The door flung open and I stumbled into a barely lit area. It took me several steps before I realized that instead of exiting into the street, I had entered a dimly lit corridor.
I would have turned back, but I heard music (different from the song being played in the Coffin Club) pulsing from the other end. Perhaps it was coming from Jagger’s apartment—the very one he had shown me when I visited the club on my last trip. It would take only a moment for me to find out. A single overhead naked bulb lit the cryptic corridor, and graffiti lined the cement walls like an urban overpass. When I reached the end of the corridor, I discovered another smaller tunnellike path, with arched stone walls and a very narrow, steep staircase that plummeted into darkness. I let the rusty handrail go untouched and crept down the stairs. They led to a single wooden dungeon door. Written in bloodred spray-painted letters was: DEAD END.
Was this someone’s office? Or perhaps another entrance to the apartment Jagger had been living in?
I pressed my ear to the coffin-lid door. I could hear a mixture of music and voices.
I slowly turned the knob and pushed the door, but it wouldn’t budge. I heard some voices behind me and the sound of footsteps descending the stairs. It was a dead end—I had nowhere to go. I knew at any moment I might be kicked out of the club and perhaps Hipsterville altogether—if I lived to tell.
Two guys with the complexion of corpses, one blond, one redhead, confronted me. “Can’t get in?” the blond one asked.
“I forgot my key,” I said flippantly.
“It’s okay, I have mine.”
He unclipped a skeleton key swinging from a chain attached to his studded belt.
“Getting in is easy,” the blond said.
“That is, if you make it past Dragon,” his friend retorted.
“But getting out is harder,” the blond warned.
I didn’t know what lay on the other side or why a key was required to unlock the door. I’d also never heard of a guard shielding the inside of a door.
The coffin lid creaked open. We stepped into a dark and dingy foyer where we were greeted by a monstrous-looking bouncer the size of a small dinosaur. Black fabric hung behind him like at a car wash, blocking any view of what he was guarding.
The bouncer’s head was shaved, and inked on it was the head of a dragon, its reptilian wings breaking out of his white tank top and wrapping his Terminator biceps. I didn’t dare ask to see the bottom half of the fiery dragon.
The two corpselike guys showed him their keys, walked through a slit in the fabric, then disappeared.
“Where is yours?” he grumbled.
“He has it,” I said, pointing to the guy I’d followed in. “Please, they’re waiting for me.”
He paused, inspecting me to see if I was worthy of passing. I’d flashed him my best “Don’t make me ask to see the manager” face when the door opened again and a group of clubsters, draped in black and sporting white fangs, entered.
“Next time, keep it on you,” he said. “Otherwise you’ll be banned.”
I pushed through the fabric before Dragon changed his mind. What lay on the other side blew my mind—it was a massive underground tomb. An ancient-looking subterranean cemetery, with serpentine catacombs and graves dug out in the stone walls and dirt floors, like something unearthed on the History Channel. It was creepy, dark and dangerous. In the center, a sunken dance floor with a hard-rocking band played on a fluorescent-lit stage. Spray-painted in red on the wall behind the bandmates were the words THE DUNGEON with a pair of real shackles and chains hanging down. Suspended above was a candelabra chandelier where a disco ball might be. Surrounding the dance floor were hallowed tombs carved into the walls, like a skeletal morgue, and fifteen-foot-high stone archways leading to cavelike rooms. Where mummies would have been buried instead were live bodies, drinking, smoking, and making out. Each cave was lined with black or red velvet and had puffy leather couches with canoodling couples. More than a few entranceways spawned darkened tunnels, their destinations unknown from my vantage point. Some bore signs—THE EXECUTIONER’S LOUNGE, THE TORTURE CHAMBER, DRACULA’S DEN—while others remained bare like an unmarked grave.
As morbid as the buried club was, the clubsters themselves were stylishly ghoulish. The dancers were uniformly pale, blue lips covered with red gloss. The clubsters ranged in dress from goth to punk to gothic Lolitas. Each appeared to be more seductive than the next. The club’s stone walls dripped with danger, while its inhabitants oozed with sensuality. Though its existence and location were secretive and secluded, I’d stumbled upon a cryptically wicked party scene. This club was far more intimate and sinister than its sister club above.
And unlike the patrons upstairs, these ghost white clubsters appeared inviting. Guys and girls alike checked me out as I made my way through. Some stared at me as if they guessed I didn’t have a key to enter, while other oglers didn’t seem to care.
Guys were kissing girls’ necks, wrists, and every place with a prominent vein as the girls smiled back with delight.
This crowd was definitely a whole lot friendlier. “Hi. Want to dance?” A guy approached me as I was avoiding stepping into a grave, while another girl, her nose as long as a witch’s, just followed me. “I haven’t seen you around before. Are you single? I know the perfect guy for you.”
But instead of obliging them, I snuck up to the bar and hopped on a barstool.
A bartender, his hair flowing down to the dirt floor, set a black Dungeon bar napkin in front of me. “We have imports or domestic.”
“Uh…how about local?”
The bartender laughed. “It’s ladies’ night. Girls drink free.”
I was as thirsty as a bloodless vampire.
“In that case…something nonalcoholic.”
“Sure…why dilute it.”
He grabbed a vintage green bottle, poured its contents into a pewter glass, then pushed the drink to me.
The drink smelled peculiar. I was hoping it would taste like supersweet Kool-Aid, but it appeared to have the consistency of tomato juice.
I touched it with my finger and examined it closely.
Then I realized it was neither Kool-Aid nor tomato juice—it was blood.
Was this a mistake, or perhaps a practical joke?
“Can I get some water, too?” I asked, flagging him down.
“Don’t you like it?”
“It’s delicious,” I said, not wanting to draw attention to myself. “I’d like to finish it off with a glass of water.”
He placed another goblet next to my blood-filled one while I rubbed my hand with a bacterial wipe underneath the bar.
I smelled the new glass. Who knows—it could have been filled with whiskey. There wasn’t any noticeable scent, so I took a small sip. I was in luck. It was ordinary Hipsterville tap water. I guzzled it down, then placed a tip on the bar. I was getting ready to hop off the stool when someone put their hand on my shoulder.
A slender guy with a five o’clock shadow sat at the bar next to me. “Where are you from?”
I rolled my eyes and recoiled my shoulder from his hand.
“I don’t mean that as a pickup line; I really meant it—where are you from?”
“Are you taking a survey?”
“As a matter of fact…”
I didn’t feel like telling a stranger my personal address. It was enough that Jagger had followed me home from the Coffin Club last time I’d visited Hipsterville. I didn’t want Five O’clock Shadow showing up at my house, shaved or not.