Lilith’s Dream: A Tale of the Vampire Life (4 page)

As he did this, she took two quick steps into the center of the kitchen. She was no more than ten feet away from him. From the brightly lit pantry, she would be visible at first as a dark form. The next second, he would realize who it must be, no matter how she looked.

She had oiled the door that led out into the back hallway with care. It made no sound as she opened it. She stepped through, pulled it shut. A deep breath, let it out. Safe—for now. Listen, as she had been taught. The ears can hear what the eyes cannot see. Faintly, deep in the building, there was a chugging sound. She recoiled. It was somebody heavy climbing the stairs. A security guard was moving between floors. There was a silent pause, then a clang. He’d gone into one of the floors, but which one? She had no way to know. She’d have to take the risk of running into him as he came out. She heard Miri’s stern words,
Do not tempt the unknown.
But what could she do, dammit? She wasn’t any good at this, and she never would be. If only she’d had more time to learn. If just once, they had taken her hunting with them. But she’d had to make it all up, using guesswork and imagination.

Hard light shone off gleaming tan walls and a black, highly polished linoleum floor. She began moving down the service stairs, stepping quickly and silently beneath the stark fluorescent lights. Her feet hardly whispered on the steps as she descended. Still, though, she knew that there was sound. There was always sound.

She had gone perhaps ten stories when she heard another clank, quite nearby—just below, in fact. She stopped, stopped breathing. Looking straight down, she could see the top of a steel fire door opening. An instant later, she smelled perfume, cheap and dense. A woman appeared in the stairwell. She had bleached blond hair tied back tight and a trench of a part. A cigarette hung from her lips.

A whore, leaving by the back way. The Sherry wouldn’t allow working girls to cross its public spaces. Instead, they would be using the same freight elevators and stairs as the rest of the service staff.

The girl was crying, her sobs almost machinelike. Had she been pushed out of some room, spat on, robbed, brutalized?

The sobbing faded like some indifferent memory, and Leo started down again. She passed floor after floor, watching as the stenciled numbers unwound to “MAIN” and then “BMT” and then “SUB-1.” Here, the Sherry-Netherland stopped, perhaps sixty feet underground.

There was no way to know what would happen when she pushed the door open. Maybe she’d be in a police guard room, or some sort of employee cafeteria.
Planning is everything. Care and forethought.
Then teach me how, dear Miri. How do you plan for monsterhood?

All right, shut up! Just do the damn thing and get it over with. She opened the door. First thing, she looked for security cameras. Cameras were death.

No cameras, at least none that she could see. Even so, she drew her ski mask down over her face before she stepped out into the room.

Dim light, black pipes, roaring. Boilers and things, furnaces. She knew furnaces, understood fire, understood heat. Later tonight, she would draw a furnace to eighteen hundred degrees, so much heat that it would vaporize bone.

Then she found what she was looking for, something that was present in all of these buildings—an exit from the subbasement to the outside. It had to be there by law, an emergency escape. It consisted of a black iron spiral of stairs that led up to a steel door…which was elaborately alarmed. If you went through, you set bells ringing in the guard room on the next level up.

She’d confronted many of these doors over the past fifteen years. They all relied on the same mechanism to trip the alarm—a hard push against the crossbar. She took our her flat toolbox and inserted a thin but very strong blade into the lip of the latch, pressing against the angle of the tongue until it came free. Being careful not to move the crossbar, she drew the door open and stepped quickly out.

A reek of garbage, the nearby sound of a horn honking in an underground parking lot, closer silence. She took off her ski mask and stuffed it into an inner pocket in her car coat. Then she climbed the steel stairs to the surface and stepped out into the street. A moment later, she was just another quick figure, as isolated as the rest who hurried up and down the sidewalk.

