It’s summer; hot dry and hard. The course of growth has already been decided. A plant withers or flourishes now. It is too late to start a new love, it is a season for growing now, not planting. Something planted now would be a stunted, mean thing, baked by the glaring sun in its infancy; destined to die in the winter freeze with no purpose, no harvest, no crop, no seed. I walk across buckled sidewalks and cracking earth, my mind full of plant species and fish orders. Cheat grass my voice croaks out at the desert, or is it just my thought? My feet blister; ooze drying blood, sweat. I walk on, my throat becoming an Egyptian tomb: dry, hard. My love was planted early, it sprouted, grew, flowered all in one night; beautiful but no good for hunger. The rest of the days were just it drying, just it dying and blowing away, leaving only me a dry husk. A dry husk rattling in the wind like the croaking laugh of a raven. I walk; there is a river, rushing, not the Amazon of the rainforest, The Nile of the desert. I am afraid. I am afraid to go near. I am afraid to jump in, to feel the cool, the wet, lest it should dry and become hot. I am afraid that the river would carry me away, that I might drown. I timidly take a sip, a sip wets my lips, I taste my re-hydrated blood. I touch my foot to the gargling waters, a cool caress. My feet almost sigh as they sink ankle deep in mud. Yet, yet I cannot escape the sight of the tombs, the monoliths, hard, casting long shadows. They must be far away before I swim. One last sip and I go, it is summer; the stream is cool wet and soft.

Egypt is a place for such thoughts. My mind wanders often. How did I end up in this place? How did I succumb to such a fate? Egypt is beautiful, but no more so than a beautiful woman who gives you syphilis. My feet are in boots again, swelling, cracking, bleeding and oozing into the leather. The sand filled winds slap against the peeling pink skin of my face. I have been here a year and the throbbing hum of the rainforest seems another world away. To most people the Amazon is a hot place, which is true but it is a benign heat, full of shade and water, Egypt is a brick oven. In a kiln dried pottery is heated and if flawless it hardens and becomes waterproof, if there is a weakness, an air pocket say, the whole thing explodes. As the sun rises higher I can feel the heat forcing itself against my faults, against my weakness; I can feel myself trying to explode. I wander the desert, mostly at night and then I wait, standing in the heat till I can stand it no longer. Eventually I slip back into the shadows, into a rough-cut chamber dating back to the pharaohs, but there in the shadows is where the ghosts lie. Not real ghosts of course, they don’t exist but in the dark and in my sleep, my thoughts constantly plague me, constantly haunt me.

In the dark I think about the rainforest where I had worked for two years as a field biologist. I dream of catching bats in the twilight; of flapping leathery wings. I think of the darkness and the sex calls in it. I think of towering ancient kapok trees, sacred trees. I think of the wildness of the forest and the wild man it brought; the man that forced me to chase him here.

It was day and I was snoozing in a hammock when I first met the man, strangely I never learned his name, even after all those weeks he spent with my wife and me at the research station. Even stranger, I never realized I didn’t know his name until after he left. He was a tall man, neither sinewy nor hulking but something in between, strongly built but not overly imposing. He was the type of man you can easily estimate to your own peril; he was a man I did underestimate.

His lips moved invisibly from the shadows of a worn leather hat, he told me he was on a quest, a quest that had taken him from the jungles of Laos and Cambodia to the mountains of Alaska, through deserts and across the ocean. He didn’t elaborate much but I gathered very quickly from his vocabulary and the self important way he spoke that his quest was a mystical one; he was looking for the perfect sacrifice.

At night he had moved away from the research station and made his own camp but he hadn’t moved far enough that I couldn’t make out the chants or see the small flicker of his fire dancing amidst the cecropias and lianas. I was measuring bat wings and waiting for other nets to fill, listening to the quiet whir of wings and the dreamy far off chanting. It sounded like there were others with him chanting but I never met them. The whole memory of that night is very dreamy, perhaps because it’s been repeated so often in my dreams. When I close my eyes to the hot days of Egypt I open them to the sodden dream nights of Amazonia.

The hot days grow cooler with the shadows and as I leave my hide-out in the cave I always hope to hear my old friends beating their leathery membranes against the night air; I’m too deep into the desert though, it’s too desolate. A full 20 percent of all mammal species are bats, it’s a lineage that has invaded every continent except Antarctica and almost every spit of land that can be called an island yet they have abandoned me here.

I step out of my cave, embracing the quickly cooling air. I reach out my hand and feel my way along the rough cliff. The stars look down; laughing, twinkling at me.

