Lilith’s Dream: A Tale of the Vampire Life (23 page)

Every time she thought, on this dreadful journey, that she had seen the worst, worse seemed to appear. Those bodies still bore life, suffering when they were cut, feeling with a dim and anguished awareness that they were being slowly consumed.

She stepped into the light. “Allo,” she said.

The female jumped up, its gown glittering. It said, “What in fuck is
that?”

“I thought I smelled something,” one of the black-clad males muttered.

“I have a gun,” the boy said, hardly even glancing at her.

“Where’d you get that dress, lady?” a male said. “You look like—”

“Shut up,” the boy said. He came over to her. “Get outa my face,” he said softly. “I got a business here, you wanna buy in? Fuck, you smell like a pig.” He went back to the others, strolling, his hips waving, arrogance oozing out of him. He said, “’S jus’ some old tunnel rat. They come up inna here alla time.”

“Well, you oughta get a apartment.”

“I ain’t takin’ this stuff up. Jesus!”

“This stuff,” the girl said, her voice lilting with new youth. “This stuff, oh, ah, heeeyy! Oh, I sound
fabulous.”

Lilith stepped closer. The three well-dressed ones came to their feet. In a few minutes, they had shed years. It was the most unholy and revolting thing she had seen in all of her time on Earth.

She reached down and picked up the boy, who at once began struggling, his voice echoing in the filthy room. With a single, quick movement, she sucked him completely dry. Her action made no noise, but the speed with which his tissues dried out created a sound like the ripping of paper. The remnant sank down in the now-floppy clothing. She crushed it beneath her feet and went for the others.

They ran, their voices pealing out incoherent, shrieked babble. Never mind, they would not escape her. She raced forward, following them up a staircase and along a corridor, then up another, narrower stair.

At the top a door opened into a room lined with containers upon which were painted images of various human foods. She was running fast now, just dimly aware of passing through another room, lighted, very hot, in which there were bubbling cauldrons and men in tall white hats. But they were not cooking the flesh of Keepers. This was all ordinary human food, she could smell it.

She grabbed the female by the neck, staggered, and was carried forward by momentum through a door that swung back on itself by some uncanny means.

Human beings were everywhere. Dozens of them sat around low tables arranged with foods. Her three victims raced out into this crowd, tumbling tables and shouting. Surprise froze her. What was this place? She could not stand against so many. They were bound to kill her, and in just moments.

She turned to go back the way she had come, but the creatures in white were coming out of the swinging door carrying axes. Now she felt a shudder of fear. Was she to be trapped here? Was she to end up in one of their shameful, hidden pots?

With a snarl of rage, she dashed on, using her strength to knock down any human who came near her. She rushed through another door, then along a dim hallway that opened into another wide, glittering room. This was a palace, certainly, and all these creatures must be rulers. No wonder they wanted youth. All rulers wanted youth.

In the mirrored walls she could see herself, and was surprised that she appeared radically different from the human females. The clothing she wore was covered with lace, and draped about her like some sort of robe. By contrast, their clothing was svelte and close to the body. She recalled that the dresses of the Englishwomen in Cairo two hundred years ago had looked as hers did. Apparently the humans had changed the way their clothing looked. She must not forget that.

Voices were rising, there were screams, there were howled words. One of the men in the blue clothing appeared. She darted into a door and found herself on a stone staircase. She ran up it, heard voices below. “Stop,” one of them cried.

She went through another door. This hallway was very quiet. She ran along it, trying doors. On each, there were Arabic numerals—457, 459, 461—and then 463 started to come open. She threw herself inside, pushing the creature within backward so hard that it slammed against the far wall. It slumped, rendered senseless.

She was in a room, not large, dominated by a flat couch. There was a window, behind which humans sat speaking. Strangely, they did not react to her presence, but merely continued talking as if she was not noticeable to them. “What’s more, we see only double-digit growth on the horizon,” one of the creatures said to her.

“Excuse me,” she replied in her awkward English. At least this one didn’t run away. She dashed through the only other door, and was delighted to find a water room like the one on the
Seven Stars.
She stopped, listened. Without, there was only the jabbering of the man in the window. She went to the creature she had stunned. It was a female, wearing the correct clothing. She lifted it and stripped it. The clothing was in three layers and many parts, not simple and elegant like her own linen and silk, not complicated with lace and tassels like this awful thing she was wearing.

