Once Bitten - Clare Willis Read online

  Now makeup. I had some Macabre Factor products: white base makeup, black eyeliner, a lipstick called “Coagulate,” and some greenish-black fingernail polish. But really, how far was I going to take this? Normally I wear just enough makeup to ease the contrast between my pale skin and dark freckles. I powdered my face with my own powder, lined my eyes with the Macabre Factor eye pencil, put mascara on my lashes. Finally I dabbed on a little Coagulate lipstick, which was red with a disturbing blue undertone.

  My hair was looking pretty good, thanks to the three products I’d applied to tame my curls. The McCaffrey hair, inherited from grandfather Seamus, is what an advertiser would term “irrepressible,” and what my mother called unruly. When I was a child my hair stood up on my head like a frizzy auburn halo, when it wasn’t arranged in braids so tight my teeth hurt. I used to pray every night that I’d wake up with straight hair. God never changed my hair, but He did eventually send me antifrizz crème. Stepping back from the mirror I surveyed my handiwork. I still looked a little too sanguineous to pass for a vampire, but I was pleased with the results.

  At eleven o’clock I was in Hayes Valley, driving down Divisadero Street. Home to many of the loveliest Victorian homes in San Francisco, the neighborhood had started out rich, then turned working class and African-American for dozens of years. During that time many blocks fell under the axe of urban renewal, replaced with ugly high-rise apartment houses. The remaining Victorians, old-fashioned and cheap, provided shelter to cash-poor but culture-rich music clubs, theaters, and cafés. Now that San Francisco’s property values were sky high there wasn’t a neighborhood in the city that wasn’t experiencing gentrification and this one was no exception. Victorians restored to their nineteenth-century glory with BMWs in their driveways shared walls with Dollar Stores and aromatic barbeque joints.

  I identified the House of Usher not by the address, but by the line of people in front who looked like they had slithered out of Nosferatu, the black-and-white version. They were waiting to enter a narrow nondescript door in the side of an Italianate Victorian with faded multicolored paint and a sagging colonnaded front porch. I parked a block down and scurried back to the club.

  The bouncer—a typically large man with an absurdly small bowler hat perched on his bald head—was turning people away right and left, checking everyone’s name on a clipboard he held in his hammy hand.

  Uh-oh, Suleiman and Moravia didn’t mention anything about a guest list.

  Chapter 3

  I tapped the shoulder of the woman in front of me. She had so much eyeliner on she looked like a raccoon.

  “Is there a guest list?” I asked.

  She nodded. “It’s a private club. You have to be on the guest list if you’re not a member.”

  “Well, I’m sure my friends put me on it.”

  Raccoon girl smiled at me pityingly.

  The 200-pound gorilla quickly dispatched the line. “Name,” he grunted at me.

  I choked out my name.

  “Angie, okay, you’re in.” The behemoth stamped my hand with a tiny bat in iridescent purple ink. I waved casually to raccoon girl, whose name didn’t appear to be on the list, and headed inside.

  A dark hallway ended in a steep, narrow stairway, probably the servants’ stairs. Spine-crushingly loud music exploded from the rooms above. I could barely hear myself think and I wasn’t even upstairs yet. People pushed around me to get in, and I let myself be swept along in their tide, trying to gawk and simultaneously appear as if I knew where I was going.

  The House of Usher’s main vestibule seemed virtually unchanged from its heyday as a Victorian mansion. A large circular velvet couch sat in the center of a room dimly illuminated by gaslights in a crystal chandelier. Twelve-foot high walls were topped with ornate moldings. Wide doorways led in five directions. To the left were the bathrooms and a coat check. The chambers were marked Girls and Boys but men and women ignored the signs and entered indiscriminately. I made a mental note to try the Boys’ room later just for the novelty.

  To the right were a tiny poolroom and a long ornate wooden bar arrayed with backlit bottles of booze that glowed like lava lamps. The largest doorway opened onto an auditorium filled with people swaying to the deafening music, smoking, or yelling into each other’s ears. Directly in front of the stage a small but intrepid portion of the audience was dancing with wild abandon.

