I AWOKE ALONE.
Terrifyingly alone.
I searched first for Irma's voice, the last warning I'd heard.
She was gone.
Not silent.
Gone.
You know how some memory, some person, is a part of you even when you're not thinking? Something your mind can always conjure? Maybe it smells like the morning coffee you had first thing at work every morning, or it's a vivid taste like the cinnamon gum you chewed only when you were a kid, or a scent and sensation like a Teddy bear's faux fur you buried your face into at a toy store once, all those traces of memory that go back as far as you can remember.
Irma was like that and she was not here. She had left the room that was me.
So had the silver familiar. Yeah, I'd fought it from the first, resented its source and found its presence creepy. Not feeling it at all after several weeks was even creepier.
So what did I feel or sense now? First, I hoped my eyelids were shut because all I could see of my environment was that splotchy blackness behind your closed eyes in bed at night.
Second, I didn't seem to be floating but I was definitely horizontal. I broke into an icy sweat when I realized I wasn't inclined to move just as much as I wasn't inclined to open my eyes. Inquiring reporters want to know. For the first time in my remembered life, I didn't want to know. I knew I wouldn't like where the faintly reflecting glass door had taken me.
I so far gleaned that I lay flat, on my back, immobile-my most terrifying nightmare since I could remember nightmares-and I didn't feel anything but some level surface beneath me.
Wait. Not quite true. What lay beneath me was stone-hard but not cold, about the same temperature as my body, because I could barely sense it. A deep breath lifted my chest and shoulders against the faintest whisper of a barrier. Something was covering me.
Not clothes.
And not above the neck, so I wasn't a dead body in a morgue-yet.
I listened so intensely I thought my jaws would snap.
Finally, faint as a wisp of wind, I heard or felt motion around me, above me. And, worse than anything, the softest slithering sound below me.
My mind-fearful I'd been transported to the Karnak, whether by my mirror magic or even a physical method while unconscious-sensed more around me than the gigantic Egyptian bulk of the Strip hotel itself.
That was only a gaudy and deceptive gateway to an endless empire buried deep in the sands of time and space. So, with a child's exotic fears, my mind pictured giant cobras gathering here, slipping their faintly sheened coils along a stone floor, nearing, their small evil faces set like poisonous jewels in the broad, flared collars of their scales.
Every lurid film clich�� about ancient Egypt assembled on the black screen behind my eyes. I saw and imagined I heard the breathless beat of torch flames in the oxygen-starved environment of the ancient pyramid chambers.
I pictured painted eyes of graceful human forms watching me. I envisioned upright crocodiles marching along with slavering jaws among creatures with the kilted and collared bodies of human bronze gods surmounted by bird and animal and serpent heads clothed in the traditional cloth headdresses.
I took another breath. I could feel and needed to see. Anything was better than six-foot-tall swaying cobras, even mysteriously muzzled royal hyenas I could no longer sense anywhere. Surely they'd be laughing if they were still present. I opened my eyes.
And looked right up into my worst nightmare.
I was indeed lying flat on my back, so I could only look up. I saw a ceiling where all the figures from my imagined tomb frieze floated at crazy right angles to each other. Obscuring most of the paintings was a large overhead lamp, its light focused tightly downward but muted to an eerie glow otherwise, as at a dentist's office.
Figures were indeed gathered around me-pale, mouthless, hairless figures like the mannequins in an expensive, avant-garde department store, with huge black liquid eyes. Three stood on either side of me, motionless.
My fear tripled. I was indeed held helpless in the alien spaceship of my nightmares, or perhaps of my oldest, most buried memories, surrounded by vague silent forms watching me as if I were a bug pinned to a dissecting table. Did they still have those awful high school biology classes where kids had to cut up worms and frogs? The memory made my skin crawl.
This recurrent nightmare of mine preceded that Millennium Revelation year of 2000-2001. I knew I was again Young Delilah, eleven or so. And so scared. So alone. And I knew, even more than before, because Real Delilah was somewhere in here with me, this was going to hurt me, badly. Again.
People think kids don't know what's coming when they lose complete power over themselves, like in a dentist's chair or on a doctor's examination table. Or an autopsy table. But they do, which is why Real Delilah had demanded dentists work with her phobias and let her sit up, why she'd gone to underground clinics for birth control pills to avoid the horizontal horrors of the ob/gyn's sinister stirrup-equipped table, the surety of invasion and hurtful, insensitive intimacy.
Adults think kids are gullible when we're only innocent.
And now I sense myself as a split personality: a kid/ adult imprisoned in my past/present and maybe about to lose it all, including my mind.
Okay, Delilah, hang on!
I had that bracing thought just in time. Or was I no longer "I," Delilah, but Lilith on an autopsy table in a new nightmare? An instant after I felt a pain so sharp and yet both alien and familiar I couldn't tell where on my body it had occurred, much less what. I sucked in a monstrous breath.
