Chapter One


Victor Renquist touched a control set in the armrest of the long black stretch limousine and cracked the smoked-glass divider that separated him from Lamar. "Pull over and stop, please, just as soon as you are able."
From behind the wheel, Lamar answered without glancing back. "It's kind of hard on this stretch of Mulholland, sir."
Renquist nodded. "I know that. Just pull over when you can. Pull into one of those observation areas where you look out over the city."
"You want to look at the lights, sir?"
Renquist nodded and half smiled. "I do indeed, Lamar. I want to look at the lights."
The limo continued to glide effortlessly along the night hilltop scenic twists and turns of Mulholland Drive for perhaps two more minutes, and then Lamar smoothly eased it off the road and gravel crunched under the tires. The limousine came to a gentle stop and Lamar sat, saying nothing, not even looking round, just waiting for Renquist to announce what he intended to do next.
"I think I might step out and breathe the air, Lamar, such as it is."
"Very good, Mr. Renquist."
Renquist had no real need to speak to Lamar, he could have directed his instructions directly into the man's mind, but the two of them maintained the niceties of the chauffeur-employer relationship. Lamar got out of the driver's seat and walked to the right-hand passenger door. He opened it and Victor Renquist emerged from the car. Renquist straightened and stood for a moment, as good as his word, taking one deep breath after another. A hundred years ago, the air in the Los Angeles basin had been possessed of a desert purity, but what now filled his unique undead lungs was rank with gasoline and the oppressive scents of eucalyptus, honeysuckle, and night-blooming jasmine, exhaust fumes mingled with subtropical vegetation made unnaturally lush by water all the way from Nevada. Such was the way of human madness. By day, much of the city had a half-completed ugliness, slashed by freeways, picketed by rearing billboards and littered with shoddy, rectangular cement boxes of a basic and unsophisticated architectural crudity that even the overlay of palm trees, panoramic glass, and pink-and-turquoise stucco could scarcely disguise. Fortunately, because of his very nature, Victor Renquist was never required to see LA by day, except on television or perhaps through the charcoal-tinted windows of a speeding limo. For Renquist, the lauded California sun was nothing more than a lethal anathema. His own intimate knowledge of the city was strictly that of the city by night.
He walked a few paces to where, with only a low retaining wall to protect the unwary, the side of the road fell away in an almost sheer drop of sandy cliff for thirty or forty feet. Below him, the lights of Los Angeles, immortalized in so many motion pictures, extended to the horizon in every direction. For a moment, Renquist was gripped by a genetically atavistic wistfulness as he looked out over the electric jewelfield of lights. O, but there and then to transform himself into a huge batlike thing and swoop unseen over trees and rooftops and the gaudy neon boulevards, riding the unnatural thermals thrown up by the heat of the concrete landscape. Sadly, thought, such exhilaration was never to be his. The secret of shapeshifting was more than a millennium lost and gone. The last of the ectomorphs had vanished over a thousand years ago, even before he had been created, and yet some twist in his nosferatu DNA could still remember and yearn, as he stood, a tall, imposing watcher in the night, black silk shirt rippling across his back in the slight breeze, high boots planted firmly and inevitably on solid ground. At first glance, Renquist looked like a slim but powerful man in perhaps his early forties, pale featured, with dark hair that curled to his shoulders. That was, of course, until one looked into his dark, deep-set eyes. The eyes told a true story, one that most humans could never bring themselves to face. Renquist's unguarded eyes were the sole testament to how he was not only incalculably old, but also something frighteningly other than human.
He may, of course have been biased, but for him, Los Angeles by night was a place of soft, if ear complete, deception; a deception that was well-suited to the needs of a predator like himself. The very pollution that plagued the city in the day and, when inversion set in, turned the sky at the horizon an ominous brown, acted as a cosmetic screen, giving the night a feel of velvet-soft focus and causing the myriad of lights to gleam and twinkle like radiant gems. For the first few moments, Renquist took in the view with the nosferatu singlesight that closely conformed to the limited range and spectrum of normal human vision, and he stared across the only slightly less than symmetrical laser geometry of Hollywood and beyond like any mere tourist. Since he was compelled to live in a world at least numerically dominated by humanity, it was only sensible to spend at least some of his time observing it as mankind did. It was a piece of calculated self-discipline designed to avoid possibly fatal oversights, overestimations, and misconceptions. One on one, the nosferatu might be infinitely superior to the humans on whom they preyed, but Renquist was well aware that he and the others like him should never fall to an overweening reliance on that superiority. They were few, a comparative handful, while human numbers were in their constantly growing billions. With the odds so stacked against them, nosferatu survival had to be a matter of constant care and vigilance.
Los Angeles always struck Renquist as a city that had begun its decline even before it had been fully built. In some respects, it reminded him of Rome, Cairo, or Constantinople, except so much was missing from the picture. It had no great mosques or cathedrals, no wondrous structures that would survive for thousands of years. The glass-and-steel towers of downtown and Century City were hardly a substitute for all the places he had known when he'd been young and when he'd been human. They hardly competed with St. Peter's or the Coliseum, the Blue Mosque, the Topkapi Palace, or the Basilica of St. Sophie, and certainly not the with the Great Pyramid, although that was really a whole other story. At first, the transitory and ad hoc nature of the place had suited Renquist, but lately he had become bored and reclusive. The challenges were tiresomely trivial, the ambitions desperately frivolous, and the driving criteria little more than infantile materialism. Renquist would have been happy to move on, but he knew, for the time being, he was firmly anchored by the rest of the colony. The colony had adapted well to this final city on the edge of America, and their presence was not so much as suspected. Although, as in New York, an arrangement had been made with a larcenous Salvadoran orderly at Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital to ensure an uninterrupted supply of packaged whole blood, the nosferatu hunted on a regular if discreet basis. Unlike the New York colony, they did not even try to exist exclusively on the plastic packs of donor hemoglobin. Such a complete self-denial of their nature and appetite for the fresh kill had only led inexorably to the condition known as Feasting, the frenzied outbreak of uncontrollable slaughter that had all but caused the colony's downfall and annihilation back in Manhattan and necessitated their flight from that city.
In certain respects, Los Angeles was a wilder, less civilized place than New York. With just a bare century of history as city behind it, it had never been sufficiently developed to divorce it from the primal underlay of tooth and claw, and hunter and hunted. Coyotes still maintained furtive territory, even in the more populated areas of the hills and canyons, prowling affluent yards and pools to snag the unwary poodle or calico cat as what, from the coyotes' point of view, was a perfectly legitimate meal. In the same way, the city was full of enough lost and dislocated souls, with no one to miss them, mourn them, or investigate their disappearance, for the nosferatu of the colony to hunt virtually at will and completely escape detection. The presence of the movie industry created a perpetual and self-renewing community of runaways and the sadly overambitious who flocked there from all over the world with tinsel dreams of making it as big as Sandra Bullock or Leonardo DiCaprio, while the poor teeming Latino nations to the south supplied a constant influx of the unknown and undocumented. It was among these that Renquist and his companions found their equivalent of the coyotes' poodles and calico cats, and the colony seemed to thrive on the arrangement.
Julia, the youngest and most headstrong of the surviving colony, had especially taken to the Hollywood social parameters like a demon duck to a dark expanse of fetid green swamp water. If Renquist suggested moving on, Julia would be the first to raise the most strident and violent of objections. Julia had always been attracted to power, and in Los Angeles she had immediately recognized it. Now that time and cash had run out on the banking barons, and the military industrial complex had moved most of its billions to the Dixiecrat South, all true power was pretty much the monopoly of the entertainment industry. Accordingly, the slim deceptive blonde, with the deep Dietrich voice, the ice blue eyes, and the iron will of a Prussian field marshal, had homed in on the town's media elite like a moth to the flame, although Renquist knew the simile worked better in reverse. Julia was much more the flame coming to burn up the unsuspecting moths. Her ruthless determination was a million degrees more all-consuming and devious than that of the most highly venal of TV or movie moguls.
Of all the surviving nosferatu colony, however, Julia was the cannon most likely to tear loose, and in this Renquist only had himself to blame. He had after all created her in the first place. Julia Aschenbach had been a budding starlet in the Nazi film industry and reputedly one of Joseph Goebbels' countless mistresses. Renquist had thought it a fine karmic joke to bring her through the Change, so he could leave one of his kind at the very heart of the Nazi hierarchy. That death sect of degenerate human butchers had disgusted even him. And not merely one of his kind. Julia had been in that very first phase when the newly transformed are young, angry, and overwhelmingly predatory. On one point, though, he had grossly miscalculated. In his general contempt for humans, Renquist had failed to examine what kind of being he was Changing. If he'd thought of the human Julia at all, it had been to dismiss her as nothing more than a stunningly airheaded beauty who would be unlikely to survive the sun, the stake, or the fire for more than a few years undead on her own. As it turned out, she was both acutely cunning and a consummate survivor. Many years later, he had learned this to his cost, perhaps the terrible cost of his beloved Cynara.
Through long twentieth-century decades, Julia had killed and prospered. She had thrown her deviant undead energy into KGB psyops, black nights of Latin American counterinsurgency, and then on, with a complete right-angle turn, so typical of her character, into achieving nocturnal bohemian fame with her own depraved performance art of the damned. She had finally sought out Renquist in New York City and demanded that he acknowledge her as his own. Julia had been accepted into the colony, albeit over the objections of some of the established members, but her plans went further than that. From the moment that she had first entered the colony and assessed the situation, her ambition had been to replace Cynara as Renquist's consort and pair-bonded hunting partner. Although it was the human, Kelly, who had been the actual agent of Cynara's passing, given time, Julia might well have engineered the deed herself.
