The Hollow Man
Norris hovered uncertainly at the edge of the dance floor. He wanted very badly to lose himself in that swaying, tangled forest of arms and legs, but every time he tried to move into a gap it magically closed up and he was once more barred from entering the holy circle. The dancers seemed to be possessed by a single consciousness one of whose imperatives was to exclude him at all costs.
After a while he gave up and looked for a vacant seat somewhere. The song wasn’t one of his favourites anyway - some gibberish about a motherfucker in a motorcade which, judging by the frequency with which it was played, was by somebody really well-known and important but not, of course, recognised by him. In any case, although he’d practised for hours in front of his bedroom mirror he had the uncomfortable feeling that when he danced he resembled nothing quite so much as a praying mantis in the grips of a terminal epileptic seizure - his arms and legs seemed to move to separate rhythms of their own, and more than once he’d flailed himself to the floor and into a painful entanglement with items of bedroom furniture.
While he was still looking for somewhere - anywhere - to sit, the track ended and something came on he did know, Darkseid’s reworking of ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ from the live album their record company had rushed out after old Todd Wotsisname had topped himself. He’d bought the album of course - everyone had bought it - but he’d hated it and had only ever listened to it out of a sense of duty. He took it as a definite sign from the gods that he ought to sit down and headed for the only vacant seat he could see, opposite a sprawling semi-collapsed form wearing a top hat that he recognised as he got nearer as - oh God! - Marty.
Oh well, he thought, at least Marty talks to me, and that’s more than anyone else around here does.
Mind you, Marty’s conversations tended to be haphazard, disjointed affairs, their content and structure determined by whichever component of his mix of recreational drugs happened to be at the forefront at the time.
"Hey, erm...", Marty said as Norris sat down.
"Norris."
"YEAH! MAURICE!" Marty almost bellowed, pronouncing it the French way. His eyes were wild and unfocused and his enthusiasm hinted at speed as being the current prevailing influence on his psyche.
"It’s Norris."
"What?"
"Never mind."
"Oh, okay. Say Murray, guess what I just saw!"
Norris was frankly surprised, given the state that he was in, that he was capable of seeing anything, but he took the bait anyway.
"What did you see?"
"What?"
"You said you saw something."
"Did I? Oh yeah! I saw a vampire, man!"
Oh Christ, thought Norris, not again! In the few weeks he’d been coming here he’d heard more than enough on the subject to last him a lifetime.
"No, really man, it’s true. Of course he didn’t look like a vampire, I mean no Christopher Lee type shit (Well, that makes him different from 90% of the people here, thought Norris sardonically), but I could TELL, man. He went up there."
He gestured upwards towards the first floor balcony.
Norris sighed, but he supposed any conversation was better than nothing.
"So what did he look like, Marty?" ... "Marty?" He saw that a downer of some kind in Marty’s Mix had kicked in and his chin was buried in his chest. A gentle snore escaped his lips.
Norris sighed again and studied the dance floor in the hope of seeing Snake. Snake was the reason he’d been coming here all these weeks. She worked at the boutique two doors down from the classical music store where he was employed as trainee manager, and from the first time he’d seen her he’d wanted her more than he’d ever wanted anything in his entire nineteen years of life. She was so different, so mysterious, so sexy, so cool. He loved the way she dressed - the black velvet, the silver jewellery, the corsets, the mini-skirts and fishnet tights - and the way she made up her face, and the way her long black hair so perfectly framed her pale, feline features, and...
Well, he’d long ago given up on trying to list everything about her which he found attractive. She was just the most exotic woman he’d ever encountered and he wanted her. He adored her. He worshipped her. He was obsessed with her.
He’d taken to trailing discreetly behind her at lunchtimes and eavesdropping on her conversations with the friends she met in the Yeoman’s Arms. He’d learned where she spent her Saturday nights and had begun work on the transformation which he hoped would in the end win her over. He’d spent a small fortune on black clothes and silver jewellery, had begun to grow his hair and - with more than a little regret - had swapped Vivaldi for Cradle of Filth.
At last he felt he was ready to brave whatever weirdness he might find in The Club and so, nervous and jittery, one Saturday night had found him here. That first night had been a disaster: he’d wandered around in a state of rootless confusion, trying to make sense of the milling chaos, growing ever more depressed by his inability to feel a part of the swirling madness that frothed and foamed around him. It had been Marty who’d saved him, who’d allowed him to begin to get a handle on what was going on around him.
