“Les, there are no real vampires.” I spoke consolingly, as if to a child having bad dreams.
Les’s ragged breathing filled my ears. “One of them is real, the one Lucy fell in love with. It’s hard to believe, I know. I didn’t believe it myself until I met him.”
“You met him? What did he look like?” It was an odd question, but Les was too distraught to notice.
“I don’t know, exactly. He was wearing a hood. They have these rituals at the House of Usher where people volunteer to let him suck their blood. You’ve got to go and record it, for evidence, so the police will believe what we’re telling them!”
So Les couldn’t confirm that the man I knew as Eric was the one he identified as the real vampire. I was both relieved and disappointed to know this, but I felt that I couldn’t hide from the truth for much longer. I owed it to Lucy, not to mention myself. I also felt increasingly sure that the truth, if there even was such a thing, would not change what I felt about him.
“Is this the same ritual you were going to go to with Lucy last week?” I asked.
“How do you know about that? Who have you been talking to?”
“Answer the question, Les.”
“Moravia told Lucy not to come anymore. Lucy said it was because her new boyfriend didn’t want to be in competition with me, that he was trying to be chivalrous.”
“That’s good for you, right? The new boyfriend was bowing out.”
“Wrong. Lucy said she wasn’t going to let me get in her way, that once the vampire knew it was really over between me and her, he’d come back to her.”
“So Lucy didn’t go to the ritual that night?” Maybe because you killed her to keep her from going?
“I don’t know. She kicked me out before midnight. I think she did go, and he killed her there. Maybe he’ll kill someone else tonight. If you go and get a video I’ll be off the hook.”
I grabbed for the edge of the table, feeling dizzy. “Les, I can’t do that, especially if what you’re saying is true. Tell the police, they can go over and see for themselves.”
Les laughed again. “Yeah, right, they’ll go right over there when I call them and tell them it wasn’t me, that it was a vampire. They’ll believe that, Angie. No, you go. There’s a password, they’ll let you in. You’ll be safe, there’s always an audience you can blend in with. Only the person who volunteers is in danger.”
“Oh, that makes me feel better.”
Les ignored me. “Go in the back entrance, from the alley near the dumpster. At the bottom of the stairs there’ll be a guard. Say the password and they’ll let you in. Make a video of what they’re doing and take it to the police. Then they’ll have to believe you. I could get the death penalty! You owe me, Angie, you handed me to the police on a…”
An electronic voice interrupted Les, saying “Please deposit fifty cents for three more minutes.”
Les shouted, “Shit, I don’t have any more money. Requiem, that’s the password…”
The connection was severed before I could reply.
After talking to Les I tried to sit up and think but it was like I’d taken a tranquilizer. My head kept slumping lower and lower until I was asleep again. When I woke up my alarm clock read 9:58 P.M. I tried to keep my eyes closed, thinking I ought to try to sleep through the night, but I couldn’t keep the lids down. My biorhythms were completely confused. I finally gave up and went to the kitchen.
Kimberley was there, dressed in a fluffy white robe, drinking a glass of milk and flipping through Vogue.
“Hey, I’m glad you came home and went to bed. How are you feeling now?”
“Better, I guess.”
I opened the refrigerator, trying to remember the last time I’d eaten. There was the Irish coffee I’d had with Eric, was that only last night? It seemed like a lifetime ago. Before that was the salad I’d eaten at the Azure Sea. I should have been starving, but nothing in the refrigerator looked appealing. It was all Kimberley’s food: soymilk, eggs, buttermilk bread, yogurt, sliced Swiss cheese. I realized for the first time that all of Kimberley’s food products were white. I wondered if there was a category of mental illness in the psychology books for white food eaters.
I poured myself a glass of soymilk and sat down opposite Kimberley. She continued to read, no longer acknowledging my presence. If Kimberley had been a different kind of person I was sure we would have been talking a mile a minute, comforting each other, exchanging theories, examining every minute detail of the past few days. But even if Kimberley hadn’t sabotaged me with the Macabre Factor account, we still wouldn’t have been best-friending it around the kitchen.
I’d been living there almost a year and I still knew only the facts about Kimberley. She’d never shared any of her feelings with me—assuming she had feelings. We lived together as if we were neighbors on the same hallway, waving hello when we ran into each other. We each had our own bathroom and neither of us used the kitchen much. If I used up the last of something I replaced it, and so did Kimberley. We coexisted. Now there were so many things between us—Lucy’s death, Kimberley’s treachery, and Dick’s favoritism toward me—I wasn’t sure we could even go back to coexistence. On top of everything else I was probably going to have to find a new place to live. For a second I imagined that the new place might be with Eric, in whatever chalet or chateau or condo he called home. But only for a second.
“What are you going to do tonight?” I asked.