She dropped it off, went to the window, and peered in. Still, the creatures did not see her. “Allo,” she said to them. They continued their droning. She touched the window. It was of a heavy glass. Also, they seemed much smaller than human beings ought to be. Finally, she took a cloth from the couch and covered it. This was some sort of spell-driven thing. Magic had run mad among the humans. Everything was magic, from the wagons that rolled by themselves, to the ship the size of a pyramid, to this strange enchanted glass.

She had learned on the ship the trick of the drawing of water, and in a moment had a wondrous lot of it coming down upon her. She opened her mouth into it, let it pour in. It tasted less of chemicals than the ship’s water, and she enjoyed its coolness and sweetness. She watched the waste curling down the drain.

After a time, she came out, taking down from the wall a length of what felt like cotton and wrapping herself with it. Phials of unguents and fragrant oils lay about, but when she attempted to anoint her breasts from one of them, it left a slick material that got bubbles in it if she swept her hands through it. Finally, she went in the water again, and was slowly covered with bubbles. More of the filth that caked her came off, much more. She got the phial and poured it over her, wiping herself with her hands until her whole body was anointed with the golden ichor that became white bubbles when alchemized into the water.

Now her skin was rosy, and she smelled again like a maiden. She took the cloth to her and held it against her breasts, and gazed upon her own face in the mirror that covered an entire wall of the chamber.

Off in the distance, she heard the surging roar of man’s works. Behind her, the people in the strange window jabbered continuously. The human creature remained stunned on the floor.

Looking at herself, Lilith saw that she was comely indeed, with her soft lips and bright eyes. The years, she thought, will not bow the mother of the world.

But loneliness might. She went into the other room, sat upon one of the thickly built chairs, bent her head upon her hand, and remained there in silence, alone in the vastness of a world that was hers no longer. As she sat, the weight of her feeding made her want to sleep. She lay back on the chair, listening to the drone of the hypnotized people in the window. A careful look at the woman she had knocked out revealed that she would not come to for some hours.

Lilith thought to kill her. But no, not now, she couldn’t eat again so soon, and the blood would go dead. She’d sleep a while and make room, then tuck the creature in. It was thin, it wouldn’t provide much blood.

Blood. She was an eater of blood. She didn’t really remember why. Or, really, even where she had come from…except for this word
Eden,
that meant land of grain.

She closed her eyes. Off in the distance of her mind, she saw stone cottages clustering under broad trees, and heard the grinding of the grain.

Once, she had been an eater of grain…she had been so young….

“We need one innocent enough to do it well,” he had said, the one they called the boy master.

T
he only sound in the neat little apartment was the ticking of the wind-up alarm clock. Paul moved through the room, impressed with how his son had set the place up. Look at this neatly made bed, clean kitchen—he’d surely started out in good order. Maybe Paul shouldn’t have done what he’d done. But he had to have the boy back, there was just no other choice. Poor Ian had been so damn humiliated, and who could blame him? He knew that the drugs had been planted on him. But why, and by whom—those were things he would never know.

He unrolled the old map he had brought with him and tacked it to the wall. The pencil lines were a little faded, but still precise. It had been made many years ago by Charles Frater, one of his earliest team members. Given that Charlie had died creating this map, it should have been drafted in blood. As they had gone through the tunnel system, Charlie had worked out the details of every lair and run that he could find, assisted by what everybody considered Paul’s uncanny ability to see the vampires’ marks and signs.

When Charlie was killed, the Company had not offered a replacement. The Company never replaced anybody on Paul Ward’s team. Justin Turk, Briggsie’s predecessor, had put it pretty clearly: “We don’t kill people, Paul. Putting somebody on your project is a death sentence.”

“Goddammit!” They were damn well back, and he didn’t have shit to throw at them. Him and the woman he loved, and a few old guns.
“Goddammit!”

If she got killed, he would feel like he’d killed her, and that would never change.

He looked at the East Side tunnels. One communicated with the ruins of the unfinished Second Avenue Subway. The other angled west, then went up Sixth Avenue. That one they had named “Condo Row” because of all the lairs that lay along it. Thirty-four of them, as Paul remembered. The New York vampires had reacted pretty much the same way—when threatened, they had rushed to protect their possessions. There had been all sorts of things down there—Renoirs and gold coins and clothing and rare books, jewelry and watches, you name it.

Condo Row, which paralleled and snaked beneath the Sixth Avenue IND, had numerous entrances into the subbasements of midtown hotels and restaurants. Paul had once come up and found himself in the coat room at “21.” Other passages ended in seemingly inappropriate places, until you understood that they’d been created during the Prohibition era to open into the newly created basement speakeasys. The vampires had found it convenient to steal people out of places where they weren’t supposed to be. One branch had even gone into the pantry of Billy Rose’s Horseshoe Club, now a disused ruin in the basement of the Royalton Hotel. During its lifetime, no fewer than fourteen missing persons had either last been seen at the Horseshoe Club or had attended the club around the time they disappeared.