Marty, of course, talked to anyone who would listen to him - indeed, he didn’t much care whether those he jabbered at were listening to him - and his palpable state of constant, extravagant intoxication allowed him to cross social boundaries in a way that others couldn’t, so that even those whom Norris came to dub The Cool Ones treated him with an amused and half-admiring tolerance.
And Marty was the one who clued Norris in to the fact that there were social strata here. Of course he didn’t treat Norris to a sociological dissertation, but he was able to glean enough from the three hours of verbal diarrhoea that flowed over him (Marty had clearly been consuming a seriously heavy stimulant) to begin to work it out for himself: Norris might be gauche but he was far from stupid.
At the bottom of the heap were people like Norris - wannabees - to whom nobody who was either cool, or who wanted to be cool, would be seen in anything other than accidental proximity. Above them were the bulk of those who came here: those who, for the most part, wanted to be cool but who didn’t quite make it. And above those were The Cool Ones, the aristocracy.
Snake, of course, was one of the Cool Ones and Norris was like a pane of glass through which she stared unseeing whenever he encountered her. The most he’d ever wrung out of her by his attempts to start a conversation had been a pained smile and a rapid retreat from him. Norris hadn’t even managed to strike up anything more than a nodding acquaintance with any of the other newbies who came in here - somehow even they seemed to recognise that he didn’t fit in. Probably even Marty recognised it but, let’s face it, Marty didn’t give a damn about anything that wasn’t psychoactive and ingestible.
Norris felt a wave of depression roll over him. He also felt a sudden urgent message from his bladder, which was demanding the release of the substantial amount of vodka he’d sucked down at home as a preparatory morale-booster before leaving for the club (And that had worked really well, hadn’t it?). He patted Marty gently on the top of his hat and headed for the toilets on the first floor.
***
The Gentlevamp’s Convenience (yes, a notice in blood-red, dripping script on the door declared it to be just that. Norris winced every time he saw it) was a dismal, dirty place that stank perpetually of urine and vomit. It was also, usually, crowded with clubbers chatting or adjusting their make-up in the mirrors over the cracked sinks, the constant babble of voices punctuated by the occasional raucous laugh or suspiciously loud sniff from one of the cubicles. But right now Norris appeared to have the place all to himself (Great. I’m driving people away even in here!).
He pissed energetically into one of the row of clogged urinals, trying to avoid the yellow pool that had gathered underneath them, and washed his hands with a slimy bar of soap as he stared sourly at his reflection in the mirror.
As he was doing so - wondering all the while if the soap wasn’t transferring more bacteria to his hands than it was removing - a voice from somewhere behind him said, in a conversational tone of voice:-
"Of course there are no such things as vampires really, but if you were to go looking for one then I guess I’m about the closest thing you’d find."
Norris almost shrieked, and the bar of soap shot out of his hands and ricocheted off the tiled wall, landing in the sink with a dull thud.
He turned round, his hands and knees shaking, to see a rather nondescript middle--aged man dressed in a dark business suit leaning nonchalantly against the wall.
"Christ! You nearly gave me a heart attack! I didn’t hear you come in."
He smiled. "Of course you didn’t. I was here all the time. My kind can be quite invisible when we choose to be you know."
Oh God, thought Norris, he’s a loony! He began edging towards the door, smiling in what he hoped was a friendly fashion, although the muscles around his mouth told him that they were fixed in a terrified rictus.
"And... And just what is your kind?" Norris asked, as he sidled.
"Oh, I don’t think we’ll go too deeply into that at the moment. It would take far too long to explain it and our time together is, alas, rather limited." He grinned at Norris, revealing a row of teeth which, although clearly strong and very white, were completely innocent of anything that might mark him out as a vampire.
By this time Norris had reached the door and he tugged at it frantically but uselessly.
"Tut! I’ve gone to a great deal of trouble to ensure that we won’t be disturbed, Norris, so the least that you can do is stay and hear me out." He gave him a disapproving, slightly hurt, look.
"Wha-wha-", babbled Norris. Then, as it hit him, "H-How did you know my name?"
"Oh, it’s just a minor talent of mine," - he grinned again - "but I find it’s a very effective way of getting people’s attention. It is, isn’t it?"
