Lilith’s Dream: A Tale of the Vampire Life (19 page)

This was good, this was a relief.

And then she saw it. It wasn’t a clear print on top of hers, but rather two of her own prints that had been partly smudged away. Her stomach felt as if it would crawl up her esophagus. A flush went down her, and she knew that she was red from her forehead to her chest. Her breathing became harsh. “Don’t let them lock you up,” Sarah had told her. “Because starvation for us is worse than the worst hell they can imagine. Eventually, you cannot move. Your body digests everything but bone and skin. But your life, Leo, it will go on, even in the skeleton.”

She looked again at the smudges and knew, again, that they had been left by gloved fingers.

“Goddammit!” When she slammed the iron door, the clang echoed up through the house. She’d known it, oh, yes. She had smelled him out, the murderous bastard. He was right on top of her, just as she had suspected, breathing his vile breath down her neck. The bastard.

So, he’d be next. Fine. She’d take Paul Ward down. Son of a bitching bastard. She was a damn good hunter, the best there was. She probably should have done him a long time ago. But she’d thought, Leave him alone. Put him in the past. Miriam had loved him, and he had killed her and torn her baby from her. He was a monster. No other way to look at it.

She had better get him, or he would get her. If he’d really come in here and seen this furnace, then he suspected—or knew—something. She had to assume the worst: that he knew everything, and he would try to kill her.

What had she done to attract his attention? She thought for a moment. Another moment. She couldn’t know. Maybe the night cook was indeed the answer. Little bastard.

She’d been a fool to have that extra person on staff. She hardly ever ate anything anymore, anyway. She’d compulsively gobble egg rolls or peanut butter or suddenly want a Cornish game hen or some crazy thing like that. The hunger had turned her into a damn bulemic, that was the truth of it. She’d stuff herself with human food, then vomit it all up. The hell—her body kept sending these messages—“I’m starving, I need to eat lettuce, steak, peppermint candy, yogurt.” So she would eat and throw up and eat and throw up, especially at night, and that was why she had let that damn Chink spy into her life!

Okay, now, calm down. Take it easy here. You’re not in jail and you’re not dead, and this is for two reasons: first, he ain’t certain; second, he doesn’t know that you know. That’s your edge, and at all costs, you have to keep your edge. So, think. Think, woman!

She grabbed her bag, dragged out a cigarette, and lit it.

She returned to the door. Yeah, it was definite—a gloved hand had obliterated some of her prints. She looked around the room. The question of how he got in was the next one to answer.

Okay, lady, how? She strode into the old infirmary and turned on the light above the operating table. They’d had the sucker on this table, once. They should have opened up his guts and then brought him back to consciousness and let him smoke that particular pipe. Bastard.

He’d come in past the alarm system, which was still secure.

Oh, fuck. Now
think,
woman!

Conceivably, Paul Ward wouldn’t need to breach the alarm. No, there was another way into this place, as there was into any house owned by the Keepers. But a human being would never be able to find it—at least, not a normal human being.

Back in Paul’s ancestry, though, there was a Keeper, back hundreds of years ago when they had been trying to create a new species, a genetic mix of humans and themselves. The effort had collapsed in bloody failure, breeding a race of superintelligent humans that the Keepers could never allow to continue. All of the families of mixed blood had been killed. The way Miri told it, they had believed that the destruction of Ward’s father had ended that line, but it hadn’t. The boy had been mistakenly left alive.

His blood was what drew him irresistibly to Miri, what made him fall so crazily in love with her, what made her able to conceive a child by him.

Dr. Sarah had typed it: He was 16 percent Keeper, Paul Ward was. He had the intelligence and power of the master species, along with a huge dose of male aggression. She’d never met a Keeper male, but Miriam had told her that the gods Apollo and Amon-Ra were mythologized Keepers, which gave her some idea of just how powerful the genes Ward carried must be.

If he could detect Keeper sign, then this house would be wide open to him. He would have come in across the garden, moved some bricks near the fountain, and descended into the entrance tunnel, or even come up from the deeper tunnels that crisscrossed the city. She crossed the basement, ducking her head beneath the pristine, white-painted brick arches that held up the house. Then she descended the three steps into the corner where the tunnel door stood. It was made of ancient iron, Keeper iron. She wouldn’t go as far as a single step into the tunnels, no, never. Many Keepers had been incapacitated or destroyed in them, and what crawling, twilight horrors might remain of them now, she dared not imagine. Sarah had told her, “You must never let them touch you,
never.”

Sarah had herself been destroyed before she could explain what she’d meant. Leo had been left knowing only that the entrance to the tunnel must be kept locked at all times.

