Once Bitten. Clare Willis

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      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 СКАЧАТЬ