Lilith’s Dream: A Tale of the Vampire Life (24 page)

“God, no. They had to get keys. How they did it, we don’t know. We’re still investigating.”

“You got their names?”

“They were dinner guests, unfortunately.”

“They made a reservation?”

“The Smiths.”

“What exactly happened?”

“They were first noticed when they burst out into the kitchen, screaming.”

“From below?”

“Four of them. Nobody had seen them go down, so the staff were quite surprised. One of the women was dressed like Sarah Bernhardt or somebody. A turn-of-the-century ball gown.”

“Did you see them?”

“Actually, yes. I stayed on that evening. We had an important table. Catherine Deneuve, with four guests. Lovely, lovely woman. I wanted it all to be absolutely wonderful. But then this group—I hadn’t noticed them when they were at their table—suddenly they burst into the dining room. They actually turned over tables. It was fantastic. A disaster.”

“You called the police?”

“Immediately. We had an officer here in about three minutes. Plus our own security people. But they were already gone.”

“All four of them were gone?”

He nodded.

Paul sighed. “We’d like to do our survey, anyway. We’ll be down there for about an hour.”

The manager had become so tense, he seemed almost coiled, his face compressed. “You’re not that.” He gestured toward the fake ID card.

Paul remained silent.

“Is there some kind of drug operation going on down there? I’ve always hated that place. We keep it locked. We don’t know how they got in.”

“We’re not cops. The hotel isn’t going to be raided.”

“It was horrible. They were horrible.”

“Yes, I’m sure they were.”

They went down through the hotel’s glittering, shadowy dining room and its pristine kitchens, then down through the pantries and the storage basement. The manager showed them a steel door, securely locked. He took out a key and opened it.

“Can we take that?”

“Of course.” He handed them the key. “But lock it behind you. We never leave it open. Ever.”

“You’ve had trouble?”

“I don’t like it down there. I’m going to have this door sealed. Absolutely. I’m walling it up.”

“That’s a good idea, mister. A very good idea.”

They went through into the darkness of a cave.

“Why are we here?” Becky asked. “The vampire’s probably gone.”

“We’ll see.”

Paul opened his briefcase, which contained an array of compact but powerful devices. They strapped new light-amplifying equipment on their faces. This system bled out tiny quantities of infrared light to compensate in areas where the darkness was complete. They put on their overshoes, specially designed with wide, hollow rubber soles to minimize sound. Neither of them spoke. They didn’t need to. All the old training and familiarity had returned the moment they got into this place.

Becky shone her light around the large, low space. There were chairs jumbled against one wall, a broad floor, and a small stage. The famous bar dominated the room.

Paul said, “What the shit?” He vaulted the bar with the ease of a powerful athlete, landing behind it without a sound. He was looking down at a body. There were things running on the dead skin. The one visible eye was heavily involved with insects.

Becky saw gray hair, wrinkles. “It’s an old man.” But he was wearing the T-shirt and sneakers of a kid.

“We don’t know what it is, Becky.”

She gasped when she saw, in the zinc ice chests under the bar, legs and arms stacked as neatly as cordwood. “Oh, God, Paul.”

There was a can of Sterno and a little griddle. A spilled saucepan lay on its side nearby. Bits of gray material were scattered around it on the floor. They looked organic, but the insects weren’t bothering them.

Paul squatted. He remained there for a long moment. Then he stood up. “He was eating the remains of the vampires we killed here.”

“Jesus. And somebody broke his neck.”

“The vampire.”

“What would happen if you ate them? Would you become young?”

“Sure, for a while. Be my guess.”

“That explains the clothes. He was living as a boy. The corpse returned to its real age after he died.”

Paul went to the far back of the room, into the club’s old kitchen. He felt along a wall in the liquor safe. She saw his hand move slightly, watched the darkness thicken as the concealed door he was looking for slid open. She gave him some light. The blackness in the tunnel beyond seemed to absorb the beam, to suck the life right out of it.

She had the urge to take out her cell phone and call Ian. They might be in here for hours, maybe all night. He would be frantic.

“Paul, I want to know something. I want to know why you came here to this specific place.”

He slowly turned. In the powerful beam of her flashlight, his face was shockingly changed, the skin powder-white, the blue eyes like glass. The lips were set hard and straight. He lifted his hand, waved it past his eyes.

She moved the light. “Sorry.”

He stared down into the dark of the tunnel.

“Paul, what I want to know is, why are we here? How did you know to come here in the first place?”

He came toward her, three steps. There was in the movement a quickness that made her see what he normally hid, and hid well—the thing about him that was so very different—the sense of an alien presence that lingered about him like smoke; the animal that peered from behind those slow eyes of his. “I just know,” he said. “It’s the way I am.”

“You deduced it. Hit it right on the button.”

“We’ve got a lot of work to do, and no time.”

“Can I call Ian first? I’ve still got a little signal here. But down below—”

“We’re not going down there.”

“So it’s out?”

“It’s out.”

It was loose in the city.

*   *   *

Leo was crying, and she couldn’t stop crying because the flashlight was getting dimmer and dimmer and she couldn’t find her way and she had been a damned fool to come down here in the first place. What had she been thinking, that she could guide some vampire up to the surface and take care of him and maybe there would be love? Is that what she’d been thinking? Because now that seemed like a very stupid thing to be concerned about, especially when she was going to be onstage in a few hours. If.