My wife had decided to go visit the mans camp, out of curiosity. I thought he was harmless, so I raised no objection. It was the last night I’d seen my wife. By sacrifice the man meant human sacrifice. In his camp were left strange symbols drawn in the dirt, carved into the trees. The symbols came from every corner of the world, from eons ago. There were Viking ruins and Incan symbols, African fertility symbols.

I had been a tracker in my youth, followed game through the mountains, fields and deserts of Colorado and Utah but it had been many years. Often as I was walking in the forest and crossed the tracks of a beast I would stop and examine, look closely, follow the trail with my eyes but it had been many years since I’d actually tracked anything. I was worried at first that I was too rusty but my feel of the trail, or the prey came back like breathing; like riding a bicycle. I followed the man for two days through the forest, never getting close enough to see him but I could still feel him ahead. I had come to the research station by the river and was poorly prepared for land travel but I did what I must for every night I dreamed of the man, his face a mass of shadows. I dreamed of the man in front of a woman, a woman tied arms raised, fire reflecting savagely across the curve of soft breasts. I dreamed of savage words and savage rituals, of naked bodies sweating, bleeding, and crying in the dark. Lips, tongues, laughter, teeth; these filled my dreams, devouring my mind, my peace, my sanity.

The story of how I tracked him after the forest is longer and blurry even to me, the forest is livid and real in my mind, the cities are a shadow world until I got here, to the desert of Egypt where I wander, this is reality too. I wander the dunes, my feet often bare against the coarse sand, the scent is cold to the nose of a blood hound but I still feel the evil near me, can still taste the sticky sweat, the coppery, salty blood in my dreams.

I found a torch burnt not long ago laying at the entrance of a black tunnel in the rock. I was afraid to go in at first but my resolve finally drove me. My flashlight seemed feeble against the stone, the sarcophagus the eater of flesh that I walked down. Every breath seemed like a clap of thunder, every thought a terrifying revelation. At the end of the tunnel I found a bundle of cloth. At the end of the tunnel I found…I found my wife. I found a mummy.

Now I wander not looking for her but for him, for the mystic. If he can take a life for power surely he has the power to give a life back. My throat becomes dry so easily hear in Egypt, my lips crack and bleed, my laugh has become the rough rusty call of a raven. Still I look, still I search, for where else is immortality if not Egypt?

Chris’ truck lumbered on through the gathering snow, his windshield wipers feverishly fighting a losing battle against the flakes. He cursed quietly under his breath, brow furrowed, and condensing with sweat, despite the cold. The heater purred contentedly, but the seals around the doors of his nineteen sixty something Chevy leaked in a lot of cold. The truck bounced lightly over the snow, and the dirt road it was covering more and more. “People die out here in the winter” Chris muttered to himself, zipping up his coat, eyes still glued to the road with hypnotic intensity. Why had he decided to take a short cut? It was still early, one o’clock, maybe two (the clock in the truck hadn’t worked since the eighties), but the spiraling flocks of snowflakes had already cut the visibility down considerably, and it would get dark fast. Chris knew that if he couldn’t find the interstate, or a town before night fall, his chances of survival would fall drastically. A sign posted along side the road gave him a short burst of hope, it was half covered in snow, the first words silenced into a white blankness, what he could read was, “Wax Wyoming”. Chris prayed that those first words were, “Welcome to”. “Was that the dark shape of a building up there in the snow?” Chris couldn’t tell if it really was, or if it was just his imagination. The snow was becoming so thick as to almost be a screen impenetrable to vision. If this is a town, it didn’t come any too early he thought to himself, squinting into the blinding whiteness. The shape became more pronounced, definitely a patch of darkness, or color in the senseless white. Chris started to slow his truck; he wanted to be careful entering a town when he couldn’t see a damn thing was dangerous work, especially when the road was covered in slick snow. The building suddenly seemed to loom in front of him, a giant sentinel, challenging his right to pass. Chris slowed, and parked, not being able to tell what type of business, or home he was stopping by, but knowing it was his last chance of survival. The door was locked, this fact clicked into place as a sort of panic in his mind, “THE DOOR IS LOCKED!” Chris breathed deeply to calm himself, and pounded on the solid wood door, but all that replied was the empty whoomp of his fist on the door, an impotent sound, a meaningless phrase of his mounting fear. Chris peered into the window, trying his best to clear away the ice, he could see a counter on which sat an ancient, dusty cash register, behind that was a room lost in shadow, Chris thought he could see someone, someone in that shadowy room staring out, monolithic, silent, watching him coldly. Chris pounded on the door again, screaming, “Hey!” his voice lost in the flurries of snow, the gusts of wind. Glancing up and down the street all that was visible was white, white like a grave shroud, shutting off the world of warmth, and light, color and life. Chris cursed to himself, but this time it was a fearful whimper, not a sound of defiant anger. He would have to drive up the street, to the next building, that was all, that was all. He slid behind the wheel of his truck again, and was comforted by the steady growl of his heater. The high-pitched sound of his wheels spinning with no purchase was less comforting. He put the truck into drive, trying to pull forward, to get a little momentum for reversing; again the wheels whirred, but didn’t move him at all.

