Chapter 6

"Welcome back to the Great Style Show. I'm Rahul and we're about to take you into the country's first singles-only recreation center ... Sin City! Are you ready? I sure am! So to modify a very familiar phrase ... Khul Jaa Sin Sin!" He shouted the last four words to the towering wrought-iron gates like an invocation to a demoniac deity.

The TV camera panned away from the grinning veejay's face to the crowd of celebrities milling impatiently. A collective gasp went up as the massive gates began to open ponderously. Then, even before it could swing all the way open, the crowd began to stream inside the compound.

They flowed like refugees across a border, desperate to reach safety and a Scotch-and-soda! They were directed by uniformed ushers down a long alley framed by a black satin cloth runner on the left and the compound wall on the right.

The crowd turned a corner in the artificial avenue and stopped short, stunned. The gaudy fluorescent neon of an enormous sign was the first thing they saw. It blinked out the individual letters of the logo S I N C I T Y and the legend below: Be all you dare to be.

Below the neon sign was a wide stairway leading up to a mezzanine floor. At the top of the stairway were a series of gleaming wooden doors with little round portholes in them, like entrances in an old-fashioned cinema hall. A dozen ushers in smart gold-green-and-black jackets and trousers, both male and female, stood smiling to receive the guests.

A low hum rose from the crowd. At first it was incoherent, wordless. Then it formed itself into a single word, repeated over and over again like the hypnotic chant of a suicide cult.

"Party ... party ... party ... party ... party ... party!" they sang out, growing in intensity. And then, like a wave of night-black beetles on a pharoah's carcass, they surged forward, high heels clacking like mandibles on bone.