raised by wolves

A week later and we’re heading south. The sun shines it’s red-tinted light on us and our car, a white convertible that we picked up from some unfortunate man in the midst of a midlife crisis. The engine purrs like a jungle cat. I’m in the back and Santiago is driving.

“What’s this place called again?”

He’s asking me the name of a nightclub. It’s Rodrick’s. We’re heading there to meet up with a girl named Sophie, the only vampire I know older than myself. From the shores of Europe her family came to the new world seeking a better life, up from poverty and misfortune, the land of opportunity and all that. They never made it. There was a vampire on board, and when the ship, the Merciful Nurse arrived at the port, it was a mass grave that floated. Sophie never told me how she escaped or how she was turned.

“Right. And you think this girl, this Sophie, is going to just invite us to the blood ceremony that will end the world?”

I look up from my book, a slim volume of Hemingway, and shrug noncommittally.

“If you’ve got any better ideas, I’d love to hear them.”

Five hours later and the sun is hanging low and red like a paper lantern. I imagine Japanese characters dancing over it’s surface. One for ‘blood,’ one for ‘hunger,’ one for ‘feast,’ one for ‘the end.’

I’m dreaming. Santiago slaps me on the leg, reaching around from the front seat. He asks me for directions and I tell him, and soon we’re there.

Rodrick’s is the kind of place you’d imagine. Neon signs advertising cheap beer and ‘Girls! Girls! Girls!’ but it wasn’t always such a dive. New owners took over some years ago and turned it into a titty bar. I get out of the car and stretch and look at the big red and white sign over the door. I wonder if Sophie even works here anymore.

Inside it’s dark, smoky and packed to bursting. I feel uneasy and I don’t know why. Usually I’m very discerning when it comes to things that make me uneasy, able to pick it out—whatever it is—with pinpoint precision and eliminate it as fast as possible. This isn’t something so simple.

There’s loud music and men dribbling cheap beer down their chins. The girls dance and gyrate for tips with tassels on their nipples. They look sick and spent in the black lights. There’s a smell in the air that stings your nostrils like sweat and come and shame. I hate strip joints.

I lose track of Santiago pretty quickly and take a seat at the bar. A young girl in thick glasses and a low-cut shirt smiles and asks what I’ll have. I order a beer and a shot and find myself subconsciously sizing the place up. I’ve got that itch. I’ll need to feed before the night is done.

“Somethin’ on your mind, stranger?” the girl asks in a charmingly faked southern drawl.

“I’m looking for someone,” I tell her. She smiles demurely and replies: “Everyone’s looking for someone. This someone got a name?”

I tell her and she laughs. “I shoulda known,” she says, clucking her tongue against her teeth. “Sophie’s got quite a fan club in these parts. But I’m sure you knew that. She’ll be on in five.”

Before I can ask what she means by ‘on in five,’ the girl is gone, off to serve some drooler another drink. I see Santiago on the other side of the bar, already with two semi-nude girls on each arm and I roll my eyes. He sees me too and winks.

And then the music stops.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” a voice from hidden speakers says. “Thank you again for coming to Rodrick’s. We hope you are all enjoying your evening so far,” a pause for a loud cheer and clapping from the various patrons. “And we hope that you are all ready to enjoy the rest of the evening ten fold!”

“It is almost that special time, gentlemen, the one many of you made special plans for tonight. Those of you unaware, you are in for a treat beyond all treats! Tonight, we are seeing off one of the finest performers Rodrick’s has ever employed. Yes, yes, try not to wail too much, but this may be the last time a performance of this caliber is ever again witnessed on these shores. But, I ramble. You all know what you came here for, and it is our solemn duty to provide it to you, one last time. Ladies and gentlemen, without further adieu…Miss Sophie Black!”

And the crowd is going just wild. Men are standing up and pounding their chests, slamming their bar stools against the floor. The other dancing girls are clapping and smiling and whistling. All the lights go off and everyone shuts up just as abruptly as they started. I feel a very uncomfortable tension in my back and chest, the kind you get when you know something awful is about to happen, like when you might have to run as fast as you ever have without the luxury of looking back to see what horror is nipping your heels.

A spotlight comes on, pointing at the stage which is attached to the far end of the bar, illuminating a stool with an ancient-looking phonograph player on top, the kind with the comically antiquated horn. The music hisses and pops and a man’s voice sings a somber operatic dirge. Behind the phonograph, there is a slight stirring of a red curtain, and then from behind the curtain, like an alabaster snake, a white-gloved hand appears. It moves slowly in time to the tinny beat of the phonograph before slowly drawing back the curtain, exposing the rest of the lily-white arm. The arm reaches around the curtain, running sensually up and down the length of a hidden voluptuous torso. There is the hint of a round hip bone, the impression of a finely shaped pair of breasts, but no skin shown but that on the forearm of the apparently disembodied arm.

And then another arm appears, also white gloved and ghostly, from the other side of the curtain. This one also moves in time with the hissing and popping funereal music, an abstract dance with it’s counterpart on the other side of the curtain. And then a leg joins in. And another. Two long, lithe, chalk-white legs that terminate in red high heels present themselves at an impossible angle from behind the curtain, and the arms never move. A seasoned contortionist would be puzzled and alarmed if they were lead to believe that these two pairs of limbs belonged to the same person—which they did. But the constraints of the physical world are not so rigid for vampires.

As the song nears it’s end, the light goes out and the curtain falls, transforming seamlessly into an elegant red gown draped effortlessly about the figure that had previously hid behind it. The place erupts into a cacophony of whistling and shouting and applause. Sophie stands with her arms spread wide and her head down, black hair obscuring her features. She waits for the applause to stop, along with the last pathetic notes of the sad, ancient opera. And then she begins her act, the real act, the no-holds-barred, all-or-nothing, drool-on-you-dogs strip show. The tinny music is replaced with heavy bass and an electronic drum beat. Some performer you couldn’t remember the name of if you tried raps unintelligibly behind the music and Sophie takes her gloves off. The spotlight is replaced with a strobe and a wild barrage of colored flashes and light beams. Sophie turns and raises her now-bare hands above her head. The curtain, or gown, or whatever it is, falls away from her as if yanked off by an invisible stage crew, hungry for flesh. She looks playfully over her shoulder, licks her lips and winks at no one in particular. From where I’m sitting it looks like she’s winking at me, but I’m certain every other john in the place thinks the same thing.

She turns and the dress falls away completely, leaving her bare and radiant but for a set of practically-nonexistent black undergarments. As the music builds, her dance becomes more manic, more desperate. Gone is the grace and the sensuality, the old-timey charm. It is replaced with an animalistic heat, a hunger too strange to name. I know the hunger’s name. I feel it. Looking at her as she writhes across the stage, arching her back and spreading her legs, I feel my dead blood boiling.

She moves like a snake, the type that swallow men whole, all the way down the stage and onto the bar. The music is loud and thumping in the back of my head and as she gets closer to where I’m sitting, the sensation of wild heat builds and builds, the way you feel an orgasm in the back of your neck well before it’s achieved.

She’s within arm’s reach of me now, and whether it’s the light or the air or something else, Sophie still hasn’t recognized me. She’s down on all fours, writhing, her body like a work of art. Men throw crumpled dollars from all directions, but none of them seem to touch her. She rises to her knees and runs her hands up over her stomach, over her breasts, up her neck and through her hair.

And now, she recognizes me.

Her look of being absolutely in charge, the look a girl gets when she becomes the center of attention in a whole room full of men, fades very, very quickly. Her eyes go wide for just a split second and I see her lips move. Even amid all the noise, the music, the shouting and drooling, I hear her whisper: “You came.”