In the microcosm of the colony, just as in the macro-world of the humans, power was the key to understanding Julia. She had seen that Renquist, as Master of the colony, wielded the ultimate power and commanded the ultimate respect, and she had become determined to be the ultimate object of his affections. It might have been more flattering if Renquist had not been very well aware that, even if he had Julia did bond, it wouldn't end there. Ultimately, Julia didn't have the personality of a consort. Eventually she would get round to challenging him for the Mastery and, in the event of that confrontation, one of them would inevitably be destroyed.
Renquist sighed out loud. Nosferatu, for all their infinite time, strength, and awesome intelligence, were intractably quarrelsome creatures. "Ah, Julia, why do I have to spend so much time watching out for you? I hardly even like you."
Lamar, who was standing at a discreet distance by the driver's door of the black limo, stiffened. "You said something, Mr. Renquist?"
Renquist turned, stepping off the train of thought named Julia and turning his attention momentarily to the human chauffeur. "It's a while since I had you drive me, isn't it Lamar?"
"That's right, Mr. Renquist."
Lamar was one of that tiny minority of humans who had a great enough awareness of their expendable subservience that they were able to subsist in close proximity with nosferatu and be pleased to do their bidding. Once upon a time, they had been known as thralls; now the word seemed to be employee. Renquist smiled coldly at the man. "I haven't been out that much in the last few months."
"So I have observed."
A hinted, although never stated, promise on the part of the nosferatu to their strange mortal retainers was that, at some time in the future, when the human had proved his or her worth, the good and faithful servant would be rewarded with the priceless gift of near-eternal life. It was, however, a promise that the nosferatu rarely kept.
"I'm sure the others are more than enough to keep you busy."
"Indeed they are, sir."
Renquist looked speculatively at Lamar. This one might make it, unless, of course he had to be sacrificed to cover the colony's tracks, or used as emergency sustenance in a crisis. "But you were wondering why I suddenly decided to go for a solitary drive on this particular night?"
"I never wonder, Mr. Renquist." And that was the absolute truth. Lamar never wondered. Lamar was possessed of a mind that functioned extremely oddly even for the brain of a human. Renquist, however, rarely invaded it. He didn't believe in routinely entering the minds of humans with whom he needed to maintain a regular or lose proximity. He only scanned them when monitoring or adjustment was needed. Human servants always grew to resent too much casual intrusion, even if they weren't consciously aware of it. They became mistrustful, unreliable, and in some extreme cases, unacceptably surly and uncooperative. Some even plunged into a form of paranoid schizophrenia. Renquist had, however, scanned Lamar very thoroughly when he had first accepted him into the employ of the colony, and what he discovered in the man's mind convinced him that, in Lamar, he might well have found the ideal retainer; certainly one worth preserving, too good to waste on any casual expenditure.
Lamar was a tall, raw-boned descendent of oil filed roughnecks and itinerant cowboys. He had grown up in some forsaken, flatland hamlet in West Texas border country and had suffered a hate-inducing childhood worthy of any prominent serial killer, and like any prominent serial killer, the greatest satisfaction Lamar could imagine would be to randomly murder and mutilate others of his species. Unlike his more homicidal soul mates, however, he didn't act on his impulses. Those urges remained locked away, along with the memories and imaginings, in a place so deep in his mind that it was the mental equivalent of a steel safe. He loathed being around people to the point of phobia, but found a perverse comfort in the company of nosferatu. Renquist knew that this probably wasn't the way a human mind should function, and Lamar might well, be in the terms of human society, a dangerous and ticking time bomb, but that wasn't Renquist's problem. To him and the others, Lamar was loyal, devoted, and unquestioning, and these attributes were all that the Master of a colony should care about in his human vassals.
"You're a good man, Lamar."
Lamar's face was expressionless. "Thank you, sir."
Renquist turned his attention back to the panorama of LA, but instead of using the limited spectrum of human vision, he changed to the deep and unique perception of the nosferatu, the special sight that perceived auras and emotions in form and color. The image of the city was instantly altered. The physical features remained, but now ghostly and less substantial, secondary to a mistlike multicolored overlay of normally invisible psychic forces. At this distance, all Renquist received were general impressions of the prevailing collective mood in different areas, but even they were spectacular, and told him a lot about the so-called City of Angels and its denizens. All over, the general impression was one of weary anxiety. It swirled like a green and pale luminescence, hanging in the flatlands and creeping across the hills with the motion of a sluggish sea fog. To Renquist, this anxiety was perfectly understandable. If humans elected to live in a place as seismically unstable as Southern California, they had every reason to be anxious. Add the ravages of brush fires, mud slides, and civil unrest, and the anxieties multiplied. It seemed that every human in the city had something to worry about. Some desperately gambled with millions of dollars on a daily basis, while others struggled barely to eke out an existence of minimal wretchedness. On every level, fear appeared to rule.
Renquist also suspected that the city had perhaps accepted too much transient evil into its geographic heart. At various locations, he could see dark magenta peaks, outstanding points of notable human iniquity. One tall and multiplex spike danced ponderously over the downtown Parker Center, the headquarters of the Los Angeles Police Department, while another, equally large but of a somewhat different tone, reared above the nearby Men's Central Jail. A third, equally unique, lingered over the great Paramount Pictures movie and TV lot. Spasms of magenta also clung to any number of the thirty-story corporate monoliths that made up the downtown business district. Other star points of smoke ruby were dotted in various locations of the city, too numerous and widely scattered for Renquist to know what crimes or conspiracies or sinister ambitions they might represent or even to attract his interest. At that moment, he was not looking for the dark red telltale markers of mere human vice and transgression. He was also not interested in the ghostly olive afterglow that hung over the La Brea tarpits. That was nothing to do with either him or humanity. It was of the Earth itself, had been there for many millions of years and would remain for millions more. Renquist's deep-seeing scan of the city was motivated by more than just general curiosity. He was looking for something specific. One of the reasons that Renquist was unhappy in Los Angeles was that lately he had been fleetingly sensing that there might be something in LA with the potential to make him very much more unhappy than he already was. Indeed, one of the reasons that he had called of Lamar to drive him on this particular night was to attempt to locate the source of these impressions.
After some searching and taking his deep vision deeper than he normally would have needed had it been a mere human aura that he sought, he finally found what he was looking for. It resembled a pale plume of vapor rising high into the air, over to his right, somewhere in commercial Beverly Hills, as far as he could ascertain, perhaps near where Santa Monica Boulevard met Rodeo Drive. Its outer mantle was an unhealthy plague yellow, darkening to a sullen purple at its heart. Renquist recognized that the aura was partially human, but it was the aura of humans who were engaged in an activity so extreme that it generated strange and unique responses and emotions. Factors other than human were also present. Renquist knew that no collection of men and women could have produced an aura like that, no matter how bizarre and depraved their behavior might be. Something else was present beneath that aura, possibly something far older than either humanity or the nosferatu. Renquist had no exact idea of what that presence might be, except that he was certain it was nothing akin to his kind. Any non-human manifestation, however, so close to where he and the colony had taken up residence, had to be treated as a potential threat. The most minimal risk posed by a non-human intelligence, of which there were far more than the majority of twentieth-century humans ever suspected, was that it might might be capable of detecting the presence of the colony and somehow exposing them. Beyond that, Renquist didn't care to think right at the moment. He was too aware that the other dangers it could present might well be close to limitless.
This nighttime excursion to Mulholland wasn't the only time that Renquist had scanned the city for possible threats to the colony's continued well-being. When they had first arrived, he and Dahlia, the diminutive but deadly half of the pair-bonded weird sisters, had conducted an initial midnight survey. Dahlia's story was less than clear and a number of variations circulated through the colony. What was for sure was that Dahlia had negotiated the Change from human when nothing more than a child, and had then, quite deliberately, arrested her physical development so she remained a cutely feral ten-year-old Victorian moppet ever since, apparently, at the same time conducting a form of incest with her even more bizarre sister, Imogene. Beneath the ringlets and the Shirley Temple, lollipop exterior lurked a sharp and devious mind, honed by a harsh whetstone of perverse cruelty, the capacity for blasphemy of a hungover longshoreman, and a sense of humor that took no prisoners. Renquist liked Dahlia a great deal. She had proved a staunch ally during the troubles in New York, and since the relocation to Los Angeles, Renquist had increasingly relied on her to take care of much of the day-to-day running of the colony.
When he and Dahlia had stood together, all those months ago, on another high point where it was possible to see out over the city, their primary concern had been the detection of other nosferatu, either isolated loners, wild wanderers, or the gathering of a group, clan, or colony. Even a city the size of LA was hardly big enough for two communities of the undead to survive in peaceful coexistence. They had, however, seen nothing of the orange flares that normally signified a nosferatu presence. Far to the south, beyond the horizon, somewhere in Baja, Mexico, they had seen something that might have been interpreted as an undead aura, but it was faded and insubstantial, the color of a rotting tangerine, primitive and totally lacking in energy and vitality. Stories had long circulated of how a strong but insular and very ancient colony of the Mexican Tlacique existed somewhere in the dry hills of the Baja, but he could hardly believe that this degenerate flicker could be that of such a supposedly proud and strong bloodline of the undead, with their implacable combination of Mayan-Atlan roots and a five-hundred-year infusion of Spanish fire. Dahlia had agreed; if the Tlacique had ever been there at all, they had either moved on or found a way to disguise themselves, even from their close European cousins. Dahlia, who made a habit of keeping up with all the current trends in the paranormal, had suggested that such a weak and degraded aura might be produced by a small hyena pack of chupacabra. "I mean, Victor, what would you expect from things that scare peons and suck on goats and chickens?"