She put her bag down and took out the feather duster and the lycopodium-based powder. She dusted the door. Sure enough, there were the glove smears again, just slightly smudged where he had pushed at it.

She stared at them…and almost felt that she could hear him breathing off somewhere in the house. She looked outward through the infirmary, toward the dull light that filtered down from the high basement windows. How the stillness of this place oppressed her. She remembered the days of music, and thought sometimes that she wouldn’t mind all that much following Miri and Sarah into the twilight. But what was it like to be like that? Did you think? Get hungry? Did you hear or see?

Maybe she’d like it—the peace, the silence. But she didn’t really think so. What she thought was that it would be the most horrible, claustrophobic torture imaginable, and it terrified her beyond words.

Miri had assured her that the furnace burned away every trace of forensic evidence, that the heat it generated was almost that of an atomic fire. But Miri had lived halfway in the past. She could be dangerously overimpressed by what was now simple science, and Leo wasn’t at all sure that the eighteen hundred degrees that the furnace attained was enough.

She went up the iron circular stairway that came out in the pantry. There was a bottle of 1832 Napoleon standing on the sideboard. She yanked out the cork and drank from its lip. Her Keeper blood hadn’t ruined her taste for liquor and drugs, thank God. It had made her almost impervious to them, though. It took a lot, and she sucked back another big swallow, coughing away the fumes when she finished and wiping her lips.

Paul Ward: was he close by, watching her now? Could be…easily. She had come in by the front door, but now the idea of leaving that way made her gut churn cutting, bitter acid. No matter what she did, though, how could she ever hope to escape the man who had taken Miriam?

She went out the back door, into the concrete side yard. From here, she could see one end of the garden, with the hibernating roses along the north wall of the house.

She lingered there, if only because the spot was hidden and felt safe. She had to take a sort of journey. It was a long, strange journey into the life of a man, but it was urgently necessary if she was to be saved. She had to do what Miriam had not been able to do, nor any of the Keepers that Ward had so far confronted. She had to hunt the hunter, kill the killer. She went along the alley, to the high gate that prevented access from the street. Unlocking it with a key from her ring, she passed into Sutton Place. Now she was just another well-dressed woman on the sidewalk of the exclusive neighborhood.

She looked up and down, alert for any lingering figure. Then she went two doors down, crossed the street, and entered the Hildridge Apartments, which had doors both on Sutton Place and East Fifty-fifth Street. She went in one and out the other, looked back, and saw nothing unusual.

Her unpracticed eye failed to notice the almost motionless figure at the dead end of Fifty-fifth Street, aiming a small video camera at her. But she didn’t expect a woman. In her mind, Paul was the threat. She knew nothing of the life or feelings of a wife, or what she might do to protect her man.

M
achines screamed, men in overalls sent nets thundering down into the hold, and a cursing crew of loaders shoveled fish. The smells of fish blood and burning fuel and sweating workmen assaulted Lilith’s nostrils. She’d expelled Kurt during her ordeal, and she was absolutely famished. When humans came near her, it was all she could do not to leap out of her hiding place in the bilge and devour them in an instant.

To her great annoyance, she saw that the closest to her was a bearer of Searcher blood, which meant a miserable meal. The Searchers had been a great disappointment.

She’d lived then along the banks of a quiet inland sea, in a land of grasses and oaks, where lions roamed and the humans traveled in packs, gathering berries and roasting wild fowl. While there, she had heard of a remarkable event among the Egyptians, and traveled to see. They had become sun worshipers, following the idea of a clever pharaoh. This sun-worshiping group was of exceptional intelligence, being composed of the best of the Egyptian herd, the lords and scribes, and the cleverest of the priests. Lilith saw that they could be the beginning of a new evolutionary thread in human life.

Posing as a human, she had become Akhenaten’s wife, calling herself Nefertiti. As Nefertiti, she had contrived to gain power. Then she had secretly encouraged the return of the old Egyptian priesthood of Ra. The people of Akhenaten were expelled from the country, meaning that they became an isolated tribe, and absolutely devoted to their god…and their new, more accurate idea of god.

Under their leader Thutmose, they had gone into the Sinai, where she had bred and rebred them until they were truly brilliant, easily able to survive without Keeper shepherds. For two generations, they had been tested by being made to wander the desert. The survivors were the cleverest of all, and she had given them a land called Kana, populated by a ragtag of berry and rodent eaters. Sadly, though, theirs was a bitter blood, which she discovered when she ate Thutmose himself, who had been driven mad by all the adversity in the desert and come to espouse inconvenient ideas.

To this day, over all this vast gulf of years, the Searchers, now called Israelites, still remembered her by her name of Lilith, and told stories of the goddess who had given birth to demons on the shore of the Red Sea, known then as the Blood Sea.