Norris nodded, lost for words.
"And do stop quaking. I’m not going to murder you. In fact I have a little proposition to make to you."
"Prop-proposition?"
"Yes, indeed. Tell me, Norris, what you want more than anything else in the world is to be cool enough to be impress Snake, isn’t it?"
"Well, yes." said Norris, who was puzzled by the trend of the conversation but who was at least temporarily reassured that his demise was not imminent.
"And you’ve tried wearing the right clothes and listening to the right music, and you’re still not cool. Isn’t that so?"
"Well, yes. I’ve really tried to fit in, but none of it works somehow."
"Exactly. Well, has it occurred to you that the problem isn’t so much what you do but what you are?"
Norris raised a quizzical eye-brow.
"What I mean is, being cool depends more on the absence of certain qualities than anything else. Marty called me a vampire, and in a way he was right, but what I extract from my - er - victims isn’t blood but just those human characteristics which are getting in the way of you achieving your ambition."
God, this guy’s a real nutcase, thought Norris, but how come he knows so much about me? In any case it can’t hurt to humour him, I guess.
"What qualities?"
"Oh, things like empathy, modesty, humility. Plus a large chunk of what you’d call conscience: all of it, in fact that isn’t there just for show. Come here, I want to show you something."
As Norris came towards him he turned to face the wall he’d been leaning against and muttered something he couldn’t catch. As he did so the wall seemed to dissolve like smoke, and Norris almost fell to his knees in shock.
"Jesus, you’re for real!" He was looking out over the balcony towards the dance floor below, watching the lights pulse and the dancers dance. He stretched out his hand and his fingertips touched the invisible, but solid, cracked plaster and stone that his companion had been leaning against seconds before.
"Oh yes, Norris, I’m for real alright, and the offer I’m making you is absolutely genuine too. But you have to know exactly what the nature of my ga- er, I mean, offer - is, and you have to accept it of your own free will. See old Marty down there?"
Marty had obviously recovered somewhat in the meantime and had made it to the dance floor where he was engaging in a shambling, spastic dance with some female in a black evening gown who was clearly almost as far gone in chemical incapacitation as he was.
"Old Marty has rather more of the qualities I’m talking about than most. It’s not a very comfortable way to be, which is why he’s busily shortening his life-span in a desperate attempt to numb himself."
"Poor Marty."
"Ah, pity. Well, that’s something that will have to go, too, along with its bigger sibling, compassion. Look at those you call the Cool Ones."
Norris followed his gesture and saw Snake and her friends in a busy knot at one side of the dance floor.
"I’m afraid there’s not much compassion for Marty - or anyone else - there. Some people would call them shallow, but I prefer the word 'hollow'. They’re skin-deep, Norris, a pretty but thin facade covering a large amount of not-very-much-at-all. Are you sure you want to be like them? It’s time to choose."
Norris looked again at Marty, and then at Snake, his head spinning with the force of his sudden desire. God, I want her, he thought, so very, very badly. Something inside him knew he was making a terrible mistake but his lips formed the words of their own accord:-
"Yes, yes please."
A strong arm spun him round to face the triumphant grin of the stranger, whose left hand shot out and, somehow, passed through his chest and into his body. Norris felt a wrench, something that felt more intense than - but akin to - the removal of a tooth under anaesthetic, and he immediately felt sharp.
"It’s time to go, Norris", said the stranger as he withdrew his closed fist.
"Oh yeah," mumbled Norris, wondering who this odd-looking dude was, "Nice talking to you."
He squared his shoulders - feeling more confident, more alive than he’d ever felt before - and headed for the dance floor.
***
Downstairs he strode purposefully towards the Cool Ones. He could feel his new-found confidence shining like a beacon as he went. Snake smiled at him as he approached, a puzzled expression of half-recognition surfacing on her face and then disappearing.
"Hi!" she said, and simpered at him.
God, he thought, what a bimbo. Sexy, though...
The newly hollow man smiled a shark’s smile back at her. Norris knew he was going to fit just fine in here...
***
The Stranger stood on the balcony and watched Norris’s progress with interest.
And Marty called me a vampire! He chuckled to himself.
He opened his fist and looked at the tiny, brilliantly-hued butterfly that twitched in the palm of his hand. He carefully placed it in the inside pocket of his jacket with all of the others, feeling them fluttering against his chest.
