CHAPTER TWO
When my head cleared, I made the decision not to leave my room that night. Vampyres were nonsense! I wouldn't stand at the curb wringing my hands like some bride at the altar while Dimitri hovered in hotel shadows and giggled at the gullibility of a grieving fool.
Perhaps for that reason, it came as a shock when I found myself in the elevator, surrounded by several other con-goers. Their painted faces drifted by me, taffeta and lace costumes glittering in scattered light thrown by flickering fluorescent tubes. Stephanie's ghost danced in the shiny metal doors and spoke to me in a whisper that was only the rustling of Superman's cape.
The world had become my dream, solid yet not, molasses beneath my feet. A kid in Klingon garb pointed a plastic disrupter at my chest, but I had lost my sense of humor in the fall between floors.
When the elevator stopped, I could only watch myself walking through the revolving glass door that led toward the night and the darkness and the black stretch limo waiting in the portico. A somnambulist unblinking, I approached the car as a skeletally thin man with a lyrical Jamaican accent ushered me inside. It never seemed strange that he knew me on sight or that he called me by name.
As the door closed behind me, there was an odd sense of finality, a feeling that one world had just ended and a new one was about to begin.
Ah, but now you must make the choice, Stefan, for it's human perception that determines the reality of any reality. Will you choose to see this brave new world or stay stubbornly rooted in your own?
The thought was outlandish in that it wasn't my own, yet the partition separating me from the driver was closed, the other man only a silent silhouette as the car rolled forward. A chill fell helter-skelter down my back, but as I rubbed my eyes to clear my vision, it suddenly struck me that my first impression of a standard limousine was altogether wrong. Reality shimmered and glittered, just so much fog.
Black leather seats had transformed to crushed red velvet, the pile thick and soft beneath my curled fingers. Small interior lights above the doors morphed into white tapered candles, orange flames flickering inside fragile glass globes.
Terror rose up within me, yet it was accompanied by curiosity, too. A voice inside me whispered, Quit fighting, just let go, let go.
And it was then that I found myself in another world—a place that had been there all along, yet one I only began to perceive when I allowed myself to see it.
It was a world of opulent luxury, where the seats were littered with petals of a pallid pink rose and where a narrow bed that took up the entire rear of the car had its crimson comforter turned down in silent invitation. At first glance, it was a bed, but when I blinked, it was plainly a coffin, custom-made of mahogany and wide enough for two to share.
On one of the plush white pillows sat a plate of fruit—cherries, strawberries, raspberries, grapes—all things red, and wet as if with dew. On the other pillow lay a bottle of fine merlot, and on the seat at my side was a crystal wine glass bearing a folded note, written in perfect calligraphy and completed with a bold signature.
My dearest Stefan,
As the journey will take the better part of an hour, please be comfortable and accept these modest gifts if you find them pleasing. I have long admired your visionary work and look forward to having you in my home this evening.
Miquel Kaliq Constantine
My heart hammered, but these macabre visions didn't vanish to fulfill my wish to be back in the real world. Even if I'd had the presence of mind to flee, the car was already racing through the city, a sleek ebony projectile where all the troubles of the world were only paintings playing on tinted glass.
I was a dazed prisoner in a speeding museum.
Nevertheless, I wanted to weep for the pain captured in those life-size canvases—for the vagrant preaching at a deserted public park and the tragedy in his life that had brought him to such humiliation; for the hookers selling flesh to support their habit while Death and Disease stalked them slowly; for the skinny yellow dog running wild-eyed and headlong through traffic as if he were there to symbolize every misguided, condemned soul on Earth.
I thought of Stephanie, for I knew we must be near the underpass where her body was found, and once again I blamed myself. She was barely 13, yet I'd let her run with her friends at these gatherings since she was 11.
Wanting to be her confidant as much as her father, I created fantasy worlds for her to inhabit, and when she outgrew them, I encouraged her to find her own or make them herself. But because my life was complicated, too, I'd patted her on the head and only half listened when she told me that the ability of the supernatural world to manifest was directly related to man's willingness to perceive supernatural manifestations. Anything was possible and the impossible was altogether likely, she said, and oh how much she'd believed it!
My failure as a parent and as a man was that I still didn't know what she'd believed or what she'd been searching for other than belief itself. I didn't know her, and never had.
Now I never would.
I stared at that truth in the limo's magical windows, and for an instant I saw her blood on my hands. Impulsively, I pressed them against the glass and gazed out, a lost child with my nose fogging the window.
"Stephanie," I cried, though no sound came from my lips. "Stephanie..."
What took my thoughts away from her right then, I don't know, though the depth of that pain was suddenly replaced with an equally profound separation from myself. A sign along the road announced we were leaving Los Angeles County, though some philosophical vagabond inside my head told me I'd left the city the instant I entered the car.
It all made sense in that none of it made sense at all.
I held the wine glass and saw that I'd drained it, though I had no recollection of opening the bottle nor any memory of how my fingers came to be stained with the sweet red blood of ripe cherries.
And then I was completely entranced, a participant in a waking dream as the limo thrust deeper into its night lover and left the world behind.