Lilith’s Dream: A Tale of the Vampire Life (25 page)

She turned off the lighter and put it in her pocket. Immediately, rustling began. As she reached up and grasped the edge, they reached her, and when they did, they began to scream. They did not squeak like the rats one might find behind a country woodpile. They screamed with the harshness of their lives and their hunger, and perhaps some nameless change that had come to them from whatever nibbling they did on the remains of vampires.

As she pulled herself up, her naked arms wallowing in thick greasy debris that immediately made her itch, they leaped at her like raging dogs, snapping and grabbing at her jeans, her boots, her exposed skin. Revolted, choking back her own cries, she kicked them off as she drew herself into the space above.

She fell, and hard—it felt like a good three feet, hitting a concrete floor. Behind her, the gun fell into the mass of rats far below. So, no gun now and no way to get another. Empty anyway, empty and now gone.

Wallowing in the filth that had cushioned her, she struggled to her feet. Her head cracked the ceiling so hard that there was a flash in her eyes. But at least there were no rats here. Rubbing her head, she was gathering herself together when something flew at her out of the blackness. Pain shot up her neck, and she grabbed into the black, finding fur, a thick, squirming body, a wildly whipping tail. She dragged the rat off her and dug her fingers into its neck until the screaming was reduced to a low crackle, then to silence, and the squirming gradually became disorganized, then ended.

She listened. Nothing, not around her. They didn’t infest this place, they couldn’t get up here. This one must have come up clinging to her jeans. She threw it down and got out the lighter. Holding it high, she lit it again.

She was in a sort of room…and all around her were wonders. Gilded frames glowed in the half-light, knights marched across a rotting tapestry, golden objects lay in a pile against the far wall. Amazed, her hands shaking, she put down her lighter and lifted one of them from the heap.

She recognized it at once, and what she saw stabbed her heart through with the dear torture of fond memory. She was holding a monstrance, used in Catholic benedictions to display the communion wafer, called by Catholics the host, and believed to contain the actual spirit of Christ.

Leo had not laid eyes on a monstrance since she was twelve years old. She had been a member of the choir at St. Agnes School, Bronxville, and the sudden, totally unexpected appearance of this object in this impossible place shocked away a lot of years and a thick crust of life.

She held the heavy object, gazing into the dark crystal porthole where once the white wafer had been placed by reverent priestly hands. She saw there her childhood face, its heart shape so perfectly beautiful that she groaned aloud.

“It’s gold,” she said to the darkness. She had come upon a horde of stolen treasure. And what treasure. The paintings were ruined, just rotting canvas and a few pitiful, flaking patches of paint. But they were magnificent examples of the Hudson River School, revealing the ghosts of grand Catskill vistas and distant, sunny days. It was the world in its truth and perfect beauty, and she saw with total clarity that the hand that had painted it was guided by something that could only be described as sacred—deeply sacred—and she regretted deeply that these miraculous creations had been left here to their ruin.

There were craters in the walls, each one filled by a dark lead meteorite, and she knew what those craters were. Bullets, huge ones, had blasted this place. They accounted for the ripped sockets in the paintings and the unrecognizable colored glass fragments on the floor, and the pearls and rubies and emeralds rolling in the dust, and the oddly twisted frock coat and splayed cellophane collar that she knew contained a broken body, gray with dust and torn full of gaping holes, but undecayed.

Then she saw something gleaming there that she thought was a diamond, and instinctively reached out, drawn to the glitter as men have been to shiny objects since we swept the forest tops of the past in screaming packs. And when she did, she reached toward the living eye of a vampire who had lain here these long years, too broken to mend himself, but still possessed of a deathless consciousness.

Don’t ever touch them,
Sarah Roberts had warned her, and when the arm moved and cold, bone-hard fingers closed around her wrist, she knew why, for she was trapped as certainly as she would have been by a blue steel handcuff. And then she saw the teeth appearing behind the crackling, shattering lips, as the black, dry-cured ropes of muscles twisted the parched skin in a smile that managed to communicate hate and cruelty and wicked, sneering irony. How could you do this, it seemed to say, you wretched little animal?

Instinct took over, and she hammered at it and shrieked and threw herself back. The body came to pieces, the whole arm coming with the hand that had grabbed her, ripping off the shoulder with a dry, crunching sound, and the dull
pop
of the bone leaving its socket.

