THE ELEVATOR DOORS opened on deserted halls depicting the eternal Egyptian decorative combo of earthly and afterlife paradise and a passage through the murky underworld separating these two desirable states.
We all paused, awed. Ancient oil lamps cast an ambient glow like the high-tech, ultraviolet-filtering low lights museums use to shield irreplaceable artworks. They illuminated everything.
The hundreds of thousands of ordinary humans who produced the Egyptian culture's prodigies of architecture, art, writing, and religious complexity for their time and place were almost supernaturally gifted.
Add to them a vampire's eternal life and strength and they were terrifying.
They always say, "Don't look back."
That's what someone somewhere sometime must have told Dorothy Gale after she got back from Oz, I bet. Dorothy, don't look back! Don't see the curled toes and striped socks of the Wicked Witch of the East lying dead under your tempest-tossed house. You didn't kill her. Fate did. You can't afford to feel guilty in a land where Wicked Witches will eat you alive.
Irma was playing Greek chorus to me at this moment.
Girl, don't follow that yellow brick road. They play for keeps here. Death is the game, my pretty, and those ruby red slippers of yours? Take another gander. They're black butt-kicking boots. No pretties here but us.
I looked around at the large jars and linens, deciding we'd arrived in a mortuary temple storeroom. I'd been boning up on ancient ways along the Nile since my first foray "way down in Egypt land," as the old spiritual put it, where Moses told Pharaoh, "Let my people go."
I glanced at Ric, trying to picture him as the Charlton Heston film version of Moses. I saw a bit of the liberator but not the asexual religiosity, thank goodness.
Quicksilver growled as Ric did a rapid visual survey.
"Great stuff for the tourists," Ric said, "but my dream featured the deep, dark, down and dirty parts. That's where we need to go if we're going to free anybody from being kept as enslaved food for an aristocracy of immortal vampires."
Ric's glimpse of enslaved vampire food kept like cattle in cavern camps overrode the memories of his own torture for now. I was thankful for anything that banished such pain. Still, how could we three rescue "herds" of people who'd survived thousands of years beyond their time?
He must have explored far beneath the royal pomp and circumstance areas of the Karnak's inner necropolis to have discovered the vampires' human food supply before he'd been captured and became it.
I shivered inside my warm catsuit. Helena's therapeutic intervention still dampened Ric's bad memories. What would happen when they fully exploded back into his consciousness?
If he remembered his torment, would he also remember I'd kissed him back from apparent death, or the brink of it? Would he love me for doing it? Or not. Love me or loathe me? I was becoming a person with either friends and lovers or enemies, nothing in between.
Did I really want to awaken every morning in a city like Las Vegas with its hidden underworld of blood, lust, greed, and death? Did I want to call a glittering playground built upon the exploitation of so many victims home? Maybe we all do that, unknowingly. That was the trouble with the Millennium Revelation. Nobody with eyes and a brain could pretend to be ignorant and innocent anymore.
Rats. That made life hard but... maybe more worth living? Or not losing, at least.
I nodded at Ric. "Lead on, amigo, and we'll follow."
We were a team, yes, but sometimes one had to take the initiative. He moved forward with the bold caution of a point man in a SWAT operation.
So far we'd only intruded on the lavishly decorated corridors of an ancient Egyptian tomb. Although the chambers and halls we passed were empty, we never had a sense of being alone. The eerily lifelike painted bas-relief human figures on the walls ensured that. In shades of red, yellow, blue, and green, the people alongside us were forever frozen in their daily occupations of work and pleasure, their black-outlined eyes always facing the viewer and on us.
The hieroglyph of their god Horus, an ever-vigilant open eye, supposedly had inspired the watchful "private eye" logo of the first and most famous private detective agency in the world.
The nineteenth-century U.S. Pinkertons' "We never Sleep" motto and open eye symbol had set the PI standard ever after.
So in the shadow of sloe-eyed, life-size Egyptian hunters and courtiers and pharaohs and boatmen and handmaidens and beast-headed gods, Ric checked every corridor each way.
A pulsing muscle in his cheek caught the light of the ancient lamps that allowed us to proceed without using our small, high-intensity flashlights.
Some seductive perfume in the smoke-wafting oil blended with the dusty, dry air and snaked almost physically through these chambers and narrow passages that angled up and down without stairs.
Ric always took the downward path.
Claustrophobia? Oh, yes. I had it.
Yet this grandiose tombscape also felt seductively peaceful, even intimate. All those white-garbed silent figures we passed seemed to acknowledge us in our somber cat-burglar black as we stalked images of their daily lives.