The demons were merely the children of other Keepers. Even she did not know exactly where the Keepers had come from—where she herself had come from. Sometimes she thought they had fallen from the stars; at others, that they were part of the earth. But the Searchers were full of imagination. They filled every blank space in every story with an invention. And so she became an impertinent wife, then a night-hag wandering the world, ever on the hunt to drink the blood of children.

Ironically, she had done just that. All the Keepers had done it. Children were easy to capture, pleasant to eat, and the parents soon got over it.

For the most part, the Keepers were known to humans only in vague legends. The Searchers knew of Lilith, though, had known of her across many generations. To explain her apparent age to themselves, they theorized that she must have been the first wife of the first man. But since she now lived near the Blood Sea, she must have left him.

She had never been a wife. She loved the idea of being one, though—but not to one of these humans, and certainly not to one of her own spawn of keepers.

Now she was down here in this filth, naked and cowering, desperate for food, with only a bitter Searcher to eat. He spoke to the others in the guttural language called English. She’d been listening to this whorish polyglot ever since she got on the boat. It was far debased from the English she had learned in Cairo during the last century. Only the lowest of the low would jabber in such an argot, so at least she would not be hearing more, not in the magnificent city of palaces that stood just beyond the quay to which they had docked.

The Searcher had his back to her now. He was but three feet away. She could hear his blood racing. He was working hard. He was also, now, almost alone. Two of the other workers had climbed to the deck of the ship. He yelled, “Get ’em in, Rini.”

“You get that lift going,” the other man shouted back from above, and the Searcher pushed a round, black button. Cables tightened, and the fish, now gathered into a net, rose dripping out of the hold.

In that instant Lilith darted forward, grabbed the Searcher, locked onto his neck, and drained him dry. She practically gagged the blood back up, it was so foul, but she managed to control herself and toss the remnant, now nothing but a spider of narrow bones stretched with skin, into the dark bowels of the hold. She threw on the man’s overall and his hat and climbed the ladder to the deck. Behind her, she heard Rini call out, “Hey, Jew-boy, whaddaya gonna get, ham and eggs?”

She crossed the deck. “Hey, Jake,” somebody called. She waved vaguely, huddling under the hat. She strode down the gangplank and off into the teeming fish market, losing herself among the stalls, never stopping, looking for Keeper sign.

But the place was huge, it was completely confusing. “Hey, lady,” somebody said. She passed quickly on. She’d seen how easy it was to attract attention in Cairo, and she did not want to try to cope with another strange human community. Then, abruptly, she was in sunlight. She looked up a narrow street between two rising cliffs. The humans must have carved this whole place out of a gigantic rock. What patience it must have taken—and look, the street positively swarmed with vehicles and people. But there was a distinct order here, none of the madcap of Cairo’s streets. Still, though, the motors bleated at each other.

She looked up and down the street for sign, saw none. Usually, there would be some marks along the byways of a dockland. She went up the street, and soon found herself facing a wide stairway down. There was a sign on it in the Latin alphabet: “Fulton Street IND.” Along with it were other words. She decided that they were incantations and spells to protect those who descended into the underworld.

She went down. There was a female in a cage, sitting quietly. She was probably being punished for some infraction, going uncovered or some such. Women had originally covered their heads because they did the picking and the harvesting, and were thus out in the sun more than the men, who hid in shady brush to hunt. Why covering of the head had become a religious law for human women was a matter for scientists to debate.

She yanked the fisherman’s hat off her head and shook out her blond hair. If any approached her with a protest that she was uncovered, she’d suck them dry.

Another room, a sort of corridor, lay beyond a barrier. She peered over the barrier and saw that it was a tunnel. This was well. The Keepers would certainly have put sign in a tunnel.

She examined the barrier. It came up only to her waist, but the circular gates would not move when she pushed them. It was so low, its only purpose must be to keep out wandering animals, cattle and no doubt the odd lion. So she simply vaulted it.

Behind her, the woman in the cage began to chatter in English. She didn’t listen. The poor creature was probably praying to the grand goddess in the harbor, and very justifiably wondering why such a magnificent female deity would not help a woman in need. Apparently they still did not know that their deities were only stone and mortar, the poor creatures, and this despite thousands of years of the post-solar god YHWH.

A moment later, two males dressed in similar blue clothing came hurrying toward her. One of them was from the land of Punt or perhaps Nubia. The other one, quite pale, belonged to a northern tribe. “Slow down, sister,” the dark one called.

She’d listened to enough English to know that he was directing a threat toward her. But the exact context was elusive. “I am not your sister,” she shouted, her voice echoing up and down the tunnel.