"Be still," a voice commanded. A human voice.
I let my eyes lower from the hypnotically greenish glass lens bleeding an aura like a halo above me to what-or I should say who-stood at the foot of my examination table.
Another unconsciously held breath burst out, surprising me. I saw something impossible yet familiar from outside my longtime nightmare: a man's strong-featured face.
He had Orlando Bloom-pale skin, thick black eyebrows, and gel-glossed hair like black patent leather. He looked up from doing something to me I was glad I couldn't see or feel, distracted by my witnessing it.
"You don't want to move when I'm doing this," he said, flicking me a glance. His eyes were dark but the pupils were small and human. Or... more like real-life-size cobra eyes, shiny as onyx beads.
His deep commanding baritone had cracked on the word "this." I detected a bit of a British accent. He was irritated with me, that I was awake and had seen him, and that scared me again. I was mute with astonishment anyway, lost in my recurring dream and in this possible rerun in real time.
Nightmares can come true, it can happen to you...
The weirdest part was that I seemed immobile without being restrained. Sure, I knew that was the classic paralysis nightmare. I suppose alien abduction victims would say they'd been drugged. And there had been that one piercing pain I'd felt, obviously from a needle, a big needle.
As if answering my speculations, the man (doctor?) lifted a small vial of dark gray fluid up to the murky light. Blood. Mine. What! Freshly drawn blood was bright scarlet.
That's when I recognized my assailant, not only what he was but who he was. Oh, he was indeed a doctor, in one sense. Even more improbably, he was also a CinSim standing there in living black-and-white. Yet his backup sextet of masked "alien nurses," although pale, were clearly in muted Technicolor or whatever we see in daily life.
"There's something off about the blood," he declared, almost to himself. "The color, the viscosity. It may not be as useful as his."
Well, of course not! What he held was not scarlet fresh-drawn blood, but as black-and-white as his own figure, which was, oddly for a medical procedure, a white shirt, black necktie, and sport jacket in some grayish tweed.
I took a closer, more focused look at the nurses. White face masks covered their noses and mouths but what I'd taken for large alien-being "bug eyes" were not exactly that. They were almost black and human size but exaggerated by thick rims of kohl. They looked halfway between the Egyptian women on ancient friezes and modern supermodels sporting ultra-extreme "smoky eye" makeup.
I struggled to sit up. This was getting too absurd to scare me stiff. I could just get up and leave.
No, I couldn't do that. I was bound. I pulled against gauze wrist restraints at my hips. My ankles seemed free but I was still as helpless as a kitten up a tree or, more apropos, a sacred scarab beetle on its back.
At least a kitten had claws.
Speaking of which, why couldn't I feel the silver familiar? Why wasn't Irma goading me on with complaints and cheers? I felt oddly shrunken, wondering if that was the first result to a body that was being embalmed, ancient Egyptian-style. What did they do first? Drain the blood? No!
Terrified, struggling to maintain hope and sanity, I became my own intentional Irma.
Come on, Delilah! You've fought off group-home bully boys, werewolf and hyena packs. One CinSim and some thoroughly modern human nurses shouldn't unnerve you.
My inner voice sounded soft and weak. I wanted to just go and cower in a corner. I wanted to kick myself again for thinking and feeling that way. What was wrong with me?
Nothing, said a wee, small voice.
Everything, shouted voices I'd imagined all around me. "That's why we have to do this."
"The blood is the life," the man at the foot of my resting place announced, toasting with the vial of my probable "bad" blood. Hey, it worked fine for me. It was my blood! It was my life!
And the doc's dialogue line came from an old thirties movie, just like the CinSim.
That "blood is the life" guy had the same hammy tones as the Invisible Man in his mad scientist mode at the beginning of his self-named movie. They all had it, this guy and all the English-y curtain chewers from wee-hours cable rerun black-and-white movies.
I'd seen all those films in the group homes when I didn't dare join the other girls in a group bedroom where the punk boyz would hunt me. Those guys despised and avoided the "game room" with its Ping-Pong table as a place for "losers."
So I hid out there nights to watch old black-and-white films as truly "silent movies" because I didn't dare turn up the volume. I had to stay awake and sit up all night to fend off... mad scientists?
No, boys! Bad boys. Boyz. They'd been after me before any of the other girls. My white skin, my blossoming "mountains," everything wrong with me. Me.
I was breathing so hard I sounded like a bellows and some distant part of my brain diagnosed it as hyperventilating.
The blood wasn't the life. It was death. My death. Bad girls. Bad grrlz. I was one.
That's why I was here, being hurt. I would bleed. I would die and this man, this doctor, would preside.
At least now I recognized him, or his breed anyway.
Doctor. I must do, be, as doctor said.
Then another, more terrifying recognition clicked into place. He wasn't just any CinSim doctor, he was the Mother of All Vintage Film Doctors and the Father of the Monster.
Doctor Frankenstein.