Renquist had chuckled, but stored the ghostly aura in his memory for future contemplation. What he and Dahlia hadn't seen, back then, was the yellow-purple plume rising from Beverly Hills. He was certain that, if it had been there during their initial inspection, there was no way they could have failed to notice it, and he had to assume that whatever was the cause, the disturbing aura was an even never arrival than themselves. Renquist knew that this thing needed a closer investigation, and he was almost tempted to instruct Lamar to drive in that direction right there and then. He didn't, though. He walked back to the car, signaling that they were moving on. "Go down Laurel Canyon and drive east on Sunset."
Lamar nodded silently and opened the rear door of the limousine. The detective work would have to wait until later. After weeks of subsisting on packaged blood, he knew the warning signs, the familiar weakness in his limbs and the primal stirrings deep inside him, stirrings that could only be ignored at their peril. If some danger did lurk beneath the rising aura, he should be as strong as possible before he attempted to approach it. Renquist ducked into the womblike interior of the limo where Mahler was playing softly on the sound system, and Lamar closed the door behind him. Lamar knew but never acknowledged. It was time for Victor Renquist to go hunting, and without his lost Cynara, he would hunt alone with only this blank-minded human attendant acting as both metaphoric horse and hound.
As the limo pulled back onto Mulholland, Renquist again leaned forward. "Turn the air-conditioning up, will you Lamar? Enough so it has some bite."
Perhaps the thing that Renquist missed most of all in LA was the thrill of cold.
* * *
In Los Angeles, no one could hear you scream. That had become a maxim to live by for Elaine Dance. In Los Angeles, one was always insulated, always encapsulated, and, until her one great ambition was fulfilled, that was the way she wanted it. From the isolation of the single-bedroom Hollywood apartment near the Pacific Design Center, where the drapes were always closed and no one ever visited, she moved to the protection of her car, the black-and-chrome '68 Ford Mustang with the dark-tinted windows that was one of the few pleasures, perhaps the only pleasure, in her current, constantly searching, wasteland of a life. Elaine Dance had no appetite for pleasure. She cultivated into friendships among the subtropical foliage and consummated no affairs under the wilted palms and relentless sun. She neither visited the beach, nor sampled the nightlife, and as far as possible, avoided even the most casual of contacts. When her thoughts grew too much for her, she retreated to the tried and trusted buffer zone of television and Valium, the bland massage in which she could effectively park her brain in the long hours when there was nothing else to do. She was like the character in the old Paul Simon song, "I touch no one and no one touches me…" It said a lot about the way she lived that one of her most sustained relationships was with the Shetland sheepdog that belonged to the gay couple in the next-door apartment. Almost every time she ventured out onto her small balcony, the dog would stare at her from the adjoining terrace with the painted metal garden furniture and the carefully tended planters. Something in the dog's large and mournful collie eyes suggested that it knew, or at least suspected, the dark secrets of her stranded and mutilated soul.
Elaine was well aware that, in all likelihood, she was slowly sinking into madness, perhaps a rigidly controlled madness that would never outwardly reveal itself until she finally blew apart, but madness all the same. To believe that a dog knew her pain could hardly be a hallmark of mental health. Hadn't David "Son of Sam" Berkowitz fantasized that a dog was his soul mate? The Mustang, aside from being both her sole pleasure and her primary means of transport here in the carbon monoxide—choked capital of car culture, was possibly the only thing that contributed to any measure of balance in her existence. When what she now thought of as her half-life became too claustrophobic, she got into her car and simply drove, out along the freeways until the endless suburbs finally gave way to naked desert. Once there, she would pull over to mourn all that she had lost under the huge, white, and uncaring Mojave moon, and sob the name Cynara over and over until she could sob no more.
On this particular night, though, Elaine was not driving her grief to the desert She was carefully threading her beloved Mustang thought the dense middle-evening traffic on the Boy's Town strip in West Hollywood, watching for sudden stops by the Volvos of gay cruisers. She was heading in the direction of Beverly Hills; she had a nine o'clock appointment with one of her regular and best-paying clients. The costume of her private and professional theater was concealed under a light jacket, and on the seat beside her was the leather hold-all, not unlike an old-fashioned Victorian doctor's bag. The slightly sinister bag contained the necessary collection of her working paraphernalia, the erotic threat and promise of which would have probably both shocked and excited any regular conservative citizen, had he or she been able to see it laid out in all its rubber, chrome, and dark leather glory.
After some stopping and staring at the lights, she was out of the central congestion of West Hollywood, past Dan Tanner's landmark restaurant and the Troubadour nightclub, and into comparatively lighter traffic. Up ahead on Santa Monica Boulevard was the slightly disturbing, monolithic black glass tower with the weird pylon mounted on the top that belonged to the group know as the Apogee, the self-realization cult that was rapidly overhauling the Church of Scientology as the big-ticket, quasiscientific, fashionable faith among movie stars, studio deal-makers, and corporate lawyers. Even in her detachment and isolation, she had heard about the Apogee people and instinctively distrusted them. She was even disturbed by their commercials on late-night TV that seemed to be attempting to tap directly into the worst of popular anxieties, even though, in some respects, she made her living by doing something not all that dissimilar.
Once, while passing the black building on foot, talking a lonely walk after a particularly exhausting weekend with a client in Aspen, as Apogee sidewalk recruiter had attempted to force his literature on her. Despite her dark glasses, headscarf, and cultivated air of unapproachability, the recruiter had gone straight into his smiling pitch. For an instant she'd been tempted to take him up on his offer of coming into the black tower for what he called an "evaluation." She would almost have been interested to see what these smug cultists might have made of an inconsolably disappointed would-be undead, but after less than a minute the curtly told him to go away. She had no time for even patently ersatz therapy.
All attempts at any kind of therapy had been terminated months ago, and thousands of miles away, back in New York City. While still there, she had, at least for a while, tried to move on from the terrible and frighteningly unnatural grief, for as long as she still could deceive herself that it might be possible, she had worked hard at retuning to drab humanity. She had done her best to maintain a brief affairs with a perfectly nice and reasonable man, a moderately successful graphic artist named Martin, who had attempted to nurse her through her depressions and bouts of raging hysteria, but had ultimately fled to save his own mind from contracting her seemingly infections disarrangement. Poor Martin had done his best, but when you have loved and lost a non-human superbeing who was close to a goddess, and you almost became a goddess yourself, even the most tender caress and most sensitive penetration of a mere mortal man could provide little or no consolation.
Her loss was so monumental that even well-meaning help was unable to reach her. With a cruelty so unusual that it defied all understanding, a black-winged wonderland of coursing blood and high passion, where all things were possible for ever and ever, had first been offered to her and then whisked away, just a matter of days before the final Change and consummation, so suddenly that she'd hardly had a chance to comprehend what was happening. She had made the journey with her deathless mentor and demon lover, all the way to those magical gates at the end of night, but at what should have been the very last glorious moment, the mad and hideous priest had destroyed Cynara with the hammer and the terrible sharpened wooden stake, and the gates had slammed closed on her hopes and immortal dreams, all access eternally denied. In the old Christopher Lee movies that aired on TV, and in the breathless purple paperbacks, when the primary vampire was destroyed, his or her proteges, the ones who had been bitten but not yet transformed returned to normal. The unnatural desire faded from their eyes along with any mark of the cross that might have been burned into their forehead, and they fell weeping into the arms of a consoling mortal protector. Unfortunately, the truth of the darklost was nothing like the cheap novels or those old Hammer films with their heaving breasts and faded colors.
After Martin, she had abandoned all pretense of returning to normality, and she'd started to listen with more attention to the voices in her head. The voices didn't exactly form words, but their message was clear. They filled her with the impulse to fly west to Los Angeles, following the instinctive knowledge that it was there that Victor and the other nosferatu had fled after the terrible murder of Cynara. The voices tempted and seduced, suggesting that, in this so misnamed city, a second chance might await her, that somewhere in the warm California night she might finally make the Change Cynara had promised and she so abjectly and desperately desired.
For a while, Elaine Dance had ignored the voices and the actions that they urged, suspecting they might be nothing more than new symptoms of the insanity she had increasingly begun to fear. She was well aware that her mind was progressively being torn and segmented. In what she laughingly thought of as the more rational sectors, the facile outer areas of her consciousness, the suggestion was constantly repeated that the whole affair with Cynara and the very idea that she was going to be transformed into one of the undead was nothing more than a dangerous delusion in which she had hidden during some kind of stress-related breakdown. In the deeper parts of her psyche, however, the places where she knew she truly lived and no truth was concealed, a powerful confidence remained. It had not been a delusion. Cynara was no hallucination or false memory, and but for her death, Elaine really would have joined the immortal ranks of the (she scarcely dared say it) nosferatu. After a protracted and lonely struggle, the deep had won out over the facile, primarily with a simple but unrefutable argument: What did she have to lose? Her former friends no longer called her neglected answering machine or sent her so much as a postcard, glad to be away from what they saw as her gothic and obsessive craziness. She had no ties to bind or excuses with which to resist the irresistible urge to chase the undead to the opposite coast. Accordingly, she had sold her few remaining possessions, packed a single suitcase, and bought a one-way ticket to LAX.