Were they Egyptian frieze angels on eternal watch, cast in the exquisite concrete of their long-dead culture? A TV reporter learns to look for visual metaphors. These pleated linen, wing-shaped kilts and skirts and capes seemed celestial and reassuring.
Except that talk of "dead" cultures was a mind-blowing concept now that we'd seen some still "lived" on... undead.
I was glad to spot no throne rooms or the beautifully neurotic twin sibling pharaohs I'd encountered on my first visit.
Truthfully, I hoped never again to glimpse them or their court musicians and armies of animated mummies and tomb-painted legions leaping off the walls to battle intruders like us.
Nor did I ever want to see again that dank, undecorated dungeon reached by some underground mirror of the River Nile, where Ric had been tortured until virtually every drop of his blood seeped into thirsty undead throats.
I still wasn't clear how the hellish river under the Inferno Hotel, doubtless the Styx, connected with a new supernatural Nile. Did moving water resemble a literal bloodstream in this Millennium Revelation world, linking cultures current and ancient, as well as lusts as old as time and as new as the latest cell phone model? At least this section of the Karnak's lower depths was dry and so far deserted.
The lamplight cast Quicksilver's canine profile ahead of us. His sharp snout and ears reminded me of Anubis, the jackal-headed god of the dead. His entire body stiffened in warning, ears pricked even farther forward, eyes staring, shoulder muscles quivering.
I put a containing hand around his collar... and pulled back stung fingers. The silver circles dotting the wide black leather were pulsing like overheated hearts, hot enough to raise coin-shaped blisters on my fingertips.
Oh my.
Ric's warning grip on my upper arm dimpled my steel-studded catsuit. We formed a linked trio in an instant, each in physical touch, all on high alert. I felt battle resolve amplify and echo between us like the drumbeat of a common heart.
We faced a darker opening, with no hint of hanging oil lamps beyond it.
Ric stepped through. We all did.
Our eyes slowly adjusted to a subtle twilight.
Gone were the lavish decorations. We stood among a thick convention of pillars like the towering black basalt ones that surrounded the Karnak Hotel entrance on the Las Vegas Strip.
These pillars, though, were of more human height, only twenty-some feet high, and made of humble yellow stone. So thick they still seemed squat, the forest of supportive pillars upheld a cavernous underground area we could see no end to.
"A royal basement?" I asked in a whisper.
The vast space with its unseen distances reverberated my three words into a muddled chorus from perhaps a thousand lips, losing all meaning in the process and becoming a rasping hiss.
I clapped a hand over my loose lips.
Too late to rethink and shut up. I'd already roused a native. From around one fat pillar popped a bizarre figure like an ancient Egyptian jackal-in-the-box.
It was half my height. I felt Ric's grip ease at that fact.
A growl reverberated into a pack of hellhounds as my dog brushed past us. Quicksilver wasn't standing off. To him, short stature was no sign of weakness. His canine grin became a widening maw and the long, low, gargled growl in his throat made a more menacing warning than any hundred rattlesnakes could broadcast.
"Aha!" cried our challenger, stomping his bare feet on the sandy stone floor and pumping his chubby hands up and down like an annoyed toddler. "Dance music at last in my deserted domain! Who goes there? Who comes to greet Bez? Man or beast, or pretty woman?"
Except for Quicksilver, who continued to growl into the creature's curly-maned, blunt feline face, we were speechless. Ric and I had been primed to face insanely blood-thirsty vampires from a civilization that, in the search for eternal life, had invented the most death-centered culture in the ancient world.
Instead we meet a stumpy, grumpy figure from a flea-bag traveling circus?
"Well?" this "Bez" demanded again, in perfect English. "I've been waiting centuries to see natives beyond my prison doors. Are you man or woman? I can tell by the hyena breath that this rude individual at my level is a beast."
Quicksilver whined a question and suddenly sat on his haunches. The creature had passed his acid test. It bewildered rather than awakened his combined canine and lupine instincts.
"To answer your question. We are all three," Ric said.
I remembered that the lion-bodied, human-headed sphinx had offered a riddle to all who passed in some old fable.
"Ah, but is she pretty?" came another query.
I couldn't fault Bez for asking. My black hair resembled the shoulder-length wigs both men and women wore in ancient Egypt. My camo-streaked face was missing elaborate Cleopatra eyeliner. And I didn't wear a long tight skirt.
"What's it to you?" Ric asked, not intimidated.
