Lilith’s Dream: A Tale of the Vampire Life (26 page)

When he got up at ten, they were gone, and they’d now been gone all day. Well, that was about par. First, he loses the best thing he ever had in his life because he got royally screwed, then when he can finally face them and try to explain, they’re gone.

He went downstairs. The house was quiet. So where were they? Off on some mission, probably. He didn’t even know what they did. It involved investigating people, that much he knew. But who and why, he had no idea. Dad had explained to him how “need-to-know” keeps secrets where they belong, but he would at least like to have known if their job was dangerous.

He was in the kitchen when the phone rang.

“Mom!”

“Hi, hon, I’m on my cell. We’re just about buried in work, and we’ve got a concert tonight, so we’re going to change down here and then go straight on.”

“What’re you gonna see?”

“Your heartthrob, Leo herself. It’s not your father’s kind of music, but we got given the tickets, so he really can’t say no.”

It was as if his soul had just drained out of his body and buried itself forever six feet under.

“Ian?”

“Mom—”

“Honey?”

“Mom, I…I…you guys have a good time.”

“Well,
I
will. You know how his nibs hates anything post about 1790.” She stopped. He listened. The phone in his hand felt like some kind of a lifeline. “Oh, hon, you’re disappointed.”

He forced himself to be steady and solid. His voice would not break. “Yeah,” he said, and listened to the word shatter like glass.

“These tickets were given to us by a very wealthy man, and we can’t just not show up. They cost thousands.”

“I know what they cost. Ten grand to the Environment Fund for each one.”

“The Environment Fund, is that it?”

“Anyway, it doesn’t matter if I’m grounded, does it? Even though I didn’t do anything except get shafted by some jerk.”

“Hon, we would take you if we could. But—”

“You and I could’ve gone, Mom. He doesn’t even want to go. He hates Leo.”

“It’s a working evening for us.” It was Dad’s voice, rumbling down the line.

“Hi, Dad.”

“Hi, buddy. I just want you to know, it’s in the line of work. We’re going because we have to.”

“Dad, this may sound crazy to you—”

“Try me.”

“Could I come down and watch? Be in the crowd outside?”

“Son—”

“We could go out afterward and have a late supper together, then all stay at the apartment.”

He should have asked Mom, he definitely should not have done it this way, he’d been a total fool.

“I don’t think—”

“Okay, forget it.”

“I got you out of night court at four in the morning, and no, I do not think you should break grounding before twenty-four hours are up. Watch it on TV.”

“It’s not on TV.”

“With that publicity hound, I’d have thought it would be.”

When he said that, angry sparks shot through Ian. He managed a polite good-bye and hung up the phone. For a moment, he thought that he could not be angrier at his dad. Nobody ever said Paul Ward wasn’t arrogant. He’d sit in there staring and not smiling and not even lift a hand in applause. That’s exactly what would happen.

Damn Dad and damn the entire world.

Except…

No, he shouldn’t do this. No, they’d be sure to call here at some point, and…he could forward the phone to his cell. Simple.

But no, they’d get back way before he did.

Except…

He could just see the entrance, then take the next train home. He’d be here in plenty of time. And at least—well, wasn’t this a little crazy, to want this much just to see some girl from a distance who you would never touch, you would never speak to, who would never know you existed.

He hammered numbers into the phone, waited for his cell to ring, then hung them both up. Deed done, he was on his way to the damn
promised land!

Lilith was made to stand before an altar with other supplicants, and soon found herself confronted by a heavily scented priest with a blue silk ribbon knotted neatly around his neck. She had fallen back on lack of knowledge of English to let the acolytes conduct her through the ritual. She was enmeshed in a whole series of arcane acts involving small inscribed shields that were kept in a packet that, it initially developed, she had left behind in the room.

The young male had retrieved it, and now the priest was completing his rituals with one of the shields. What material was it made of that caused them to value it so? It had not the beauty of gold or lapis lazuli. In fact, she’d never seen anything quite like it before, and there were a dozen of them in the leather packet the young man had handed her with such pride. And this ritual of the priest—what might it mean? Afterward he smiled at her, so she assumed that whatever he had read from her shield had offered good portents.

Man, always calling on his gods, looking to the skies or the entrails of sheep or the blowing of the leaves upon an errant wind for guidance—did he not know, even yet, that time unfolded into the silence of God, and destiny had another name called chance?

“May I call you a cab?” the young man asked.

The intonation suggested a question. Apparently he wished to address her in some new manner, now that the priest had given her the required blessing.

“You may call me a ‘cab,’” she said.

Improbably, he rushed into the roadway with a small brass whistle and began blowing it furiously. She was well aware by now that she was at sea among a vast number of customs that were quite beyond her understanding. This would require vigilance and care. Every moment, every new and bizarre request, presented another danger.

Soon, a yellow carriage pulled up at her feet. As a newly invested acolyte or priestess or whatever she was, it seemed that she was expected to go about in this thing. There were many of them on the road; it appeared to be a commonplace enough privilege. She entered the machine.

The young man stared at her. Another man put the cases in a compartment behind. Of a sudden, the smile disappeared from the young man’s face. “It takes all kinds,” he finally said with a snarl, and slammed the door.

“All kinds,” she replied as the vehicle pulled in among the other vehicles of the honored.

“Where to, lady?”

“To where.”

“Where you goin’?”

“Allô.”

“Shit, lady, you don’t speak English. What you do speak?
Parlez-vous français?”