Not a bad haul for one night, he thought, and I’ve still got the West End clubs to do...
He smiled one last smile at Norris and Snake dancing together below him, and then he was gone.
After a while he gave up and looked for a vacant seat somewhere. The song wasn’t one of his favourites anyway - some gibberish about a motherfucker in a motorcade which, judging by the frequency with which it was played, was by somebody really well-known and important but not, of course, recognised by him. In any case, although he’d practised for hours in front of his bedroom mirror he had the uncomfortable feeling that when he danced he resembled nothing quite so much as a praying mantis in the grips of a terminal epileptic seizure - his arms and legs seemed to move to separate rhythms of their own, and more than once he’d flailed himself to the floor and into a painful entanglement with items of bedroom furniture.
While he was still looking for somewhere - anywhere - to sit, the track ended and something came on he did know, Darkseid’s reworking of ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ from the live album their record company had rushed out after old Todd Wotsisname had topped himself. He’d bought the album of course - everyone had bought it - but he’d hated it and had only ever listened to it out of a sense of duty. He took it as a definite sign from the gods that he ought to sit down and headed for the only vacant seat he could see, opposite a sprawling semi-collapsed form wearing a top hat that he recognised as he got nearer as - oh God! - Marty.
Oh well, he thought, at least Marty talks to me, and that’s more than anyone else around here does.
Mind you, Marty’s conversations tended to be haphazard, disjointed affairs, their content and structure determined by whichever component of his mix of recreational drugs happened to be at the forefront at the time.
"Hey, erm...", Marty said as Norris sat down.
"Norris."
"YEAH! MAURICE!" Marty almost bellowed, pronouncing it the French way. His eyes were wild and unfocused and his enthusiasm hinted at speed as being the current prevailing influence on his psyche.
"It’s Norris."
"What?"
"Never mind."
"Oh, okay. Say Murray, guess what I just saw!"
Norris was frankly surprised, given the state that he was in, that he was capable of seeing anything, but he took the bait anyway.
"What did you see?"
"What?"
"You said you saw something."
"Did I? Oh yeah! I saw a vampire, man!"
Oh Christ, thought Norris, not again! In the few weeks he’d been coming here he’d heard more than enough on the subject to last him a lifetime.
"No, really man, it’s true. Of course he didn’t look like a vampire, I mean no Christopher Lee type shit (Well, that makes him different from 90% of the people here, thought Norris sardonically), but I could TELL, man. He went up there."
He gestured upwards towards the first floor balcony.
Norris sighed, but he supposed any conversation was better than nothing.
"So what did he look like, Marty?" ... "Marty?" He saw that a downer of some kind in Marty’s Mix had kicked in and his chin was buried in his chest. A gentle snore escaped his lips.
Norris sighed again and studied the dance floor in the hope of seeing Snake. Snake was the reason he’d been coming here all these weeks. She worked at the boutique two doors down from the classical music store where he was employed as trainee manager, and from the first time he’d seen her he’d wanted her more than he’d ever wanted anything in his entire nineteen years of life. She was so different, so mysterious, so sexy, so cool. He loved the way she dressed - the black velvet, the silver jewellery, the corsets, the mini-skirts and fishnet tights - and the way she made up her face, and the way her long black hair so perfectly framed her pale, feline features, and...
Well, he’d long ago given up on trying to list everything about her which he found attractive. She was just the most exotic woman he’d ever encountered and he wanted her. He adored her. He worshipped her. He was obsessed with her.
He’d taken to trailing discreetly behind her at lunchtimes and eavesdropping on her conversations with the friends she met in the Yeoman’s Arms. He’d learned where she spent her Saturday nights and had begun work on the transformation which he hoped would in the end win her over. He’d spent a small fortune on black clothes and silver jewellery, had begun to grow his hair and - with more than a little regret - had swapped Vivaldi for Cradle of Filth.
At last he felt he was ready to brave whatever weirdness he might find in The Club and so, nervous and jittery, one Saturday night had found him here. That first night had been a disaster: he’d wandered around in a state of rootless confusion, trying to make sense of the milling chaos, growing ever more depressed by his inability to feel a part of the swirling madness that frothed and foamed around him. It had been Marty who’d saved him, who’d allowed him to begin to get a handle on what was going on around him.