“God Damn it!” Suddenly the stress from the last few days crashed in on him, the call telling him his mother was dying of cancer, how he had to take time off of work and drive from Colorado to South Dakota despite the rising pile of unpaid bills. The desperation as he had pleaded with his wife to stay a few days before that. She had just replied, “What good are you if you can’t even get our son one present for Christmas? One damn present, that’s all I asked for!” She had left without another word, but Chris had seen the twisting pain of conflict on her face, the sparkle of tears she would not shed in her eyes. He screamed at the mindless whiteness, something more maddening that the white static of a dead channel on television. Why had he tried to fill that chaotic blankness? Why had he purchased that little UHF station? What maddening vision of illusive success had driven him to do it? Chris had already had a good enough job; he had been working as a foreman in the oilfield. Sure, it had been hard work, but it was work he had enjoyed. Sure the men he worked with were crude and low class, but they were men that respected him, and they were the type of men he could die for. Chris remembered seeing the station on his drive home, a little television station for sale, and he had been infected with a fever, he had wanted more than anything to fill those channels with his thoughts. Chris a man, who had worked with his hands, had busted his back his whole life, suddenly wanted to tap into his mind. He had bought the station, but he had underestimated the time and labor he needed to devote to it. The station became his new mistress, and soon he had to leave the oilfield, the hours were too long and inflexible. His dreams seemed to taunt him though, the station was doing mediocre at best, and the profits were razor thin. To support his family he had to take a part time job at a gas station, and that more than anything else seemed to disgust his wife, she seemed for the first time to be ashamed of him. Still Chris worked, and prayed that the station would become more profitable; he clung to the idea of a unique station, a station that showed the sort of things he wanted to see. Unfortunately, no one wanted to gamble by advertising on a station so different from the rest. Chris found shows he enjoyed, bizarre Japanese game shows, with English captions, rugby tournaments, and Shakespeare films. Chris had imagined that people were tired of the same old filth, the ridiculous reality shows, and vulgar brainless comedies every other station showed. Even when his ratings were horribly low, Chris continued to tell himself and anyone else he could find, that he just needed to get more people to try his station, if they tried it, he was sure they would love it. Then his world collapsed when he realized he could barely pay his bills, when more importantly his wife realized they could only pay some of the bills if they were to have food to eat. She had left him, the few days before he got the phone call about his mother were a relentless agony to him, and then he had focused all his attention on getting to his mother, on seeing her before she died. All other thoughts were blocked by that one; he could almost forget that his house was empty, except for a growing pile of bills. In the dark recesses of his subconscious, the bills were malevolent creatures, breeding and growing to enormous populations in the shadows, whispering among themselves their plans to destroy him.

All of these events suddenly came rushing to the forefront of his mind, and Chris broke into sobbing despair, over his steering wheel. Finally a plan formed in his mind, and he was able to gain some amount of control. He would break down the door, he had to survive, had to get into the building, otherwise he would freeze to death out here, and the weather wasn’t letting up. Chris rammed his weight against the door, but his feet slipped on the ice, nothing happened, he tried again and his feet slid out from under him completely. Chris lay on his back in the ice and snow, considering what to do next. He moved his hand to push himself up and hit a rock, he smiled to himself. The glass broke with a painful tinkle, and he could hear the dull thud of the rock as it hit the wooden flooring beyond.

