The Mile High Masquerade

They call it the Mile High City. A mile closer to God, and He still looks the other way. I stopped taking that as neglect a long time ago. I take it as permission.

 

Keep the postcards for the tourists. The Denver that matters doesn't show itself until the sun is down. The oil money built these towers and then went broke inside them, so now they stand empty — whole floors of dark glass, lit all night, nobody in them. Good. An empty building is a quiet place to do quiet work. East of the city there's a new airport that cost four billion dollars and can't open. Nothing in this town works anymore, and nothing is coming to fix it. Remember that. A city that can't take care of itself will never come looking for you.

 

The papers called last summer the Summer of Violence, like it was a thing that would end. It didn't. The northeast side buries its boys every week — kids killing kids over a street corner — and there's so much of it now that nobody's shocked anymore. They put metal detectors in the schools. Crack came through and stayed, and it left the streets full of exactly what a thing like me wants: people nobody counts. The addicts. The runaways. The ones with no one waiting up. When one of them turns up dead, the city writes down "overdose" or "exposure" and closes the file. I have never had to look far for supper here, and I have never once had to explain one.

 

You'll come to like it. They don't tell fledglings that, but they should. This is a city so busy dying that it will never hear you feeding. Every drunk in a doorway, every stranger walking home alone — that's a meal that doesn't know it's a meal yet. The living lock their doors against a danger that's already inside the walls, and you are the danger. That hunger that woke up the night your heart stopped will not fade and will not quiet, not in a year, not in a hundred. So feed it. Feed it here. You will not find easier ground.

 

But make no mistake: none of this belongs to you. Denver is one small holding in something much larger — the Camarilla, the Tower, older and colder than anything you can picture, its hand on every city worth having. Here that hand is the Prince, and he keeps the Masquerade nailed down because his betters, in cities you'll never see, told him to. A town that files its dead under gang and overdose suits him fine; it means no one looks twice at a body drained white in a stairwell. You are allowed to hunt here. That word matters. Allowed. It gets taken back the moment you become a problem, and then they leave what's left of you out for the sun.

 

And Denver — as rotten as it is — is the safe part. It's the part with lights on. The part that still pretends to be a city.

 

Past the foothills, that stops.

 

Drive up any canyon out of Denver and the Tower's reach ends behind you. The mountains never answered to a Prince and never will. They're full of dead towns — hundreds of them, whole cities the silver rush built in ten years and the crash of '93 killed in one, left to rot back into the pines with their old mine towers still standing on the ridgelines. The living say nothing's up there. They're wrong, and they're happier wrong. A ghost town is the one place left in this country where something can stop pretending to be human — and those mountains are full of things that stopped a long time ago. The starved. The mad. The buried. The truly old. They den up there in the dark, where no one enforces the law and no one bothers with the Masquerade, because there's nobody left alive to hide from. Whatever's up there doesn't kill to eat. It's long past needing to. It kills because it can, and because it's bored, and because you came.

 

Those peaks were old before the first prospector drove a claim stake into them. They're hollow now — dug out, emptied, worked down to nothing — and in a hundred years of taking, they've never given anything back. Some nights the wind comes down off them carrying something under the cold, something even the elders won't put a name to, and the oldest creatures in Elysium go quiet when it does. These are things that watched this whole state get carved out of stolen ground and burned into being, and never so much as looked up. And even they turn west, toward the dark, and wait for it to pass.

 

So stay down here, childe, where the lights are on and the city's noise covers your tracks.

 

Welcome to Denver. The city is ours.

 

Pray you never have a reason to leave it.