, long gown now stood among us, a figure of hysterical anguish.
She threw back her slim soprano’s neck and lifted an even slimmer glass vial to her gray silver-screen lips. A thin stream of mercury slid oysterlike down her throat. Then she screamed, screeched, writhed, clutching her vocal cords as they corroded and cracked, and vanished along with her ability to make any sound.
“You did this,” the Wolfman snarled at the Phantom. “You told me she was dead, that I had no mother. But the mercury poison destroyed her vocal cords, not her life.”
“Her vocal cords were her life!” How odd to see the Phantom of the Opera scorning a woman for using her gift, but the character had been a control freak too. “Cleva wanted to perform, and you were a young boy, Creighton,” the Phantom argued. “You needed a mother with you, not one off in nightclubs singing for far less than emperors.”
“Creighton. That was her surname,” Larry Talbot remembered, “given to me as her firstborn. She tried to kill herself because of you.”
“I had theatrical work, boy, a rising career! Cleva refused to give up her singing to stay with you.”
“Others could have tended me. They already had.”
“Yes, her voice was sublime, beyond incredibly sweet.”
“And it never was so again. You cared nothing for her gift, her talent, so she seared it from her throat in front of you,” the Wolfman said with a guttural whine of pain. “And then you told me she was dead. I was just a boy of seven. You kept us apart for years until she found me again.”
“Once you knew of her existence, you left me, Creighton. You went off with her.”
“Which was fine with you. You never wanted me to go on the stage, on the screen, as you never wanted her to sing. She destroyed her gift in her pain at your not valuing it. Or her.”
“You called yourself ‘Lon’ and tacked a ‘Jr.’ on your name at the order of the studio bosses after I was dead.”
“I didn’t want to. I wanted to be my own man, as my mother wanted to be her own woman, but your legend mired us both in paths that hurt us.”
“I didn’t put the bichloride of mercury in her hand.”
“You put the despair in her soul.”
“Our divorce was overdue.”
“As I was born prematurely. I guess,” the Wolfman said, straightening into the sad, human, but familiar form of Larry Talbot, “I guess our timing was always off, Dad.”
I held my breath, caught up in the family tragedy. Sure, they were all CinSims, so it was like watching ghosts play out some long-dead script. But the drama was true to life.
“I died young, Son,” Lon Chaney admitted, “alone, before age fifty, from cornflakes, of all things, used to make snow on a set. I lost my voice at the end, as Cleva had, as my deaf-mute parents had before their births. A throat hemorrhage silenced me forever, seventeen years after Cleva’s mad attempt at self-destruction.”
“So why is she singing now?” Lon Jr. asked.
They turned to me, as if I were the image of Cleva. I was brunet, as the printout photo of her had been, but my hair was closer to jet-black. She’d looked high-hearted smart in a top hat and a monocle from some forgotten vaudeville or nightclub routine. We hardly resembled each other, but to the CinSims’ eyes, we were the eternal woman, heroine, victim, mother, child, lover, supporter, opponent.
“She wanted Creighton to hear what she had been,” I said to the Phantom. “And,” I said to the Wolf Man, “she wanted to see what you had become.”
“Yet,” the Wolf Man said, “she lived to a riper old age than either of us.”
“But … you’d never heard her sing,” I pointed out. “Now you have.”
The Wolf Man nodded. “The pack sings. It’s part of our heritage.”
“Are you the actor or the role?” I asked.
I gestured at the Phantom. “This is an inspired and impassioned instructor. You have a chance to replay all your roles over and over again, with Cleva as an invisible audience. I don’t think you’ll see or hear her again, except in your CinSim hearts.”
Frowns. The moment had passed. They resumed their roles, utterly alien to each other except in being monsters. Phantom and Wolf Man. Larry Talbot vanished into his woodland arena. The Phantom limped back to the bowels of the theater.
I reported to the head monster in the penthouse soon after.
* * *
“So you’re saying I leased a pair of CinSims with unresolved relationship issues?” Cicereau demanded. “What is the Immortality Mob pushing these days?”
“Leasing illusory surfaces of human beings is a dodgy business, even in these post–Millennium Revelation days,” I told him.
“And the ghost of the Chaney wife and mother decided my hotel-casino was the place to sing bloody murder about stuff that went down a hundred years ago, when she and Lon Chaney got divorced? Women! They never give up. Why me?”
“Perhaps you own daughter’s haunting created a channel for another woman who felt a trusted man had taken her life, one way or another.”
“I didn’t hire a psychoanalyst-investigator, Street. Out, out, damn Joseph Campbell! You quit the psychobabble and concentrate on being a babe and just guarantee that psycho siren is outta the Gehenna and my hearing for good.”
“Oh, she’s gone, and I will be too. Once you fork over what you owe me.”
He pulled a wad from his pin-striped pants and peeled off Benjamin Franklins, snapping the hundred-dollar bills to the desktop like he was laying out playing cards.
At three thousand, he paused for my
reaction.
“I banished one ghost and reunited two CinSims, not to mention tussling with the Hunchback of Notre Dame, the Wolf Man, the Mummy, and the Phantom of the Opera.”
He resumed, slapping down hundreds until he reached five thousand. It made quite a pile.
“Tell me you don’t sing,” he asked with a beady eye on my throat.
“I don’t.”
“Fifty-two Benjamins for the whole deck of cards, covering a maintenance visit if the Chaney boys act up again.”
* * *
Lon Chaney, the Man of a Thousand Faces and reluctant postmortem “Sr.” to his son Creighton’s studio rechristening as Lon Chaney Jr., had hoped his feats of grotesque disguise proved that “the dwarfed, misshapen beggar of the streets may have the noblest ideals and the capacity for supreme self-sacrifice.”
Cleva Creighton had sacrificed her sublime voice in her tormented fight for the right to use it.
Lon Chaney had learned to “speak” so eloquently in silent films by growing up with deaf-mute parents, and then died speechless of throat cancer.
Creighton Chaney had rejected the father who’d deprived a young boy of his mother, but fate had turned him to walk in the same career shoes.
Speaking of shoes, I left the Gehenna with a couple months’ salary, a satisfyingly “happy” ending for two icons of film history, and a kicky new pair of leopard-pattern flats with full-blown roses on the toes in honor of poor, deluded, but talented Cleva Creighton.
“Need a lift back to the Inferno party?” a voice asked as its owner fell into step with me as I strode through the din-filled Gehenna lobby.
“I’ve had enough unwanted transportation today, thanks,” I told Sansouci. “I think I’ll walk.”
The daylight vampire might claim to feel no regrets for his centuries of survival on other people, but I guessed he had more in common with tormented Larry Talbot than a mobster like Cesar Cicereau would ever perceive … or believe.
Alone, I pushed open an entry door and walked out of the intense hotel-casino air-conditioning to mingle with the throng of tourists heading like lemmings for the Strip under the hot-syrup warmth of the Nevada sun pouring down.