His incantation was in two languages, she could discern that readily enough. After the conquest and the arrival of the Greek ruler Ptolemaeus, the Egyptians had begun to speak Hellene. Perhaps these had also been conquered, and this “parlez-vous” was a snippet of the language of the conqueror, used as the Egyptians had used Hellene, to display their familiarity with the court of the new pharaoh.

“Parlez-vous français,” she responded.

“Ah, bon! Je suis d’Haïti. Si, où est-ce que nous allons?”

“Si, nous allons.”

“Pardon? Mais où?”

“Mais? Ah, si!”

“Que?”

The meanings of these words were unclear to her. She struggled to devise a sensible-sounding response. After the ritual, she had been escorted into the vehicle. Now all the questioning made it clear that she had to instruct the driver. Then she recalled the use of the word
change,
by the young man when they were still in the room of the woman Perdu. “I change,” she said.

“Okay, back to English. You change. Where do you go?”

“I go where I change.”

He hit the steering wheel.

“Leo Patterson,” she said. It was a name. It was also where she wanted to go.

“You mean the Music Room? You’re going to the concert at the Music Room?”

“The Music Room.”

Muttering spells, he accelerated into traffic. The vehicle moved past an array of amazing structures. They were not cliffs carved with rooms as she had first believed, but enormous constructions built by the hand of man. As she had been by the bridge and the great statue in the harbor, she was awed by these human things.

The towers of this place jutted up into a sky of bright, hard blue, smeared with racing white clouds. The air was colder than it had been at home in many a long year, and she enjoyed the feeling of it on her face as it blew in the window.

Suddenly, looking up at the sky, feeling the cool, she realized that she was remembering something from home. It was only a fleeting recollection, but she knew, now, that she had gone beneath a flowering plum tree to sleep, and in her sleep had dreamed, and was dreaming still….

“You okay?”

She used the intonations and accents she had learned from the SONY. “You got that right, buster.”

“Hey, Lauren Bacall!”

She had so little idea of what he had just said that she did not even try to reply.

Her heart was leaping in her chest, her skin was prickling, and she felt the most poignant, acute sense that she was missing something important, that another, beloved life—her real life—was passing her by.

“Lady, you can’t be taking all that luggage to the Music Room. You’re goin’ to a hotel. Have to be. So, you tell me, what hotel?”

That was familiar, “hotel.” It was the name of the temple in which she had lived and worshiped. “Hotel Royalton.”

“No, the Royalton’s the one we’re leaving. Bye-bye, Royalton, get it? Finished. No more.”

Ah, yes. “Leo Patterson,” she repeated, hoping that this might elicit further results.

This was apparently the correct response, because the driver’s face illuminated with a broad smile of a kind she had not seen in a very long time. The humans were monsters, but a smile is a smile, and she could not help but respond in kind.

“Leo lives at the Sherry,” he said.

“Yes.”

They went up and down some streets, crossed a wide plaza, and pulled up before one of the great towers. “I can drive the wagon,” Lilith said. “I have done it before.”

She could see in a small mirror the expression on the driver’s face, which revealed that this comment was not expected. So her thought that he had stopped from fatigue was wrong.

The door was suddenly flung open by a male in resplendent clothing, obviously a human of great importance. She was guided out as others placed her bags on a rolling platform. So the ritual was to be repeated here. Man had always enjoyed ritual, but this business of being unable to so much as walk three steps without yet more of it was absurd.

She was conducted to another altar in the opulent new temple, and again did the ritual with the card. “I am already a ‘cab,’” she explained to the priest when he began to swipe the thing through the various magical sigils that were employed here.

He glanced at her in such an odd way that she decided that she was growing overconfident, and stopped speaking.

“I don’t see your reservation, Mrs. Perdu.”

“Ah, good.”

“No, I don’t have a reservation for you. Let me—” He signaled another priest, who came majestically forward, his eyebrows raised, his chin high. If she understood anything at all about religion, her response had caused a higher priest to be engaged in the ceremony, which was all to the good.

“Yes, Mr. Friedman?”

The first priest replied in an incancatory undertone. “We don’t have a reservation here.”

The other murmured. “She looks like she’s dressed for a party.”

Now they whispered. Lilith heard every sound, of course. “The cabbie told the door that she’s going to the Patterson do.”

“Oh, Jesus. Put her in a suite.”

Now they both turned to her with great smiles on their faces. “Welcome to the Sherry-Netherland, Mrs. Perdu. You’ll be in the Rose Suite, very nice.” He rang a little bell. More of the creatures swarmed over her trolley of bags.

“Leo is here?”

“Oh, I believe that she’s rehearsing over at the club.”

“Ah. I will go there.”

“Would you care for the hotel to provide you with a car and driver for your stay?”

“Yes.”

“Very good. And when will you be leaving this evening? I think that the club’s only—oh, ten minutes at most. Fifteen. Perhaps seven-thirty?”

“Seven-thirty.”

They went into another of the rising and falling compartments, this one far more opulent than the Royalton, as was the entire place. She was beginning to see that the entry and exit rituals were the only religious aspect of the place. These were really apartments of rooms where people stopped to rest. She wondered if they all carried their possessions about like this all the time. What sort of arcane lives must they live if they did this, darting about like flies, never stopping in any one place for long?

The chambers they gave her had sun pouring in the tall windows, illuminating the rose pink decorations, the tables and chairs, and the stuffed couches and such very nicely. Instead of one room, there were a number of rooms. In this one was placed sitting furniture, in another a broad table. At the far end of the wide, tapestry-thrown floor was another chamber, this one containing a large couch made of gleaming brass. She had not seen so much space, or such nice space, since she was at home.