As she spun the Mustang's wheel, turning right off Santa Monica and heading up toward Sunset Boulevard and the upper levels of the millionaire enclaves of Bel Air and Beverly Hills, she glanced at the square-cut Hamilton on her wrist, the dial visible above her folded-back glove. She had more than fifteen minutes to spare, and that was the way she liked it. The dominant should always be punctual. Even though, once in LA, she had continued her post-Cynara, New York practice or reducing all human contact to an absolute minimum, Elaine did have to face the reality that she still needed to make a living. Even a half-life could not be sustained without some measure of material support. Her choice of commercial domination had been a matter of pure chance, unless she allowed herself to believe in some dark Jungian synchronicity of degradation. When she'd been down to her last couple of hundred dollars, and realizing that to work a conventional job, even with her degree in math, would be impossible without compromising her isolation, she spotted a small box ad in the LA Weekly for an operation called Justine, Inc., that specialized in "disciplinary outcall." Although she had torn the ad from the paper and kept it, it had been some days before she'd finally dialed the number.
The resulting interview had been conducted by a hard-bitten blonde with a deep tan and a small fortune invested in cosmetic surgery. After asking a few pointed questions, the woman succinctly laid out the deal, the rules of the game, and the limits of legality. Within the space of twenty minutes, Elaine had signed up as a specialist outcall operative on the roster of Justine, Inc. After a few weeks with the agency, she found that she was able to quickly establish her own client list, which meant she could dispense with Justine's services and save paying thief forty percent commission into the bargain. She found that the chill and absolute lack of emotion with which she confronted the infantile psychodramas that were now her personal service industry actually went over big with the clients. She was in demand and working so constantly that the sadomasochistic trysts were becoming a matter of routine, a lucrative and perverse routine, perhaps, but a routine all the same, and like all routines, it inevitably edged her in the direction of depression.
When the repetition became too draining, Elaine told herself the only reason the subjected herself to this way of life was because she was certain, in her heart and in her blood, that the vampire colony was there in LA, and she would ultimately find it. Wait, thought; Cynara had told her that the word "vampire" was never to be used…the nosferatu colony was there in LA, and she would definitely find them. All she had to do was to pinpoint the source, but she knew this wouldn't be easy, Cynara had made it clear that the undead were cunning in the extreme and unrivaled experts at camouflage and concealment. When new and raw in town, she had spent almost all of her first fees from Justine Inc. on hiring a private eye to research the name Victor Renquist. His first report had confirmed that Renquist really was in LA, but that he was shadowy figure on the edge of the financial world, definitely not a player, but perhaps someone who had a lot of tings on a lot of people. She paid the detective more money and he agreed to dig deeper, but he had never offered a second report. Instead, he showed up at her apartment late one night, white and shaking, refusing to continue with the case under any circumstances, but also refusing to explain why. He even offered to return her money, except that he'd spent most of it on lap dancers, gin, and amphetamines, and needed what remained to get out of town. Something had managed to completely terrify the man, and although it was yet another disappointment, she now knew that she was at least on the right track.
As she waited for the lights on Sunset Boulevard to change, she reminded herself tat, in one respect, her LA lifestyle couldn't be faulted. She appeared out of the night, performed the rituals of her needs, and then returned to the darkness from whence she had come. She was aware that she was aping her dream, but at the same time, she told herself she was at least a little closer to what might have been. The real nosferatu were somewhere near at hand and she would find them. For all she knew, she might have actually passed their new Residence.
Once across Sunset, the Mustang climbed winding roads that would have been as inexplicable as a labyrinth to a stranger with only a Thomas Guide, but Elaine had traveled these twists and turns at least a dozen times before. Elliot Kreuz, her nine o'clock, was one of her most devoted, almost worshipping, regulars. The approach to the Kreuz residence was through a pair of wrought-iron security gates supported by granite pillars that always struck her as an amalgam of a medieval castle and a concentration camp. She halted the Mustang in front of the car, then a male voice crackled from a speaker behind a steel grille set in one of the pillars. "Yes?"
"Eva Dresden for Mr. Kreuz."
Eva Dresden was the name under which Elaine Dance practiced her profession. She liked to refer to it as her "name of the night," and as with so many others who adopted pseudonyms, she had retained her original initials, perhaps to prevent herself from becoming completely obliterated by the commercial fantasies that were the "other ED's" stock in trade. Not that obliteration was so repugnant. Back in New York she had toyed with the concept of actual suicide on more than one occasion, but had continued to cling to a thin strand of hope. It was this same strand that also prevented her from giving up Elaine Dance forever and becoming lost in Eva Dresden.
Her reply received no verbal response, but the gates slowly swung back and Elaine eased the Mustang forward. At first, the house itself was invisible, fully concealed by trees and landscaped shrubbery until she rounded a curve in the driveway and there it stood, in all its security-wired, floodlit absurdity. Its style was high Beverly Hills, a chateau constructed according to an architectural convention that lay somewhere between the Loire and Disneyland. The homes of most her clients were equally gauche and grotesque in their dollar-designated opulence. It was only as it should be. In this context, money was her only object, and after all these months, the bucks her clients paid her were the biggest that could be commanded by a mistress of her specialized trade. The fact that these clients lived in homes belonging in a theme park was none of her concern, unless it was just one more reason they should be paying for punishment. The tired sexual tastes of these nouveau tres riche that kept the wolf from her door were only one more extension of a crass and entirely tasteless lifestyle.
As she brought the Mustang to a halt on the concrete apron of the carport, the tall front door of the mansion was already open and a muscle-sculpted figure in white jeans and a formfitting t-shirt was silhouetted against the light. This was Ivan, Kreuz's live-in bodyguard who, according to such gossip as Elaine ever heard in her near isolation, had been recruited from the Russian Mufia. Ivan was the perfect example of the city's uncomfortable culture of wealth where one's status was, on one very crucial level, calibrated by the degree of personal security one could afford. Elaine turned off the engine, picked up the doctor's bag from the seat beside her, and stepped out of the car. She walked toward Ivan, not bothering either to put the Club on the wheel or to lock the driver's-side door behind her. Ivan greeted her with a thick, almost comedic accent. "Good evening, Miss Dresden."
She nodded curtly. "Good evening, Ivan."
She briefly glanced up at the sky before she entered the mansion. It wasn't so much a prayer as a wordless longing for a very different kind of night and stars. Ivan stepped back to let her pass. "Mr. Kreuz is waiting for you in the library."
Ivan was not quite as professionally stone-faced as he should have been. The very faintest trace of knowing smirk played briefly at the corners of his mouth, and Elaine became stiffly irritated. What right did this hired Muscovite sputnik goon have to treat her like some common whore? That was the trouble with the Russians who, over the last few years, had firmly entrenched themselves in the Hollywood underworld. they didn't quite have the decorum down, like, say, traditional Italian hoods or the Chinese tongs. Perhaps a Communist upbringing made it hard to rasp the nuances, or maybe they just didn't care. Elaine got her own back by not bothering to thank the man. She knew the location of the library. It was where Elliot Kreuz always conducted the games they played. He seemed to favor a literary backdrop for his perversions. Although the walls were lined with shelves of leather-bound volumes, and it even had one of those sliding ladders to reach the upper shelves, Elaine highly doubted that Kreuz had read very many of the books, if in fact any of them. She even wondered if some of the shelves were filled with nothing more than false spines. Certainly none of the films that Elliot Kreuz produced ever came within hailing distance of anything as sophisticated as a book. The majority of their plots could be fully outlined on a cocktail napkin. One languid afternoon, back in the golden days of their love, Cynara had described Victor Renquist's library to her. The word might have been the same, but in all other respects, the two libraries occupied different planets.
Elliot Kreuz was a small and strangely rodent-furtive man when one considered the power that he wielded. The term Napoleonic was maybe a little overblown, but it was well-known that he spent his days cruelly abusing employees and underlings. This was almost certainly why so many of his vacant nights were occupied with having his karma leveled by the more stylized abuse and theatrical cruelty of women like Eva/Elaine and her sisters under leather and lace. Kreuz stood beside a fireplace that Elaine could have sworn was copied from the interior of Xanadu in Citizen Kane. A fiare blazed, but its heat was instantly syphoned away by the relentless air-conditioning. Kreuz's hair was oiled and slicked back, and he was dressed in a burgundy silk robe. He held an overlarge balloon snifter of cognac in his right hand. "How are you, Eva?"
For an instant, Elaine suffered a twinge of something akin to stage fright. What was she doing here, and why? Then her control reasserted itself. She was here to treat Elliot Kreuz with the contempt that he deserved and be paid handsomely for it. Besides, it was Eva Dresden who was doing all this, not her. she also knew that, under the burgundy robe, Kreuz was wearing women's ,lingerie, either from Frederick's on Hollywood Boulevard or Victoria's Secret, depending on whether his mood was trashy or chic. The moment he removed the robe, as he inevitably were from Fredericks, he would be Candy the Slut, who had been a very bad girl. If they came from Victoria's Secret, he would be Sandra the Princess, who required a more urbane form of pain and correction.
Elaine instantly dropped into the Eva character. "I don't think how I am is any of your concern, do you?"
She placed the doctor's bag on a side table and Kreuz bowed his head. The game had started. "No, my lady."
"So put that drink down and start paying attention."
