Lilith’s Dream: A Tale of the Vampire Life (41 page)

No, Ian, don’t, no, Ian!

He took a long breath gurgling with her blood, and as he did, she heard him groan and felt him begin to tremble.

Lilith backed away.

Ian, no! Don’t taste it, Ian!

She felt his tongue darting out, touching it, felt his arms coming around her, getting purchase. Then his teeth, he was tearing into her, and it hurt but she could not move, he was biting right through to the artery. Then he was shaking, he was struggling, she could feel it, she could hear soft, desperately urgent sounds as she knew his mind screamed no to his ravenous gut,
no, no Ian
—

There was a roar, a vast shattering of glass, a whole cosmos erupting around her and over her. Lilith passed overhead in a graceful arc, a comet trailing blood and smoke.

It is always complicated until the defeat, and then it is always simple. So it had been for the others, and so it was for her. Lilith knew that she was tremendously damaged. She knew that one entire side of her body was not working. She saw the guns, the humans behind them visible only as dark hulks, so covered with equipment that they weren’t even recognizable.

How odd that her dream would come back to her now, of something so simple as a dusty yellow road that crossed a field of wheat, then wound off toward a village. But it was all in fog, unfocused, hard to see.

Riding on another great roar which she knew came from the barrel of a gun, the dream got clearer. She saw now the shady bower where she had been sleeping, saw the sun peeking in around the plum blossoms. Far from feeling the pain of the bullets that were disintegrating her, she felt the pleasing stiffness that follows good sleep.

In the roaring and the smoke, she stretched deliciously. At the same time, she was aware of blood spraying everywhere and voices and shattering glass and a terrible and yet beautiful death scene, with her broken body blowing like a leaf amid myriad tiny reflections, a rainbow of color and red death.

Her eyes fluttered open. Bees hummed in the flowers of the tree that concealed her. Far away, she heard a bell tolling. She had to go, she’d overslept.

She stood, went to the edge of the shade, and pushed aside some of the long, loose branches that hung like a concealing curtain around the base of the tree. She stepped forth into the sleepy thrall of a summer afternoon.

The moment Becky saw Ian crouching there, the dying vampires dropped into the past for her. Paul and the others would finish them off. Her mission was to help her son. She yanked off the night-vision goggles, unneeded in this miraculous place, and rushed to him.

He knelt beside Leo, his face covered with blood.

Paul came, as she knew he would.

“Dad?”

The pistol moved, the barrel pointed.

“Dad?”

She heard the click of the action being cocked, soft, efficient.

“Dad?”

Silence.

She looked at Paul. His face was hard—sad but so very hard. “Kari,” he said hoarsely. “Jean. We have this one to do.”

Becky was stunned, totally. “He didn’t feed!”

Paul closed his eyes, shook his head slightly.

She put her hand around the barrel of his gun, forcing herself to bear its heat. But she didn’t turn it aside.

“Dad?”

It was like a dance, slow dance in a sea of blood, as they came forward, came toward Ian. Ian began to get to his feet. It looked like he’d been at Leo, looked exactly like that. She heard the snicker of rounds being chambered. They would all fire at once. He’d be gone in an instant. They would leave nothing to linger, they would not be cruel.

Becky knew what had to be done. Trembling, the sorrow pouring through her like a Niagara Falls of pain, she removed her hand.

“Mom?”

The guns came up.

She couldn’t look. She averted her eyes—and saw that Leo’s body wasn’t desiccated. For an instant, this seemed simply a little wrong. Then it seemed a lot wrong.

“He didn’t feed!”
She grabbed him and went for the floor.

The guns roared, sending more of the precious mirrors shattering into ignorant rainbow shards. Heat seared her back, then she lay in a galaxy of sparkling instants, red flowers shuddering in ancient breeze, a dog’s hip, a golden broken eye. And beneath her, the gasping, gagging, crying body of her son.

They sat up. She hugged him. Like soldiers who have been near an exploding shell, they touched each other in the miracle of survival. She looked up at the three men, Kari, Jean, and Paul. “Look at the body,” she said with the thick care of somebody so shocked that they can barely form words, “he did not feed on that woman.”

Paul sank down, had to be held up by Kari and Jean. She thought he was crying, but it wasn’t that. His skin was gray, his breathing sounded shallow, he dropped his gun with a great crash to the floor.

“Chest,” he gasped, “gotta catch my breath, here.”

Then Ian was on him, holding his father in his bloody hands, drawing him down, taking his big head in his lap.

The room still glowed brightly. A few of the strange glass paintings had been shattered, but there were hundreds more in great frames, rows and rows of them.