The place was cold, dusty, and dim, but it was decidedly better than spending the night in the elements. Chris stepped past the cash register into the next room, and jumped and involuntary shriek of surprise rising from his throat. A butler, complete in tuxedo stood stock still in front of him, as if awaiting an order. The butler was obviously wax, and looking past him, Chris could see that the entire room was completely filled with wax figurines; Elvis and the beetles competed for swooning fans in one corner. John F. Kennedy, Lincoln and Washington stood against the far wall, making speeches for invisible voters. In the center seated around a small table, and holding cards were the most realistic wax figurines of the lot. There sat four cowboys playing cards, smokeless cigarettes and cigarillos hung limply from their lips. Their wild eyes stared suspiciously at the other players. Their clothes looked old and worn, and Chris suddenly realized that they were wax figures, but the clothes were really fabric. Looking at the poker players sent an odd tingling chill up his spine, and Chris turned away, surveying the rest of the room. Near the back was a staircase roped off with velvet, and a little sign, which read, “No Patrons Please, Private!” That looks promising he thought, and made his way towards it, passing crazy horse, pointing away defiantly, and Winston Churchill smoking a cigar on the way. The stairs were as dusty as everywhere else, and Chris thought no one had been in the museum in a very long time.

Chris lifted the velvet rope, and ducked under, making his way up the stairs slowly, suddenly apprehensive. At the top of the stairs was a wooden, unlocked door, he turned the handle and entered. It was a small, dusty studio apartment, with a single bed (that more closely resembled an army cot), and a tiny kitchen, containing a stove and oven, a mini fridge, and a few cramped cabinets. The bed had a worn, chewed but also thick woolen blanket, the color of tomato soup. Chris looked around the apartment, taking in the sparse scenery; at least he could survive here, if he had some food. Chris stepped further into the apartment, and saw a small wood burning stove beyond the foot of the bed, and a reasonable pile of wood, a very good thing to see. Opening the cabinets he found a box of matches, a pile of newspaper and a package stamped with the letters M. R. E. Chris shuddered a little involuntarily, a meal ready to eat, they were military rations, and they tasted awful, but they lasted forever and it could keep him alive until he could find help. Chris closed the door at the top of the stairs and started a fire. The place was soon fairly cozy and stretched out on the bed; lumpy pillow under his head Chris began to snooze. Suddenly he sat up bolt right, he had heard voices, voices from down stairs. Chris’ heart was suddenly hammering, panicked, what if it was the owners of this place…with a shotgun? Chris hurried to the stairs, but he could see no one below him but wax figurines. “Hello?” he yelled uncertainly, no answer, he called again, but still only the whistle of wind through the broken window replied. Chris cautiously searched the bottom floor, already missing the heat above. No one else seemed to be in the building, unless… unless he was made of wax.

The apartment was still warm, but the fire was dying, as Chris was loading more wood into the stove, something under the bed caught his eye. It was an empty, unlined book, all of the pages were as white and blank as the snow piling up outside. Chris flipped through the book, wishing he had a pencil, at least he could doodle, or write, or play TIC, TAC, TOE with himself to pass the time. Chris closed the book, and looked at the black cover, shining up at him, thinking of how the greatest ideas, maybe even the greatest things in the world could be put into a little book like the one he was holding.

Chris dropped the book to the floor and curled up in the bed, watching what little he could of the snowstorm outside through the frost shadowed glass. Soon enough Chris dozed off again, and again he thought he heard voices, but he didn’t wake up, and he was never sure if the voices were part of a dream or not. When Chris woke up again the snowstorm had edged away into irregular flurries of flakes, and the full moon was shining brightly from a circle of patchy clouds that surrounded it. The room he lay in was eerily bright, and dreamlike, but Chris was shivering, and he hurriedly started a new fire. As he was about to wrap the blanket tightly around him again, he saw that the door at the top of the landing was open. Chris frowned and shut the door, shivering and glancing down into the breathless dark below. The latch must be broke, he thought, hurrying back to the relative warmth of the bed next to the stove.

That night Chris’ dreams where painted a mind numbing white, accented by black shadows of night. The next morning was cold and bright; it was as if the world had been turned into a horrible black and white film outside of the door of the wax museum. Chris couldn’t make the front door budge more than an inch due to the enormous drifts of snow at the front of the store. He could climb out of the window though, being careful to not step wrong, and find a sharp piece of glass amidst the flakes. Looking both ways down the street, Chris saw a huddle of snow-rounded shapes that he made out to be buildings. The buildings were at most an eight of a mile away, but the wet and cold of the snow was already getting to Chris, and a huge burst of wind in the still early morning quickly drove him back inside. Hurrying upstairs he stood in front of the stove, warming himself, but his stomach growled fiercely, telling him he needed food, and if their wasn’t anymore here, it meant the buildings, four feet of snow or not.

