Carole Douglas - Vampire Sunrise

“Your look of pity is misplaced. I have more money and power than I ever did. Any one of my nurse attendants would rip your throat out at the lift of my little finger and drain your blood for my continual, moving ‘cocktail’ by IV tube.”

“It’s not pity, Mr. Hughes. It’s curiosity.”

“Partly that too, yes. You are annoyingly curious, also lucky I’ve taken a liking to you. Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve done that? Would you consider a seven-year exclusive contract?”

“You don’t make films anymore.”

“Are you sure?”

“I guess not. I didn’t expect to find you were the literal top man at the Karnak either.”

His thin lips smiled, reminding me of dashing forties photos of him looking like Clark Gable’s double. I guess a lot of men did in that era. Pencil-thin mustache, fedora at a jaunty angle. They could be the hero, or the villain, in a hundred different enjoyably forgettable noir crime dramas.

“You are always so dependably… buoyant,” he said, glancing south of my collarbones again. “No one has made me smile in thirty years.”

“That’s great, HH, but an hour or so ago I was about to become steak tartare for a demented CinSim.”

“Frankenstein can be obsessive and he’s no engineer, that’s for sure, but he demonstrated promise for weird science.”

“He’s a CinSim escapee from a piece of fiction written almost two hundred years ago as a moral and philosophical fable.”

“The point is, he intended to create life. We are now in an era when life can be scientifically helped along at both the beginning and the end of the cycle. And now death can be defeated, by extreme measures sometimes, as in my case, or by something as tried and true as CPR and its Kiss of Life.”

His watery eyes fixed on mine. I appreciated the change of focus but wasn’t going to say a word about Ric. No one but Grizelle knew I’d accepted Snow’s Brimstone Kiss.

“You’re saying,” I ventured, “that if you’d waited a few more years you wouldn’t have had to make yourself into a vampire to stay in business.”

“Simplistic, but yes.”

“So why let some CinSim loon loose in the Karnak?”

“I own it, for one thing. Yes, I own a lot of things no one suspects I do. Always did. For another, I’m aware that in this post-Millennium Revelation world, the ancient ways might hold secrets of life and death that are every bit as effective and useful as any that modern science can explore.”

He sat back. “Drink your wine, Miss Street, not everyone gets a glass hand-delivered by the Lord of Blood himself.”

“How do I know it’s not sweetened blood,” I asked, “not bull’s blood, say?”

“Because Shezmou is the god of wine, as Bacchus was for the Greeks. I’m tickled you found and freed him. He is quite the fan, Delilah Street, and proud of his vintages. The one in your hand derived from a formula many millennia old and the instant-aging magic of a reawakened god.”

Millennium wine. That would be a commercial hit too. So would my Vampire Sunrise cocktail, now that I’d discovered the impulsive title was a literal description of up-and-coming vampires in Vegas, from the Gehenna’s Sansouci to the Karnak legions.

I sipped ancient wine again while Howard leaned his head back against the sofa pillows. “What impression does the Karnak entrance give you?”

“Those massive inscribed black pillars so close together? They create shade from the sun but their immensity makes you aware of how architecturally awesome the Egyptians were.”

“They also obscure the fact that the center of the hotel is the top of a massive pyramid built deep into the sand and stone below the Strip level.”

“I didn’t see any pointy top anywhere inside the hotel.”

“You weren’t meant to.”

“I see. The Luxor Hotel had already claimed the pyramid as an external image and brand since the nineteen nineties.”

“I could have bought and leveled the Luxor and built my own pyramid-shaped building openly here.”

“Why hide a pyramid inside a temple facade?”

“You must understand that a pyramid was not just a massive tomb and monument to some old man’s ego.”

Was that an actual twinkle in Howard Hughes’s colorless eye? He snorted with elder glee.

“I do so relish your quaint moralizing stance, Miss Street. Quite takes me back. That has been so long out of fashion. My revolutionary undergarment got The Outlaw and Miss Russell’s bust delayed from public release for two years, but when it finally came out it took down the old Hayes office blue-nose censorship.”

“ You were the real ‘outlaw.’”

His rat’s-nest-haired head bowed. “How you make me wish I was the man I used to be. You are as gorgeously waspish as Katharine Hepburn.”

“You dated her?”

He merely smirked.

“I mean, she dated you?”

“Kate was an innovator too.”

I’d actually started to succumb to his tattered charm… until I remembered he’d had the gorgeous Vida attacked and turned by a vampire merely to provide an attractive vehicle for his own conversion to Undead.

Playboys weren’t real men and they really were playing for keeps when it came to satisfying their own wants.

“She didn’t much like me, either, in the end,” he noted. “But men like me don’t care about trifling emotions. We see the future, and you and I are sitting atop it.”

“A huge ant hill of ancient hubris? The Egyptian royals have about as much substance and depth as the Nile at its lowest level before the flood. Granted, the civilization and its beliefs and rites were elaborate and impressive, but it’s dead and gone except for these ghastly bloodsucking relics.”

He shook his head.

“I told you not to underestimate the pyramids as showy tombs. They were really ancient experimental laboratories. ‘Resurrection machines,’ as some scholars put it. They were after that most prized human goal: eternal life. Call it science. Call it religion. It exists in every culture and every time period.

“Dead bodies are buried, mummified, preserved, marked, and noted. That is not morbid; it is the expression of an ardent, unquenchable life wish. And I want it not just for my admittedly selfish self, Miss Delilah Street, but for my medical interests. I invented the hospital bed, too, you know.”

His piercing look made me fear he’d known about Ric’s Inferno recovery room.

“I want what I have-long and active life-for every human on the planet, for every child dying of leukemia and every dismissed so-called senior falling into dementia.”

I gulped some more of the Lord of Blood’s elderberry wine to calm my latest shock.

Whatever else Howard Hughes may have been and was… inventor, romancer, aviation pioneer, real estate king, crackpot… I now saw him as a creature whose dreams were as outsize as those tombs of the pharaohs we call the pyramids and that Hughes considered Tinker Toys for immortality.

“Yet,” I said, “the aristocracy and upper scribe and artisan classes who’d followed the pharaohs into immortality and vampirism bred herds of generations of true Egyptians to feed on beneath this very hotel you now own and operate. You’re responsible for those bloodsuckers.”

He gazed at the pale red liquid filling the opaque plastic tube piercing his inner elbow.

“Bloodsucking, like sex or any personal exchange of bodily fluids, is so pre-Millennium Revelation. I plan to convert the Twin Pharaohs to my method of ingesting purchased donated blood. The others will follow their example.”

“Methadone for heroine addicts or a ‘nicotine patch’ for the blood-addicted? That doesn’t work very well for smokers.”