Marty, of course, talked to anyone who would listen to him - indeed, he didn’t much care whether those he jabbered at were listening to him - and his palpable state of constant, extravagant intoxication allowed him to cross social boundaries in a way that others couldn’t, so that even those whom Norris came to dub The Cool Ones treated him with an amused and half-admiring tolerance.
And Marty was the one who clued Norris in to the fact that there were social strata here. Of course he didn’t treat Norris to a sociological dissertation, but he was able to glean enough from the three hours of verbal diarrhoea that flowed over him (Marty had clearly been consuming a seriously heavy stimulant) to begin to work it out for himself: Norris might be gauche but he was far from stupid.
At the bottom of the heap were people like Norris - wannabees - to whom nobody who was either cool, or who wanted to be cool, would be seen in anything other than accidental proximity. Above them were the bulk of those who came here: those who, for the most part, wanted to be cool but who didn’t quite make it. And above those were The Cool Ones, the aristocracy.
Snake, of course, was one of the Cool Ones and Norris was like a pane of glass through which she stared unseeing whenever he encountered her. The most he’d ever wrung out of her by his attempts to start a conversation had been a pained smile and a rapid retreat from him. Norris hadn’t even managed to strike up anything more than a nodding acquaintance with any of the other newbies who came in here - somehow even they seemed to recognise that he didn’t fit in. Probably even Marty recognised it but, let’s face it, Marty didn’t give a damn about anything that wasn’t psychoactive and ingestible.
Norris felt a wave of depression roll over him. He also felt a sudden urgent message from his bladder, which was demanding the release of the substantial amount of vodka he’d sucked down at home as a preparatory morale-booster before leaving for the club (And that had worked really well, hadn’t it?). He patted Marty gently on the top of his hat and headed for the toilets on the first floor.
***
The Gentlevamp’s Convenience (yes, a notice in blood-red, dripping script on the door declared it to be just that. Norris winced every time he saw it) was a dismal, dirty place that stank perpetually of urine and vomit. It was also, usually, crowded with clubbers chatting or adjusting their make-up in the mirrors over the cracked sinks, the constant babble of voices punctuated by the occasional raucous laugh or suspiciously loud sniff from one of the cubicles. But right now Norris appeared to have the place all to himself (Great. I’m driving people away even in here!).
He pissed energetically into one of the row of clogged urinals, trying to avoid the yellow pool that had gathered underneath them, and washed his hands with a slimy bar of soap as he stared sourly at his reflection in the mirror.
As he was doing so - wondering all the while if the soap wasn’t transferring more bacteria to his hands than it was removing - a voice from somewhere behind him said, in a conversational tone of voice:-
"Of course there are no such things as vampires really, but if you were to go looking for one then I guess I’m about the closest thing you’d find."
Norris almost shrieked, and the bar of soap shot out of his hands and ricocheted off the tiled wall, landing in the sink with a dull thud.
He turned round, his hands and knees shaking, to see a rather nondescript middle--aged man dressed in a dark business suit leaning nonchalantly against the wall.
"Christ! You nearly gave me a heart attack! I didn’t hear you come in."
He smiled. "Of course you didn’t. I was here all the time. My kind can be quite invisible when we choose to be you know."
Oh God, thought Norris, he’s a loony! He began edging towards the door, smiling in what he hoped was a friendly fashion, although the muscles around his mouth told him that they were fixed in a terrified rictus.
"And... And just what is your kind?" Norris asked, as he sidled.
"Oh, I don’t think we’ll go too deeply into that at the moment. It would take far too long to explain it and our time together is, alas, rather limited." He grinned at Norris, revealing a row of teeth which, although clearly strong and very white, were completely innocent of anything that might mark him out as a vampire.
By this time Norris had reached the door and he tugged at it frantically but uselessly.
"Tut! I’ve gone to a great deal of trouble to ensure that we won’t be disturbed, Norris, so the least that you can do is stay and hear me out." He gave him a disapproving, slightly hurt, look.
"Wha-wha-", babbled Norris. Then, as it hit him, "H-How did you know my name?"
"Oh, it’s just a minor talent of mine," - he grinned again - "but I find it’s a very effective way of getting people’s attention. It is, isn’t it?"
Norris nodded, lost for words.
"And do stop quaking. I’m not going to murder you. In fact I have a little proposition to make to you."
"Prop-proposition?"