A search of the entire building turned up one moldy package of crackers in the back of a cupboard, but nothing more. Wrapping the blanket around him, Chris bravely faced the snow outside. Trudging through the snow turned out to be much more tiring, and surprisingly hotter work than Chris anticipated, and the blanket more a burden than a help. Every step taken through the snow was like a hurdle, but the buildings loomed closer and closer, until he could recognize the first as a grocery store, through the plate glass window. The door of the grocery store was locked, Chris yelled for help, but the only reply was an ice sickle falling from the edge of the roof. Chris yelled again, shouting for anyone who could hear him, but if anyone could, they were resolutely ignoring him.

Looking in both directions, the man had no choice, he was in a survival situation, and again he resorted to a rock. Looking through the grocery store he briefly thought of staying there instead of the wax museum, but it lacked one thing: a heat source. Chris piled himself with bags of canned foods, a box of cereal, a few pots and spoons. It was hard for him to not notice the layer of dust on everything, and he just prayed that expiration dates were not rules set in stone. As a second thought, Chris also loaded a bag with travel blankets he found near the maps display. The bags made the work of getting back to the museum even more tiring, and warm, but he performed the task resolutely. Chris was in relatively good shape, and he was still under thirty-five, his body could handle the work. Looking at the small piece of town as he trudged back gave him an odd thought: this town was like the notebook, blank, no people, no color, just a blank town with nothing written in it.

Chris cooked a can of ravioli on top of the wood-burning stove, and quickly ate it, while some of it was still cold, and some pieces burnt his mouth, the food was never so well received as it was then. Chris realized only after he had eaten how scared of starving to death he had been, even more than freezing. Freezing takes only a few hours, much of that time spent in numb mindlessness; starvation was painful, and long, a drawn out and uncomfortable affair.

After eating there wasn’t much left to do, so Chris made his way back down into the museum, which was cold, but more interesting than the little apartment atop the stairs. The poker players seemed to captivate him the most, tough, wild old west cowboys playing a game of stakes. Such games could turn deadly at the drop of a hat, or so the movies tell us. Chris thought that the statues of the poker players were nearly perfect, cigarettes in hand, eyes staring intently at cards, hair matted and dirty beneath weather worn hats. Chris noticed something strange at the table though: one of the chairs was empty, this seemed to be an odd detail to the scene, why make an extra chair? The chair itself was indeed wax, so it must have been made specifically to sit empty.

Chris examined the rest of the museum, and even started talking for the statues; Lincoln gave a grand speech on snowstorms starting with, “My fellow Waxians…” Always the poker players in the middle drew Chris; they seemed somehow more real than anything else in the museum, more substantial than the rest.

There was no cell service in the wax museum, or on the snow filled street outside. Chris spent day after day entertaining himself as he could. It occurred to him that he should join the game of poker that looked so interesting, so he sat down.

Chris picked up the deck of cards, and was surprised that it was a real deck, and not one made of wax. Easier than making a fake deck of cards he thought. So he picked up a poker hand, then as a second thought, he pulled in a small pile of chips. Real chips too. This is stupid he thought. He threw down the cards and walked away from the table, why should he play a one person poker game? Eventually Chris came back to the table, he had nothing better to do, nothing at all.

From behind Chris’s hand of cards he thought he saw a quick movement, a jerk, a wink, something. Lowering his hand quickly he saw with nervous eyes what he knew must be there: Wax figures sitting at a table, frozen exactly as they were at a game of cards.

A small voice whispered from the back of Chris’s head though, Are they exactly as they were? They look positioned slightly differently. Chris ignored the voice, trying to concentrate on the meaningless cards in his hand but the voice persisted, Maybe they’re actually alive, maybe they’re ignoring you, secretly hating you like everyone. All the people you know put on these fake faces of wax, everyone you know pretends to be sociable, pretends to like you but secretly they hate you just like the guys at this table.

The voice had always been with Chris but usually it saved its whispers for long nights when he stared at the ceiling and quickly scurried away with the light of dawn. Now the nasty little voice in the back of Chris’s head was practically screaming, shouting for attention in broad daylight and there was nothing to distract him from it, no T.V. no radio, no Xbox. Chris threw the cards haphazardly on the table and quickly stomped up the stairs, his breath becoming frantic and rough. He didn’t look back at the card table but shut the door of his room and cried. Chris thought of his mother dying all alone miles from here, he thought of his wife kissing another man. Mostly what Chris thought of though was himself trapped in an expanse of killing, cold white. He sobbed thinking of the dead, cold figures below, figures like Neanderthals trapped in caves of ice and preserved for millennia.