When she dragged it off herself, the fingers began clattering like a scorpion’s pincers as the hand expended itself helplessly in the muck that covered the floor.

She leaped up, clawing at the ceiling as a drowning submariner might claw at the iron that confined him. She stumbled forward, falling toward and then through a rotted Gobelins tapestry. She staggered, fell again, hit a wall, and slid along it. She turned, feeling something soft, then pressed deep into some kind of material.

Light appeared,
light!
The lighter was gone, but it didn’t matter now, because there was light behind this wall of cloth. She pushed her way through and suddenly was in a place so altogether different from where she had been that she wallowed in confusion, tumbling to the floor in a heap of cloth. Swimming, struggling, she tore the material away from her face and dragged herself to her feet—and found herself standing in the lower-level men’s department at Bloomingdale’s, which she had entered by crashing through a rack of overcoats that had been recessed into a wall.

The monstrance still clutched tightly in her hands, she looked from face to face—an elderly customer whose tongue was slowly passing behind his lips, a woman who barked out a sound somewhere between laughter and terror, a salesman whose face filled with question so innocently pure that it melted the years in an instant, and turned him into an astonished little boy.

A tall man, black, who had been trying on the jacket of a very fine suit, had the presence of mind to say, “Well, damn.” Then his teenage daughter, fumbling in her purse, asked in a sweet, neatly composed voice, “May I have your autograph?”

L
ilith clicked a button on the thick wand again, surfing as fast as the controls would allow. It still seemed slow, as the screen changed from image to image. When she had calmed down enough to explore her new surroundings, she had understood that the SONY wasn’t a window, but rather that it contained thousands upon thousands of pictures painted in such extraordinary detail that they seemed real. They were being run rapidly together to create the illusion, in a slow-registering human eye, of movement. If she unfocused, she would also see them that way. However, a little attention revealed the truth: she was really looking at streams of discreet images.

It was hard to imagine the number of people that must be involved in creating them, but the motive was clear enough. The pictures were used to inform. Although there was writing involved in human life as well, this seemed the more important means of communication. Using the clock that she’d found on the wrist of the woman who had occupied this chamber, she had counted 750 of the pictures in half a circuit of the sweep hand across its face. She did not measure time in such detail, any more than she could imagine anybody making so many pictures. And they flowed onto the screen from many different directions. How there could be so many in the SONY and yet it not be filled was quite a mystery.

One or two of the picture sequences were in other languages, but most were in English. She’d heard nothing else spoken here, so she had used the SONY to improve her smattering. She had followed conversational exercises with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, Robert Mitchum and John Wayne. These were distinguished from other material in the SONY by the fact that they involved long dialogues about the persons and items pictured, and so could be used by the student to learn the language. She would stop at the images in gray tones, as they afforded the best likelihood of getting useful conversation.

From looking at the pictures, she had concluded that mankind’s world had become vast indeed. Cairo wasn’t the center of anything. This mighty place was the center. Or another one, full of white monuments, perhaps was the center, or a third, distinguished by a great, tapering tower called an eiffel. She had seen trains for the first time, planes and plane crashes, Ted Heath and Rosie O’Donnell and Louis Pasteur, George Costanza, Oprah Winfrey and Queen Noor, Wolf Blitzer and Adolf Hitler, all for the first time. She had understood Adolf Hitler immediately, wondered if he wasn’t in some way a creation of Keepers, placed in a position of power to cause mayhem and slow the growth of human population. Stalin the same, and communism, which had obviously been contrived by Keepers to reduce human economic vitality.

She could see that they had worked hard, all through the last century, to stop the march of man. As they had failed, they had been forced to hide in the tunnels that were their traditional means of movement through cities, and there they had been trapped. She’d seen enough in the dungeons below this city to know what had happened. The humans had invaded their places, somehow getting past the ancient blinds that concealed Keeper passages from man’s eyes.