"Yes, indeed. Tell me, Norris, what you want more than anything else in the world is to be cool enough to be impress Snake, isn’t it?"
"Well, yes." said Norris, who was puzzled by the trend of the conversation but who was at least temporarily reassured that his demise was not imminent.
"And you’ve tried wearing the right clothes and listening to the right music, and you’re still not cool. Isn’t that so?"
"Well, yes. I’ve really tried to fit in, but none of it works somehow."
"Exactly. Well, has it occurred to you that the problem isn’t so much what you do but what you are?"
Norris raised a quizzical eye-brow.
"What I mean is, being cool depends more on the absence of certain qualities than anything else. Marty called me a vampire, and in a way he was right, but what I extract from my - er - victims isn’t blood but just those human characteristics which are getting in the way of you achieving your ambition."
God, this guy’s a real nutcase, thought Norris, but how come he knows so much about me? In any case it can’t hurt to humour him, I guess.
"What qualities?"
"Oh, things like empathy, modesty, humility. Plus a large chunk of what you’d call conscience: all of it, in fact that isn’t there just for show. Come here, I want to show you something."
As Norris came towards him he turned to face the wall he’d been leaning against and muttered something he couldn’t catch. As he did so the wall seemed to dissolve like smoke, and Norris almost fell to his knees in shock.
"Jesus, you’re for real!" He was looking out over the balcony towards the dance floor below, watching the lights pulse and the dancers dance. He stretched out his hand and his fingertips touched the invisible, but solid, cracked plaster and stone that his companion had been leaning against seconds before.
"Oh yes, Norris, I’m for real alright, and the offer I’m making you is absolutely genuine too. But you have to know exactly what the nature of my ga- er, I mean, offer - is, and you have to accept it of your own free will. See old Marty down there?"
Marty had obviously recovered somewhat in the meantime and had made it to the dance floor where he was engaging in a shambling, spastic dance with some female in a black evening gown who was clearly almost as far gone in chemical incapacitation as he was.
"Old Marty has rather more of the qualities I’m talking about than most. It’s not a very comfortable way to be, which is why he’s busily shortening his life-span in a desperate attempt to numb himself."
"Poor Marty."
"Ah, pity. Well, that’s something that will have to go, too, along with its bigger sibling, compassion. Look at those you call the Cool Ones."
Norris followed his gesture and saw Snake and her friends in a busy knot at one side of the dance floor.
"I’m afraid there’s not much compassion for Marty - or anyone else - there. Some people would call them shallow, but I prefer the word 'hollow'. They’re skin-deep, Norris, a pretty but thin facade covering a large amount of not-very-much-at-all. Are you sure you want to be like them? It’s time to choose."
Norris looked again at Marty, and then at Snake, his head spinning with the force of his sudden desire. God, I want her, he thought, so very, very badly. Something inside him knew he was making a terrible mistake but his lips formed the words of their own accord:-
"Yes, yes please."
A strong arm spun him round to face the triumphant grin of the stranger, whose left hand shot out and, somehow, passed through his chest and into his body. Norris felt a wrench, something that felt more intense than - but akin to - the removal of a tooth under anaesthetic, and he immediately felt sharp.
"It’s time to go, Norris", said the stranger as he withdrew his closed fist.
"Oh yeah," mumbled Norris, wondering who this odd-looking dude was, "Nice talking to you."
He squared his shoulders - feeling more confident, more alive than he’d ever felt before - and headed for the dance floor.
***
Downstairs he strode purposefully towards the Cool Ones. He could feel his new-found confidence shining like a beacon as he went. Snake smiled at him as he approached, a puzzled expression of half-recognition surfacing on her face and then disappearing.
"Hi!" she said, and simpered at him.
God, he thought, what a bimbo. Sexy, though...
The newly hollow man smiled a shark’s smile back at her. Norris knew he was going to fit just fine in here...
***
The Stranger stood on the balcony and watched Norris’s progress with interest.
And Marty called me a vampire! He chuckled to himself.
He opened his fist and looked at the tiny, brilliantly-hued butterfly that twitched in the palm of his hand. He carefully placed it in the inside pocket of his jacket with all of the others, feeling them fluttering against his chest.
Not a bad haul for one night, he thought, and I’ve still got the West End clubs to do...
He smiled one last smile at Norris and Snake dancing together below him, and then he was gone.
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