Lilith’s Dream: A Tale of the Vampire Life (3 page)

How interesting this would be, to go in a carriage without a horse. Did he pull it himself? Roman boys played at war, making their slaves pull their baby chariots about in the peristyles of their houses. But a human being was not strong enough to pull a heavy conveyance like this carriage. It had two rows of seats within, and four doors, and seemed at once dirty and beautiful. It also had wide, small wheels that would make it quite impossible in the sand, even for somebody much stronger than a human being.

She got into the thing, seating herself behind a circular rail, placing her hands firmly around it. She detested the bouncing of carriages, and there was always the threat of the ditch.

“The American fears the Arab’s driving, my cousin. She thinks you a fool.”

She heard this. How dare they consider her a drover. “I’ll not drive,” she said.

There was a silence from without. The men grouped together. As low as they whispered, she could hear them with ease.

“I tell you, it’s a djin.”

“There are no djin, no more than your foolish god who never—”

“No, no, Allah be praised, go with God. Look at her! Look, she looks like some kind of a—what is it? Marble. A woman made of marble. It’s horrifying.”

“I see money. Twenty pounds for ten klicks, and no haggling! I’m going.”

“Cousin, I would not go out into the night with that thing.”

But he went.

L
eonore Patterson looked down at the steak that the waiter set on the coffee table before her. She cut into it and watched the blood come out in runnels, then spread in intricate rivers across the bright white china plate. She touched one of them, then brought the tips of her fingers to her lips. Memory.

She threw herself back on the couch, touched her temples, massaged them, then pushed hard, feeling the flutter of her own veins. She pressed until it hurt, blocking some of the deeper pain, the torment as if a brutal leather garrote were being tightened around her neck.

“You want something?” His tone was carefully pleasant. He did not care what she wanted or didn’t. She was a job.

“I’m fine,” she replied, wishing that she could keep the ugly snap out of her voice. Indifference would be less revealing. She was far from “fine,” but it was also none of his damned business. She lit a cigarette, took a long, miserable drag.

“Should we do that?”

“Tell me when I smoke,” she’d said, “remind me.” She wished to hell she hadn’t. “I’m stopping tomorrow. Remind me then.”

“You’re stopping tomorrow. Shall I have the suite stripped?”

Leo met his eyes. “Of cigarettes?”

He nodded. George had been her chief of staff for three years. He’d come to her from ten years of freelancing New York for Bowie and Jagger and people. Before that, incredibly, he had been on security for Jackie. He was, in other words, exactly right.

But not tonight. Tonight he was exactly wrong, because tonight she had to ditch her very pretty and very efficient George. She’d been taught to plan every inch of every move, to respect the danger of the hunt, and she could not allow George or any of the other servants to know that she would be leaving the suite in the small hours of the morning.

Suddenly her spine felt hot. She sat up, rigid. In the secret, internal war that she was fighting with her own body, another stage had been reached. She tore viciously into the steak, causing George to step back from the table, causing Malcom to ask her, “May I pour you some wine? We have a Giscours that would be lovely with that meat.”

Damn them and their wine.

“No, thanks,” she said, forcing her voice into an artificially cheerful lilt. She put down her utensils and pulled her feet up on the couch, then fired the remote at the big-screen TV across the room. She began surfing.

George and Malcom watched her without watching her, unobtrusively alert. She knew that there was absolutely no human feeling involved in their attentiveness. George watched an icon. Malcom had asked his question of an icon. Neither of them saw the desperate woman who sat before them, who at thirty-three looked nineteen. When she’d become ageless, she had gained the confidence she needed to become a performer.

Years of grief and fear had followed her blooding by Miriam Blaylock. Miri had been killed by a monster called Paul Ward, a crazy “vampire hunter” with a genius-level ability as a detective and no mercy at all.

Something about the blooding had changed her voice. She’d been a good singer one day, a brilliant one the next. Her voice was a dream, a curling hypnotic smoke, all because of the vampire blood that now ran in her veins. Or maybe it was knowledge that made her sound as she did, the alluring resonance of somebody who kills.

She had started at the Viper Club in L.A., and just gone on from there. “Somebody Love Me” was number one on the charts, looking certain to be her tenth gold record in a row.