Chris fell asleep against the door, tears drying on his shirt with his knees pulled to his chin. He awoke on the small cot of a bed to the dead, dry sound of laughter and the clunk of a shot glass. His frantic mind was confused, he thrashed out at the darkness around him, forgetting his surroundings and slipping towards the oblivion of madness, then suddenly his mind snapped into focus and he remembered where he was. He listened quietly, trying to slow his crazed breathing. Below he could hear coarse voices speaking coarse words, he couldn’t make out sentences or thoughts but he definitely could hear some words.

Then a shout directed up the stairs…up towards Chris. “Why don’t you come down and play you yellow, cowardly city slicker? There’s room for one more!”

Chris shivered, cowering beneath his blanket, his mind whizzed with dizzying emotions and insane thoughts. At least I know they’re insane thoughts; I can’t be too far gone, he told himself. Chris closed his eyes shut and covered his ears, this isn’t real, this isn’t real. The almost demanded attention though, becoming louder and more persistent. Finally Chris threw himself onto the balcony, eyes roving wildly. Below at the poker table the players all looked ghostly and reflectively in the dim moonlight, but they were visible enough. All the poker faces were turned to look directly up at Chris, but not a muscle moved, not an eyelash twitched. Chris screamed some incoherent howling gasp that brought him to his knees but the figures didn’t move; everything was silent except for Chris’s panting, choking breath. They were always positioned like that, they were always like that! Chris screamed to himself, but he didn’t really believe it. It was easier to tell himself that he imagined the whole thing once he was back under his blanket trying to fall asleep. Chris didn’t sleep much but the museum was as silent as a tomb for the remainder of the night.

Chris stumbled through the drifts of snow, climbing over it, crawling in it, pushing through it, panting, sweating; his hands red, raw and cold. He wanted to get away, to get away to anywhere but in the end he realized there was nowhere to go except back to the museum. When Chris finally gave up and turned around he had traveled an alarmingly short distance through the snow.

Chris paced and thought, but in jumbled confused phrases and images, nothing seemed clear to him anymore, everything was chaos. Finally Chris napped a little but the voices woke him again and this time everything seemed completely clear in his mind. Chris walked down the stairs towards the players as if he had done it many times before. These were no wax figures, these were his poker buddies. The cards were dealt quickly and expertly, the men laughing and talking with each other and Chris about women, guns and beer. Stories of waking up after binge drinking in Tijuana and bar fights in North Dakota were the fare of their talk. Chris laughed along and joined in with the flow of the conversation, making his own tales up when his life couldn’t compare with that of the others. Cards were dealt, chips bought and passed. It didn’t take Chris long before his few dollars were spent and his chips were down to nothing.

A man to his right said, “I’ll raise you ten and I call” Chris was sure of his hand this time with a full house but his money was all gone. He considered for a bit, “I have some more cash upstairs; I’ll get it if I lose. He looked around at his stone faced companions, they nodded in compliance.

Chris lowered his cards to the table and the man across from him laughed a deep throaty growl of a laugh, “looks like you owe me ten dollars son.”

Chris lurched up from the table, “um, I’ll go get that money” and hurried up the stairs, locking the door behind him in a panic, Oh God! Oh, God, Oh God, oh GOD! I don’t have the money, I don’t have the money and the way those guys were talking, they’d easily kill me for ten dollars!

Chris heard loud cursing from below, then stomping footsteps on the stairs, “I want my money you mother fucker!” There was pounding on the door, then a grunt and a large thud, the wooden door was beginning to crack and splinter. Chris had just enough time to pull open his window and fall Screaming and panting from his window into the white drifts below, he could hear the door banging and breaking behind him as he fell. Chris pushed himself up in the snow and tried to hurry over it, but he kept sinking to his waist in the piles of flakes. Suddenly there was a sharp pain in the left side of his chest and Chris collapsed, breathing out his last, tiny droplets of blood from his nose stained the snow crimson.

A Park ranger found Chris, a bloated body in a patch of melting snow, eyes frozen open and staring. The investigators found evidence that Chris had been staying at the wax museum; the strange thing was that he had jumped from his window with the door locked from the inside behind him. There was no trace of a struggle, just an empty wax museum centered with four poker players, cigarettes mashed out in an ash tray at the side of the table.