Wind gusted, steam sped from a Con Ed ditch, a bus came clamoring down Fifth Avenue. She moved east. She would go to First Avenue, start at Fifty-ninth and work her way down under the concealing shadow of the Queensboro Bridge and into the upper fifties. She’d find somebody, she always did, wherever she went, here or on Third Avenue with the working girls, or down on Greenwich Street, or just about anywhere.

The bridge thundered, the Fifty-ninth Street tram bobbled in the sky on its way to Roosevelt Island. A Lexus full of bridge-and-tunnel boys passed her slowly. No good, too many of them. Then there came a figure huddling north into the wind, wearing a sports jacket pulled closed by a fist. As he approached, she evaluated him. His eyes painted her quickly, flickering with short, fly like movements. He was softly made, no athlete. Good. He appeared healthy enough. A second check mark on his death warrant. Look at the hands—no ring trench. Three marks and you’re in.

“Got the time?”

“Uh, it’s—” He made a show of looking at his watch.

“Eleven-forty. I have a watch, too.”

His eyes met hers, flickered away. So he wanted a kink. He was out looking for something odd. Fine, she’d done it all five times over. Guys looking for anonymous sex weren’t generally interested in the missionary position. He offered her a weak smile.

“Look, honey, you want a date or not?”

“What’re you—uh—”

“It’s a date. Whatever you want.”

“Uh, I, you know, it’s just ordinary.”

“C’mere.” She put her arms on his shoulders, smiled up at him. “Now nobody can hear us but us.” She met his eyes. “Honey, you look like you lost your mommy.”

“Maybe that’s what happened. I did. You know, what about the, sort of, that I’m—I have a big job. A lot of people work for me. I spend my life giving orders and my wife, she’s not—she can’t…she just can’t.”

She took his hand. “You just forget it, okay. Okay? ’Cause I know what we’re gonna do.”

“You do?”

“Baby, don’t you worry. You found the right girl. It’s lucky. I’m looking for it. I love it. So just—here, come on, don’t you pull away, now, honey.” She took him by the wrist, led him until he resisted.

“Where is it? Is it a hotel?” His voice was higher, edgy.

“It’s a private house. Just you and me.”

“Is this expensive, because—”

“Don’t worry about it.”

He was silent but resistant, still very wary. She held him firmly, moving quickly toward the old house, the place where she had found her miracle and lost her humanity. She didn’t actually enter it often, not unless she had to.

She drew out the old brass key.

“Here?” he asked, raising his eyes to the dark facade.

“Come on.” She laughed, drawing him up the steps. “It’s gonna be just us, total privacy, nobody can hear, nobody can see. You ever get that before? You can do anything.”

“Look, lady, it’s not that I don’t trust you, but I’ve never contemplated anything quite like this.”

Interesting use of language. Was this an educated man, a professional, the kind of guy whose disappearance would get a lot of notice? She opened the door, turned on the hall lights. “Okay, okay,” she said to him when he hesitated on the stoop. Just come in the damn house, mister. For chrissakes.

When he entered, she immediately pushed the door closed. He could not know that there was now no way for him to get out, not through that or any door or any window, not without her keys and her knowledge of these intricate locks. No matter who he was or what he was, a dead man now stood before her.

He smiled, revealing neatly kept teeth. “Well, wow,” he said. “Wow.”

“It’s very old.”

“That ceiling, it’s lovely.”

She turned on the lights in the ceiling.

“Tiffany,” he said, “is it the real thing?”

“The real thing,” she said. She ushered him into the living room, turned on the lights there.

It was so marvelous, this room where her life had begun and ended. There, on that Louis Quatorze chair, she had sat while Miriam and Sarah played on the cello and the pianoforte. Here was the center of her heart and her love.

“This is—I don’t know, you’re just a little girl and this place—is this your folks’ house? I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m doing here. I visualized, I guess, I thought some older woman—you know, a working girl—that would just, you know, a kind of quick thing in a hotel room or something. Just quick, fifty bucks and good-bye.” He smiled again. His cheeks were flushed, his lips trying to smile, his eyes blinking continuously.