Then she clicked past a picture that startled her. She went back to it. A huge room, a woman on a stage singing. The music was of no importance, but the leather-clad creature had a glow about her that Lilith recognized instantly. She watched. There came a close-up of the woman’s face. Lilith watched with the greatest care. Because this…no, the woman wasn’t a Keeper. Then the picture flashed to another view of the woman singing in another context. Words began to move up the screen: “Silver Dreams,” and the woman on the screen sang,
“Silver dreams fly me away, silver dreams save my soul…”
Her voice was hard-edged and yet resonant, much richer than a normal human voice. It was interrupted by a hollering male: “Call 1-800-999-0020 right now, and you get not only Leo’s greatest hits, we’ll add Leo Patterson Intimate Moments, both for $19.98. Remember, these special Leo editions are not sold in stores.”

Behind the screaming words, the voice of Leo Patterson continued. Slowly, Lilith came to her feet. She knew what she was looking at, she knew precisely. This lovely creature was a blooded human being. Then, abruptly, the scene changed to an idiot kissing a crocodile.

Lilith sat stunned.
Blooded!
Oh, joy, there was life yet in this benighted world, and look how they loved her! There had been a huge audience, the man screaming his words from excitement! And blooded, blooded, so feeding. Yes, she would be an ally, she must be.

Lilith paced, thinking how to get into the SONY. How to go in the pictures? Was there a tunnel inside? Oh, she had to go!

She rushed to the SONY, but it was attached by mere rope to the wall. Nobody could be inside, it was too small. So, by what enchantment, then…

Oh, the humans were so great, and she was so small, but there was this blooded woman somewhere, somebody to help her, to love her.

She rushed up and down the floor, up and down, trying to think, to understand. But she understood nothing, she knew that.

There had been a number. “Call,” he had said. That was it, the thing that contained voices that stood on a small table—it also had a pad arranged with numbers. She went to it, pressed the correct sequence.

Nothing happened. She did it again. Still nothing. A hard knot evolved in her throat. She might survive if she found this bloodling. Survive! She had not thought of this possibility. She’d been trying to understand how to be rendered to ash and not dismembered, that was all she had hoped to achieve.

But now—she pressed the numbers again, then again.

Or perhaps this thing had nothing to do with it. She went to the SONY, held the wand to her face, and shouted the numbers. Then she shouted them at the images on the screen. Then she pressed them into the pad on the wand.

Nothing, nothing, nothing!

What might it be, then? She went back to the thing on the table. She had picked the part of it up that appeared designed to fit against the head and heard buzzings and beeps. She did this again. The buzzing lingered for a moment, then became a series of beeps.

Pressing buttons, she eventually got a voice saying, “The number you have dialed, 3336699, is not in service. Please check the number and try again.”

She pressed the number the man had shouted. “The number you have dialed requires that a one be dialed first.”

She did it again.

“Heartstrings Music, your order, please.”

“Hey, sister, put Leo on the line.”

“Excuse me.”

“Gimme Leo, sister.”

“You want the Patterson album?”

“Say again, sweetheart? I’m not getting your drift.”

“Do you want the Patterson special?”

It was gibberish. Lilith put the device back in its cradle. Gentle tears rained down on the machine. How she hated this world! Oh, what a hideous, confusing, impossible place! She stood up, went to the window, stared out across the cliffs carved with windows, and screamed.

Outside, birds were flushed by the sound. On a roof across the way, men stopped their work and held their ears, then looked with wide eyes in the direction of this place. She stepped back out of view. She threw herself back onto the sleeping couch.

Suddenly there was a noise. It was a bell ringing very rapidly, repeating itself in intervals. It seemed to invite her to pick up the speaking instrument. She did so.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Perdu, we have you checking out today.”

What did this mean? She had no idea. “Perdu” could be the name of the creature she’d stunned and later eaten, which had been in here when she arrived. Its remains were dust on the floor of the clothing cupboard.

“Okay, mister.”

“Okay! Well, actually it’s three-thirty, and we do need the room.”

“Sure thing, kid.”

“So when will you be out?”

“I will be out when, so okay.”

“Excuse me?”

“Okay, kid, we’ll do it your way.”

“Uh, I’ll send up a bellman.”

“You do that, sweetheart.”

She replaced the speaking and listening piece into its cradle. What to do now? Her one object was to find that exquisite blooded creature, who represented hope and life for her. But the place was a vast maze, and everything was so mysterious. Where might she be if not at the other end of the stated number?

She whipped around, startled by tapping. What was it? At the door, a persistent tapping, then repeated more loudly. She went closer, listened. Breathing through nostrils slightly closed by swelling. Tired, yet young breathing. A male. And yes, she smelled its skin.

