S. Cedric - Of Fever and Blood

And Eva pushed too, moving as she could among the sweat-soaked bodies until she could get a glimpse of the stage. First she saw the bass player, who had long frizzy hair and was wearing a T-shirt that said “Sodom.” He was bent toward the audience, clinging to his instrument, one foot on the stage monitor. Anonymous hands from the audience were clinging to the bottoms of his pants and refused to let go. There had to be a guitar player behind him. The colorful stage smoke obscured him, but his presence was made palpable by the saturated chaos of his instrument, his ear-splitting harmonics.

As for the lead singer, he was hard to miss. He was tall and imposing, with shaman makeup and bone trinkets around his neck. His voice-or rather his wailing-rose and flew with the music. Head thrown back, eyes rolled upward, he had a foot on his monitor too and seemed to be anchoring himself to the mike stand with one hand. The other hand was raised toward the sky, as though he were trying to hang onto it.

When he lowered his head again, his eyes underneath the veil of his hair began to shine. Eva flinched with an old atavistic fear. It was the fear of unexplainable and powerful energies that sometimes slip behind the eyes of madmen and saints.

Under the ultrapowerful lighting, she had the impression that this man was staring at her and that his gaze was piercing her soul. For a second, the singer’s hair had been white as snow, a blinding sun-like halo around his face.

Then the hair, pasted to the sweaty singer’s gaunt and haunted face, turned black again. His heavily made-up eyes did not cast any light. On the contrary, they absorbed it, like chasms.

“What the soul hides,” he screamed into the mike, “blood tells!”

Eva decided to retreat, making her way back through the crowd and heading for the bar. She needed to have a drink in her hands.

When she spotted the boy behind the bar, her first thought was that he was incredibly good-looking. Early twenties in all its superb arrogance, as thin and smooth as a pre-Raphaelite angel, his eyes made up with black liner, and his hair like silky snakes.

As she reached to him, Eva opened her coat. The barman’s eyes immediately fell to her corset.

“Your hair looks cool!” he shouted over the music.

Eva smiled and lowered her shades, locking her red eyes with the young man’s.

“Vodka!” she shouted back.

“The first one’s on me!” he replied with a wink. As he put the glass in front of her, he leaned over and said, “I’m Anthony, by the way.”

“And I’m the police,” Eva said in his ear.

She discreetly flashed her ID. It was a thrill watching the boy’s eyes widen and his mouth twitch, once to the right and once to the left. How could he have imagined that the girl he was hitting on was actually a cop.

This time, she was the one leaning over the bar to get closer to him.

“You work here every night, Anthony?”

“Uh, yes, why?”

She slid the photo of Audrey Desiderio beside her drink.

“Have you ever seen this woman?”

He studied the picture.

“No, I don’t think so.”

“How about this one?” Eva asked, showing him the picture of Barbara Meyer.

This time he nodded, which made his braids ripple.

“Yeah, that’s Barbie! She comes here all the time. You’ll have to wait, though. She’s not here yet tonight.”

Eva suppressed a sardonic look. Poor Barbara would not be showing up for the fun anymore.

“Do you remember the last time you saw her here?”

The boy thought for a moment. “Last week. Well, this week, last Tuesday. We had an electro ball. I remember it, all right. She was dancing on the stage.”

Tuesday night, then.

The same night the killer locked her up in her place.

It was a good thing she had come here, after all.

Eva wanted to ask another question, but several customers were waving impatiently at the other end of the bar.

“Be right back, okay?” the boy said before going over to take their orders.

Eva took the opportunity to turn around and have another look at the crowd. At the far end of the venue, the stage was now lit up in red, and on the large screen behind the band there was a video of oozing blood. As the sounds of the organ-repetitive and hypnotic-filled the place, the hysterical audience gave the musicians a thunderous ovation. The band members twirled their sweat-drenched T-shirts above their heads before tossing them into the crowd. The sea of bodies dressed in black and metal rushed with renewed vigor against the barriers in front of the stage. They raised their arms, fingers and pinkies extended in the horns symbol, and they let out beastly screams of ecstasy and expectation.

“We are Moonspell from Portugal!” the lead singer yelled in a voice so deep, it sounded either animal-like or divine. Eva could not decide. His tone became thunderous as he declaimed: “Vampiria.”

Hundreds of hoarse voices responded in unison: “You are my destiny! My only love and my true destiny!”

Then the overdriven guitar rushed in, and the vocalist rose again toward impossible zenith. And Eva felt crushed, fascinated, swept away by the music. An invisible burning hand entered her, spreading inside her flesh, wrapping up her heart. She surprised herself by wanting this strange sensation to go on.

“In a city once named Desire,” the singer chanted, his eyes rolled upward and both arms outstretched. “Dreaming with the entombed dear!”

And the crowd continued to scream with him in a strange and powerful communion.

The band paused, and hundreds of hands rose in the air. Ecstatic screams rose from the crowd. Then the avalanche of sound and energy erupted again, coming in for the final kill.

Fascinated, Eva watched. The gleaming eyes. The screaming mouths. The fists like hammers, and the sight of this crowd in a trance was hypnotic. She would have loved to join them, forget all about the case, just simply ride this gigantic wave of sound, feel her body ripple and dance with the ghosts, add her own screams to theirs.

But she did not come here for that.

Whether she liked it or not, for a few more hours still, she was on duty.

She was here to get information. She would not leave without learning more about Barbara Meyer.

As the barman set a fresh glass in front of her, she slipped a bill on the bar and leaned toward the boy. Her lips brushed the silky snakes close to his ear.

“You must know everyone in here, right?”

“Most of them, yes.”

“Could you answer a few questions a little later?”

“Barbie is in trouble?”

“I’m afraid so,” Eva eluded.

The boy went over to take an order from a girl with an impressive green Mohawk.

Eva lifted her glass. She took a sip of deliciously cold vodka.

“No, really sorry, beautiful,” answered the man in the black latex T-shirt stretched tight against his muscular chest. “I’m not from here. I know nobody.”

His face glistened with sweat. He ran the back of his wrist across his cheek, smearing his mascara even more. He smiled at Eva-revealing prominent fangs-before walking away from her and diving back into the crowd, into the chaos of music and moving bodies.

The last band had finished its set awhile earlier, but the decibel level had not decreased, and the Hells Bells was still full. Some unseen DJ had taken over, spinning one hit after another. They were heavy, repetitive songs, and now the ghosts were swaying, their eyes closed and their centers of gravity very low. Like strange and sensual zombies, they were absorbed in their own inner worlds.

Eva let herself drop on an unoccupied sofa and brought her vodka to her lips. She had lost count of how many glasses she had drunk. But she did not feel tired. She was frustrated more than anything else. All night, she had been observing the motley group here. She had projected herself inside these young men and women, inside their chests filled with wild magic and reckless youth, where there was no such thing as consequences. And the more she profiled them, the more she felt like an intruder. Even here, among misfits, she was the biggest misfit of them all. It was not even irony. It was fact, and it had the taste of despair.