“I’m going to take a sleeping pill and go to bed. I can’t wait to have this day over.” She looked at me over the magazine. “What about you?”
I’m going to the House of Usher to film a vampire ritual. Wanna go?
“Nothing much. I might go over to Steve’s place to watch a movie.”
I left Kimberley in the kitchen and sat in the living room without turning on any lamps. The twinkling lights of the city, giving way to soft inky blackness at the edge of the water, had a soothing effect on me. I noticed that, just like yesterday, I was starting to feel better now that it was full night. My headache was gone and I felt wide-awake.
Kimberley came in. “Do you want me to turn a light on for you?”
“No!” I said a little too sharply. I changed my tone. “I like looking at the view this way.”
“Okay, I’m going to bed. I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Good night.”
The light in the kitchen was off and the living room was in even deeper darkness. But as I gazed across the room at the built-in bookshelves where Kimberley kept her library, the titles leapt out at me like there was a spotlight on them. Feng Shui Your Crib, How to Meditate in 10 Minutes a Day, The Art of Business, The Business of Advertising. I’d never been able to read those titles from the couch, even in daylight. Was my eyesight getting better?
I thought about what Les had asked me to do. What he had really asked, although he didn’t know it, was for me to see whether Lucy’s boyfriend and mine were one and the same. I wanted to exonerate Les. I wanted to find Lucy’s killer and have it be somebody I’d never seen before, someone I didn’t give an expletive about. I wanted to see Eric again, but not at the House of Usher. I went to my room to change clothes.
Steve lived in the Castro District, a neighborhood known throughout the world as a gay mecca, now being taken over by the “stroller pushing crowd,” as he liked to call heterosexual parents. But on a Friday night at 11:30 the stroller crowd was snug in their beds and Castro Street had reverted back to its previous owners. Handsome men with handlebar mustaches and bulging pectoral muscles strolled arm in arm. Rainbow flags signifying gay liberation fluttered in the wind. 1970s disco music pulsated from the open doors of the bars.
Steve’s apartment was on a hill directly above the busy part of Castro Street. Every spot on the street was taken, so I double-parked in front of the building, turning on my hazard lights. I entered the portico of the graying, 1960s-era shoebox building and pushed the intercom button for apartment four.
Steve’s garbled voice sounded like he was still under his covers. “This better be an emergency.”
“Steve, listen, I need you to come out with me.”
“Angie, I was asleep!”
“I need a wingman.” Steve and I had been out together many times, but it never worked for meeting potential mates because we always had so much fun with each other that we scared off everybody else.
Steve’s voice was weary. “I thought you were sick, now you want to go party? You better come up here so I can chastise you properly.” He buzzed me into the building and I climbed a flight of narrow stairs to his door.
Dressed in boxer shorts decorated with hearts and a red T-shirt, Steve gestured me into the living room of his one-bedroom apartment. He had done wonders with the room, making it look like a tiny Tuscan villa, with terra-cotta walls, antique wooden tables laden with flowers and Italian pottery, and even a miniature replica of Michelangelo’s David. He tried to get me to sit on the overstuffed velvet couch, but I chose to pace instead.
“So, what are you doing out by yourself at midnight?”
“Steve, I don’t have time to explain, we have to go to the House of Usher. Les thinks it was one of the people there who killed Lucy. He asked me to help him, there’s no one left except me, he says he’s innocent, the police are going to arrest him unless I get some evidence, he told me where we can sneak in…” I stopped, knowing I was going in circles.
“Let me get this straight. You think one of these characters might have killed Lucy, but you want to go straight to the lion’s den and offer yourself as a rump roast, and bring yours truly along for dessert. I don’t think so. That’s what we have the police for, Nancy Drew.” Steve sat down on his couch and crossed his arms, case closed.
“I’ve already thought this through. The police are not going to do anything except keep looking for Les, at least until they have some other suspect. They’re not going to get another suspect because they have no cause to look for one. Les is right, I did give him up, and if he didn’t do it I have to help him.”
I wasn’t going to mention my other reason, wanting to make sure Eric was not the person Les thought was Lucy’s killer. Then he really wouldn’t let me go.
“And what if these wackos did kill Lucy, Angie? What about this guy, Eric, who drugged you? What if it was him?”
So much for deception.
Steve looked at me closely, then clapped his hand to his mouth. “You saw him again, Angie, I see it in your eyes. You’ve completely lost your mind, and I’m not letting you out of this apartment!”
I sat down on a satiny wing chair. Tears prickled my eyes, threatening to spill over. I scrubbed at them roughly with my hand. “Yes, I saw him again. We went out last night. We rode down Highway One on a motorcycle. It was magical…” My voice trailed off.