  The band members didn’t seem particularly vampiresque, except for the fact that they were all pale as an alligator’s underbelly. The guitarist, wearing black leather pants and naked to the waist, was pounding three chords for all he was worth. The front man was a whirl of long black hair and a costume that seemed to be made entirely of rags. He crouched low and slunk across the stage, screaming lyrics at an indecipherable speed and decibel level. I put a finger into my ear, and then checked it for blood.

  I passed into another room, separated from the stage by a heavy door so the noise level was almost tolerable. White-clothed tables topped with flickering candles created an aura of genteel elegance. Most of the people in the room looked like what you might expect at any hip nightclub. Lots of black clothing and leather jackets, red lipstick, and everyone smoking. I guess if you think about it it’s kind of hard to tell a vampire from a typical night-living poet or musician. Same pale skin, same dark circles under the eyes, same intense faces peering through wafting cigarette smoke.

  I glimpsed Suleiman and Moravia sitting at the back of the room. Kimberley was between them, looking like Casper the Friendly Ghost in a white sleeveless dress. She couldn’t have been more conspicuous, but I knew she’d done it on purpose. Kimberley never made a fashion mistake. I walked over to the table.

  There was a woman on the other side of Moravia: painfully thin, with a face that was all sharp angles and lines, but her blue eyes were huge and long-lashed. Her nose, her right eyebrow, and the spot just below her lower lip were pierced with gold studs and rings of varying sizes.

  Suleiman stood up and made his customary bow. “Angie, I’m glad you decided to come. Please, have a seat.” He pulled out the chair next to the thin woman for me. Kimberley smiled and raised her champagne glass, as if to toast me for making it this far.

  Moravia was concentrating on her martini, staring into it like she was reading her fortune. She didn’t seem to be drinking so much as inhaling. A female wraith in a black leather corset took my order for a cosmopolitan. I usually drink wine but I felt like I needed some liquid courage.

  Suleiman introduced the blond woman as Lilith. She offered me a hand that felt like twigs in a silk bag. She twirled a hank of her bleached blond hair nervously around her other hand. If you were into Dickensian street urchins, you would find Lilith very attractive. I was searching for something to say to her when a man materialized out of the smoky darkness and pulled out the chair next to mine. When I looked at him I got gooseflesh. No, it was more than that. It felt like my skin was trying to slide off my bones in an attempt to get closer to him.

  His long reddish-blond hair was tied behind his head, framing a face with a slender nose, square jaw, and sumptuous lips. His eyes were such a light blue they seemed to glow in the dark. He was what I imagined a French prince of the eighteenth century would look like if there had been no inbreeding. The suit he was wearing was right out of Jane Austen, a soft midnight blue velvet that you only see in women’s lingerie nowadays, but on him it looked as masculine as a leather jacket and a cowboy hat.

  This man was not just handsome. I had seen the Mona Lisa in person on a high school chorus trip, and like her, he made you want to stare until your eyes dried out. His gaze enveloped and then stripped you, literally and figuratively. It seemed he already knew your every hope, dream, fear, and crime; there was nothing you could say that would surprise him. With his lips lifted in that same tiny smile as Mona, he seemed both amused and slightly impatient with the antics of normal humans.

  I heard a noise, like a fly buzzing on a window, which turned out to be Suleiman speaking
to us. “Eric, nice of you to join us. I’d like you to meet Kimberley Bennett and Angie McCaffrey. They’re the ones I told you about from the ad agency. Ladies, may I present Eric Taylor.”

  Eric Taylor? He should have been named something exotic and unpronounceable. But when he took my hand and put it to his lips I forgot his name anyway, giving myself up to a brief but blissful sexual thrill. He kissed Kimberley’s hand as well, but she didn’t seem as moved. He sat down between us, but turned to me.

  “That is a beautiful dress you have on. You look like you fit right in.” A slight accent, maybe French, rolled the r in dress.

