Chicks Kick Butt

lashing out to mate with a momentarily still elevator cable.

Within the coiled tension of my fisted hands, the links of silver shortened and pulled me atop the elevator car like a giant slingshot. I’d become used to its sudden shape-shifting, but the only witness to the operation remained below.

I gazed down ten feet at a jumping Rumpelstiltskin chattering away like Cheetah, Tarzan’s clever movie chimp costar. Only from above could I see that my kidnapper hadn’t been an ape or a monkey but a man. A hunchback. The Hunchback, I realized.

Now I could translate the sounds he had chortled from high in the hotel atrium while I’d been hefted like a trophy over his ungainly head. I had a silent movie script to go by, where the word had been shown onscreen. Not “Thank you very” but “Sanc-tu-ary!”

That’s the word the Hunchback of Notre Dame had shouted as he swung the kindhearted Gypsy girl, Esmeralda, away from the stake where she was to be burned as a witch and up to the gargoyle-guarded stone heights of the famed Paris cathedral, where a hunchback was the humble bell ringer and where an innocent scapegoat like Esmeralda could find a triumphant “sanctuary” from the ignorant mob storming the church grounds.

This guy had mistaken the crowd of pushy tourists for a rioting mob and me for Esmeralda.

I could think of only two black-and-white-era CinSim hunchbacks, both consummate actors, both despising the Hollywood looks sweepstakes. One was Charles Laughton. The earlier, silent-film version had been Lon Chaney, “the Man of a Thousand Faces.”

Something about this bizarre situation was ringing a bell in my head besides the endless vocalizations above, now segueing from the soaring hymn of “Ave Maria” to “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life,” which reminded me of my mission.

Thrilled as I was to have actually relived one of the most iconic moments in the early history of film, I had to lose this scenario and figure out why and how a woman with the voice of an angel would want to haunt a murderous old sinner like Cesar Cicereau.

I’d begun my escape swinging on a silver cord instead of a bell rope, and now was clinging atop a rapidly rising elevator car. Looking up, I saw enough cables to string a harp and a big dark flat nothing—the elevator shaft top—waiting to brain me.

I wound the familiar’s shrinking silver cord around my palms. When I had just a garrote-length left, I looped it around the handle on the car’s rooftop emergency escape hatch and pulled … only I wanted in, not out.

Moments later, just as the elevator shaft top loomed above like an iron hat, I jerked open the hatch to drop down into the brightly lit car, taking my weight on my bent knees. I straightened as the hatch overhead banged shut, smiling at the startled tourists into whose midst I’d so abruptly appeared.

“ Whew . What a wild private party on the penthouse level,” I complained. “Do not accept any of those slot machine invitations. It was ballistic.” They eyed me with mixed suspicion and envy.

Meanwhile, I noticed the Muzak filling the now-plummeting car. More of that sweet and impossibly sugary soprano voice. What was she singing now? “Send in the Clowns”? No need to get personal!

“Oh, that voice is unearthly,” a woman said as the elevator doors finally opened on the main floor.

Yeah! Probably a ghost.

At least I was back where I’d begun, even though my newly laceless shoes were useless after my catapult atop the elevator car. At least I was now wearing a silver charm bracelet dangling place-appropriate wolf heads.

I decided to restart my investigation on the main floor. First, a limping detour down the shopping wing brought me to a store called Two Cool Tootsie’s. My dressy spike heels were buckling sideways, so I charged a pair of Steve Madden leopard-print flats with a rose on the toes to Cicereau’s account.

Unfortunately, the gushing saleswoman took me for Cicereau’s latest moll, not an employee whose wardrobe had suffered in his service.

“Shame about your mangled Jimmy Choos,” she consoled me.

I’d explained I’d caught one high heel in an elevator door and broken the second while wrenching the first loose.

“Are you sure the boss will like you as well in flats?” she asked. “I hear he runs hot and cold.”

“Oh, Cesar is quite a runner, but he dotes on anything that reminds him of dead Big Cats,” I said. “That old Starlight Lodge hunting urge, you know.”

She shuddered as she rang up the new shoes. “I’ve heard what gets chased down at that place. Just stay on his safe side, honey. Cringing is good.”

Shod again, I cruised the main entertainment area with a fresh eye. The building’s gigantic wooden tree architecture mimicked soaring Gothic cathedral columns. No wonder the Hunchback had replayed his best scene here with me as a stand-in.

Tourists strolled leaf-patterned parquet paths around forest scenes of ferns and flowering plants and thick clustered trees. The scale made you feel as small and helpless as a chipmunk skittering near the trickle of hidden streams, hearing the rustle of bird life in the leaves above. Sensing silently stalking wolves in the shadows. At least I did.

I was glad to break into the brightness of a skylight-illuminated mountain village square with a half-timbered inn called the Huntsman’s Haven that broadcast scents of fresh-baked bread, beer, and bratwurst.

A Gypsy wagon and camp drew children to the tricolored wagon, ponies, and the music and color of juggling, knife-throwing, and fortune-telling attractions. I am not an outdoorsy girl. One enforced summer at a mosquito- ridden Minnesota camp during my group home days had been enough for me.

I really needed to check out the hotel’s theater stage. The Gehenna’s big contracted show starred Madrigal, the strongman magician, and his creepy pair of female fey assistants. Picture two-foot-high Barbie dolls with glitzy wardrobes, webs, and venom.

My captor had been an escapee from an old silent movie. Had the Gehenna been adding new attractions?

Sure enough. The slick marquee advertising Madrigal and his fey accomplices had a smaller satellite now, a film theater showing London After Midnight.

This was definitely a black-and-white silent film. As a vintage film junkie, I was drawn toward the marquee like a mesmerized bride-to-be of Dracula. This 1927 silent classic had been lost, burned in a fire in the sixties. How could London After Midnight be shown here?

Before I could get close enough to the booth to barter my shoes or my soul for a ticket … so much for refusing to carry a purse … a sinister figure, all in black, stepped into my path.

He wore a top hat over a clownish, frizzled, chin-length hairdo that framed a vintage gray face with popping eyes and an ebony-lipped mouth grinning to show every tooth filed into a point. I didn’t know whether to scream with laughter or fear, and aren’t those the yummiest theatrical moments of all?

Spotting me, he spun with a demonic grimace and lifted the arms of his calf-length cape … to display the bat-winged spines visible underneath.

Sinister or comic? Early films walked that very thin line.

“Wait!” I shouted, my voice lost in the echo chamber that is a casino concourse’s everyday clamor. Tourists love the sounds of crowds and action.

The bizarre figure vanished behind a clot of fanny-pack-wearing sightseers.

I froze.

“Don’t you look sooo darling, dear?” A grandmotherly tourist in a Jimmy Buffett T- shirt, Bermuda shorts, and varicose veins intercepted me.

“Love your vintage rag-doll look and Hello Bad Kitty shoes. Are you one of those living statues? You can’t fool me! Where’s the bratwurst bingo line?”

I wordlessly pointed in the direction farthest from where I was standing, and the troop of seniors trekked on past.

But my freaky vampire vision had disappeared just as I’d been about to put a few bizarre pieces together. I was beginning to feel like Alice in a Wonderland of horror films. Since when had Cesar Cicereau’s Gehenna Hotel and Casino been anything but an old-style establishment with only one miserable Peter Lorre CinSim on site?