She went on with that same sensual amus.e.m.e.nt, as if she were educating the totally innocent-which, of course, in the circ.u.mstances, she was.
"Children, let me point out the playrooms. Beyond the bar, the movie room. We have a comprehensive selection of exceptional quality, men and women, women and women, men and men...whatever might appeal. Up the stone stairway...the pleasure rooms. Just beyond that, my personal domain. My dungeon. Visit me later, if you dare." She smiled at Mary and Nancy. "Have you been bad?" she inquired in a throaty, teasing voice. "Do you need confession? We can arrange for that, too. But first, you must have a drink. The special tonight is a b.l.o.o.d.y Mary. Mary...how darling, just like your name," she said, eyeing Mary again.
"Tonight, everything is on me." She laughed softly. "We"ll find a form of payment. For now remain at the bar. Watch." She stared at the three of them for a long moment. "I will tell you when it"s all right to move, do you understand?"
"Yes," Jeremy said, relieved. He had to admit, he was more than uneasy.
He was...scared.
She leaned close to them. "Always know the way out," she said.
"Always know the way out," Nancy repeated. Jeremy wondered if he had sounded almost mesmerized when he had spoken, the way Nancy did.
The dominatrix seemed pleased with the response and smiled again.
She exuded a sleek sensuality, along with something smoldering and fierce. She escorted them the rest of the way to the bar and spoke to the man behind it. "Drinks, please. Right away. For my American friends."
The bartender was tall, lean, dark-eyed, perhaps in his early thirties. He nodded, then hurried to do her bidding.
They sat at the bar to wait for their drinks. Looking around, Jeremy thought it might have been almost any bar anywhere-except for the naked people and the masked woman. Next to them, two men were discussing something in French. At the end of the bar, a good-looking man speaking German was trying to pick up a pretty blonde.
He turned to say something to the dominatrix, but she was gone.
"This is so exciting." Mary whispered.
"Yeah. A thrill a minute," Jeremy murmured. "Stop being such a weenie," Mary told him.
"You know," Nancy murmured, "we"re not going to learn much if we spend all night just hanging out at the bar. We need to look around."
"That woman just told us to stay here," Jeremy said firmly.
"She also said we should watch," Nancy argued. "We"ll see more if we look around."
"She said to stay at the bar," Jeremy repeated firmly. "And to always know the way out."
Mary giggled. "Maybe they"re worried about police raids."
He had a sickly feeling the dominatrix had been worried about something far more serious.
"Look, Jeremy, that woman is gone, and we can"t just sit here all night," Nancy said.
"We need to split up," Mary added. "No one is going to talk to us if we stick together like the Three Musketeers."
"We should stay together," Jeremy warned uneasily.
Mary laughed softly. "You shouldn"t want us hanging on to you. Our hostess seemed to be pretty into you."
Jeremy didn"t know why, but he had the feeling the dominatrix had quickly a.s.sessed him and found him too young and far too naive. He looked over the heads of the Frenchmen and saw that she was back at the bar. She was behaving casually, chatting with the bartender, speaking to people as they came and went from room to room, and yet...
She seemed to be watching.
For what?
"I don"t know about you two, but I"ve got to see the pleasure rooms," Mary said, sliding off her bar stool.
"I"ll check out the movie room," Nancy said.
"I don"t know about this," Jeremy protested. "I can"t be with both of you."
But they ignored him, already moving. He saw the dominatrix. She had noted their movements, and she didn"t seem pleased.
Jeremy immediately lost sight of Mary, who must have run up the stairs. He found Nancy hovering at the back of the movie room.
He stopped where he was, taking the overstuffed couches and the haze in the air from cigarettes and pot. On a large screen, a p.o.r.no flick played. Two women were seducing one man-and each other. As he watched, one woman held the other down while the man bared his teeth and bit into the immobilized woman"s neck. She seemed to go into instant throes of ecstasy. Blood l.u.s.t apparently led to wild arousal.
Despite all the flesh on show, the movie didn"t begin to arouse him. He realized he was far too tense to feel anything other than an unsettling sense of alarm.
A girl rose from one of the couches and approached Nancy, taking her hand. Nancy followed her back and sat down.
Jeremy decided that Nancy could fend for herself. The woman who had approached her was slim and not more than five two.
Nancy was giggling and over twenty-one. If she wanted to live on the wild side in pursuit of her craft-or using her craft as an excuse-it was completely her call. He made his way to the stone stairway and hurried up.
They should have stayed together at the bar, as they"d been told, and just watched.
He reached a long hall lined with doors.
The hall itself seemed far longer than it could possibly be. Perhaps it was the dim lighting and the way the far end of the hall was almost completely dark, adding to the illusion that it went on forever.
On and on...as if in an impossibly long shot for a horror film.
Except this was real.
He told himself that he was only giving in to fear and letting his imagination run wild. Look. All he had to do was look.
No one was in the hallway. He had no idea which door Mary might have chosen.
As he stood there, he felt rather than saw a shadow. No, not a shadow, exactly, a sense of greater darkness. As if something large had cast a pall over the meager light offered by the candles that burned in medieval sconces every ten feet along the walls.
A lump formed in his throat. He was tempted to turn, run back down the stairs and out into the night. Of course, if he did, he had no idea of where he would actually wind up. They had been driven through a dense, fog-shrouded forest, and they hadn"t pa.s.sed another living soul until they had reached this place, which, from the outside, had appeared to be nothing more than a ruin on a cliff. Yet the urge to run, escape, flee to any other place on earth, tore at him with an urgency that defied all logic.
He would not yield to it. Mary and Nancy were here, and while they were welcome to whatever pursuits they chose, he couldn"t abandon them to this...
"This danger," he whispered aloud.