The men ran faster, drew closer. She came to the end of the raised platform, jumped off, and went down into the body of the tunnel itself. Two bars of iron ran away into the distance. A third one, hidden under a wooden lip, followed them.

“Come on, lady, you don’t wanna do that.”

“Aw,
shit!”

She saw guns. She had not the slightest doubt that they intended to put her in the cage with the human female, no doubt for the absurd infraction of not having her head covered. She would not go in a cage. When she heard them scrambling down to the floor of what she had decided must be some sort of a mine, she ran faster.

From the distance ahead, there came a clanging noise. Soon, she saw two lights. A load of ore, and it wasn’t being drawn by donkeys. It was coming fast, and there was no obvious way to get around it. The two men were gaining on her.

“Get off the line, lady!”

“Come on, lady, we ain’t gonna hurtcha.”

“Jesus God, she stinks. Christ, I can smell her from here!”

Stinks. That, she understood. She’d learned all about it on the
Seven Stars.

The thing that had been in the distance was now close by. It began to bleat, signaling, she realized, that she must go to one side. She stepped up on the wooden bar that covered the third of the rails.

“Oh, Jesus, get offa there! Lady—”

She stepped back, then went into the farther side of the tunnel. The next moment, the machine with the lights went flashing past. The din was so amazingly loud that she screamed against it. The noise blanked her mind, blotted out her being. It was like death itself, this shrieking, ringing, roar.

As the thing passed, she saw in brightly lit windows a fantastic sight: human beings. Not ore, but people. There were masses of them, packed together more tightly than the fish in the hold of the boat had been, or the coach riders in Egypt. More incredibly, they were not suffering from the roar, but rather eating, staring at the same sort of paper flags she’d seen them carrying about in Cairo, or chatting amiably.

She stepped out onto the other rails, only to hear a huge blast of noise. She looked behind her, and found herself staring right into the lights of another of the machines. She stood, transfixed, as the man driving it stared down at her.

And then she did the only thing she could—she leaped forward and threw herself against the low wall on the far side. Here, the sound was more than sound, it was a pulsating thunder, the voice of a raging storm.

Then gone. And, before her eyes, a slender, perfectly straight line. She gasped, cried out. Her fingers scrabbled along the surface. Keeper sign!

“Okay, sister, it’s over.”

“Come on up. Here, hon, I’ll help you.”

She felt hands upon her, the hands of man. But she could also lay her hand on that line, could touch it three times just right…and roll.

“Holy shit!”

Then, muffled, “Beats fuckin’ all! What in fuck’s under there?”

There came hammering, but she wasn’t interested. This was a Keeper place in here, and those two creatures would not be able to enter it.

“Lady, are you okay?”

“It’s the electricals in there. Somethin’.”

She went on, moving slowly in the absolute darkness. She raised her hand to draw some light out of the ceiling, but when she rubbed, nothing glowed. So she had to go ahead in darkness. She drew air deep into her nose, but could smell no telltales. Behind her, quite far now, she heard the men still hammering and yelling, trying to break into the tunnel.

Her hand brushed something soft. She felt it again—a thick hanging of some kind. Why didn’t they have any light in here? What was the matter with these Keepers, that they would not provide even the minimal light that their eyes needed? Feeling along the cloth, she thought that it must be a curtain. She dropped to the floor, felt for the hem, found it, and lifted it.

There came a different scent now, something hard to define—mildew, certainly. But also something else—what? She went past the hanging, and dropped it behind her. This muffled the clamor being raised by her pursuers, who were now hollering like madmen and pounding on the wall. They had realized that they could not follow her, and they did not understand. Ahead, she smelled closeness, a smell of old cloth, and again, that indefinable odor. She also heard something. Was it the sound of somebody moving?

“I greet you,” she said in Prime.

No reply.

She waved her arms around…and struck something, which went over with a clatter. Feeling for it, she came to a familiar shape: the wax body of a candle. She took it in her hands, touching for the wick. But there was no wick. She squeezed it, then felt a harder area on it. She ran her finger along this ridge, trying to visualize what it might be. The base of the object was ragged and dry. There were places along the shaft where rats had gnawed at it. But they had not found it appetizing, apparently.

She noticed that it had curved slightly. Now, this was odd. It had a sort of animation of its own. She laid it in her palm. The slight tickling she felt told her that it was continuing to move. She picked it up, gingerly took it to her nose. There was a slight—very slight—smell of rot. She sniffed the ragged end.

She threw it and leaped up, flailing, struggling, trying to find her way in the blackness. But she could not find her way, and fell over something else, fell hard, landing on her back, hitting her head with a hard
crack
that left her momentarily stunned.