wanted her really bad. But we’ve got her.”
“Snow owns her, and the film.”
“Snow needs us to control her, as only you can, and to decipher her role in this wacky mob-run supernatural hierarchy . . .”
“As only
I looked around. I had to admit the cushy seats and the dark empty theater was making me, um, pliable, way more pliable than any metal woman.
Ric took advantage of my silent okay to push away the hair on my nape and engage in his favorite turn-on, and now mine, a clinging, stinging kiss turned passion bruise. I was nervous about how close our ritual was to welcoming a vampire intimacy. Still, I’d become hooked on this shadowy secrecy, on hiding the visible proof of our passion, on the danger of edging near where vampires and vamp tramps went for sex and blood. Maybe I’d been a naive fool all my earlier life to fight the darker side of love.
His lips released. I felt a faint bloody rawness on the hot surface, glossing his lips as they moved along my skin. It wasn’t a bite, merely sexy suction. He softly nuzzled his way onto the public side of my neck, lips lingering at the hollow of my white-skinned throat.
“You’d look hot with my mark here.”
Matching hickeys with Snow? I felt a shudder of guilt and anxiety. I think not.
My fingertips shushed his lips. “Really. We
“It’s full dark and we’re alone in a major luxe environment. And you just taste so good.” He grinned. “All right. I’ll satisfy myself with these gourmet cheese curls. Jeez! Hector Nightwine is one of a kind, taking the popcorn out of the pop culture.”
I didn’t tell him I hoped they were just cheese. Hector’s appetite ran to suspect foods, like white-chocolate- covered maggots.
I sipped the Albino Vampire, leaving a lip-gloss imprint on the rim. Ric sipped his, leaving a similar but fainter version of my imprint, part my lip gloss, and not part blood, I hoped. Made me wonder about the whole history and point of lip painting. . . .
The movie screen opened on black emblazoned with white letters.
“Right off I can see this is going to be an action opus,” Ric commented.
I gave him a friendly punch on the arm. “The first
“Hokey,” Ric grumbled, but he tilted back in his body-hugging leather seat. I did the same, feeling like tiny Dwan supported by the huge, padded leathery palm of King Kong.
Once the starring city of Metropolis in all its corrupt futuristic glamour of the world of 2000 as imagined in 1927 took center stage, it was impossible to take your eyes off the screen. The production was German, and the prophetic scenes of skull-capped male workers marching like convicts into the “forced” labor of the mechanical age was chilling.
Meanwhile, the white-clad, golden-blond sons of the corporate masters gamboled in Olympic-style games in an Eternal Garden—of Eden?—and were visited by gorgeous girls in evening gowns of sheer chiffon and feathers.
Ric leaned over to rest his head on my shoulder. “How come you don’t wear any outfits from that era?”
“The style was ‘boyishly’ chic,” I pointed out.
“Huh?”
“This was the first time women showed bare arms and legs. They were the major erotic zones of the era.”
“If you say so.” Ric shook his head. “Now that you mention it, that glitter hides the fact that all those girls’ chests are flat as two-by-fours. Not my druthers.”
“Duh.”
“Who’s the guy in the eyeliner and riding britches who’s always swooning?”
“That’s the hero, the evil manufacturer’s son. Both genders wore liner in these early black-and-white films to make the eyes stand out.”
The scene showed the young activist, Maria, crashing the Sons’ party, a raft of Dickensian orphans clustered around her. She was all sweetness and pleading light, the dialogue box reading, “These are your brothers.” Poor hero-guy was instantly smitten and set out to find her like Prince Charming with a hard-on for a glass slipper.
Some of it was corny, some of it was prophetic, and all of the sets were stunning.
We stared unblinking at Maria in her high-tech glass coffin as she transformed into the gleaming cyborg the mad scientist Rotwang had made . . . at Rotwang’s neon and test tube laboratory transforming the sleeping Maria. Once Maria’s essence is poured into the metal robot, it in turn becomes a human-looking false Maria who Rotwang sends out to incite the workers to self-destructive rebellion against the city’s masters.
For the usual flimsy reasons, false Maria does a nearly nude stint as the whore of Babylon dancing for the leering moneyed class. All very symbolic but also the obligatory strip club setting we see on TV all the time today. Even Ric was mesmerized by Bad Maria’s frenzied erotic dance. Some things never get old.
At last the workers finally realized they’d been had. Their rampage ended with burning the false and defiant Maria at the stake, where she turned back into the silver metal cyborg before the false personality finally “died.” The good Maria was freed to unite with her suitor and rebuild the leveled
When the film ended, Ric was leaning forward on the edge of his posh chair, arms braced on his thighs, hands laced together.
“That’s all Brigitte Helm,” I said, “from saint to seductress to saint again. Her false self sure whipped up that crowd of wimpy workers like Hitler on a tear.”
“That’s just it,” Ric said. “This film eerily predicts what would happen in Germany ten years later when Hitler was in power. Speaking of power, I can see why Snow wants to reinvent that amazing towering Metropolis cityscape as a Vegas attraction. The dancing girls and even the Seven Deadly Sins are built in. Did he name his rock band after those creepy critters?”
“Don’t know. Too bad the Sins’ scene is mostly lost. We see them as gray, stone figures in a churchlike setting that come to life and walk toward the viewer, with Death as their sheepherder coming last, carrying a scythe.”
“Snow’s onstage backup group is a lot more sinful than those walk-off parts, especially Lust and Envy.” Ric ginned as he named the two female members of the rock group.
“So you’d noticed those hip-swiveling hussies? I thought you weren’t a fan.”
“I don’t follow Vegas stage shows, but when you admitted after I recovered from the Karnak ordeal that you’d had to submit to a Brimstone Kiss to get Snow to help rescue me, I caught a show to see what was involved. He bent down to do the Elvis scarf trick with the mosh pit groupies, but no kisses.”
I allowed myself a mental sigh of relief. And since when had Ric started calling Christophe “Snow”? He’d been reluctant to sound friendly with the mogul-rock star in any way whatsoever.
“You must have been his last customer,” Ric added with that deceptively casual side glance of a veteran interrogator. “Must have cured him of the habit.”
“Maybe.”
“I had to buy a used video of the show to get Brimstone Kiss footage. Just the standard long wet lip smack, but those women sure swooned like the hero of
Did I ever! And it wasn’t fit for family consumption, much less one’s boyfriend.
So I dismissed the strength of the effect. “The fans get overwrought when they have actual contact with an onstage idol. Every moment is magnified. It’s a kind of psychic orgasm.”
That was perfectly true, although in the case of the Snow groupies, the orgasms were real and serial.
“Not with you, though,” Ric wanted to confirm.
“You know Snow’s a power freak. A man, or whatever, who can call a dragon into being from a palmful of ashes would have to be. Me submitting to the Brimstone Kiss was his price for mounting your rescue expedition. He