Who would ever have imagined that such a danger could lurk behind a cloakroom door, or around the corner from the famous horseshoe bar?

The other main tunnel, nicknamed the Sutton Place Express, led up along the East River. It communicated to ten or twelve escape hatches that opened into the river. Vampires were strong swimmers; they could stay underwater for an amazingly long time without becoming incapacitated. They would come up to the street out of their tunnels, take a victim, and fade back into the system, taking the remains with them. The bones would be crushed to splinters and tossed in the river.

The Miriam Blaylock house, radically different from the dirty lairs where most of the vampires lived, also communicated with the East Side tunnels. This was why they’d come to be called the Sutton Place Express by his team. It was into the East Side system that Blaylock had escaped on the day she’d almost succeeded in killing him in that house of hers.

Paul sat down with his gun. The big, highly specialized pistol was a dull, gleaming blue. It carried a twenty-bullet magazine, and the bullets were fat, mean magnums, capable of blowing a human—or vampire—head into four or five pieces upon impact. Three shots would tear a vampire to bits. The French had an even better weapon, but this would have to do. Paul dropped it into his underarm holster.

“Charlie was a hell of a draftsman.”

Paul turned. Becky was supposed to be in East Mill with their son. “Where’s Ian?”

“In his room with the door locked, feeling sorry for himself. He wasn’t doing X, by the way.”

“Momma believes.”

“He says the tab was dropped on him during the raid, and Momma does believe.”

“You know something, Momma? I believe him, too.”

She looked at him sharply. An instant later, realization dawned. “You bastard,” she said quietly.

“I had to!”

“You—” She stopped herself. Her eyes flashed with rage. But then she, also, saw the necessity.

“You did it before you knew about the new vampire.”

“I did it because I didn’t want him in the same damn city with Leo. The blood attracts, you know that.”

“Paul, you crushed him. You just plain crushed him.” She strode to the window. “Jesus, you are a piece of work.”

“It wasn’t even a real tab. When they tested it, he’d’ve been let go, even if he got sucked up in the system.”

“You had no damn right to do this! You and your damn cop friends. Jesus Christ, you just cut the kid’s heart out!”

“He’s up at home instead of down here with these damn vampires, and I don’t happen to think I cut his heart out at all. I think I saved his life.”

She hated it, he could see it in her face. But she was also grateful. He could see that, too.

He pressed his advantage. “What would we have done? ‘Hey, Ian, there’s a big old vampire here in New York, and if you see it, you’re gonna fall in love, and ain’t that just dandy? Bullshit, Becky. Bullshit! I did the right thing.”

Her silence was blue with rage. But she swallowed it. What other choice did she have? “Okay.”

“So now I’m gonna go in there”—he indicated the tunnels—“and I’m gonna repeat the sterilization protocol.” He hauled out his gun, slapped it against his palm.

“You’re not going in there alone.”

“I am.”

“That vampire is going to be desperate and well aware of the danger.”

He shrugged. “I’m gonna be just as well aware.”

“Paul, you stay out of there.”

He loved her. But he would not do that. “Unless I destroy that animal, people are going to start disappearing again. Maybe it’ll be somebody’s kid—a kid like Ian, out to have a good time. He takes a shortcut down a side street, and Mom and Dad spend the rest of their lives waiting. Or a father—some night watchman from the Dominican Republic, got three kids and a wife in Bushwick, he evaporates into thin air.”

“Like your dad.”

“And his wife and his kids are sent to hell, and they didn’t do a damn thing to deserve it!”

“Just like you and your mom were. Paul, I love you, and I respect your motives immensely. With all my soul. But you are NOT going down there, because you cannot go up against a vampire alone and win, and you know that, and I know that, and I am not going to lose you.”

“I have a sworn duty.”

“What about your duty to me? Your
sworn
duty? Or to your son—the duty to that wild blood you two have lurking in your damn veins?”

He gazed at her, his brilliant eyes telling her that he thought he would checkmate the monster that was down there. “The way I figure it, the thing’s gonna spend a day or so exploring. It’s going to find all the vampire remains down there and get real worried. It’ll hole up in some dark corner.”

“This thing came from God only knows where, when we thought they were all gone. Extinct. But here it is, one hell of a survivor, you ask me. It doesn’t seem like the holing-up kind.”