  “Is that a nice way of saying I’m obviously not a regular?” I responded. When I’m nervous I tend to get a little uppity.

  “No, of course not, I was just teasing. There’s nothing to be obvious about. This is just a nightclub. Most of the people here have nothing to do with the lifestyle anyway, except that they like to wear black and go to clubs. No, Suleiman told me about you. He mentioned that you were fascinated by us.”

  “Really, now.” I was all the more indignant because it was true. “I don’t believe the word fascinated ever crossed my lips.”

  Eric leaned into me so that his lips were about two inches from mine. A rich sweet scent rose from him, something I thought I recognized but couldn’t quite place, definitely not cologne but almost an internal perfume.

  “But you are fascinated, aren’t you, Angela?” he whispered, his voice low and caressing.

  I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, trying to get a grip on myself. But when I inhaled my head spun like I’d had three cosmos. With my eyes still closed I leaned closer, forgetting for a second who and where I was, wanting to enter the smell, wanting to kiss the lips…then somehow my cerebrum came back and took over from my cerebellum. I leaned back and opened my eyes, mentally pinched myself. I took a big slug of my drink. Eric sat back in his seat so that he was facing the whole table.

  “So, Eric, what do you do for a living?” Kimberley asked.

  “Hmm, for a living, an interesting expression. I live, for a living. But if you mean what do I do that involves money, I dabble in this and that. The stock market, venture capital, real estate development.”

  I looked for a smile to see if he was kidding, but his expression was serious. I figured that if he were lying he’d at least have the smarts to pick just one of those areas, instead of claiming all three.

  “And I’m a model,” Lilith interjected.

  This woman did have the sunken cheeks, acne-ravaged skin, and dark circled eyes that most models display when you see them up close, but a steady diet of coffee, cigarettes, and blow did not mean she made her money on the catwalk. As with actors, most of the people who claimed to be models didn’t have the W2 forms to back it up.

  “Really, what was your last job?” I asked, not wanting to be mean, but unable to stop myself.

  “French Vogue.” Lilith smiled. She had me there. It would take quite a bit of effort to check that one.

  “You should give me your card,” I parried. “My agency hires a lot of models. I might be able to get you a job sometime.”

  I looked at Eric and wondered if Lilith and I were sparring over him and I hadn’t even realized it. His self-assured smile told me that was what he thought.

  “Do you live in San Francisco, Eric?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Alas, no. It is a lovely city, but I’m here on business.”

  I felt a not-so-little stab of disappointment. “Where do you live?” I asked, hoping he’d say somewhere close, but with the sinking feeling that the answer would be Paris, Tangier, or Burkina Faso.

  Suleiman interrupted before Eric could answer, leaning forward to speak to both Kimberley and me. “Eric and Lilith are two of the people I had in mind for the ad campaign. I just love the way both of them look, don’t you?”

  Well, one of them, yes, indeed.

  “Lilith is a model, so she already has experience,” Suleiman said. Lilith gave me an “I told you so” smile.

  “Show them your teeth, both of you,” Suleiman said.

  Lilith drew back her upper lip and I let out a gasp. She had perfect little fangs, about a half-inch long, the color blended exactly with the rest of her teeth. They looked as real as the ones on the tiger in the San Francisco Zoo.

  Suleiman said, “We did those for her about a year ago. I don’t know where Eric got his, but they’re even better. Show her yours, Eric.”

  Eric’s eyes glinted in the candlelight. “Maybe later,” he said, and smiled without opening his lips.

  I suddenly felt the need to change the subject. “So, Eric, where do you know Suleiman and Moravia from?”

  “Oh, Sully and I are friends from way back. But let’s talk about you,” Eric said, moving toward me again. I leaned back. I wasn’t ready yet for another whiff of his magic spell.

  “Sully tells me you’re doing the advertising for Macabre Factor. What are some of the other companies you’re working with?”

