Carole Douglas - Vampire Sunrise

“Quack!” I accused. “You’re not even a real doctor. They called you that in the movie, not the novel. At best you’re a wildly out-of-date movie baron and at worst a sniveling has-been.”

He stood astounded, maybe shocked to discover that someone else with a speaking role was in the chamber. Spotting the creepy black blood vial resting in the groove at the table’s other end, I did an end run around the vampire nurses and snatched it back.

In my hand the true red color blossomed like a liquid rose.

The exit’s behind him, Irma cried, back and rarin’ to go. Get us out of here.

I was amazed to see the nurses filing out behind me through an opening flanked by two giant crocodile-headed statues. Old-time Egyptians were squirts. I lowered my head and ducked through. These passages sure weren’t designed for Vikings.

I could sense the nurses running right behind me. The absence of hot, panting breaths on their parts gave me new goose bumps.

Bodyguards? Irma asked. And I’m Rosie O’Donnell. Scram, please.

That was the problem. Where to? I had to stop, look, and listen in the deserted passage.

While I surveyed the maze, the brides of Dracula times two were gathering around me, salivating.

“Her heartbeat is so much louder now that she’s run,” one observed to her sisters.

“I can still smell the fresh blood in that vial,” another said, eyes closed with a gourmet’s appreciation.

“The doctor said it was ‘bad.’”

That wasn’t the first time I’d heard that from medical personnel, such as the doctor who’d pumped quarts of blood into Ric’s body and treated his wounds. I was tempted to defend the honor and quality of my blood, except that was suicidal at the moment.

“And he would be so angry,” another vampire nurse pouted.

“Not if the blood was really okay.”

“True. We could say she fell and cut her carotid artery open and we could only stanch the flow with our fangs.”

“He wanted her alive.”

“She still could be. A little.”

By then my silver familiar had shifted into a three-inch-wide dog collar around my neck, dangling enough cascading chains of crosses to armor a Crusader.

“Ouch!” a nurse complained, stepping back to hold a defensive forearm against her smoky shadowed eyes. “You’re blinding us with all that shining silver churchy hardware. It’s very rude to bling us to death.”

“Just remember you’re ‘bodyguards’ and get me out of here,” I said.

So, like six very busty blind mice, they blinked and took the lead, feeling their way along the dim passage with me clanking crucifixes behind them.

I kept glancing back. Frankenstein was apparently microchipped like all the CinSims. He remained a prisoner of his ageless new laboratory.

The passage ended with a familiar artifact, the chariot “pulled” by stone horses. No ravenous hyenas lingered here now, but I was more than happy to leap into the chariot, armored like a Crusader.

The vampires crowded against the stone horses’ shiny, cold sides. I saw one pull on a gold rein that swung from the bridle.

What this ride would be worth in twenty-first-century terms I didn’t even want to know. That much gold…

Since I had ridden this chariot down into the royal chambers below, I wasn’t surprised when the entire supporting floor lifted us all up like a group of Disney World tourists on a disguised elevator.

I was surprised when I saw the hotel’s marbled main floor with ranks of facing sarcophagi passing and vanishing below.

Then I remembered what my demon parking valet pal had said on my first visit. The chariot marked the entrance to the Karnak Hotel’s new high-end condos. Only very high rollers would be allowed to buy into this modern obelisk of chutzpah and wealth on a scale to dwarf Dubai.

I couldn’t wait to meet Mr. or Ms. Big when we reached the biggest penthouse in the sky.

ONCE THE ELEVATOR stopped, the nurses pushed out the opening doors ahead of me. Hallways led away in a half-sunburst pattern. Directly ahead were gold-sheathed double doors high and wide enough to admit King Kong.

I hoped the big ape was not the next CinSim I encountered. I was in no mood to play Fay Wray, although I was appropriately attired in my bare feet and winding sheet, with the cross-hung chains now a discreet bib necklace at my collarbones.

Even my gaudy familiar had decided to play it close to the vest.

I crossed the threshold as the nurses vanished to either side, leaving me to encounter Ms. Big alone. And she was a rarity indeed.

“Welcome to my kingdom,” she said. “I am Cleopatra.”

Her “throne room,” though, was a lavish modern penthouse suite featuring sprawling leather-upholstered sofas and ottomans you could sink into and glass-topped coffee tables sparkling with art glass decorations from the window-wall light.

I recognized Cleo at once, and, for once, not from my long lone nights watching old movies on the group home TVs. I hadn’t seen her on any film or any rerun TV channel. She was a creature of memory and the ether, like real Egyptian royalty. She was a Cleopatra for the ages.

Her tissue-sheer gown was a half-circle attached by jeweled bands at her wrists and upper arms, richly beaded in an intricate rayed design. Gold ribbons radiated from her nipples and the fork of her legs, providing such ineffective coverage the outfit would be banned in Boston to this day. An elaborate gilded headdress half-covered her thick dark hair.

Theda Bara as Cleopatra. Awesome. No footage of this silent-film queen portaying the Queen of the Nile in her first screen appearance remained to fascinate or amuse either lowly masses or sneering film critics. Someone, though, had recovered legendary lost footage to create this CinSim without peer. She was, as much as any moving being could be, even in Millennium Revelation Las Vegas, Cleopatra herself.

I moved my bare feet slowly over the icy thrill of granite floors, for she also was bare of foot, as if savoring the relief from the sandy sun-drenched climate we shared thousands of miles and many millennia apart.

“You are a traveler through the desert and have suffered much misadventure,” she said. “My handmaidens will bathe and refresh you.”

How could I resist this divinely corny invitation? Was I finally an extra in a vintage movie? Not a desirable corpse for a grue-drenched modern century but a guest in a desert land with an ancient code of hospitality to extend every civility as they had not been bestowed for centuries.

And then they could in good conscience kill me, of course.

But what a way to go!

THE VAMPIRE HANDMAIDENS, now attired in linen sheaths like fifties housewives (except the sheaths were see-through so they probably were Desperate Housewives), guided me through halls and chambers to a sunken pool tiled in lapis lazuli and carnelian.

I dropped the sheet like Miley Cyrus hadn’t at that infamous Vanity Fair photo shoot. I wasn’t worried. I was an adult and this was classy, folks! Art.

Clutching it together had helped me conceal the vial of my blood in my curled fist. Now I laid the tiny tube at the pool’s edge before I waded into the limpid water and sank naked under its dubious cover. Wow. Not too hot, not too cold, but just right. A tepid, body-temp tub after all my stress. Perfect.

A wary kid who always used the gym dressing rooms, I’d suddenly shed my inhibitions with my winding sheet. Call it resurrection. Maybe being alive and in possession of all my blood had encouraged me to go with the flow.

Actually, the early-sixties Cleo had been a kind of role model of mine. You figure it: me seeing late-night reruns of the Technicolor Elizabeth Taylor Cleopatra : Liz: black hair, blue eyes, white skin. Okay, they said her eyes were violet. I could get contact lenses. Right?