“It came from Cairo.”

“You know that for certain?”

“A trail goes cold there, picks up here ten days later. Bocage has it pegged as a female, about five-eight, blond, blue-eyed. Also weak on street smarts. It lived somewhere in the desert, all right.”

“Feeding on what?”

“There are people in the desert. Bedouins.”

“Too noticeable.”

“It’s a wanderer. That’s why we’ve never caught it. It stayed ahead of us.”

“Paul, have you ever considered that it’s surviving because it’s better than the others? It knows we’re here. This public kill is bait on a hook.”

“That had occurred to me.”

“No vampire would do a kill like that and not hide the remnant, not unless it was stupid, and they don’t come that way, or it was inexperienced, and this thing is probably thousands of years old, or it had another purpose altogether. And Paul, I’ll tell you right now what that purpose is, because I know. That purpose is you.”

“Becky, I’m going down there, and you aren’t. That’s the beginning and end of it. I’m doing a recce from Sutton Place to Fulton Street, then working my way up Condo Row all the way to the end. If I don’t have an encounter, good. I’ll find another way. If I do catch up with it, even better. We can send the damn skin to Briggs.”

“That’d be a masterstroke of diplomacy.”

He closed his jacket. He was going. He was doing it right now.

She backed toward the door, staying in front of him. You never gave up your ground, not if you wanted to win a confrontation with Paul Ward. “I’m going to cover your back,” she said carefully, putting as much force into her voice as there was.

He tried to get around her.

She stayed in front of him. Just. “We never defeated one of them if it was ready for us. Not one.”

“Miriam Blaylock was ready for us.”

“She died to save her baby.”

“By getting herself killed? I doubt it.”

“By surrendering to his father! She knew what you’d do.”

A long silence.

“And you brought home a wonderful son! Please, Paul, we need you. Especially your son. You’re the only person in the world remotely like him. He’s going to have to learn to control one hell of a powerful and very alien personality. I can already see it growing in him, Paul. He’s struggling with some amazing demons, and if you aren’t there to help him make it, he isn’t going to make it.”

Now he would push her aside. He would be gentle, but there would be no point in resisting. The hard eyes glittered. “If we both go down there, he could lose us both.”

“You admit it. You’re risking death. What if you die, and the vampire doesn’t?”

“You’re next.”

“Back to back, we have the best chance. One by one, we are defeated in detail. If we’re going to survive, we have to do this together. If it can get you, it can sure as hell get me. You know that as well as I do.”

“There is no other way!”

“We’re going in together.”

“And Ian?”

“Maybe he gets us both back, and maybe just one. But we win down there, if we go in together, and you know that’s the truth.”

“I know I can do this vampire.”

“And I agree! With me rearguarding you.”

Long sigh. Cold, steady look. Admission that she was right, expressed as a slight softening in the corners of the eyes.

The best place to enter the tunnels would be the Blaylock garden, but that wasn’t a real good idea. They had to do it from an unexpected point, somewhere that the vampire wasn’t likely to be waiting for them.

“I’m planning to go in through the subbasement of the Royalton.”

“I know the location. We got a family of five down in there.”

“Five,” he said in a hollow voice.

They took a cab up to the hotel, entered the lobby. The Royalton was high Manhattan glitz above ground, but its basement was a very different matter. Billy Rose had built the Horseshoe Bar in the 1930s. The place had served everybody from Eleanor Roosevelt to Frank Sinatra’s Rat Pack. It had been closed down in the 1950s.

They had found it by accident, going up one of the tightly wound staircases the vampires used to access their grab stations. Instead of emerging into some basement that used to be a speakeasy, they had ended up in this wonderful, ruined room.

“Should we involve the manager?”

“Why?”

“He’s gonna get told that we went through. What if he calls the cops?”

In a few moments, they were sitting in the office of Gene Forrest, general manager of the hotel. Forrest was both carefully and casually dressed. He looked exactly like he belonged at the ultra-cool Royalton. Paul showed him an artificial credential.

“Office of Environmental Analysis? I’m not familiar.”

“We’re planning a rodent sweep.”

“We don’t have rodents.”

“There’s a space under your subbasement that does.”

“There’s that old bar down there. But it’s sealed.”

Paul nodded. “If it isn’t, we’ll seal it. Just want to let you know we’re going to be doing a little testing down there.”

“We had some guests go down there the other night. Drunk. One of them was in costume.”

Becky could feel Paul’s tension rise. It didn’t sound like it meant anything, but maybe it did.

“Do your guests often go down there?”