* * *
Julia Aschenbach slowly swiveled on the chrome-and-fake-zebra barstool, less than pleased that the Jungle Room was a great deal more crowded than she had expected. Without a press of people, she had more leisure and space to take pleasure in its patently vulgar absurdity. The Jungle Room at the Trade Winds could have been designed by the creators of Graceland, only working with a bigger budget and an even greater sense of overkill, and she always derived a childish delight in its tasteless layering of structured, cargo-cult bamboo, both real and plastic tropical foliage, the simulated hides of exotic and endangered species, and the continual garish movement of the concealed mood lighting. It provided a relief from the antique of functional, and generally somber, decor of the Residence. The Jungle Room at the Trade Winds was harmlessly silly, and very little silliness was ever in evidence at the Residence. Under Victor Renquist's Mastery, the colony took itself extremely seriously. Julia knew that this was as it should be. It had come through a near-destructive ordeal back in New York City and, in addition, nothing but grim seriousness could be expected of Victor while he insisted on continuing to mourn Cynara. Despite the perfectly understandable reasons for the nosferatu to maintain a low profile, Julia frequently found the prevailing bunker mentality so oppressively unyielding and dour that she needed, now and then, to flee to some sanctuary of moronic human frivolity. Hence the Jungle Room. In such a place of public foolishness, she could not only catch a break from the colony's gravity, but she could also hunt in comparative anonymity.
Overhead, polished wood fans with brass fittings slowly turned and gas-fed flaming torches burned in cressets behind the long bar. A cultural mishmash of African carvings, polynesian tiki gods, and Easter Island heads stared down from the walls, while palms and carefully maintained exotic plants were in such abundance that the Jungle Room could almost have qualified as a small section of rain forest set down on Wilshire Boulevard. One corner was taken up by a sculpted waterfall that splashed over faux volcanic rocks that glowed from within, while at the other end of the long room an aviary, constructed from more split bamboo and again filled with tropical plants, was the habitat of a dozen or more hard-eyed parrots, permanently angry at their unnatural incarceration.
Scarcely more free than the parrots, separated by their own self-imposed barriers and locked in their individual mental cages, between eighty and a hundred humans, all from the motion picture industry, jostled and agitated, some working on intoxication and others attempting to avoid it, all calculating, like poultry, the crucial order of who was ordained to be pecked by whom. Quadrant Pictures was holding a post-screening party for one of their films; as far as Julia could tell, some unremarkable piece of trash filled with explosions and automatic weapons, aimed primarily at what was euphemistically called urban youth. In other words, angry teenagers of the minority underclass who wished they owned explosives and automatic weapons of their own, and in some cases quite probably did. Julia had not been aware that the event was happening when she had chosen the Jungle Room at the Trade Winds as the starting point for her solitary night's hunting.
She had hoped that she might have enticed Victor to come and hunt with her. She knew he couldn't, with any good grace, resist her wiles and blandishments for very much longer. She had allowed him a decent enough interval to complete his lamentations for Cynara and it was high time that he accepted the inevitable and selected a new mate for himself. If he continued on his solitary way, he would risk appearing ridiculous and even begin undermining his own authority. A Master could not remain alone and aloof and expect to retain his hold on a colony indefinitely. Needless to say, Julia considered herself the most eligible of all possible mates for Renquist, and she took every chance to be available for him. When she had gone to look for him on this particular evening, however, she had discovered, to both her disappointment and annoyance, that after weeks of melancholy lurking around the Benedict Canyon Residence, living off packaged blood and generally showing all the signs of the deep nosferatu blues, he had taken Lamar and the colony's biggest and longest limo and gone off on some mysterious errand of his own.
It was thus that midnight found her seated at the Jungle Room bar trying to put some measure of distance between herself and the post-screening, open bar crush. Maybe it was just as well she hadn't brought Victor; in the face of this press, he almost certainly would have fled in claustrophobic disgust. All around her, her nosferatu deep vision flickered and flashed with the crowd's varied auras of envy, need, and distrust, all of the poisonously colored and highly venal hall-marks of those who considered themselves industry insiders in full social cry. Despite her efforts to tune them back, their noisy minds crowded in on her. She had expected that the bar of the fashionable up-market hotel would have had just a smattering of customers at that time of night, not so many as to make her claustrophobic, but sufficient to give her a choice of victim that she could lure, seduce, drain, and ultimately kill. Hunting alone wasn't a total anathema to Julia, but she far preferred to work paired with a second nosferatu, especially when confronted by a crowd of this kind. When a pair of the undead worked a room together, it meant a lot less time was spent having to entertain human nonsense.
She had tried a couple of times to hunt with Sada, the other young, bright, and comparatively normal female in the colony, but somehow it wasn't the same as pair-bonding with a male. She also didn't feel quite comfortable one-on-one with Sada. Although the late Cynara had been Requist's consort, she had also adopted Sada as a part-time, sometime concubine. It was always possible that some lingering loyalties remained from that relationship. It was no secret that Julia and Cynara had been sworn rivals for the attentions of Renquist, and that the colony as a whole tended to blame Julia, at least in part, for Cynara's destruction. If Victor continued to refuse to pair with her, Julia was firmly resolved that the matter of creating more males should be formally raised before a meeting of the full colony.
She knew that this was an argument that she could only win with some difficulty. The last male she had brought through the Change had been Kurt Carfax, the egotistical young musician who, once nosferatu, had turned out to be irrational and dangerous and one of the major triggers for the cumulative disasters that had decimated their numbers and driven them from New York. Carfax had gone after Renquist with a feral, alpha-male fury, and Victor had been forced to break him in single combat, then eject him from the colony to perish in the light of the sun. With this piece of recent history hanging from her neck like Coleridge's albatross, her only tactic could be to pretend that she had the communal interest at heart and to stress the current condition of imbalance and the potential and dangerous stresses it could create.
Aside from herself, six other nosferatu had made it out of Manhattan in their coffinlike aluminum flight cases. Of these, three were male, and three were female. On paper, this looked like a fairly equable balance until one examined the true nature of these males and females. On the distaff side, Dahlia and Imogene, the weird sisters, were so bonded to each other they were highly unlikely to either separate or allow a male to enter their strange menage. Sada was unattached, but she seemed to like it that way, unless Sada, in her own quiet manner, was also grieving for Cynara. Considering the choice of males in the colony, however, Sada might just side with Julia in the matter of creating more of them if she had any ideas of future bonding. New blood, so to speak, although, even in reverie, it was a terrible pun.
Of the males, Lupo was the oldest after Victor, at least five hundred years undead and, more importantly, of the old school and intractably traditional, with a dark and solitary formality that stretched all the way back to the Italian Renaissance. He was an absolute loner who, as long as any of them could remember, had never so much as entertained the idea of a consort. Segal was a grotesque who couldn't even mingle with ordinary humans, and it was highly unlikely she or Sada would bond with him. That only left Victor, and Victor was not only the Master of the colony, but also, as far as Julia was concerned, the master of playing hard to get. One way or another, she didn't intend to spend eternity hunting alone like some eternal nocturnal spinster. If Victor refused to come around, she would have to either find or create some new companion.
When Julia did hunt alone, she preferred the chase to be swift and lacking in complications. The only redeeming aspect of the unexpected party at the Jungle Room was that it offered her a fairly extensive menu of possible prey. She made a brief and superficial scan, a sampling of the nearest minds, browsing for the interesting or unusual, and she knew in an instant that she really should not have bothered. Venal and vapid, universally looking for an advantage and, at the same time, terrified that what they already had might be taken away from them, the humans around her were exactly what she might have expected. Their auras filled the room with an uneasy submarine blue-green, highlighted here and there with sudden flashes of jealous emerald as envy, lust, and loathing spiked in one mind or another. Julia had long since ceased to be surprised that those who dealt in the business of packaging dreams and fantasies should have such narrowly corrupt dreams and fantasies of their own. Instead of wondering, she began to focus on selecting an adequate victim from this highly standardized crowd. Perhaps a dozen of the men and three or four of the women had turned their thoughts in her direction. As she read their minds, nine times out of ten, she sexual images were first to be conjured. They pictured her perhaps naked, perhaps adorned, posed, positioned, and available to them. Only after this initial flash of self-titillation did they start wondering who she was, who she knew, and what she might be worth in cash or contacts.
She could easily pick from any of these individuals who flashed passing desire, and they would happily go with her, never realizing what was happening to them until the life was finally draining from them. It would not only be a matter of satisfying her nosferatu hunger, she could also take a certain cerebral enjoyment in watching the mortality pass from a human pulled out of this crowd. She knew these studio parasites all too well, and was of a firm mind that the human gene pool was better off without them. This opinion hadn't only been formed as a result of her current California connections. Hadn't she been a film actress herself when mortal, before Victor had brought her through the Change? Of course, that was sixty-five years ago in Berlin, and the industry flunkies of her milieux had also been full members of the Nazi Party, but in most of the essentials the differences were more minimal than most might have expected.
When confronted by a diversity of options, Julia's tried and tested policy was to retreat to the high ground of passive aggression. Why expend unnecessary time and energy in pursuit when the prey would quite happily come to her, sealing its own fate in the process? Right at that moment, two decidedly possible candidates were paying Julia particular attention. One was a young man with healthy symmetrical features and light brown hair pulled back into a ponytail, who had looked in her direction a number of times with a speculative interest. He was dressed in an expensive and well-tailored, if overly large, lightweight tan suit, probably an Armani, with padded shoulders that betrayed the wearer's insecure need for an edge as he moved through his world. His aura indicated a certain self-interested puzzlement. He couldn't place her, but thought somehow that he should. He suspected, mainly on the evidence of her expensive black designer dress and low-key but equally costly jewelry, that she might be important, connected, or at the very least wealthy, and he was disturbed that her face and background weren't logged into his hustler's card-index memory. The irony was that Julia conformed to his suspicions on all of these points, but not in any way that this ambitious young human could even come close to imaging.
