Carole Douglas - Silver Zombie

“‘A great star fell from Heaven,’” he recited as he handed me one glass, “‘burning like a torch, and … the name of the star is wormwood.’”

“‘And Kansas, she said, is the name of the star,’” I sang like the Good Witch Glinda.

If Snow wanted to quote the Book of Revelation to an Our Lady of the Lake girl, I could quote The Wizard of Oz right back.

“Nice pipes,” he said, the sunglasses dipping to eye my legs.

I was shocked to view a thigh-high slit in a long green satin skirt that showcased the familiar as a silver “garter” snake.

“Passing through the Green Room has a stunning effect, doesn’t it?” Snow commented. “Like going through a glamorizing car wash for humans. They call it the ‘Emerald City Dorothy spa option.’ The lasers take your measurements and melt off your everyday wear, ‘painting’ the bedazzled client with more formal clothes. I see the females get a gown fit for a movie queen, so the obsessed gambler has his lady distracted from the moment they enter their suite.”

“I suppose the gaming man only gets a fistful of green casino cards.”

“Oh, no. They offer a spa experience for gentlemen clients too.” He held out his suited arms. “They need the money man relaxed and ready to rock and roll the dice and roulette wheel all night long. You don’t think I’d dress like a riverboat gambler on purpose? My only … successful resistance to the process was to reject the bilious green color.” He eyed me from top to toe. “Well, you are black Irish, and the plaits didn’t suit you as well as having your hair loose.”

“I hate wearing green,” I muttered to dismiss his compliment.

Green was for jigging, red-haired, freckled Irish lassies, not a dark and deep depressive diva like me. Okay, I dramatize. Shut up, Irma.

However, I was determined to avoid any and all of the green mirrors in the suite in case they skewed my mirror affinity, so I found his comments a mystery, except for the hair, which I’d felt unwinding. He led me through another set of doors, and down a dim aisle of shallow stairs.

A giant movie screen faced us, but it was matte black and mirrored nothing.

Looking around, I spotted glassy green reflections bouncing from multiple surfaces, all too fractured to add up to a mirror. That was comforting. I didn’t want to display any mirror-walking tricks in front of Snow.

I could only glimpse a tiny reflection of myself in his sunglasses’ lenses. Although my hair was still black, I was wrapped in shiny shades of green, like a Christmas present.

“If I were a talking mirror,” Snow said, the sunglasses moving up and down me like the laser lights, “I could report that you’d whip that slinky green vintage gown you’re wearing off a black-and-white movie screen in a Wichita minute.”

“If it’s green, I doubt it. The latest antiterrorist technology and clothes manufacturing trends could account for much of the makeover wizardry,” I speculated. “Nothing was that ‘magical.’ The laser measurements. The melting outer garments. Even the clothes spun like webs onto living mannequin forms.”

“True,” Snow said. “Millennium Revelations may come and go, but if you sell entertainment to the public, you always have to have a gimmick.”

He led me down the plush-carpeted stairs to a row of pistachio-colored leather theater seats. I noticed that my navy pumps were as plain and simple as ever, but now dyed teal-green. I wondered how my blue eyes had fared in the Emerald Tunnel.

Snow continued playing tour guide.

“You must be dying to know what I’m doing here. Please sit, Delilah, and prepare to observe the wonder of the century.”

I placed my long-stemmed glass in the chair’s builtin beverage holder and arranged myself. My satin gown seemed to be made of green linguini, it draped so easily over me and the chair, but when I leaned back I felt a chill. The leather was room temperature and cool. My back was bare from tailbone up as the leather accepted the pressure of my skin. My naturally pale, unblemished skin.

If I’d been asked to lie on a reclining chair of thorns I couldn’t have been more pained.

Seeing Snow again had focused my mind on the whip strikes I’d transferred to him from Ric. Were they still raw? In an ordinary human being, they surely would be.

No matter how luxe and silken the surroundings, that unspoken fear rubbed my expectations raw. The cushy ambiance prickled me all the more as I pictured that supernaturally white skin beneath the silk shirt festered and scabbing and feverish, no matter how much Snow always mastered cool.

Or … not. That was the bed of nails he had me on, constructed from my too-vivid imagination and my guilt.

“I don’t understand why you’re here,” I blurted.

He’d taken his own chair, sitting forward as taller men will, leaning his forearms on his knees, pure white hands loosely laced together, not putting his back flat against the leather back. Was he trying to make me think the worst?

A reporter knows only to push. I eyed my wristwatch, squinting at a hard-to-read greenish abalone-shell dial now encrusted with green garnets. I assumed emeralds would not be bestowed on the wives of even gambling whales.

“What,” I asked, “is Vegas impresario Christophe doing at a remote casino operation like Emerald City in Wichita? Not even you can jet back to Vegas in time for your seven p.m. show,” I pointed out. “Unless you have dragon wings.”

His pale lips split in a smile that revealed yet whiter teeth. “Can you have caught me out in a trade secret, Delilah?”

“You’re a shape-shifting dragon?”

I dearly hoped so. That would make him a major new supernatural on the Millennium Revelation map and way too inhuman—and huge—for me to worry about having hurt.

That was the crazy part. I was worried I’d hurt the impervious Snow when he probably had the power to destroy me six times over with a wave of his little finger. I looked closely. That milk-white digit now flaunted a peridot-set green-gold ring.

Apparently he hadn’t escaped the Emerald City Green Room’s do-over as thoroughly as he’d thought.

Snow set his white riverboat gambler’s hat on the empty chair seat next to him. He tilted back his profile and throat and ran his fingers through his tied-back hair, releasing it to his shoulders, smiling at the blank screen straight ahead.

I charged ahead. “You can’t convince me you’d be interested in investing in some over-the-rainbow casino property in Wichita, Kansas.”

“Oh, but I am.” He finally sat back and directed the sunglasses’ blind gaze my way. “And, since you’ve turned up at this opportune moment, I’m here to show you a movie.”

What is it with these guys? Irma crabbed. First Ric and now Snow. We’re lounging around here like blond bombshell Jean Harlow and Mr. Rock Star Hottie wants to watch a movie with us? Your chances of even copping us another hickey here are zero, baby.

I sipped the slightly bitter taste of green anise in the absinthe, glad Irma was right. This was a rare retro moment in La-la Land. Private screening. Major Red Carpet slinky gown. Retro cocktail. I glanced again at Snow. Irma was right again. That bleached Southern Comfort, Rhett Butler outfit didn’t do him a disservice.

Tomorrow is another day, baby, I told Irma.

Then “Rhett” hit the twentieth century’s greatest contribution to humanity, the remote control. The minute he did, reels of a silent black-and-white film began flickering on the screen, and my pulse started doing the jitterbug.

I sat forward, no longer worried about exposing my uneasily naked back to Snow, Rhett, or whoever. The scenes and figures I watched were pretty jitterbuggy too. That’s the way silent films were seen in the early days, like 1927, in that herky-jerky motion.