Silent Screams - C. E. Lawrence [94]
“Trying to insult me!” she’d muttered as she picked at her salmon mousse. “She’ll be lucky to look half this good when she’s my age!”
“Well, you did ask her to guess,” Lee pointed out, but that didn’t pass muster either.
“I don’t care—it’s just rude, that’s what it is!” she insisted.
“Never mind, Mom. We all look the same to them,” Lee remarked, but the joke had gone so far over her head he could hear the rushing of wind as it passed.
He had left an especially big tip in case the girl had overheard anything his mother had said.
He looked over at Kylie, whose eyelids were sliding shut, her head resting against the windowpane, her breath forming a cold little spot of mist on the glass. She was a pretty child, with her father’s coloring—blue eyes and blond hair. He breathed a silent prayer for her safety to gods he didn’t believe in, an empty benediction without the power of faith behind it. Things that were mysterious in his childhood were mysterious to him still. Life’s big questions remained unanswered, and he had no faith that would ever change.
Chapter Forty-one
Kylie slept during most of the drive back to the city, but as they neared Jekyll and Hyde, she woke up and began craning her neck for a better look at the restaurant.
“There it is!” she shrieked as the car shot up Sixth Avenue.
Jekyll and Hyde was a theme restaurant aimed at out-of-towners and the Harry Potter crowd—seven- to twelve-year-olds. It occupied all four floors of a curiously stubby building on Sixth Avenue and Fifty-eighth Street, snuggled tightly between towering banks and office buildings. The ornate sign on the neo-Gothic façade was in crimson lettering dripping like spattered blood.
The Jekyll and Hyde Club
Actors roamed the restaurant’s four floors dressed in a variety of roles straight out of grade-B horror films—the mad scientist, vampiric hostess, dotty professor, lusty chambermaid—while grotesque statues of gargoyles and skeletons spoke and moved. The creepy portraits in ornate gilded frames lining the walls had eyes that really did follow you around the room.
As they walked toward the restaurant, Kylie bounced from foot to foot and chanted softly to herself. “Chicken nuggets, chicken nug-gets.”
Kylie adored fried chicken strips, but Lee’s mother refused to buy them for her, calling such food “rubbish.”
They stepped into the building and were absorbed into the heavy Gothic atmosphere of the restaurant. Red velvet wallpaper lined the walls, and thick Victorian drapes blocked out any shred of sunlight that might sneak in through the floor-to-ceiling French windows. The club was in a state of eternal twilight, with only the flickering of thin yellow flames from gaslights to illuminate the patrons as they wandered through the dim, spooky hallways.
A cadaverous actor dressed as a vampire met them at the door and escorted them up the stairs to the second floor. They were seated at a table in the corner, underneath a portrait in an ornate gilt frame. The face in the picture was of a middle-aged man with heavy features, and he wore a fur-lined red velvet cape and hat, suggesting a nineteenth-century courtier. The man’s eyes, under their heavy brows, actually moved. Lee supposed this was done by remote control. Perhaps there was one person on the staff whose job it was to move the eyes in the paintings. As he and Kylie sat down, he saw the eyes follow their movements.
Kylie saw it too. “Look!” she squealed. “He’s watching us!”
“Yes,” he replied, looking around the restaurant. He had the disquieting feeling that they were actually being watched. But the place was filled mostly with families, the children squirming in their chairs, watching the costumed staff work the room, weaving in and out of the tables as they chatted with customers.
Kylie nudged Lee in the ribs. “Here comes the professor.”
Lee