Tales of the Vampire Twilight

(Chapter Two)

"A Visit to Darkness"

Thirteen steps lead to Darkness. The tall thin stranger climbed them, then handed seven dollars to the girl with the fuschia hair, declined a hand stamp, and slipped through the curtains into the club.

Music that sounded like Carl Orff pounded through the air as the room swirled with black-clad figures framed with red lights and dense smoke. Others lurked in the shadows of a mezzanine or lined the bar where Angel poured an endless stream of cocktails and blood-red wine.

As the man took his own place at the bar, Angel's eyes were drawn to him instantly, though she could not have begun to explain why. He was tall, but no more so than eight or nine others at the bar. His hair was no blacker, his eyes no browner, and, certainly, his skin no paler. Perhaps it was the steadiness of his gaze and, indeed, his entire aspect. He seemed hardly to breathe amid the throb of the music and the tidal ebb-and-flow of the dance floor.

In a club for vampires, Angel was a perfect fit behind the bar--slim and fashionably pale, but with bleached-white hair that commanded attention and, in a strange way, respect. Surrounded by familiar faces with sabretoothed smiles, she, herself, avoided affectation without drifting into condescension toward the clientele. Here, now, was someone new, however, and she was drawn to speak to him.

"What can I get you?" she asked him, leaning over the beer cooler behind the bar to be heard.

"You," he replied.

"Not on the menu, I'm afraid," she answered, so disappointed in the come-on that she half-suspected she had heard him wrong.

He smiled a tight smile at her. "I have a proposition for you," he said.

"I bet I've heard it before."

"Oh, I doubt that." The smile broadened, but grew tighter at the same time.

The music seemed to recede in Angel's ears, as if she were suddenly alone in the club with the dark stranger.

"You can save a life, if you like. This is not an offer I make very often, but I see potential in you."

"Yeah, right."

"I'll take a life tonight. Someone in this club. Some innocent out there on the floor. Or one of the wannabes upstairs."

Angel glanced up to the mezzanine, the preserve of the hardcore vampire lifestylers and their donors. Something in his words sent a chill through her and made the music wholly fade from her ears.

"Sacrifice yourself. You can join me and become what those fools"--he gestured for the first time, a dismissive sweep of his hand indicating the vampires in the gallery--"dream of being every daylight hour. Would you like that? Immortality? Don't forget, you'd save an unsuspecting soul in the bargain."

The room was truly frozen now around Angel and the dark man. She read nothing but truth in the impassive pools of his eyes. She knew that somehow she had stumbled onto a crossroads, a profound choice had been proffered to her, the likes of which were beyond simple understanding. She knew she had but a moment to answer from her most basic instincts.

"No," she said. She could not have said why. Perhaps the stranger knew her answer when he made the offer. No matter. There was no opportunity to reconsider. Her attention was drawn for a heartbeat away from the stranger to a customer, a woman in a red velvet Edwardian gown, and by the next heartbeat, when she looked back, the tall thin man was gone.

And the next day when she heard how a young man was found behind the club, his throat savagely torn away, she wept.

And still she returns to Darkness. With a yearning she can never explain or accept or escape.

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