The other human attracted to Julia was a petite, chestnut-haired young female suffering from a serious case of sexual indecision and ambiguity. The woman was, deep down, omnivorously bisexual, but too guiltily confused to relax and enjoy her genetic luck. A streak of distorted puritanism seemed to believe that she should be one thing or the other, and vacillation could be nothing but an intolerable sign of weakness in a woman who believed she had to constantly compete with men. For the past few months, the woman had attempted to confine herself exclusively to men, and was how in the process of castigating herself for the physical attraction that she found drawing her to Julia, and yet wanting to be drawn all the same.
After a brief scan of the rest of the field, Julia closed the deal with herself. It was between the bisexual woman and the sandy-haired young man. The first one to approach her would be hers. In that respect, they would, albeit unknowingly, roll the dice of their own destiny. As it turned out, the young man was the first to make a move on her and thereby doomed himself by his eager unwillingness to bide his time. He eased through the crowd, held out his hand, and went into his introductory routine. "Hi, I'm Glen Grauholtz, I'm Vice President of Acquisitions at Quadrant."
Julia allowed herself a private smile. The bisexual woman had briefly blazed with envy and disappointment, little knowing that hesitation, guilt, and indecision had combined to save her life. "Glen Grauholtz?"
"That's right."
Julia looked him up and down with insolent appraisal. "Nice alliteration."
Glen Grauholtz didn't know exactly what to make of this response and retreated to a holding pattern of interrogative small talk. "Are you an actress?"
Julia was almost tempted to tell him that she hadn't acted in a film for over sixty years, but Glen Grauholtz looked too stupid to stand the shock. "Do I look like an actress?"
Grauholtz nodded and smiled. "Frankly, yes"
Julia coyly half-closed her eyes and let her long blond hair fall partially over her face in the manner of Veronica Lake. "Appearances can be deceiving."
The Glen human had a typically Hollywood social need to identify and graduate by rank and occupation. "So what do you do if you're not an actress?"
Julia, as she so often did, told the absolute truth. "Right at the moment, in my own little realm, I primarily decide who lives and dies."
Wasn't the nosferatu's greatest protection that no one believed them or believed in them? As if to make Julia's point for her, Glen Grauholtz's aura clearly demonstrated how he assumed she was speaking in metaphor. It hardly occurred to him she was talking anything but industry power, the commercial clout to help or harm, and he was in a momentary conflict between apprehension and a greedy opportunism. In little more than a nanosecond, though, opportunism won but and he became willing to charm, flatter, and grovel, anything if he could exploit this chance meeting to his advantage. He eagerly wasted no time moving in. "Can I get you a drink?"
"I though that was what the waiters were for. There's one over there with a tray of champagne."
"I though I might get a martini from the bar."
Of course, a martini would do very little to Julia's noferatu metabolism, but she liked she pure clarity of the liquid in its conical glass and also the alcohol burn when she first swallowed it. Some of her kind shied away from alcohol as a kind of humanistic perversion, but Julia had always taken her cue from Victor's cultivated taste for vodka and cognac. "Shaken or stirred?"
Grauholtz looked bemused. "I'm sorry?"
They were too young and uneducated to remember classic James Bond, and yet they believed they could create films. She wearily shook her head. "Nothing. I suppose it'll do me no harm to join you."
Grauholtz's aura glowed as though he'd scored a major triumph. He signaled a little too grandly to the bartender who, always irritated by unwarranted grandeur, avoided his gaze and served another customer instead. Julia intervened. "Let me try. I'm rather good at this kind of thing."
She naturally had the bartender's immediate attention, which did nothing for Grauholtz's need to feel in control. In a cocktail instant, two perfect martinis were standing in front of them. Julia and Grauholtz each picked one up and touched glasses. He asked her if she had seen the film that the party was intended to celebrate, and Julia shook her head. "That kind of thing doesn't really appeal to me."
Although she was largely mitigating her accent to her own version of standard American, she let enough of the smoky Teutonic slip through to set him wondering if maybe she was something important or connected in the Euro industry, maybe Canal Plus or Channel 4. Europeans scared Glen Grauholtz. He knew that his LA parochialism made him vulnerable and that his concepts of style and status hardly held up in the teeth of an older and more sophisticated culture. A European hustler could out-snob a Hollywood flunky any time. To give him credit, though, this Glen human did the best he could in the face of possible disadvantage; he dropped names, intoned gossip, made demiwitticisms, all the time trying to steer Julia toward revealing something about herself.
Needless to say, he got nowhere, Julia wasn't giving up anything in the way of information. What, after all, was she supposed to tell him? Should she start with the anecdote that she had been responsible for the mysterious and supposedly drug-and-Satanic-cult-related deaths of a number of the cast or crew of the now-shelved epic Walk with the Undead? She didn't think he'd want to hear about that. In fact, the deaths had been nothing to do with either drugs or Satan. Julia, helped by Segal the grotesque, had gone on a wild, although well-planned, blood rampage, partly because she had totally disapproved of the view the film presented of her kind and also, on a more practical level, one of the production designers, in the course of her research, had been about to stumble across some very real and extremely damning nosferatu artifacts. Julia had not told Victor about this private kill mission, and she had also sworn Segal to secrecy. She would hold the information in reserve until the best moment of utility presented itself. She never knew when she might need something extra with which to manipulate her nominal Master.
After some ten minutes of conversation, Julia decided that this Glen would serve her purpose of the night, but she wasn't prepared to waste a lot of time on him. The narrowness of his perspective made him little more than a one-note bore. She would put him to the test quickly and with no further delay. "If you really wanted to do something nice for me, you could get me out of here."
The Glen human was instantly torn. He wanted Julia, but to leave the party at this stage was close to unthinkable. She could see the choices parading through his mind. If he was to leave to so early and so obviously with a woman he had just met, his rivals would spread the rumor that he was putting his cock before the company. On the other hand, if this strange and yet so amenable woman turned out to be an asset, he would be a fool to stick around at a totally routine party. The film being celebrated was not, after all, even one of his projects.
Julia used his hesitation to increase his discomfort with a goad of impatience. "Of course, if you're expected to stay…"
The Glen aura vibrated with indecision until, finally, a gambler's greed won out over corporate cowardice. He glanced one time round the room to both see who was watching and to assess what he might have to lose. "By the look of them, they can survive without me."
As the two of them left the Jungle Room, other guests were still arriving. One woman among a group of latecomers instantly caught Julia's attention. In the muted light, Julia was momentarily convinced that she was looking at a highly overweight Stevie Nicks. Having always poisonously disliked Fleetwood Mac, Julia casually scanned that woman's mind and discovered, somewhat to her relief, that the woman wasn't Stevie Nicks at all. Had it really been the signer, Julia might have had to cancel all current plans and immediately work on her death. As it wasn't all things could stay on course. Seemingly this fat Nicks clone went by the name Gladriel Faulkner and was some kind of professional New Age counselor. Bogus psychic advisors of that kind were as old as Los Angeles itself, and this one was as bogus as any who might have gone before, so far from any genuine prescience that she couldn't even tell when a non-human entity was riffling her thoughts like a well-thumbed deck of cards. Then, as Julia was about to exit her mind in disgust, she happened across a name that stopped her in her tracks.
"Brandon Wales!"
Julia was so surprised that she had done the unthinkable and exclaimed out loud. Glen Grauholtz looked at her with an expression of confusion and then turned and searched the crowd. "What? Brandon Wales is here? That's impossible. He's a total recluse these days. Everyone knows that."
Julia snapped into the voice of command. "Wait there. Do not move."
The Glen human froze into such sudden rigidity that a number of partygoers looked at him as if he was either drunk or crazy. Gladriel Faulkner also blinked a number of times, and appeared beset by a sudden migraine as Julia tore like lightning through her immediate memory, looking to see what her connection with Brandon Wales might be. Where Wales was concerned, Julia was nothing short of an unashamed, if undead, fan. In the early fifties. Brandon Wales had been the golden brooding youth rising to fame with the violent lead role of Frankie in Idaho Roberts' Flowers for the Dead, first on Broadway and then in the Oscar-winning movie. From there, he had smoldered through films like Docks of the City and The Hell Riders, and even distinguished himself as Iago in the movie version of Othello. In the sixties had he had directed his own epic, if bizarre, six-hour Western, Ace of Diamonds, and embraced any number of radical causes, none of which had endeared him to the Hollywood establishment. In the seventies, he had continued his turbulent and unorthodox career by winning and then rejecting a second Oscar for the title role in The Patrone, then playing the controversial part of the insane Colonel Himmel in Vincent Verdi's Saigon. After Saigon, Wales had announced that, as far as his acting was concerned, he had no more worlds to conquer and that, bored with adulation and even his art, he was retiring from professional and public life. With the often-quoted words, "I refuse to continue my life as a sideshow attraction," he attempted to abdicate his role as a pop-culture icon and the idol of millions.
Brandon Wales wasn't quite as god as his word or declared intention, but almost. Now and again, he would emerge from seclusion to play some highly paid cameo, but beyond that he totally hid himself, either behind the forbidding walls of his mansion high in the Hollywood Hills, or living as a primitive on his private island in the South Pacific. Idleness, however, hardly agreed with Wales any more than fame. A stormy procession of damaging marriages and relationships came and went, and compulsive eating caused his once prizefighter's muscle tone to balloon to fat until he was monstrously overweight. As far as Julia could read from the untidy and haphazard mind of Gladriel Faulkner, Wales was now in an advanced state of morose depression, believing that death was the only remaining unique experience, truly his final frontier, and for reasons that were not revealed, he had enlisted Faulkner as some sort of spiritual advisor and quasitherapist.
