Jeff Lindsay - Dexter is delicious

Even at this hour of the night there were people on the sidewalk, but these were the leftovers, the ones who had partied too hard and couldn't remember how to get home, or those who just didn't want to call it a night and lose the glow, even after all the clubs had closed.

All but one: Fang was at the end of the block in a building that was not as dark and quiet as the others, although the front side was subdued for South Beach. But down the alley on the far end there was a glow of black light and a relatively small sign that said FANG in a sort of nouveau Gothic script, and sure enough, the initial "F" matched the one on the black token we had found with Deke's shirt. The sign hung over a dim door that appeared to be painted black and studded with silver metallic brads, like a teenager's idea of what an old dungeon door should look like.

Deborah didn't bother trying to find a parking spot. She just jammed her car up onto the sidewalk and jumped out into the thinning crowd. I got out quickly, but she was already halfway down the alley before I caught up with her. As we got closer to the door I began to feel a rhythmic thumping deep in the folds of my brain. It was an annoying and insistent sound that seemed to come from inside me and demand that I do something, now, without making any concrete suggestions about what. It pounded relentlessly, at twice the speed of a healthy heartbeat, and turned into actual sound only when we were finally standing in front of the glossy black door.

There was small sign with raised gold letters in the same script as the token and the sign above the door. It said, PRIVATE CLUB. MEMBERS ONLY. Deborah didn't seem impressed. She grabbed at the doorknob and turned; the door stayed closed. She thumped her shoulder into it, but it didn't budge.

I leaned past her. "Excuse me," I said, and I pushed the small button set into the doorframe below the sign. She twitched her lips angrily, but didn't say anything.

After only a few seconds the door opened, and I had a very unsettling moment of disorientation. The man who opened the door and stood looking down at us was very nearly a dead ringer for Lurch, the butler on the old Addams Family TV show. He was close to seven feet tall and wore a classic butler's outfit, complete with morning coat. But happily for my sense of unreality, when he spoke to us it was in a high voice with a thick Cuban accent. "Joo rang?" he said.

Deborah held up her badge; she had to hold it straight up in the air, as high as her arm could reach, to get it anywhere close to Lurch's face. "Police," she said. "Let us in."

Lurch put a long knobby finger on the sign that said PRIVATE CLUB. "Hee's a pribait clope," he said.

Deborah looked up at him, and in spite of the fact that he was almost two feet taller and had a cooler costume, he took a half step backward. "Let me in," she said, "or I will come back with a warrant, and la migra, and you will wish you had never been born." And whether it was the threat of INS or just the magic of Deborah's glare, he stepped to the side and held the door open for us. Debs put away her badge and stormed in past the man, and I followed.

Inside the club, the thumping sound that had been annoying outside turned into a pure agony of overwhelming noise. Riding over the top of the torturous beat was a reedy electronic sound, two notes played together that did not quite harmonize but went through a ten-second pattern that repeated over and over. Every two or three times the pattern repeated, a deep electronically distorted voice would whisper something over the music, low and wicked and suggestive and sounding far too much like the nearly heard voice of the Passenger.

We went down a short hallway toward the place where the hideous din was coming from, and as we got closer I could see the reflected fluttering of what appeared to be a strobe light, except that it was black light. Somebody shouted, "Whoo!" and the lights went wine red, flickered rapidly, and then, as a new and more horrible "song" started up, the light turned bright white and then back to ultraviolet. The beat never stopped and never changed, but the two reedy notes went into a new pattern, accompanied now by a shattering screech that might have been a distorted and badly tuned electric guitar. And then the voice again, this time audible-"Just drink it," it said, and it was answered by several voices calling "Whoo!" and other syllables of modern encouragement, and then as we got to the doorway, the deep malignant voice gave a kind of old-movie evil chuckle, "Moo-hahahaha," and then we were looking into the main room of the club.

Dexter has never been a real partygoer: Large gatherings of people generally make me feel quite grateful that I am not ruled by human impulse. But never before had I seen a more compelling example of all that is wrong with trying to have fun with others, and even Deborah stopped dead for a moment in a vain attempt to take it all in.

Through a thick haze of incense we could see that the room was packed with people, almost all apparently under the age of thirty, and all dressed in black. They were writhing back and forth across the floor to the beat of the horrible noise, their faces twisted into expressions of glazed delirium, and, as the black light strobed, it lit up the sharpened fangs that many of them had so that their teeth glowed weirdly.

Off to my right was a raised platform, and standing in the middle of it, rotating slowly on two facing turntables, were two women. They both had long dark hair and very pale skin that turned almost greenish in the flickering lights that played over them. They wore sleek black dresses that looked painted on, with high collars that completely covered their necks and a front that opened up in a diamond-shaped cutout to show the area between their breasts. They stood very close together, and as they turned around past each other their faces would touch gently, and they would brush their fingertips lightly over each other.

Along the side of the room three thick velvet curtains hung down and as I looked, one of them slid open to reveal an alcove containing an older man dressed all in black. He held a young woman by the arm and wiped at his mouth with his other hand. For a moment a flash of the lights glistened off something on the woman's bared shoulder and a small voice whispered to me that this was blood-but the woman smiled at the man and leaned her head on his arm, and he led her out of the alcove and back onto the dance floor. They vanished into the crowd.

At the far end of the room was a giant fountain. A darkish liquid burbled up from it, lit from underneath with a colored light that pulsed and faded from one color to the next in time to the relentless drumbeat. And standing behind the fountain and lit from below with a terribly theatrical blue light was none other than Bobby Acosta. He held up a huge, two-handed golden goblet with an enormous red gem on the front, and he poured from it into every cup raised up by the passing dancers. He was smiling a little too hard, obviously showing off his expensive pointed crowns from Dr. Lonoff, and as he raised the goblet high above his head and looked happily around the room, his eyes fell on Deborah and he froze, which unfortunately made whatever was in the goblet slop out onto his head and roll down into his eyes. Several of the partiers held their cups up imperiously and bounced in place, but Bobby just stared at Deborah, and then dropped the goblet and ran into a back hallway. Deborah said, "Motherfucker!" and lurched forward onto the crowded dance floor and I had no choice but to follow into the madly twisting herd.

The dancers were moving in one direction in a tightly packed mass, and Deborah was trying to cut straight across them to get to the hallway where Bobby Acosta had disappeared. Hands clutched at us, and one slender hand with black-painted fingernails held a cup up to my face and sloshed something onto my shirtfront. I looked down the arm and saw it belonged to a svelte young woman wearing a T-shirt that said TEAM EDWARD. She licked her black-painted lips at me, and then I was bumped hard from behind, and I turned toward my sister. A large and vacuous-looking guy wearing a cape and no shirt grabbed at Debs and tried to pull her shirt open. She slowed down just long enough to plant her feet and throw a perfect right cross at the guy's jaw and he went down. Several people nearby shouted happily and began to push harder, and the rest of the crowd heard them and turned, and in just an eyeblink they were all pushing toward us and chanting rhythmically, "Hai! Hai! Hai!" or words to that effect, and we were slowly forced backward, back toward the door guarded by Lurch where we had come in.