He had been in love once; he pondered this thought, the sound of slot machines hypnotic, his mind drifted away. He was a pale man standing alone at a bar at the end of a casino on the ground floor of a hotel. It was a large nameless hotel lost among the giants of the Luxor and the Tropicana, but it was still a large and very nice hotel. The man watched with blind eyes as men and women sat pulling the levers, watching the machines spin, waiting, waiting for riches so they could begin to live as they had always wanted to. The man leaned against the dark oak paneling of the bar and inhaled deeply on his cigarette, the smoke was tasteless, empty, without joy, but it passed the time. The man felt dead, cold and empty, and the shocking pallor of his face was a testament to this. The metallic ching, ching, ching, of gamblers continued on, but he didn’t even hear it. The man was fifty years and more than fifty miles away. He was on the beaches of some nameless European lake by some nameless European village, a quiet beautiful village in the moonlight. The tiled roofs glowed quietly the cobblestone streets glimmered; it was magical, especially standing on the shore of the lake watching a small rowboat bobbing off the end of the dock. Even then the man had considered his life a curse, he didn’t feel the beauty around him but rather saw it with cold mechanical eyes. He had stood at the end of the dock, his stomach full, and his mind full of thoughts of death, when he met her. She had seemed to float on the moonlight in her black dress, a beautiful specter of night. He had talked with her then as a man to a woman, she had been sweet, young, beautiful, sexy. He fell so deeply in love with her he forgot his own hates, his curse, he had forgotten for a while who he was, and she never knew. The nights had lasted forever, he would take her in the rowboat to the middle of the lake, and they would swim, the coolness of the water wonderful against the burning heat of their skin at night. He remembered sitting by candlelight on rose scented balconies, the gentle breeze rippling in her long black hair, and carrying her delicate laughter away. He remembered lying on grassy hills, starring at star-studded skies, and then looking into her eyes, and becoming so utterly lost. He remembered his lips forming the words, “I love you.” Had he really loved her? He questioned himself on this night after endless night, why then had he not given her the one thing to make it last forever? She could stand beside him still beautiful as ever, but he couldn’t do it, he couldn’t bring her into his damnable life so completely. Sometimes he wished he had done it, other times he knew he had done right. He knew his life would be lonely forever, and long ago he had stopped trying to find a love to replace hers. A high feminine voice interrupted his thoughts, “Were you waiting for us Babe?” He looked up startled, he’d almost forgotten about the call girls. Two beautiful girls stood there, girls in their early thirties, wearing tight dresses, one of them black and enticingly short, the other wore a red dress, slit to the waist, revealing a sliver of smooth, delicately beautiful flesh. Both dresses were cut low revealing the swell of bountiful breast. The man smiled slightly to himself, “Yes indeed I ordered you.” The blonde girl, who had addressed him, looked him over slightly, “Well do you want to do something with us first, or should we just head to your room?” The other girl with a beautiful head of long dark hair just stared on, unseeingly with deep brown eyes.

“Why don’t we just retire to the bedroom?” The man lead the two women to the elevator, and then to his suite on the third floor, but neither touched them or spoke to them until in the suite itself. There was a large entertaining room in the suite with a bar, kitchenette, sofa and a hot tub, but the man seemed to take little interest in these things, stopping only to offer the girls a drink of wine.

The blonde girl snorted a little, “No offense mister, but were not supposed to drink on the job, it can be dangerous.”

The man eyed her darkly, “No doubt, often women in your line of work are subject to drugging and other such mischief, but madam I can assure you there is nothing but the finest of drink in this bottle.”

The blonde smiled, half faked smile, half sneer, “No thanks anyway.” The other girl who had been silent until now, spoke softy, “I’ll take some sir.”

The man smiled thinly at her, and poured a glass for her, the blonde glared at her. After little ado when the two glasses of wine were finished the man told each of the girls to go into one of the two bedrooms and lay naked on the bed, he had lowered his voice as if a conspirator in a murderous plot, “I will take you one at a time.” The blonde had seemed about to protest, but he raised his hand the expression on his face cutting her short, “Please do exactly as I say, and you may earn a fair sized tip.”

The blonde bit her tongue, and walked quickly to the bedroom to the left. The girl with black hair, walked slowly towards her room, then looked seductively over her shoulder at him, her red dress dark in the dimness of the room, lit only by the street framed in the mirror three stories down. Both women shut their doors as he had told them, and for a small moment he was left alone, thinking, making his choice, although tonight it was a mercifully easy decision.