Nobody understood just what that song meant to her. It sounded as if her heart was in it because it was. In her whole life, the only person who had even come close to loving her was Miri, and she’d loved her like a person would love a cat.

Her gleaming, ever-perfect beauty only made it worse. Such beauty doesn’t draw people to you. On the contrary, it isolates you, frightening men and making women sad. It’s a disfigurement.

“Are you ready for us to go?” George asked.

He sounded as deferential as some imperial flunky, afraid that his question might seem impertinent to her highness. But why? Her highness was just a kid from Bronxville, for God’s sake, the daughter of a guy who bought media for Gray Advertising and a woman whose chief purpose in life was to attend charitable meetings. She had been a face that came down into the world and left again, and Leo knew the sounds of the house: the dripping of the kitchen faucet, the rattling of the trees against the eaves, the whisper of wind in the chimney. But not touch, not smiles. She’d been part of the furniture.

In school, she was the kind of person who was always and never there. She wasn’t pretty enough to be of interest to boys, she wasn’t aggressive enough to count in the rough society of girls, and she wasn’t rich, so she didn’t matter in spite of herself, as the rich kids did. She used to pretend to be an alien, or somebody from a foreign country. Sometimes she would speak with a thick French accent and claim to know little English. Nobody cared. If she called, she dated…sometimes. If she did not call, nobody called. She had been a stranger in her own life, not even important enough to be hurt.

Leonore Emma Patterson considered herself to be, if anything, even more isolated now. The merchandising was all anybody cared about or knew. Ultimately, the words that David Bowie had murmured to her on the stage at Madison Square Garden, during the Children of the East benefit—“We’re all alone, you know, forever”—ultimately, those rather melodramatic words were not melodrama at all. They were just the truth.

There was also no hope. None. At the level of fame she had now reached, you could only meet people who had motives, or stars as screwed up and crazy as you were. She was just this awful freak, this ugly, perverted
freak,
and she hated herself, she wanted to walk out of her own body, to leave it behind right here on this couch forever.

What had happened to her was so outlandish, so impossible that when she was not being torn apart inside by her habit, it was as if it didn’t exist, as if everything was normal, as if the tinsel world in which she lived was real. She was a woman with a womb and a heart and she loved kids and the idea of being pregnant, and she would go out in disguise, just to sit near people with children. She went to kids’ movies, she went to parks, she walked the block when school was letting out, listening to the bright voices while, inside herself, she wept with shame and was twisted by poisonous memories.

If she did some really good hash and then some chrys and then dropped X, she could make it through another twenty-four hours without killing somebody.

“Am I still on pro?”

George said crisply, “You have four months to go.”

“Shit.” She’d been in court too damn many times, and she had to be real careful or some judge was gonna put this lady where she so very definitely belonged, which was deep in the deepest cell in the nastiest super-max this side of Texas. Down there, she would die the slow, agonizing death she so richly deserved.

She went to the window, gazed out at Fifth Avenue. “Martini,” she said. A moment later, Malcom was shaking. She counted all ninety-nine (he never varied, he was perfect), then took the drink. Sipping, she shifted her gaze toward Sutton Place. There were twelve hotel suites in Manhattan from which you could see the roof of one particular house. She wandered from one of these suites to the next, living a few months in one, a few months in another. She had to be able to see the house, had to look upon it, had to remember and hate…and love.

She wanted to get high and drunk both, anything but feel what she was feeling right now. Compared to this addiction, alcoholism was baby stuff and drug problems were child’s play. No, no, this was what you could safely call the big time.

She threw back the rest of the drink and went into her bedroom, closing the door behind her. A moment later, she called George on the intercom. “I’m gonna crash. No calls, no visitors, until you hear from me.”

“No club?”

She clutched the bedspread like a life preserver, or a rope to put around her neck. Yeah, there was an “unofficial” club date tonight. She’d made it before the hunger came upon her. She’d wanted to do it, been looking forward to the hour of release from the burden of self that singing on a stage would give her.

As a result, the half of New York that mattered was waiting for her to show up at Club Six on Anne Street. But, guess what, the very thought of doing what she’d been dying to do now made her almost spit up her guts. “No club,” she whispered, and put the handset down.