She reached out, grabbed his crotch. He was tumescent, and immediately became hard. “Look,” she said, “you just do as I tell you, and it’s gonna be like nothing you ever thought you’d get. It’s gonna be the best experience of your life. The best, you got that? I mean, I’ll tell you the truth, mister. I won’t lie. You’re getting this, this ultimate fantasy, here. Do you understand that? Do I look twenty?”

“You look—”

“Kneel
down!”

He shuffled to one knee, sort of squatted. “How old are you? I mean, this could be very illegal, here. Illegal for me, you know.”

She raised his chin, looked down into his eyes—and slapped him hard enough to snap his head to one side. He yelped, and she said, “It’s as illegal as hell, mister. I’m your dream, mister. Your fantasy, am I right?”

“Fantasy—”

“To be like you are, a scumbag—say you’re a scumbag.”

“…scumbag…”

She slapped the other cheek. “I don’t hear you!”

“Scumbag! I’m a scumbag!” He took her hands. She drew them away. On his own, he went down to the floor. He embraced her feet.

In that moment, she felt a vast loneliness within her, something akin to sorrow and beyond sorrow, beyond the tears and the pain in her bones. “Strip,” she ordered. She laughed, a girlish tinkle.

He got up and took off his sports jacket. “If there’s a—you know—do you have a special room?”

“You’ll do as you’re told right here.” She folded her arms. “This is where.”

He went down to his skivvies, then stopped. She drew them off. She’d seen so many naked men in her life, dozens and dozens of them, it seemed, more when she was a sort of half-star, less later, far less now. Now, in fact, the only naked men she saw were guys like this, who were dying.

She reached out, took his dick in her hand. It shot up to full stiffness. His eyes got kind of glassy. He looked as if he was turning into a fish. Pulling him by the dick, she led him to the main staircase, then upstairs.

Although he was apparently to play the slave, she hated him with the dull, hopeless hatred of a captive who understands that no escape is possible. What flowed in his veins was more important to her right now than heroin to a strung-out junkie.

He said, “Hey,” and she gripped the hot, dreary thing harder and pulled at him more roughly. Come on, come on, don’t talk anymore, just let’s get it done.

She didn’t take him into the master bedroom. She hadn’t been in there in years. Instead, she went to the smaller of the four bedrooms on this floor, the one toward the back where she had lain in anguish while the new blood had been pumped into her veins, in the most loving, dearest, and cruelest act that perhaps could be done on the earth.

“Oh, man,” he said, “this is nice. Are we really the only people here?”

“Just you and me.”

“Because—”

Now he would say his dismal, boring fantasy, face flushing, eyes all moist, trying to make whatever sordid, disgusting thing he wanted to do seem somehow reasonable and viable. But it would not be reasonable, it would be infantile and grotesque, maybe extremely grotesque. But she would do it, some of it, if only to disgust herself more and hate herself more.

“What’s the game, honey? We can’t do it if you don’t say it.”

He remained silent.

She sat down on the bed, drew him down beside her. Then she saw that his face had changed, that he was not a sweating, nervous fool anymore, that there was something acute in his eyes, and something inside him that seemed to be in motion, as if he contained another, darker version of himself that had been waiting for this moment to reveal itself.

His hands, which had seemed as soft and loathsome as the rest of this bloated maggot, came around her throat, and proved to be not at all maggoty. No, the pudgy fingers concealed iron.

She felt her throat closing, heard her breath start to hiss. Outside, the wind hissed against the window. He rose up and plunged down on her, crushing her beneath his weight. He stank of cigarettes and stale, unwashed skin. His erection pushed against her thigh.

“Fuckin’ cunt,” he snarled.

“What are you doing?”

“You stupid piece of filth!” His fingers pushed at her windpipe.

“You’re killing me!”

“So. The fuck. What?”

She writhed. He was strong, dammit, real strong. “You’re a—”