What would Steve say if I told him everything—if I described my encounters with Eric, the strange symptoms I’d been having since the first time he’d touched me, and the desperate longing for him that was starting to consume my waking hours and my dreams? What if the situation were reversed and Steve was telling me the same things about a man he had just met? I would be doing anything in my power to keep him away from the guy.
“Les needs my help. I hope you will go with me, but if you don’t, I’m going anyway.”
Steve stared at me for a long moment, and then stood up. He pulled off the red T-shirt as he headed for his bedroom.
“I guess black is the color du jour?”
We drove by the House of Usher and checked the front entrance. The usual abnormal crowd was waiting to get in, names being checked by the beefy bouncer. We parked around the corner and walked down the alley behind the nightclub. If I hadn’t been feeling so nervous I would have laughed at the sight of Steve, looking like Marcel Marceau without the white face in skintight black pants, turtleneck, and beret, tiptoeing at midnight behind a dumpster filled with rotting Chinese food. The black metal door I had used in my escape two days before was slightly ajar, just as it had been then.
When we entered I heard mind numbingly loud music pounding down on us from upstairs. Mercifully, it was muted by a set of closed doors. Following Les’s directions we went down one flight and through a dank room filled with cardboard boxes to a door, where a person undistinguishable as to age or gender, in black shapeless clothes, with black shoulder-length hair, was standing. I could hear sounds through the door, chanting or singing and perhaps drums. When Steve hesitated I shoved him forward. This was not something one should think too hard about.
“Look like you know what you’re doing,” I hissed at him.
The genderless person stared at us impassively.
“Requiem.” My voice was a hoarse whisper.
The person opened the door.
Steve pulled back, forcing me to drag him. His expression said: “What the %#*& are we doing here?” I peeled his fingers off my arm and strode in, swallowing the bile my fear was producing.
About fifty people were standing in front of a stage, watching the show in progress. The only light in the large room came from a row of pillar candles near the front, so I dragged Steve with me into the shadows at the side of the room. I opened up my cell phone, trying to hide it under the black shawl I was wearing. I was sure someone would see me recording and throw us out, or worse, but then I noticed that at least two other people were taping the proceedings, one with a phone, and one with a camera. I nudged Steve and pointed. He shrugged and whispered, “They probably have a website. Crazyvampireshit.com.”
At first glance what we were seeing appeared to be the kind of lesbian sex show you can see at certain downtown clubs for the price of three watered-down drinks. Two women dressed in little more than G-strings and leather bracelets were writhing in a theatrical approximation of sex. What was different was the blood. One woman’s neck and chest were covered with shallow cuts in the shape of circles and stars, from which blood dripped in rivulets. The other woman licked the blood and rubbed her hands over the wounds until the first woman’s skin was covered in a red sheen.
We seemed to have come in at the end of the first act because the two women picked themselves up and went behind a curtain. I wondered what they could possibly follow up with, and whether I could stand to look anymore. It helped to be looking through the camera. It gave some distance to the proceedings.
Moravia and several others arrived on the stage, each holding a pendant flag emblazoned with an abstract coat of arms. They were chanting words I couldn’t understand, but it had the rhythmic intonation of a Mass in Latin. It even sounded like Latin, with a lot of the words ending in um or us. Suleiman entered, wearing a black robe with red satin lining embroidered with fanciful patterns. I pulled my shawl around my face just in case he or Moravia happened to look my way.
“Hey, aren’t they your clients?” Steve asked in a loud whisper. I nodded.
“Didn’t they say they wanted you to use people in the club for their campaign?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Great idea. Watching the pig blood scene in Carrie always makes me want to buy cosmetics.”
The music and chanting faded and Suleiman’s voice boomed out over the audience. “Sons and daughters of the night. Is there one among you who chooses to offer themselves as a sacrifice to the Lord of Darkness, who wishes to taste immortality and rend the fabric that divides this world from the Beyond?”
A young woman pushed through the crowd and climbed the stairs on the side of the stage. She was thin and delicate, with long blond hair. I zoomed in on her face and saw it was Lilith. Her eyes had a drugged, glazed-over look and she stumbled as she walked.
Lilith stood at the front of the stage and held out her arms. It seemed she’d done this act before. Suleiman and Moravia unbuttoned her shirt, stroking her arms and shoulders and whispering. Two other men in cloaks stepped forward and just as they did Lilith slumped like she was going to fall down. The men grabbed her arms and held her upright.
A tall man entered, his head covered with a black velvet cloak so that his face was obscured. He was holding a dagger about ten inches long. The chanting started again by the participants on the stage and was taken up by the observers. The man held the knife high above his head, then came forward and raised it over Lilith’s chest, as if he were going to stab her in the heart. There was a collective intake of breath, then silence. I felt like I was at a bullfight, waiting for the matador to deliver the coup de grace. My head swam and I felt I might faint but my feet were frozen to the floor. Steve silently took hold of my free hand.