The whole scenario so incensed and disgusted Julia that she would have liked to have forced the awful Gladriel Faulkner to take her to Wales right there and then. It was so entirely wrong that a human she had admired should be living in such a mental and emotional quagmire, and be looking for support from a fool like this Faulkner woman. Unfortunately, the Jungle Room of the Trade Winds Hotel was too crowded and public for Julia to seize control of Faulkner's mind and march her out of there. The resulting muscular spasms alone would simply attract too much attention, and Julia also knew that her highest priority had to be to feed before the sun rose again. Good sense would have to prevail over impulse, but as she swiftly excited the woman's mind, she dropped a psychic bookmark that would enable her to find the woman again, or if need be, call Faulkner to her. An idea regarding Brandon Wales was already taking shape, and Julia knew Gladriel Faulkner would soon be seeing her again.
Although Julia's probe of the woman's memory had been deep and intense, in human terms, it had taken little more than an instant. Faulkner frowned and looked around like someone emerging from a brief and inexplicable flash of dizziness. Julia also released her hold on Glen Grauholtz, who also frowned and rubbed his forehead as the two of them continued on their way. Crossing the hotel lobby, headed for the parking lot, she shot him a penetrating glance and again used the voice of command. "You won't remember any of that."
Grauholtz's eyes momentarily went off focus, but then he again pulled himself back together with a fast shake of his head. "Did you say something?"
Julia blandly shook her head. "No. Not a word. You must be hearing things."
On the parking lot, they were immediately confronted by a uniformed Trade Winds car hop anxious to please and looking to maximize his tip, but actually presenting the first logistic problem that occurs when picking someone up in car culture Los Angeles. Grauholtz looked quickly at Julia. "Do you have a car?"
Again Julia shook her head. "I never drive. I am always driven."
Once inside Grauholtz's black BMW, Julia took a pack of menthol cigarettes from her purse and placed on in her mouth. As with the martini earlier, nicotine had little stimulant effect on her. She mainly smoked for the effect that it had on humans. As she expected, the Glen person looked at her in surprise. "you smoke?"
"I will if you do me the courtesy of lighting it for me."
Grauholtz was totally at a loss. A quick look inside the human's mind told Julia that he subscribed to the fashionable antismoking prejudice, but since he was also contorting himself to curry favor with her, he was clueless about how to react. Just to make his life a little more complicated, she made a slight moment of her lips around the slim paper tube and his libido instantly kicked in as he imagined the many better things those lips might do. Finally, and still with a visible reluctance, he pushed in the car's cigarette lighter. Julia raised an eyebrow. "Are you worried our car will smell of tobacco?"
"I just can't believe you're ruining your health like that. Those things can kill you."
Julia exhaled. "Cigarettes are not going to kill me."
"You sound very certain."
"I am."
"And what about secondhand smoke?"
Julia leaned over and lightly placed her fingertips on his cheek. "You have nothing to worry about on that count, my dear. Believe me."
They were now moving with the evening traffic along Wilshire Boulevard and the human looked at Julia questioningly. "Where are we going?"
Julia laughed. "Is that your discreet way of asking ‘your place or mine?'"
Glen Grauholtz might fancy himself as slick, but with Julia constantly pushing him in different directions, he was becoming increasingly awkward. he forced a laugh. "I suppose you could say that."
Julia flashed him her most seductive smile. "Why don't we just drive for a while? Maybe out to the beach?"
This was plainly not what the man had been hoping for. She intercepted a clear image of the two of them in a passionate embrace in the bedroom of his sleekly furnished, Century City apartment. He not only wanted to have her, but also wanted to show off his toys. She projected a counter-image at him. The two of them sprawled and wild, moaning on a moonlit beach while surf pounded in the background. Although he was too young and ignorant to recognize it as borrowed from Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity, he needed nothing more in the way of incentive.
"Pacific Coast Highway?"
Julia knew, from that point on, she could do what she liked with him. "That would be a start."
Grauholtz drove the stickshift BMW with a studied, show-off nonchalance, running through the gears like it was the Indy 500. It did little to impress Julia, although that was the obvious intent. A part of her wanted to laugh out loud at him, to reveal what she really was, and what was going to happen to him in the short future that he had left, but instead she merely smiled a facsimile of unstated promise and let his imagination take him where she wanted him to go. Oh, my dear, you will pay for your presumption. Of that there is no doubt.
Very soon, they were weaving through the wee-hours traffic on Pacific Coast Highway, with the ocean on one side, the high sandy cliffs of the Pacific Palisades on the other, and the lights of Santa Monica dwindling behind. As they passed the Malibu Colony, Julia remembered that, up ahead, would be Pepperdine University with the tall aluminum cross dominating the main entrance to the campus. The cross at Pepperdine might have been a serious obstacle had there been the slightest truth in all the tales of how the undead feared religious artifacts, but that was strictly the unfounded belief of superstitious Old World peasants, gothic fang fiction, and cheap movies. Of all the folktales that surrounded the nosferatu, only two were accurate. Destruction came both with the light of the sun and at the point of the driven stake. That was deadly fact. On the other hand, Julia saw no reason to drive as far as Pepperdine to get this Glen human on his own so the mighty feed unobserved. She didn't fear the cross, but saw no reason to look at the thing. The trappings of Christianity might not be a threat, but Julia still found them an abhorrent malediction.
"Why don't you pull of somewhere so we can go down to the beach? I want to look at the sea."
Within a half-mile, Glen did exactly that, winding the BMW down a narrow lane and then parking on a low bluff overlooking rocks, sea, and flat sand. The tide was out and distant surf curled white in the darkness. Almost straight away, he unsnapped his seatbelt and reached for her. Julia was actually shocked by this display of crass gaucherie. He wanted to do it in the damned car. She archly and easily moved away from him and opened the door beside her. "Let's not be too teenage."
Before he could say anything, she was out of the car and walking toward a zigzag flight of weatherbeaten wooden steps that led down to the beach. She moved fast enough to show her determination, but also sufficiently slowly to guarantee that he would follow her. As she started down, she was aware that he was already behind her. She even caught a drift of his thoughts. Oh yes, he wanted her, he wanted her almost to distraction, but at the same time, a part of him was worried about his shoes. His shoes? While nearly drooling over the arch of her back and the sway of her hips, he still had the obsessive material detachment to concern himself as to what salt and sand might do to his goddamned three-hundred-dollar tasseled loafers. Even for a human, this one could well have used a hard lesson in basic priorities if it hadn't been already far too late for him.
At the bottom of the steps, Julia continued walking out across the sand for twenty paces or so and then stopped and turned. Grauholtz was coming toward her in the darkness. She noted that he was now carrying his ridiculous shoes, walking in his sweat-socked feet. As with every victim she had a choice. She could let the human go easily, filling his head with glorious exploding images while death came, so, as his blood drained, he was carried by a first raging and then fading flame of rapture beyond his most impossible dreams. On the other hand, she could dispatch the prey by the hard way, with him screaming, but unable to make a sound, eyes wide and jaws locked in a rictus of horror, every second a seeming century as he fully perceived the terror of his fate. It was the shoes that decided her. If he couldn't come to her consumed with passion, if desire didn't overwhelm all consideration of his wretched footwear, then let him go in the full stark agony of slow and hideous total awareness.
"Come to me, Glen."
He reached for her with neither grace nor romantic finesse. His tie was pulled down and he was shirtsleeves, having left the jacket of his suit back in the car. He dropped his shoes and his hands were instantly on her body as he roughly tried to kiss her. For him, she was nothing more than a release and a score, a fast triumph and a boy's club trophy. He considered her a due payoff for what he perceived as his level of career success. Had there been even the minimal chance that she might have had mercy on his passing, he had canceled that with the crudity of his rutting. The nasty, greedy, human boy child would sob to the uncaring sky with full and final, fatal understanding of everything. He would not go gently. As his thumb and probing fingers kneaded her buttocks and crotch, her fury suddenly came to the boil. She might play the whore to lure the quarry, but a limit had been reached.
"TAKE YOUR IGNORANT MONKEY HANDS OFF ME!"
She hurled him from her, only holding back the fullness of her strength at the last minute for fear of snapping his neck. As it was, Glen Grauholtz sailed a good six or seven feet before he crashed into the sand, sprawled on his back. The force of her command was such that, for more than a mile around, lovers faltered in full mutual thrust, wondering what had happened. In topless joints near the airport, lap dances hesitated and patrons looked guiltily away from the strippers and nervously reached for their beer. Worse, though, than the snarl of Julia's rage was the silence that followed while Grauholtz started up at her with a choking, uncomprehending dread. A dozen soft stars glittered down through the haze and city skyshine, the lights of a late departing red-eye lifted from LAX, but he saw none of them. His only vision was Julia looming over him in all her nonhuman, cold-flaming majesty. He was seeing her for the first time as she really was: dark and towering, implacable and deadly, against the rage of the yellow moon and deep indigo hunters' night, so incapable of clemency and compassion. Her blazing eyes became windows on places that a human being should never see, and they made it clear that it was pointless to utter a word, and yet he did.
"I…"
"You?"
"Don't…"
"It is all but already done."
Panic mobilized him and he scrabbled backward, like a frantic crustacean, on elbows and the heels of white sweat socks, kicking up damp sand. Julia didn't move to go after him, but her lips pursed in unchallengeable authority. "Freeze!"