The truth was, she hadn’t been thinking at all, she’d been acting on impulse, doing just what she wanted to do in that particular moment. That was why she’d let Miri blood her, because it had been a sensational experience, the combination of being totally surrendered to Miri, feeling the boiling cold of Miri’s life force going through her veins and making her heart race so fast it seemed about to explode, and feeling like she was going to become eternal and powerful and just as incredibly glamorous and wonderful as Miri.

This was the same kind of decision—impulsive, crazy, and wrong. The thing that she could never understand about herself was why she would suddenly do something like this. She didn’t lead her life this way. Absolutely not. She led her life like a marine drill sergeant with a chess pro override. You don’t become a superstar any other way. It’s never a damn accident. So why was she here? What was driving her?

“Help! Help me!”

Her cries echoed away into the distance. She’d been blundering along this messy tunnel for a long time now, dodging pipes and sagging wires and rusty machinery. There were rats literally everywhere, a whole city of rats that must be going up at night and feeding on garbage, then coming down here during the day. They were big, fearless, inquisitive rats. They weren’t particularly aggressive or anything, but their casually interested stares left no doubt about what would happen to her when her light went out.

“Help! Help me!”

The echo called back to her, of that voice of mixed youthfulness and age that had made her so famous. What damn difference did it make now? All that fame and money and her eternal youth were just generally worthless here.

Her flashlight finally did what it had wanted to from the beginning—it went out. She shook it. Nothing. She burst into tears. Standing in the middle of this dark and treacherous place, hugging herself, cold and completely helpless, she cried like people must cry on the night before execution. She cried for a long time, bitterly and angrily, until there was nothing left but snuffling and choking.

When she stopped, she heard a sound at her feet. It was close, a sort of frantic sputtering noise. But what was it?

A pain shot up her right leg. Instinct caused her to slap at it, and her hand encountered rough fur.

It was rats, rats all around her and now nipping at her, trying to draw blood so that they could get more.

Her hands shaking so much she could hardly control them, she got the gun out. Holding as far from her as she could, she fired it.

The roar was mind boggling, it made her scream, it made her ears ring, but what she saw in the flash made her whole heart and soul howl with sheer, blinding terror, because it was a seething, tumbling, circus of rats.

She fired. Again. Again. Again. And in each flash she saw them, she saw them turning tail and running. Fired. Fired. And then it was clear. No more rats.

Kicking, shrieking at the darkness, she moved slowly along. She waved her hands in front of her, fighting the persistent sensation that they were going to drop down on her from above.

“Help! Help me, please!”

Another sharp, twisting pain in the fat of her calf. She swung around, fired again—and they were back, a stormy gray ocean of them swarming toward her in the flash. Again she fired. Again. They kept coming. Again, again, again,
click click clickclickclick
.

She hurled the empty gun at them and tried to run, shuffling along, scuttling, waving her hands in front of her. She gagged, retching up the acid that was making her stomach twist itself into burning knots.

She fell, crashing to the floor with a dry, scraping thud. They seethed over her, covering her in an instant.

What would happen? Would she die, or would she become part of them, of their stomach and their shit—what would happen?

She clawed her way to her feet, dragging them off her like leeches in the Congo, bellowing like a wounded heifer, begging God for deliverance.

Then she remembered something. She thrust her hand into her pocket, and there it was, the lighter she’d taken from George back in the limo. Crying, screaming in her throat, she pulled the little Bic out and raised it high and lit it, grotesquely mocking Lady Liberty out there in the free air of the harbor.

The rats didn’t like that, not really. But they sniffed into the pool of light. They would get used to it.

Bending low, she thrust the flame at them, screaming as she did so like a Valkyrie…a very scared Valkyrie.

Then she felt something, a new sensation. It was deep under her feet, a throbbing that came and went. She moved a bit more, going toward a pile of debris that choked the tunnel ahead. As she was walking, she felt the throbbing again. It had a rhythm to it, and she thought she knew what that rhythm was: she was hearing a subway.

Everybody knew about the old Second Avenue Line, which had been abandoned and left unfinished back in the 1970s or ’80s. Somewhere back then, anyway. Was that what she was in, and therefore she was hearing the Lex, somewhere nearby? She moved a little farther ahead. Seeing that she was active again, seeing the fire, the rats had backed off once more. But not far. They were everywhere, looking at her like pedestrians watching a burning building.

Again she heard the sound, and this time it was a little louder. It was definitely the subway, that was clear now. She moved more quickly, clutching the lighter, afraid that it, too, would soon go out. Every few steps, the sound was a little more distinct. She knew a lot about the subway. She hadn’t always been a little rich girl. Life for Leo Patterson had started out in Bronxville, but by the time she was fourteen, her whole existence was centered on Metro North and the subway, her umbilical cord to Manhattan. She’d dress up in her stardust gown and go from club to club with the other bridge-and-tunnel girls, trying to suck, fuck, or bribe her way into someplace worth going. And failing. Always. You had a mark on you that only Manhattan could see, you who crossed the bridges and slid through the tunnels.

The lighter was getting hot. She turned the flame down. Another train passed, going pretty fast. She must be somewhere near one of the crosstown lines. She looked for some kind of a door or something, some way of getting into the living part of the subway.

She thought that the line was actually above her. Raising the light, she looked up. And there, she saw something that might matter. Along the roof of the tunnel were dark rectangles, possibly openings of some kind. They were dripping, with long stalactites hanging from them. Her guttering flame couldn’t reveal much about where they went, if anywhere, but at least they weren’t here on this floor amid the confederacy of the rats. She went to the concrete wall and looked upward. She was tall enough by half a hand to grasp the edge of the sill above.