She had stopped smiling.
Aghast, Frannie watched the slender finger turn deep pink, then red, then brown. She watched it bubble up, blacken and crisp until the smell of burning flesh made her start to gag. And still she couldn’t look away. At last, when there was nothing but a stump of charred and crusty bone, Randi dipped it into Frannie’s drink.
She heard it sizzle.
“See?” Randi repeated, thrusting her hand toward Frannie’s face and holding up her middle finger – unburned, all long and pink once more. “I’m flame-resistant, pain-resistant. Kind of immortal.” She dimpled once again. “And because of that, dear Frannie, I can arrange for you – sad old lady that you are – to have anything you want in the world. Love? Beauty? Youth? A man? All yours.” She put the finger in her mouth and sucked the Bloody off.
Frannie leaped to her feet with a speed that shocked her, and staggering, she vomited, splashing cheesy curds on the bar, the carpet, her shoes and, oh God, the trouser cuffs of the large man sitting to Randi’s left. He recoiled in instant revulsion, simultaneously spilling whatever it was he’d been drinking down the front of his yellow shirt.
“Shit! Watch it, will ya?” Livid, he jumped to his feet and turned furiously on Frannie, who was wiping at her sour mouth with the back of one hand while she cringed and tried to move away. But she backed instead into a second man who’d been handing beers around. Foam geysered from the glasses in his hands and drenched everyone in beer.
The men reacted with animal rage.
“Godammit!” yelled the beer guy, “Watch where you’re going, lady! What’s the matter with you, you dumb old cunt?”
Into Frannie’s head popped the idiotic thought that for the first time in decades, it seemed, men were actually noticing her.
Stammering and hoping to make it all right, she was still trying awkwardly to back away when she felt Randi just beside her. Randi had drawn herself up to her full, impressive, height, and before all their astonished eyes she’d turned fiery and potent and strong. Sparks flew from her body so that the group of furious men, frightened, shrank away. Randi leaned across Frannie, grabbed a thick handful of bar napkins, knelt, and began to mop up the mess. And as she kneeled there, expertly wiping the floor and their shoes, the globes of her perfect breasts dropped cleanly into the sling of her low-necked black tee. She held the pose for half a minute, then sat up on her knees and, looking amused, threw back her shoulders for the fullest effect, widened her emerald eyes and purred, in a darkly silken voice:
“I’m so sorry, gentlemen. I’m afraid my friend hasn’t been feeling very well this evening. She might even be coming down with something, um … preternatural. Please let me finish cleaning all this up and I’ll stand you all to a fresh round of drinks.”
They’d gathered about her, spellbound.
“Oh, please don’t bother,” Mr. Yellow Shirt murmured. “It’s all right. Really. No kidding.” Feeling behind himself for an empty stool, he dropped onto it hard.
“No, no, we’re fine,” they spoke over one another, childlike in their bedazzlement. “Let me help you up.” “Let me.” Elbowing and jostling each other out of the way, they competed to help the far-from-helpless Randi to her feet.
Arising gracefully all on her own, Randi bestowed her most brilliant smile on her worshippers and then, slipping her arm through Frannie’s, drew her away and through the crowd to a secluded booth, very far from the bar.
“I like to think of this as my office when I’m in town. It’s quieter here than it is over there. Not as dangerous, either!” Randi grinned. “Sit.”
Fighting nausea still, and stunned, Frannie bumped her way across a curiously patterned velvet seat and dropped her purse on a black-marble tabletop. The marble felt cool, and there was better light here, which felt fine. More than fine, because she needed light to study this person, this Randi; to examine her … flawlessness? What in God’s name was she?
But Randi had become her everyday self now, while beside her, Frannie felt she had transformed into someone tipsy and imbecilic.
And she’d been worrying about a lesbian pick-up.
“Want another drink?”
“Want”, not “would you like.” A sign.
“No,” she whispered, noting her drink was here on the tabletop. How had that happened? “This one will do.”
“So, what do you think, Frannie?” Randi asked companionably.
The woman could read her mind.
“What are you? A devil or something?” She tried for a smile. “I always thought the devil was a man.” She eyed the other woman apprehensively.
“Oh my God, how boring. No, I’m not the devil. I’m her gatekeeper. Her intermediary, you could call it.”
“Her? HER!” Frannie was startled. “And there’s a gate to Hell?” (How drunk am I, she wondered?) “Not a pearly one, I suppose.”
“Not remotely pearly. You were standing there this morning, in fact.”
Frannie had to struggle to remember where she’d been this morning.
“Oh, you mean The Hair House?” She pondered that for a moment. “You mean a beauty parlor is the door to Hell?”
“We like to call it a portal.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“Those of us who own Hair House franchises.”
“You mean there are more of you? Of them?”
“I mean there are hundreds, all over the world.”
“Oh my God!” she said, before catching herself. “Oh, I’m sorry!”
“You don’t have to be sorry. God knows all about us. We suspect she sometimes sends us clients.”
Was she having this conversation?
Surreptitiously, she glanced at Randi’s fingers again. All ten were intact.
“And who owns these places?”
“Just ordinary women like us. Like you and me.” Randi paused. “Or maybe, more like me. Women who longed to look like movie stars or celebrities. Women who were born quite plain, some of them. Or disfigured. Women who’d grown sick and old. Women who were unhappy with themselves.”
“And you are one of those?”
“I was.”
Was she actually taking this seriously? That had to have been a stupid magic trick and Randi, a crazy person. But somehow, she needed to hear more. So maybe she’d finish this drink. Or order another, because this drink had – oh, God – quenched that terrible finger.
“So how does it work?” she asked, hoping to sound convincingly interested. She didn’t want to make this madwoman mad.
“Well,” Randi began, looking pleased and settling in, “it’s fairly simple. In exchange for making us look like I do and/or making us immortal, Mrs. Andros, our founder, sets up a Hair House in a city that doesn’t have one. In return, we find her souls.”
Really? Frannie thought. That easy?
She studied Randi’s face in the half-light. The woman didn’t look delusional (whatever that looked like) and she’d explained the “arrangement” in such a casual way, as if she’d