The word ended in a drawn out viperous hiss and Grauholtz's muscles locked, body helpless, soul predestined. Julia reached down and ripped away his shirt. All the man could do was to let out an inarticulate paralyzed gasp as shapeless nether demons of her world and creation closed on him. Slowly, carefully, and perversely taking her time, Julia extracted the small and very sharp stainless-steel spike from the jeweled sheath she wore as a broach. With the precision of a surgeon, she pierced Grauholtz's flesh just above his heart and then pulled the razor-tipped spike slowly downward, cutting a deep, inch-long slit in his chest. Blood welled immediately, and with a sigh, she descended on the would. As she drank, she felt him shudder and his spine coil back in agony and the panic of despair. She could still have allowed his consciousness to slip into unknowing oblivion, but she angrily held him with her, locked to the very last, knowing every nuance as his mortality approached, and he was drawn into the supposedly eternal and unseeing dark.
When she was finally finished. Julia rose slowly. The human may have been obnoxious, but he was also young and vigorous, and she felt all but on the edge of a swoon. She waited for a few moments as the initial weakness of her metabolism processing a complete satiation slowly ebbed, gradually transforming itself into an expanding, moonhowling, blacknight strength. She straightened up, casting the faintest sky shadow over the cadaver of the drained prey, and she lifted her head. Julia would have liked to howl out loud for all the sea to hear and the hills to ring with echoes, but having learned discretion the hard way, she contented herself with a long sigh of silent exaltation. She then leaned down and picked up the body, cradling the limp form as easily as if it had been the corpse of a baby. That was the other thing she had learned in New York. The remains of the hunt could not just be left. The hunter needed a plan for their disposal. She saw the shoes over which he had shown such concern lying on the sand, about four feet apart, one on its side and the other the right way up. Should she take them too? Julia thought not. Let the tide have them.
She carried Glen Grauholtz back to his BMW. First she pitched him into front passenger seat and drove up the lane until she was facing the highway. Stopping the car and making sure that she was unobserved, she got out and placed the body behind the wheel. Then she leaned in, turned on the engine, and wedging down the clutch, she shifted gingerly into first gear. Very delicately she placed the dead man's foot on the gas pedal, and using the last galvanic flickers of his collapsing nervous system, she caused him convulsively to press down as she freed the clutch, grabbed her purse, and swung clear. The BMW lurched forward, onto the highway, and straight into the path of a GM tractor trailer hauling produce for the Ralph's supermarket chain. The big semi plowed into the car, folding it almost in half and pushing it aside like a broken toy, before the truckdriver's reflex emergency braking caused the rig to start to jackknife.
As the truck thundered past, lurching from lane to lane, the BMW rolled over and in a consummation of bent metal and breaking glass came to a stop just a short distance from where Julia was standing. Somehow a spark reached the car's gas tank and Julia had to step swiftly back as a wave of heat from the resulting fireball broke over her. Somehow, the truckdriver managed to get his rig under control, but it was some hundred or more yards down the road before he could finally bring it to a halt. He jumped down from the cab and started running back in the direction of the burning car. Julia didn't doubt that he had called in the emergency on his radio, and very soon sirens would be coming down the highway. Confident that her victim was nothing more than a charred corpse, whose lack of blood would not be noticed, Julia melted into the darkness. Her involvement with these humans was at an end. Hours were still to pass before the rising of the sun, but she felt that her evening was as complete as it was gong to be, and she was content to walk invisibly beside the highway, savoring the night, the feeling of well-being, and a thousand small thrills or energy that popped like tiny champagne bubbles in every part of her body in the aftermath of the kill and the feed. Just as she predicted, the sirens and flashing lights of police and fire trucks were speeding to where the car was now burning itself out, too late to do anything but clear up the mess and attempt to piece together what might have happened. Julia smiled at his thought, confident that they would never come up with an answer that was even close to the truth.
Up ahead, she saw a pay phone and decided that it was time to return to the Residence. She could have contacted one of the other member of the colony by a direct mental call. They had probably already sensed her when she had screamed her anger at Grauholtz. The phone, on the other hand, was simpler and more civilized. She lifted the receiver and dropped in two quarters. The phone rang three times, then Lupo answered.
"Lupo, it's Julia. Would you please send a car for me?"
Lupo indicated with a monosyllable that he would do as she asked, and Julia hung up. Somewhere, in the tangled and dried out brush at the top of the cliff, a coyote looked down at her. The animal knew she had just hunted and it was about to do the same. They exchanged a moment of predator kinship. Somewhere, hidden but near at hand, the coyote had three cubes and was responsible for their feeding. Julia had fed herself, but had no one and no responsibilities. She wondered which of them envied the other.
* * *
The Nine entered the circular black-and-purple chamber n single file, seven men and two women, identically dressed and identities concealed in sweeping black capes lined with purple silk that exactly matched the primarily black-and-purple decor of the round, high-domed chamber. Each face was hidden in the deep cowl of its owner's robe and all moved with the uniform coordination of a long-practiced ritual. The center of the chamber was dominated by a huge circular table of polished grey marble streaked with veins of yellow and rust, like poison and old blood. The table was surrounded by nine high-backed, leather-upholstered chairs placed at regular and equidistant intervals. In the center of the table stood a three-foot-high, stainless-steel version of he same pylon that, in its true, full-sized form, reared from the roof of the building two basement levels and twelve floors above them. Continuing the attitude of formal ritual, the Nine crossed the chamber and then proceeded in an orderly circling of the table, each stopping when they reached their appointed seat to wait, standing, until the all nine were beside their designated chairs. Finally, when the ninth was in position, he gave a signal and they all sat as one.
The design of the table might have been noticeably Arthurian in its context, but to pretend that it or any part of the chamber might be dedicated to goodness and chivalry was wholly impossible. The total ambience of the underground room could only have been specifically designed for the keeping of potentially unspeakable secrets and the desire to wield equally terrible power. From the muffling drapes that lined the continuous curve of the wall to the cloying, musky stench of the incense that burned in two tall, black iron, standing censers, it was plain that whoever created this place had made every effort to install as many of the standard trappings and symbols of quasireligious authority and rule by mystic intimidation as was possible without the place becoming hopelessly baroque with clutter.
Elements of the high-powered corporate boardroom had been fused with the iconography of Freemasonry, the judicial intimidation of a court of law, the menace of the Black Mass, and even the regalia of the inquisitorial Catholic Church, while the color scheme and lighting plan blended a New Age funeral parlor with a highly self-conscious school of heavy-metal gothic theater. Although, at that moment in time, no stranger was present to dispassionately or even fearfully observe, the overall impression was that any newcomer should be fully and immediately overawed and humbled, and left in no doubt that this was the sanctuary of a mighty inner elite in whose hands rested a considerable determination of the visitor's fate. Small overhead spotlights threw the cape-shrouded, now seated figures of the Nine into stark relief, while the dimness of the remainder of the chamber all but gave the impression that dark and sinister shapes could be lurking and prowling in the outer shadows.
As soon as they were seated, the Nine pushed back their cowls and their faces were revealed. Each wore a state-of-the-art mini microphone and earplug headset that, when combined with the small video/computer monitor display screens that were set into the surface of the table, added an advanced techno-factor to the generally arcane and darkly magical. With the cowls removed, the Nine lost a little of their mysterious uniformity. The ages of those present appeared to range from a hard-brittle but attractive blonde with somewhat incongruous porno-star big hair, who couldn't, without the most expensive of Beverly Hills plastic surgery, have been any older than her late twenties, to a decadently wasted and wrinkled individual in his fifties or early sixties whose straight grey locks fell fully to his shoulders in the manner of some patriarchal hippie necromancer. Between these two extremes were two übermensch surf gods, a pair of what looked like corporate-political-legal hatchet boys, a short, forty-something, rabbinical figure who blinked myopically from behind very thick rimless glasses, a worried hustler in his late forties or early fifties, and a pale woman with an intense, penetrating gaze and a mass of grey-blond hair that she swept out of her eyes when she felt the need for flamboyant dramatic effect. Although very obviously from differing generations and backgrounds, even unveiled, the Nine still maintained a singular commonality. With one possible exception, their expressions were all the same: knowing and confident, although the rabbinical figure and the grey-blond woman were also a little distant and withdrawn. They only face that displayed any flicker of doubt or distrust was that of the middle-aged hustler, who went by the name Orton Ghast, and had a certain cast of the snakeoil salesman in the indirectness of his smooth-shaven features, as though he didn't quite trust the motives of the other eight.
The evidence of the electronic not withstanding, the next move of the Nine, after revealing their faces, was strictly metaphysical. As one, they placed the palms of their hands together and interlaced their fingers with a complexity that could probably only be matched by highly obscure cults of Hasidim. They inclined their heads and began to intone in unison:

"Iss mass ssarati sha mushi lipshuru ruxisha limnuti
Izizanimma ilani rabuti shima ya dababi!
Dini dina alaktilimda!
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn."

When the prayer was finished, a faintest chill whisper of a draft seemed to pass through the chamber and the incense smoke roiled into miniature thunderheads. The Nine remained as they were, heads bowed and hands clasped, until the air was once again still, and then the aging hippie unlaced his fingers and looked round at the others. "Beyond the Gate dwell now the Old Ones; not in the spaces known unto men but in the angles betwixt them." The others answered. "Spirits of the earth remember, spirits of the sky remember." The hippie nodded. "Let us commence our business."

Copyright © 2000 by Mick Farren