She went into the clothing cupboard and drew on some of Perdu’s clothes. She chose the ones that seemed most in keeping with her station. The dress glittered with tiny bits of metal sewn to it, and clung to her form very, very tightly.

The tapping came again, louder yet. To the breathing, add muttered words, “Fuckin’bitch…c’mon…”
Taptaptap! Taptaptap!

She put on bright red sandals with tall spikes inexplicably fixed to the heels and went lurching across to the door. Who would want to wear such things?

Taptaptap!

She opened the door to a young man in black clothing.

“Miss Perdu, they sent me up to help you with your bags.”

The creature had a nice flush. Too bad she was quite full. As he regarded her, she watched the pupils expand. For what reason was she surprising him? She stepped back, allowing him into the room. She did not want to appear unusual. The humans would destroy her in an instant, she was certain of it.

“You going to a party, ma’am?”

“I am going to a party.”

“Okay.”

She wondered what this “party” might be.

He moved to the cupboard, then turned around.

“Where are they?”

“They?”

“Your bags. Aren’t you checking out?”

“I am checking out.”

“But your clothes—everything’s still hung up.”

“You got it, baby.”

“You need to pack. Do you understand English?”

“Sure thing.”

He muttered, “The hell you do.” Then he said, “Where are you from?”

“Egypt.”

“Oh, boy. Look, I’m gonna help you.” He removed a large, black case from the cupboard, then took some of the clothing and laid it on the couch. “You remember, you packed before you came here?”

“You better believe it.”

“Look, my guess is, you have somebody who packs for you at home. I can do this, if you don’t mind.”

“Okay by me.”

He began putting the clothing in the cases that he brought out of the cupboard. His busy hands pushed the dust off the bottoms of the cases, the dust of the real Perdu. He could have massaged Lilith with those strong young hands, but she never wanted to be touched by a human again.

She followed him into the narrow, unadorned corridor. He carried Mrs. Perdu’s materials on a gleaming brass platform that rolled along on wheels, a very pretty workman’s tool. Then they went into another machine, a small room that had a sliding door. It was like the little moving room aboard
Seven Stars,
and after a moment the doors slid open again. The man pushed his platform with the bags upon it out of the room. Lilith followed, trying to conceal her wonder at the opulence of the hall that spread before them.

Thus did she descend into the glittering, eerie netherworld of man.

You think you have something decent happening at last, and it all goes to hell immediately. What stupid piece of shit had dropped that tab on him? Some jerk that didn’t want him at Stuy, but why not? What was the matter with him that he didn’t know? He paced his room. God, but it was small. All these Leo posters, the junk of an infatuated child. But her concert was tonight and everything, and he wanted to be there so damn much. Just to see her. It wasn’t much to ask, but when you’re dealing with absolute, total grounding, it’s a lot. Didn’t they realize that she hadn’t performed in public since he was a little kid? You never got to see her except on the tube, that was the thing. Shit, though, what would it be—four seconds of watching her run down a red carpet and into a club where he was not allowed?

That Mal had done it. He’d given him the rave flyer, then dropped his tab on him when all of a sudden there were these cops there. Mal Sweeter, that was his name. Sweeter, yeah. Yeah, real sweeter, you prick. Prickface asshole.

He’d been signed up for Classical Lit and Particle Physics and everything, dammit. He’d e-mailed Jack and Sherry and all the kids, they were going to all meet in the city next weekend and do a rave with him and then go back to his place and make this incredible breakfast and crash for the day. He never went outside the law. A CIA kid didn’t have latitude, and he respected that. He could rave, but not do drugs or drink, never, no way. It could affect somebody’s career, and there was no way he’d ever do anything to hurt his mom and dad.

“Believe it,” he shouted into the silence of his room. He’d been in here since they’d returned from the city at four A.M., and he was as hungry as hell. “Mom?” It wasn’t that he was mad at them—they’d been very understanding. Dad had said, “I choose to believe my son,” and that had meant a lot after two hours in a holding tank with a bunch of scared kids and scum the likes of which he had never even imagined existed before. He’d just been so damn embarrassed, that was it. He’d ridden all the way up here in the backseat, not saying a word. He’d been congealing inside. He wished he could be in the trunk.