  I picked some of HFB’s “household name” brands. “Strevichnaya vodka? You’ve seen those big billboards with the naked lady in the bottle, like a ship in a bottle?” Eric nodded, gazing at me with those translucent eyes. “Um, Comet toothpaste, you guys probably use a lot of toothpaste, we do their advertising. Tangento, they’re a big company, have a lot of subsidiaries you might know, Adonis athletic wear, Venus lingerie. Unicorn Pulp and Paper, they make, uh, paper products.”

  Oh my God, I’m babbling.

  Eric smiled. “Not at all. I am aware of all these companies. Very high profile.”

  I wondered about his saying “not at all,” an obvious non sequitur. It almost seemed like he had read my mind.

  “You must be very good at what you do,” Eric continued, “but you don’t seem like the type.”

  “And what ‘type’ would that be?” I replied. I felt like he was toying with me, but I didn’t want him to stop.

  “The business type, the nine-to-five type. You seem like an artist to me.”

  “Well, I was an actor. Majored in drama in college.”

  Eric nodded knowingly. “Yes, an actress, that’s what I would have said. Why did you leave it?”

  “The usual three reasons. Food, clothes, and a roof over my head.”

  Eric put his hand on mine. His touch was ice cold, but he had just put down a frosty glass. “Would you care to dance?” he asked.

  Although I’d had years of physical training for the theater, my dancing was still strictly character actor. I thought up a quick excuse. “I don’t think so. The sledgehammer is not my favorite instrument.”

  Eric laughed. “Not there,” he answered. “We insiders know a much better place.”

  Still holding my hand, he helped me stand up. “We’re going to dance,” he announced.

  “Have a good time!” Kimberley trilled, like a mother sending her daughter to the prom. Before we walked away I saw her pull her chair closer to Suleiman. I knew I should stay and chat with the clients, but ever since Eric had appeared I didn’t really care about the usual things anymore. Lilith was busy trying to light a cigarette and didn’t acknowledge our departure. We went to the back of the room and through a door with a sign reading MEMBERS ONLY.

  The new room was designed like a Victorian opium den. The walls were draped with velvet curtains of indeterminate color. A group of tables, all of them set for two, lined one curtained wall. The rest of the room was divided into curtained-off areas, some open to display couches, although I suppose chaise lounge is the correct term for long sofas with one high back and side. Several couples were dancing to music that could not have been more different from the alligator underbellies. It had a slow hypnotic beat topped by the softly keening sounds of a woman singing in a language I had never heard before.

  In front of us a woman with long dark hair danced with her back to another woman. Her head was leaning on her partner’s shoulder, eyes closed, an expression of ecstasy on her face. The
other woman swayed in time to the music, stroking the dark-haired woman’s body rhythmically, nuzzling her neck. And all around me was that sweet indefinable odor. I thought I was going to faint. I stumbled and Eric grabbed my arm.

  “What do you think?” His voice seemed to come from inside my head.

  “I had heard that some of the bars in San Francisco have make-out rooms but this is something else.”

  I tried to joke, but I wasn’t feeling very funny. In fact, I couldn’t tell exactly how I was feeling, but I knew I didn’t want it to end. Eric swept me into the circle of dancers. He held me away from him, as if we were in dancing school. His left hand held my arm aloft and his right hand gripped the small of my back, subtly directing me to move with him. Even though I had no idea how to waltz I was doing it, and feeling graceful besides. I realized I’d never danced with a man who really knew how to lead a partner. While we danced he gazed into my eyes, the Mona Lisa smile gracing his lips. The attraction I felt was so intense I wanted to look away, if only to catch my breath, but I couldn’t tear my eyes from him.

  The music’s tempo became quicker. With one move Eric pulled me close, simultaneously angling me so that I was pressed against his right hip. His arm tightened around me and I felt each of his fingers separately through the thin silk of my dress. He pressed his cheek against mine and just like that we were doing the tango. His skin was soft and silky, but hard underneath, like marble wrapped in velvet. His breath was cool and dry but had the same rich, heady sweetness that seemed to seep from his pores. His scent was what perfume makers had been trying to capture for thousands of years: the distilled essence of attraction, indefinable but irresistible.