Because somehow he knew that his unease was justified. He felt a raw sense of instinctive panic taking hold in his gut.
The shadow was there, real, palpable, evil and malignant.
It was just a shadow, he tried to tell himself. A result of the candlelight, the intense darkness of the night...
"Where are all those psychologists when you need them?" he mocked himself out loud.
He felt the most intense desire to keep looking over his shoulder. There was something there. Something pursuing-no, stalking- him. Slowly, playing with him. He could feel it. Feel the danger, like a gazelle on an African plain suddenly aware that a lioness was silently slipping up behind it....
He spun around. He was alone in the hall.
It was simply the time and place, he told himself. He was in the land of legends, with a bunch of no-life idiots who liked to play at being vampires. It was silly; it was sad.
But fanatics could be dangerous.
And still he felt he was facing something that didn"t remotely resemble a human danger.
He turned back, staring at the doors.
And felt it again. There was a shadow, something...evil. It was laughing at him, he thought. It knew his fear, thrived on it, and laughed....
They had to get out of there.
"Mary?" he called aloud-almost screaming it. He no longer cared what anyone thought, what ridiculous expectation the girls had for journalistic success. They had to get out.
"Mary?" he called again, and opened the first door.
It was simply too fascinating. Mary was pretty sure she was standing there in wide-eyed wonder. No matter how sophisticated she might have considered herself to be in her own world, she knew she must appear like a lamb in a forest here. Still, this was the kind of thing that made for a great story. People loved to share such wanton and carnal experiences-vicariously. They wanted to be shocked and appalled. They were curious, and satisfying their curiosity sold print. And she? She intended to sell. People were always intrigued by s.e.x and violence. It was unlikely that she would be traveling to any major war zones, so that left s.e.x.
Well, s.e.x and fantasy. The vampire fantasy. It kind of made sense that some guys wanted to act like they were vampires, because vampires had power over women. And some women loved the idea of being taken, dominated....
There was certainly fantasy here, combined with masks...and s.e.x....
First she had stumbled on an intimate menage a trois. They hadn"t noticed her in the doorway at first, they had been so...involved.
Then a husky voice had suggested she join in. Certain her face was a thousand shades of red, she had apologized and moved on.
Another door had led to an empty-but prepared-chamber. And chamber was the right word, not room. The s.p.a.ce had been decorated to resemble an ancient dungeon, with shackles on the wall, and whips and chains laid out on a table, ready for use.
She had studied the place as dispa.s.sionately as she could, trying for journalistic objectivity, but then, uneasy, she had hurried on with a little shudder. Definitely not her scene.
The third room she found amusing. A very tall, well-muscled man was dressed in a very pink, very lacy nightie, heels and a garter belt. He was admiring himself in a mirror. She excused herself, trying not to laugh as she departed.
But she didn"t feel actually scared until she opened the fourth door.
There was no reason for her fear, really. The room was empty and almost completely dark. Where candles and lamps had burned elsewhere, the only light here spilled in from the hall. When she first opened the door, she saw nothing at all. Then it seemed as if a pair of eyes, fire-colored eyes, stared at her from the deep recesses of the room.
As the light filtered in and her eyes adjusted, she realized it was just a man, sitting alone in the dark. Again she excused herself and hurried on. But even as she closed the door, it seemed as if the darkness still cloaked itself around her. The hall hadn"t changed, and yet it had. It had darkened. As if a giant shadow...
Don"t be silly, she told herself. The candles in the wall sconces were just burning down.
But it seemed as if something chilling had settled in her bones. People. She needed to find people. It didn"t matter what they were doing. He-men dressing in pink lace and frills, writhing bodies involved in an orgy...anyone.
She opened the next door. There was soft light. Comfortable chairs. One wall seemed to consist entirely of a giant television screen. From somewhere, music was playing.
She walked in. "h.e.l.lo?"
No answer. For a moment she felt faint. Dizziness seized her. She closed her eyes. She couldn"t believe it, but she was afraid she was going to black out.
She fought the feeling, wondering just how strong her b.l.o.o.d.y Mary had been. She opened her eyes. Somehow, things seemed slightly askew, as if something had changed in the few seconds when her eyes had been shut.
The sense of fear was still gripping her heart.
Run. Go!
She found herself sitting down. The TV came on, and the scene was arresting. A beautiful woman sat at a dressing table. She was in an elegant silk gown, brushing her hair. The room appeared Victorian, though the dressing table had art nouveau elements.
There was a large wardrobe with the same elegant wood carvings, and a four-poster bed. Drapes floated in, wafting on the breeze with the same surreal whisper as the brush made, stroking through the woman"s long pale-gold hair.
As Mary watched, a shadow seemed to materialize at the window.
She was afraid. Very afraid. She wanted to run.
And yet she could not. It was as if she had frozen in her chair.
Even as the shadow appeared at the window, she sensed another shadow rising behind her. She could feel the darkness, could feel the chill, the ice, whispering along her spine, as if arctic breath were teasing at her back.
There was nothing there, she insisted to herself.
It was evil, cold, a whisper in black and red....
Whispers didn"t have colors....
This one did. Black, like an abyss. But touched by something...crimson.
Like blood.
Get up, Mary. Run! she warned herself.
But she couldn"t. She could only stare at the screen. The shadow had drifted in through the flowing drapes and was gaining greater form. Materializing.
Her eyes widened. She wasn"t watching TV, she realized. No movie was playing. She was looking through a one-way mirror.
The scene was in the next room, and it was really happening.
It had to be a parlor trick, a magician"s act. The shadow was becoming a man. Materializing from the mist, like a vision from every tale told about the evils found in the Carpathian Mountains of Transylvania. It couldn"t be real. It was an act, performed by employees of the private club, something done with smoke and mirrors. Not real.
She would not watch anymore.
But she couldn"t move.