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.