Chicks Kick Butt

woman’s voice came to my rescue.

* * *

“Stop. Stop! I won’t be caught between you! I won’t be the maiden victim again and again. I won’t be silent. I will sing. I’d rather die than be torn between the two of you. Monsters! I am a nightingale and I will not be caged.”

A pretty woman wearing a pale, long gown now stood among us, a figure of hysterical anguish.

She threw back her slim soprano’s neck and lifted an even slimmer glass vial to her gray silver-screen lips. A thin stream of mercury slid oysterlike down her throat. Then she screamed, screeched, writhed, clutching her vocal cords as they corroded and cracked, and vanished along with her ability to make any sound.

“You did this,” the Wolfman snarled at the Phantom. “You told me she was dead, that I had no mother. But the mercury poison destroyed her vocal cords, not her life.”

“Her vocal cords were her life!” How odd to see the Phantom of the Opera scorning a woman for using her gift, but the character had been a control freak too. “Cleva wanted to perform, and you were a young boy, Creighton,” the Phantom argued. “You needed a mother with you, not one off in nightclubs singing for far less than emperors.”

“Creighton. That was her surname,” Larry Talbot remembered, “given to me as her firstborn. She tried to kill herself because of you.”

“I had theatrical work, boy, a rising career! Cleva refused to give up her singing to stay with you.”

“Others could have tended me. They already had.”

“Yes, her voice was sublime, beyond incredibly sweet.”

“And it never was so again. You cared nothing for her gift, her talent, so she seared it from her throat in front of you,” the Wolfman said with a guttural whine of pain. “And then you told me she was dead. I was just a boy of seven. You kept us apart for years until she found me again.”

“Once you knew of her existence, you left me, Creighton. You went off with her.”

“Which was fine with you. You never wanted me to go on the stage, on the screen, as you never wanted her to sing. She destroyed her gift in her pain at your not valuing it. Or her.”

“You called yourself ‘Lon’ and tacked a ‘Jr.’ on your name at the order of the studio bosses after I was dead.”

“I didn’t want to. I wanted to be my own man, as my mother wanted to be her own woman, but your legend mired us both in paths that hurt us.”

“I didn’t put the bichloride of mercury in her hand.”

“You put the despair in her soul.”

“Our divorce was overdue.”

“As I was born prematurely. I guess,” the Wolfman said, straightening into the sad, human, but familiar form of Larry Talbot, “I guess our timing was always off, Dad.”

I held my breath, caught up in the family tragedy. Sure, they were all CinSims, so it was like watching ghosts play out some long-dead script. But the drama was true to life.

“I died young, Son,” Lon Chaney admitted, “alone, before age fifty, from cornflakes, of all things, used to make snow on a set. I lost my voice at the end, as Cleva had, as my deaf-mute parents had before their births. A throat hemorrhage silenced me forever, seventeen years after Cleva’s mad attempt at self-destruction.”

“So why is she singing now?” Lon Jr. asked.

They turned to me, as if I were the image of Cleva. I was brunet, as the printout photo of her had been, but my hair was closer to jet-black. She’d looked high-hearted smart in a top hat and a monocle from some forgotten vaudeville or nightclub routine. We hardly resembled each other, but to the CinSims’ eyes, we were the eternal woman, heroine, victim, mother, child, lover, supporter, opponent.

“She wanted Creighton to hear what she had been,” I said to the Phantom. “And,” I said to the Wolf Man, “she wanted to see what you had become.”

“Yet,” the Wolf Man said, “she lived to a riper old age than either of us.”

“But … you’d never heard her sing,” I pointed out. “Now you have.”

The Wolf Man nodded. “The pack sings. It’s part of our heritage.”

“Are you the actor or the role?” I asked.

I gestured at the Phantom. “This is an inspired and impassioned instructor. You have a chance to replay all your roles over and over again, with Cleva as an invisible audience. I don’t think you’ll see or hear her again, except in your CinSim hearts.”

Frowns. The moment had passed. They resumed their roles, utterly alien to each other except in being monsters. Phantom and Wolf Man. Larry Talbot vanished into his woodland arena. The Phantom limped back to the bowels of the theater.

I reported to the head monster in the penthouse soon after.

* * *

“So you’re saying I leased a pair of CinSims with unresolved relationship issues?” Cicereau demanded. “What is the Immortality Mob pushing these days?”

“Leasing illusory surfaces of human beings is a dodgy business, even in these post–Millennium Revelation days,” I told him.

“And the ghost of the Chaney wife and mother decided my hotel-casino was the place to sing bloody murder about stuff that went down a hundred years ago, when she and Lon Chaney got divorced? Women! They never give up. Why me?”

“Perhaps you own daughter’s haunting created a channel for another woman who felt a trusted man had taken her life, one way or another.”

“I didn’t hire a psychoanalyst-investigator, Street. Out, out, damn Joseph Campbell! You quit the psychobabble and concentrate on being a babe and just guarantee that psycho siren is outta the Gehenna and my hearing for good.”

“Oh, she’s gone, and I will be too. Once you fork over what you owe me.”

He pulled a wad from his pin-striped pants and peeled off Benjamin Franklins, snapping the hundred-dollar bills to the desktop like he was laying out playing cards.

At three thousand, he paused for my reaction.

“I banished one ghost and reunited two CinSims, not to mention tussling with the Hunchback of Notre Dame, the Wolf Man, the Mummy, and the Phantom of the Opera.”

He resumed, slapping down hundreds until he reached five thousand. It made quite a pile.

“Tell me you don’t sing,” he asked with a beady eye on my throat.

“I don’t.”

“Fifty-two Benjamins for the whole deck of cards, covering a maintenance visit if the Chaney boys act up again.”

* * *

Lon Chaney, the Man of a Thousand Faces and reluctant postmortem “Sr.” to his son Creighton’s studio rechristening as Lon Chaney Jr., had hoped his feats of grotesque disguise proved that “the dwarfed, misshapen beggar of the streets may have the noblest ideals and the capacity for supreme self- sacrifice.”

Cleva Creighton had sacrificed her sublime voice in her tormented fight for the right to use it.

Lon Chaney had learned to “speak” so eloquently in silent films by growing up with deaf-mute parents, and then died speechless of throat cancer.

Creighton Chaney had rejected the father who’d deprived a young boy of his mother, but fate had turned him to walk in the same career shoes.

Speaking of shoes, I left the Gehenna with a couple months’ salary, a satisfyingly “happy” ending for two icons of film history, and a kicky new pair of leopard-pattern flats with full-blown roses on the toes in honor of poor, deluded, but talented Cleva Creighton.

“Need a lift back to the Inferno party?” a voice asked as its owner fell into step with me as I strode through the din-filled Gehenna lobby.

“I’ve had enough unwanted transportation today, thanks,” I told Sansouci. “I think I’ll walk.”

The daylight vampire might claim to feel no regrets for his centuries of survival on other people, but I