The man waited, waited until he knew that both women must be undressed. He walked to the center of the room, then turned left, and opened the door to see the slender form of the girl, her blonde hair sparkling in the moonlight mixed soothingly with neon. He touched her gently, letting his hand caress her neck, her breast…her legs. He lowered his head, his lips touching the graceful curve of her neck, his hand still now on her thigh. She gasped, a surprised, almost gurgling sound, then she gave herself over to him, and his icy hands. The other girl lay naked on the bed, nervous, hearing nothing, wondering why he was waiting so long, wondering if he had gone into Michelle (that was the blonde’s name) yet, and if so how it could be so deathly quiet, yet still she waited. The door opened slowly, quietly, she opened her mouth to speak, “Shhh” he quieted her. She lay still feeling the delicate warmth on his hand playing sensuously on her body, she felt herself become excited, despite herself. He whispered something in French, the words like delicate pastry on his lips. She wanted to ask the meaning of the words, but his eyes caught her, and she was powerless. He loved her like she had never been loved before, or since, later she found sex had become meaningless to her, nothing compared to that night. It was as if she could feel his incredible energetic life pulsing through ever part of him, and then through her like lightning. He was so warm, so full of life. For him it was a moment of humanity in his dark existence. He felt as though for a moment he could feel something slip teasingly through his fingers, when he thought he had lost it so completely, but he could never grasp it to keep it with him. The man loved her again and again, losing himself in the act, as she was lost, forgetting this was her job, that she was nothing but a prostitute; she was a lover now, and that was what mattered. He finished with her finally and she laid on the bed her naked form shaking with ecstasy, her breasts heaving, as she filled her lungs. Now he leaned over he carefully, and whispered in her ear, “You can wait for your friend in the lobby, I’m not finished with her.” Then he kissed her delicately, truly, not as a man kisses a prostitute, but a well loved wife.

She closed her eyes and sighed. The hall was lonely, and she now felt cold, even as the soft beads of sweat dried on her. The lobby was filled with voices, and sounds, cold metallic sounds, but it was no comfort to her, she stopped at the bar, and ordered a drink from a tall balding man wearing the green pants and black shirt of his uniform. The girl drank slowly, remembering again she was a prostitute, now feeling ashamed for letting her mind run away with her, for becoming attached. But the passion, she thought, she sat pondering, wondering, not realizing it had been an hour since she left the room, now two hours, not hearing the clicking machines slow and stop. She ran the fine golden chain the man had given her as a tip through her fingers. The metal was beautiful, but so cold. She didn’t even see when the very man she had slept with quickly and quietly made his way past her, accompanied by a bell hop pushing a rather large trunk on a cart. Time passed and soon she sat in a bleak white room, answering the same questions over and over, no she didn’t hear a name, again I told you it’s hard to remember any specific features, but he was tall, and handsome. The detective seemed frustrated, how could a man drain her co-workers blood from two holes in the neck, and her not know anything more about it then this? Again he questioned her, again he paced back and forth, he raised his voice in slight anger, he lowered his voice as if telling a secret, and still she remembered nothing. Another police officer took over, and the same thing again, they ran around in circles going over the same thing again and again. The hotel staff was of little more help, the bar tender said he didn’t remember much of the man except that he was a man, and admitted, he was looking more at the two prostitutes then the man himself. At the front desk the clerk said the man checked in only a couple hours after dark, and was sure he had signed the registry, but now not even a trace of the name was to be found. A dusting for fingerprints was fruitless, the prostitute’s fingerprints on the wineglass, the cleaning lady’s on the draperies, and the television, nothing else. Even the security cameras in the casino showed only a dark blob in generally blurry man shape, the police inspector had cursed the hotel for the faulty video, but the prostitutes showed up crystal clear. In the end it was just another case of a hooker murdered, not too many really cared in Las Vegas, and there was more important work for the police. On the last day of questioning the questions had grown frantic, and the interview long, the lovely dark haired prostitute was released to the early evening of Vegas, to begin her work… As the girl walked across the parking lot towards her car she saw a small swirl of fog around her ankles, seeming very out of place, and a gently breeze. The fog swirled up seeming to embrace her for a moment, and she felt almost as if she were in the man’s arms again, and then the breeze seemed to carry a name, a name lost to the voice, “Madeline.” Then the voice was gone, the fog carried away in the wind away from the hollow bright streets of meaningless Vegas, she touched the golden chain at her throat and shivered, better get back to work.