The figure did a clumsy somersault directly into our path. "Nothing and everything. Pretty women are a specialty of mine. Ugly ones too. As you may notice, I have no claim to beauty myself."
I eased out my held breath and scanned our otherwise still-unpopulated surroundings.
No, no incoming spectral or physical hyena packs. No charging zombie mummies. No terra-cotta-skinned warriors armed with spears, battleaxes, bows and arrows. No royal gold chariot bearing twin male and female pharaohs braced for battle.
Just this impish squat figure blocking our passage.
Well, had we met our one Munchkin in this murderous Land of Egyptian Oz?
Was he-and I noticed the operative organ, rampant and outsize, that confirmed it beneath his round belly-a chubby Cupid-like court jester? His head was at about my waist level and, given his lascivious grin, I was not really comfy with that, even in a fully covering catsuit.
His legs and arms were all hairy muscle and his face surrounded by curly hair and long beard. He was a jug-eared, lion-maned, Egyptian-collared and kilted, rotund creature, both jovial and sinister.
I couldn't decide if he was a pet or a demon.
From Quicksilver's continuing blend of whimper and growl, he was as confused as I was.
Not Ric. He'd pulled out his boot knife, a wicked eight-inch blade, and aimed it at the navel on the jolly little potbelly, just above the too-obvious male member.
"Aren't we the pretty foursome?" the creature demanded, unfazed and preening. He leered at me. "I bet you bear a tattoo of my image on the inside of your thigh, if you're the pretty lady."
Ric's fist had him up in the air by the bunched beaded collar, dangling. Ric kept the powerful kicking legs two feet from his tensed torso, doing no harm.
"What," he demanded, "have you to do with this lady's thighs?"
"Nothing! And everything! Good sir. Fine sir. Gentle sir. I will give her sweet childbirth, that's all."
"Thanks, but no thanks," I said. "You think I'd wear a tattoo of your person on my flesh?"
He shrugged and appealed to the dog.
"It does look too wet and slippery to hold ink," he conceded of my thigh. "Yet many ladies do and are the better for that. I should introduce myself so you will explain your most fascinating selves.
"I am Bez, cousin of the goddess Bast, lion cub in some guises, otherwise humble domestic servant, protector of households and the birthing process, and licker of lady parts when invited."
Quicksilver went to his belly, stretched out his legs, and fixed his canine jaws and eyes on what delicate bodily part-as with Cicereau's goons in Sunset Park-he considered the creature's "spleen." One leap and...
Ric shook the little man. I realized Bez was a dwarf. Ric's personal history of childhood slavery would keep him from hurting anything with a childish aspect unless he was dangerously and personally challenged. Bez might be many things, even dangerous at times, but now he was merely a friendly and curious obstacle. Ric's frustration must be immense.
"What are you doing down here?" he demanded.
"What your gentlenesses must also be doing down here," Bez said. "Exploring maybe, patrolling. The Lands of Their Joint Majesties are minor above, but major below."
"You're a guard dog of sorts?" Ric asked.
"A guard god. Yes, a humble one, or I would be much closer to the throne room. But, really, sir"-his oversized head leaned inward-"if you yourself do not harbor millennia of blood tastes, you'll much prefer these empty, natural caverns, home to those who would practice the old ways but also have no way to defend their preferences, alas."
"The new ways," Ric said, "require legions of cowed and unwilling blood donors, indentured for centuries, being born and dying for one reason only: to be food."
"Food. Ah, yes. One of my favorite things. I admit to a lion-size appetite despite my small size. I must say I like being of this elevated stature your gentle grasp permits."
The bizarre head that combined features of a chubby man and a lion looked from right to left and back again.
"However, since I am charged with the safe passage of life from mother to child, and most of these born here are meant to be drained, ultimately to the death, I suppose I am obligated to help any liberators rash enough to venture below. I saw you captured here, man-stranger. Your valiant fight gave me hope my people might someday face a kinder fate. If you could use a guide to the Underworld, I would volunteer myself."
Ric lowered Bez to his chunky legs with a swallowed curse.
"All right for now, Shorty. I'd not seen your like down here, during my brief and, as you state, violent earlier visit. You seem harmless enough."
"And nice to see you again, sir. Harmless? Always my major advantage, sir, among a very formidable pantheon of predatory-headed gods," Bez said with a bow. "It's true I'm partial to the ladies but my role is guardian, which leaves me stranded at a lot of portals while others have all the fun."
Ric was still dubious. "Such as inspecting women's thighs, no doubt."