Carole Douglas - Vampire Sunrise

It would have been rude not to sip it, even if it was a vital bodily fluid. I was surprised by a taste similar to a light Merlot.

“Marvelous.”

Theda stamped her sandaled foot and ankle wrapped in a cobra bracelet that was bound to remain just that, a gaudy gewgaw. Poor thing.

“My wine!” she ordered. “I am Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt.”

Shez’s Ric-gorgeous brown eyes gave her the once-over I’d get from a put-out Hollywood hairdresser.

“You are a resident CinSim, Orderer of Shezmou. You wear one of my hieroglyphs. My first obligation is to guests.”

Of course! The most notoriously revealing gown in the history of film bore three five-armed stars signifying Shezmou over the naughty bits. The god guy was a born style maven.

“You’d do really well with your own exclusive shop on the Strip,” I told him. “Do you have all the ancient recipes?”

His face stayed beautifully blank. He’d been made a male model ahead of his time.

“Formulas,” I prodded, “for your oils and perfumes.”

“I would need sesame, moringa, pine kernel, almond and castor oils.”

Hmm. I could see the look of the line now: Cleopatra’s beauty secrets for the ages. Shez pictured on the label in his boat with two stars over his cobra-topped but noble head. I wasn’t sure about getting that moringa stuff… I’d groggle it when I got home.

After all, I’d redeemed Shezmou’s immortal life and freed him from labeling a pillar in the Karnak underbelly for eternity. Why couldn’t he pitch his own private label aboveground in the bustling commercial metropolis along the Strip? I owed Shez a decent future since his past had been so… static.

A high-end beauty and wine combo enterprise was fresh marketing. Wait! A wine bar with cosmetics to go. Chez Shez: “Drink in the secrets of everlasting health, beauty, and longevity…”

Yes, daydreaming my pet Egyptian god into a beauty brand was making me cocky now that I’d discovered friends in high places at the Karnak’s priciest residence tower. Time for serious updating.

“Where is Bez?” I asked soberly.

Shez placed the white wineglass on the zebra-pattern coffee table in front of Theda and turned to me.

“Alas, Deliverer, he was taken to the throne room to be the royal jester. His guardian post farther below was eradicated by us and our allies, as you will recall.”

“There isn’t a food market there still?” I asked carefully, as Theda stared incomprehensibly.

In her silent-film day, actors did a lot of incomprehensible staring because the action froze as dialogue placards popped on the screen mid-scene.

“No.” Shez was emphatic.

What would the Karnak vampires use for food then? I was afraid to speculate at the moment.

“And-” Maybe it was a couple sips of wine, but none of the exotica around me was distracting anymore. “-the great gray warrior… hound, was he seen…?”

Now I knew why lushes cried in their beer. Or wine.

“No, Deliverer.” Shez remained expressionless. He’d had millennia to master that Godfrey demeanor. “Not along the great River Nile in sky, on earth, or in the Underworld.”

I took a deep breath, controlled myself. “But you are safe here?”

“Oh, yes. I have an entire floor for my wine and oil presses, my supplies. And, of course, I am free to leave anytime when darker duties with my lord Osiris call me.”

“Great,” I said.

I felt even safer here now that I’d seen Shezmou. Human “Deliverers” don’t get their heads twisted off and he was in no way a vampire.

Still, I thought frantically while nodding and sipping socially. Just who could or would foot the bill for an ancient Egyptian demon god to take up his kinder, gentler hobbies?

“I hope to see you here again, Deliverer,” Shez went on. “Your business proposition is most interesting. I do have time on my hands in these latter days.”

Shez bowed to me (wow!) and eased out of the room. Whoever had provided Shez shelter couldn’t be an out-and-out villain.

Or maybe not.

I heard a discreet clattering noise behind me and turned.

A human in living color was moving toward our conversation group. He had long gray hair and beard and was wearing a striped robe and using a walking staff. With the window-wall light at his back, he reminded me of nothing so much as Charlton Heston as the aged Moses from the 1958 The Ten Commandments.

The film had been a Cinemascope Technicolor epic. So this guy was not a CinSim. Nor was he even human, I realized, as he came close enough for me to recognize him.

It was Howard Hughes, dressed as urbanely as Hugh Hefner in a silk-lapeled robe, dragging his IV pole of thinned blood with him like an imitation of Marley’s Ghost in chains.

Holy Horror! Imagine. Those two HH-initialed old guys, twins suffering from mogulism and lechery, still going, after all these decades.

A handmaiden nurse scurried to catch up to Hughes and scoot the wheeled IV stand into place next to him when he grasped a sofa back and swooned more than sat on the goose-down cushion. I assumed it was goose-down because (A) he could afford it and (B) the way it swelled up around him bespoke really ritzy upholstery.

Besides, that almost skeletal bony frame needed all the padding it could command.

“Miss Street,” he greeted me, or rather, my boobs. “I must say it is an aesthetic pleasure to see that bit of costuming worn by one born to fill it properly.”

Theda writhed on her divan and squealed her displeasure.

Hughes ignored her at first, then frowned. “Go tint your nipples or something else vampy.”

Theda rose and scurried away, giving me a poisonous look. Another enemy; join the club.

“There goes another secret piece of film history for you, my vintage-film lover.” Hughes leaned close enough to whisper. “Seeing the surviving photos of Miss Bara’s Cleopatra costuming inspired me to invent the first steel-underwire push-up bra for Jane Russell in The Outlaw. Miss Russell also possessed your assets in abundance. Or perhaps I should put it vice versa. So you owe me for your support.”

“Laundromats everywhere must curse your name,” I told him, unimpressed. “When I was in college, bra underwires were always escaping during the spin cycles and breaking the equipment.”

His bony shoulders shrugged. “Progress has its price. My point is that engineering can be applied to the trivial, a woman’s undergarments, and to the sublime, a marvel of the centuries, say, an Egyptian pyramid.”

I wanted to shrug back but realized that would only incite the undead old lech. I’d thought being escorted here by a harem of nurses and greeted by Theda made this a “just we girls” night or I’d never have allowed the sex-slave pampering bit.

“You needn’t fear me personally, Miss Street. I am far too careful to take my blood from any living being and am too old and wise for sex. Besides, Shez is prettier than you; pity he’s such a remorseless god. Anyway, do you know how many germs fester in the human mouth?” He shuddered delicately. “I admit I still like to look, but, alas, cannot touch and have not for many decades.”

I nodded, almost sympathetically. Even when he’d been alive and first came to Vegas, back in the late sixties, he’d sequestered himself on the top floor of the Desert Inn and bought a local TV station so it would play only the movies he wanted to see, all night long.

How freaky to remember that’s pretty much what kiddie me did nights in the Kansas group homes forty-some years later: stay up all night getting hooked on old movies.

I wondered what he feared, what had scared Howard Hughes so much he went from playboy engineer, inventor, filmmaker, flier, and mogul to a crazy, lonely, emaciated, old billionaire hermit?