Virtual Virgin

was an ancient fertility god, one attribute was outsize and often a bit too obvious. He was not the lean-hipped he- man tomb paintings used to portray Shez and most male Egyptians. Bez was muscular, but stubby and hairy, even his face surrounded by a curly mane and beard. He was more reminiscent of your neighbor’s cute pot-bellied pig that had grown larger and noisier than advertised.

“I came to escort you to the peak of the Karnak,” Bez said, ogling my outfit. “I see that I will not be able to look up your skirt as easily as you could look up mine, if desired, as I am sure that is. You are a strange woman from this strange land and wear twin snakeskins on your legs. Which I, however, find most interesting.”

“You kilt is safe from any sneak peeks,” I told him. “I need to reach Shez’s top-level workshop from inside the Karnak.”

I had no idea if Bez knew who or what Howard Hughes was, but I did know the undead mogul was backing Shezmou’s less lethal efforts both in his private quarters and on the Strip. He was quite the inventor and medical research sponsor, our Howard, in his twentieth-century heyday, and even moreso now that he’d become eternal.

Bez beckoned me to bend down deeply to receive a private word. While doing so, I caught him trying to peer down my top. Where is it written that fertility gods have to be four-thousand-year-old dirty old men? Probably in all the ancient books.

“Our high and mighty rooftop deity has installed a secret path to his throne rooms,” Bez whispered in my ear. “Follow me.”

Quick and I did, getting sour stares from women tourists as Bez tweaked any passing hems, be they on skirts, skorts, or short-shorts. I hoped they took the little lion god for an unmanageable kid, because they sure glared at me like I was the world’s worst mother.

“The souvenir shop?” I questioned when I realized that was where we were heading. “The only souvenirs I want to take out of here on this visit are Quicksilver and me.”

“Tut,” Bez said, mischievously grinning up. “This place holds the cleverest innovation to the Karnak yet.”

Like the Luxor’s main floor attractions, the Karnak souvenir shop was designed to put the visitor inside a pyramid, with faux stone and scene-painted walls and shelves crammed with reproductions of Nefertiti heads and King Tut’s golden death mask.

Bez seized my hand, Quicksilver acting as a guide dog on my other side, and led me through the crowds and small mazelike shops. The culture-vulture tourists in the shop area were too busy ogling glitzy reproductions of the glory that was ancient Egypt to donate a glance to any passing dog-and-pony show like my party.

We came to the deserted restroom area and passed it.

Quicksilver whimpered in confusion and I was starting to wonder if the randy little clown was just trying to get me alone with him.

Bez abruptly got on his knees and then mane-butted the lowest fake-stone block. Just as Quick and I exchanged mutually mute and puzzled looks, the stone swung inward into the dark, into which Bez was disappearing except for his unhappily exposed rear end.

I looked back for witnesses, but realized this spot was beyond any viewing angle from the shop area.

What a disgusting sight. All fours, Irma noted. Not dignifying.

At least Bez isn’t behind us, I told her. Close your eyes and think of England.

My “snakeskin” leggings proved useful as I knelt to wriggle through the opening, Quick panting on my heels. The other side was as black as, well, a tomb.

I stood cautiously. No head or body bumps. There was room.

A moment later glowing amber light revealed everything. I saw Bez standing, arms akimbo, dead ahead. I looked back to see the entry stone had shut behind us. More of the gigantic sandstone block walls and a paved path angled upward to our left.

The most amazing object was an exquisite wooden bench with arms and legs carved into the likeness of lion cubs. It seemed suspended against the far wall, like an abandoned amusement park ride seat.

“Hop on,” Bez urged, jumping up to install himself next to the wall.

I looked up the grade and spotted parallel dark lines painted along the bottom of the wall opposite where we’d entered. Then I looked harder. The lines weren’t painted. They were fastened to the wall.

“This is an inclined elevator, like in the Eiffel Tower in Paris,” I exclaimed, mystified and charmed at the same time.

Not another step, Irma warned, this looks like the way to a fertility god’s bachelor pad. That imp Bez is always on the make.

I ignored her and sat next to “that imp.”

“I know only,” Bez said with a wicked leer, “to touch the magic button.”

His stubby thumb depressed a gold circle atop the seat’s inner arm. A buzz of bees, almost as soft as silence, accompanied us as the seat glided upward.

Howard Hughes invents again, Irma noted with a sigh, and shut up.

Quick huffed out his doggie disgust at the mechanical route and trotted up the incline well ahead of our conveyance.

Riding up the inside of a reconstructed ancient Egyptian pyramid passage was an experience I didn’t want to hurry. Bez grinned like the grown-up child he was beside me. I recalled that Karnak Hotel’s exterior concealed the top of an interior pyramid. Howard Hughes must have secretly constructed this inclined elevator so employees could sneak in and out of his top floor quarters without the resident vampire court far below the hotel’s bustling main floor suspecting anything.

When the elevator mechanism hushed and stopped, Quicksilver lifted his forepaws and leaned on the fake stone wall. Again, it swung inward, revealing the elevator door and foyer outside Howard Hughes’s most upscale lair.

Hesitating, I saw Bez gazing back down the illuminated slanted pathway. “If only they’d known about this when constructing the Great Pyramid at Giza.” A sigh ended his wish.

Once I moved into the foyer, I immediately faced the familiar double doors to Howard’s suite.

I knocked.

Theda Bara, the silent screen vamp CinSim, flourished open the doors still wearing her notorious Cleopatra costume, or lack thereof. It was actually more concealing than the similar outfit Bad Maria wore in her Whore of Babylon production number with the Seven Deadly Sins doing backup at the Metropolis nightclub.

Theda shrugged her disappointment at seeing me again, her A-cup metal bra shimmying at the gesture. How sad to think that female competition never died. Also metal bikini bras.

Howard awaited me in his cushy living room, his gaunt form attired in a burgundy brocade dressing gown. Its color tastefully echoed the clear plastic bag of blood suspended from the IV stand always at his side.

After forty years of afterlife as a vampire, he had the burned-out rock star look down pat. His rutted face seemed to have been caught in a fire in the wax museum on the way to the plastic surgeon’s office. Bald-doll wisps of dull hair framed those ruinous features. A shrunken head would not be an out-of-line comparison. His surviving body was scrawny to the point of lacking any muscle tone at all.

If this was my secret father I was going take an even-more-assumed name and hide out in Iceland for the duration of the twenty-first century.

“Delilah!” Howard exclaimed on seeing me. He waved the usual set of busty Playboy vampire nurses to his side. “See what my guests would like to drink. Water for the dog, I’m guessing. A good four-thousand-year-old red wine for our friend Bez, the god of luck and love. Perhaps a Shezmou three-zero-forty-one B.C.? And for the very modern Miss Street?”

His shaggy eyebrows elevated on a forehead terraced with frown lines and hovered there, awaiting my answer.

“I could probably use a good belt of plain scotch,” I admitted, taking a deep breath.

“Johnnie Walker black, neat, four fingers.” He waggled four of his. “With any luck, it’ll knock her on her ear so I can whisper sweet nothings in it, which is all I’m good for these days.”

He sighed. “I know drinking from the tap”—a long horny fingernail indicated his neck—“would be much more