She lay back in the silk sheets. City silence: the relentless sneer of the air-conditioning, the subdued boom and chatter of traffic. The top of the window revealed long clouds moving southward. Moaning wind said that this October night would soon turn cold. The full moon appeared, racing in the ripped sky. This vision from childhood winters brought a sting to her eyes. Sentimental girl, lost in the woods, looking for any welcoming cabin she might find…and a man, O a man, in whose eyes she was only her.

Drivel. Sentimental pap. She was all teary about a childhood that had been worse than her present hell. At least now she had the limos and the worshipers. She turned her mind to Miri, whom she had truly loved and who had taken from her more than she had to give. At first, it had seemed so sweet. She’d had a few happy months with Miri, until Paul fucking Ward blew her to pieces. Now Leo was alone, and try as she might, she’d never found another person like herself, let alone another real vampire like Miri, to cherish her and tell her that it was all a part of nature, that she, too, belonged to the cold laws that ran the world.

The moon was swallowed by clouds, and the corners of the Sherry-Netherland tower wailed. In her legs, her chest, above all deep in her stomach, there were burning points of need. All of the little points would grow, she knew, until they formed a web of fire. And then, so very slowly, she would begin to weaken.

On stage, she was Madonna with Enya’s eyes and the voice of a girl who had just this moment discovered love…and it was all one hell of a lie. She squirmed, ran her hands down her legs. She decided that it felt like her marrow was boiling. Sitting up in the bed, she threw her shirt off and stroked her breasts until her nipples were erect.

She went into the back of the closet and took off her baggy Leo! T-shirt and her shorts, and pulled on the black turtleneck and pants that she would wear tonight. After lacing the black sneakers, she pulled back the baseboard where she kept her cache, and withdrew the fleam she kept there. This ancient blooding tool had been given to her by Sarah Roberts, Miriam’s companion, who had also been offed by P. W. The fleam had been used by the doctors of two centuries ago to bleed patients. This one had an ivory handle gone yellow with age, a silver shaft, and a spotless hooking blade that came to a needle-sharp point. Leo nursed her fleam. She sharpened it by the hour as it was meant to be sharpened, with a chamois, until the mere weight of the instrument was sufficient to make it sink into flesh.

She slipped it into its case, and slid the case into the pocket concealed in her pants. Then she went into the bathroom and sat down at the makeup table. Fifteen years in the entertainment industry had taught her just about everything there was to know about makeup. A shadow here, a line there, fresh contacts and a black wig, and suddenly Leo Patterson wasn’t Leo Patterson anymore. She was still tall and beautiful, but the trademark lips were more narrow, and the elegant eyebrows had a different, wider shape. The eyes, which had been blue, were now a dull brown. Onstage, she needed a miracle worker to light them, blue though they were, because they were so dead and sad.

Now, instead of saying to themselves, That’s Leo, people who detected some familiarity would think, Don’t I know that woman?

The next step was to evade George. First, she double-checked her bedroom door. He would come in occasionally when he thought she was deeply asleep, and kneel beside her bed and put his head on her pillow. It was kind of nice, actually, but it must not happen tonight. At least it beat having him sneaking around smelling her shoes or something. Or maybe he did that, too, who was to know?

She opened the door that the waiter used to reach the bedroom without appearing in the living rooms, and went quickly along the narrow corridor to the kitchen. There was a faint odor of cigarette smoke, a radio playing Taiwanese rock ballads. In the pantry, Mr. Leong, the night chef, sat at a small table reading a Chinese newspaper and smoking. He was there to cater to any whim she might have during the night, for egg rolls or a ham sandwich or oatmeal, or a complete banquet.

She watched him, carefully noting how alert he appeared. His eyes were moving quickly back and forth. He was reading intently, which was the next best thing to his being asleep. She stepped out into the kitchen. Now she was in his potential full view. There was no margin for error, nothing she could do if he saw her except go back into her bedroom and hope he didn’t mention it to anybody.

No matter how careful she was, there could come a time when the police would be asking each of these men where she had been on this night, and each of them would have to be so certain that she was here that they could pass a polygraph. Not even unconscious doubt must be there.

When the cook took a drag on his cigarette, she could hear the crinkling of the tobacco as it burned. Then there came the sigh of the smoke being expelled through his nostrils. He picked his nose, then made some comment in Chinese, speaking angrily to the newspaper. He licked his finger, shook the paper, and turned to the next page.