Virtual Virgin

“Supposedly. Don’t you know the common remedies?”

“I’ve been locked up in mirror-world.”

Now was not the time to explore what my remote “twin” had been up to during my twenty-four years of existence. Still, Lilith’s simplistic questions reminded me of Sansouci, the “daylight” vampire. Sunglasses allowed him high-noon strolling time.

“Maybe you could use your superpowers to smash a huge hole in the roof—” Lilith was saying.

“And let the starlight in? Three hundred million light-years isn’t going to make any planet-Earth vamp go nova.”

I couldn’t get lost in centuries of legends and hearsay about what killed vampires. Vida was right. Yet Sansouci was a new-model vamp and he’d kept sunlight from his eyes. Sunlight had to be bad for vampire eyes, at least.

With all these lights here . . . and still the vamps were hopping around like Paris Hilton in a Manhattan nightclub spotting an Excess Hollywood camera. When the strobe light hit them, I noticed that their fangs had come out to play. Zero hour was approaching fast.

Their dance partners, male and female, were too busy being cool in black leather and shades—cat’s-eye- shaped shades, Snow-type expensive European shades, mirror shades, eye-slit shades, wraparound shades, round scholarly John Lennon shades, Sansouci aviator shades, glitter-framed shades, Matrix shades, cool hot shades—to notice anything outside their rum-and-Coke and cocaine hazes.

I had to escape looming doom mode and think like Vegas thought. Corporate. I had to get into the head of Forties arm-candy Vida knuckling under to Cesar Cicereau and watching hard as he took over what would become Vegas when it was as low-end and unglitzy as Delilah Street—pardon my low-esteem self description—was today. Or a few years ago. Vida the entrepreneur, building a new immortal life in California.

That’s when I realized that Rave Machine had to be the first club she’d owned. The gym down the street was the new, improved version, with a vamp-only membership. This had been a real health club she’d bought and had now turned into a literal tourist trap.

I turned to Lilith. “Where were you getting your quick smoke? There are smoke alarms all over this ceiling.”

She eyed the dark spaces between the huge light fixtures. “Yeah, I saw them. I thought they were security cameras at first, but then I tumbled. So I ducked behind one of those doors.”

“What doors?”

“Step back from the railing and this pit of whacked-out lights and you’ll be able to focus on them.”

Sure enough, we were standing on a balcony. A row of blank metal doors were set back about ten feet.

I eyed Lilith’s skin-tight everything. “Where do you carry smokes?”

She worked something out of her front jeans pocket with a mighty wriggle. To some—men—it might be provocative. To me it was a time waster.

She finally withdrew a slim rectangular metal case. “Vintage, baby. The lighter is built into one end. Isn’t it cool?”

I raised an eyebrow she couldn’t see in the shadows. Maybe there was hope for her yet.

“So the doors are unlocked. What’s in there?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Crap. It’s dark.”

“Not if you light one candle in the darkness.”

“Religious crap.”

I grabbed her elbow—I almost got a shock—and pulled her to a door. “This one?”

“I guess.”

“We haven’t time to play ‘you-don’t-care.’”

I grabbed the nineteen-thirties cigarette case from Lilith’s hand, my palm loving the incised Art Deco lines it felt, the sleek compactness . . . thinking Vida would know and love this artifact of her era . . . rats, sentimentality sucked! My thumb found the strike wheel and pushed hard. A sturdy little flame flared into life . . .

. . . and its tiny glare reflected off long glass tubes lining the top of a bullet-shaped coffin on the floor in the small chamber built to house only it.

“The vampires sleep in this space cocoon thingie and there are roomfuls of them up here?” Lilith asked, sounding in awe for the first time I’d ever heard her do so.

I didn’t have time to explain. “Help me drag this out of the room.”

“It looks heavy.”

It ain’t heavy, it’s my maybe baby sister, and she is sometimes very dense.

Thanks, Irma.

“You like to flaunt those hard-candy girlie biceps?” I challenged Lilith. “Use ’em.”

Together, but mostly me, we manhandled the awkward “coffin” out of the room and through the open door. We heaved it upright on the outside wall, where it looked mighty like a space-age mummy case.

I raced back into the room, striking Lilith’s ninety-year-old lighter time and again before it ran out of fluid, hunting two things: a loose old-fashioned male plug lying around and a female receptacle, known in the building trades as an “outlet,” in the wall.

Sometimes they are pain in the neck to connect and sometimes they make beautiful music together.

I returned to the balcony flushed with effort. Lilith was leaning her crossed arms on the railing, looking down. “The vamp girls are really slingin’ hash now. And those dumb guys are keeping their sunglassed eyes glued on the girls’ gyrating hips, baby, not their lips. That’s guys for you.”

“Stand back by the doors,” I said.

She turned. The upright tubes lining both the bottom and the top of the plugged-in case were tinging and buzzing and blushing pink and yellow. “You don’t tell me what to do, Dee.”

“Lilith! What happens next could blind you. Nose to the wall. Cup your hands around your face when you get there.”

“And you?

“I’m gonna aim this little Venusian Palace death ray and then do the same as I told you.”

Lilith was boot-scuffling her way to the wall like a reluctantly obedient three-year-old. That girl had issues. “The Venusian Palace is a Vegas Strip residence tower behind the Gehenna Hotel.”

“Right. Remind me to tell later you how it made the news. We are about to invent Vampire Fire.”

She reluctantly helped me (so much for her muscle tank top) manhandle the “coffin” (so aptly named by Lilith), to face the Dancing with the Stars super-ultra-huge mirror ball trophy hanging above the crazy-lit floor below.

“Now,” I ordered her. “Nose to the wall, eyes shut, and hands cupping your face.”

She cozied herself up to the painted concrete like it was a six-foot-two hunk. “I’m going to think beautiful thoughts. Of your boyfriend.”

“Whatever makes you docile.”

Every muscle in my body was shaking from overextension as I turned myself into the wall and cupped my own hands to put my eyes totally in the dark.

Below, the music was reaching its climax with the shrill of police sirens amping up the mix. I could picture the gyrating couples, vampire and human, reaching the end of the set with a mutual—but so misguided on both sides —mass predatory pounce . . . except the mirror ball was (I hoped but dared not look) broadcasting a strange new light into the frenetic mix below.

The sirens and guitars shrieked and my spine burned with the bites of a thousand fire ants as a totally atonal mass scream of dying vampires joined the last chords.

I heard an electrical apocalypse.

All the breakers in the place burned out at once, even through the light-reddened flesh of my hands I glimpsed when the house went dark as the vampires went down.

First, there was silence.

Then, the buzz of people muttering discontent. Questions floated up.

“Where’re the freaking lights?”

“We’re blind as bats.”

“This is a gyp joint.”