“It’s all of civilization,” Jean breathed. “This is the treasure house of the ages.”

They gathered, then, around their fallen comrade. They’d done it before, all of them, many times. They were efficient, and in a surprisingly short time Paul was outside, having been taken to the surface through the Queen’s Chamber beneath the Pyramid of Cheops, which held the hidden door to this extraordinary place of record.

As they moved up the narrow, spiraling tunnel to the surface, Kari and Ian carrying Paul, Jean’s gun sounded again and again behind them. He was destroying the two vampires utterly, pulverizing them, making certain that no trace of life remained in them. If they had souls to release, they were released. The blood sank into the earth and deeper, even more secret chambers.

Then Jean, also, went to the surface. In the dark and silence he left behind rats came, and cats came, and long albino crocodiles.

L
ilith crossed the dell where the plum-blossom tree grew, and made her way along the ridge that swept downward to the fields of Eden, and beyond them their village nestled among its trees. On the shimmering distance stood the red pyramid, glowing in the late sun. None knew who had built it, or any of the pyramids that were scattered across the countries of the sky, but they were said to be the knots that held the carpet of the universe together.

Two columns of smoke rose, one from the inn and one from the baker’s. Skyward, white clouds dreamed along the blue, and great, dark birds circled lazily.

The bell kept ringing and ringing. Then she saw snatches of color appearing along the road near the village gate. What was this? People were coming out. She looked around, but there was nobody else here. They were coming out to meet her, and ringing the bell for her.

And then she remembered something that it seemed very strange to have forgotten, it having happened only an hour ago. She had come here with her husband—been brought here, in fact, weeping and afraid.

She touched her cheek. Oh, yes, she had been weeping, and so recently that her eyes were still damp. As she kept making her way down the hillside, the ringing of the bell got louder, and the voices of the townspeople rose to an excited chatter.

What was this? There was nothing in the wedding rite about this. So why were they…why? She stopped, attempting to understand what was happening. And then, in that moment, maybe because she noticed and maybe because it was just time, she experienced the true vastness of her own memories of the past hour, and immediately sank down in the road.

There was a world inside her, a huge world in all its gaudy and terrible ages. Still on her knees, she turned, looking back toward the plum-blossom tree, thinking that something in the fruit had made her swoon. But no, this was no ordinary fever. Under the tree, she had dreamed a magnificent and terrible dream, the whole life of a world.

Then everyone was there, the children sweating from their play, the adults dusty from scything the fields. A man came to her, whom she knew was her father. “Have you forgotten Adam?”

Adam!

The group parted, opening her way to the square around which the village was built. There was the fountain, playing merrily in the late light, and sitting beside it was a tall young man with the powerful shoulders of a hardworking farmer.

As she went forward, he came to his feet. He gazed down at her. “It’s been more than an hour,” he said.

“I slept so hard! I feel like I’ve been up there forever.”

He took her in his arms. It was—oh—like magic to feel the strength of him draw her up so easily so close. When he laid his lips upon hers, she felt as if she had truly come home. But when they stopped, she felt a fearsome thirst, as if she was dry to her marrow. She leaned to the fountain and drank of the clear, cold water. Down at the bottom, she could see the bright fish speeding, the ones that generations of children had tamed until they could hold them cupped in their hands.

The water seemed to flow directly into her veins, cleansing her.

“What happens?” he asked.

“Happens?”

“You remember…you went on the wisdom journey.”

How long ago that seemed—as if yesterday was somewhere off in history, before their world had been shattered by its wars, and the survivors had rejoined God.

“You have a dream. It’s a very long and terrible dream.” She stopped, then. She could not tell him the truth of what she remembered—that she had been asleep not for an hour, but for eons…and what had transpired in those terrible times, in that place that was beyond the beyond. “In your dream,” she said hastily, “you wave a magic wand, and a world full of simple creatures becomes a world full of searchers like we were, before God embraced us.”

“What is the secret? Why is it so dangerous?”

“It’s God’s business,” she said nervously. How could he understand that his young wife had woven good out of threads of evil? How could she ever say what she really remembered? “Ur-th,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“The name I gave it, the place I dreamed about.”

“One Place All? That’s a good name for a world.”

For the breadth of an instant, she seemed to hear the great roar of an ocean, but she knew that it was another sea, the sea of humanity that had been spawned in her dream.

She looked up, wondering where in the sky they might be, for in her heart, she felt that her dream had been enacted somewhere, that the towering anguish of soul that oppressed her now was a wound from a secret life in the eons.

“You have never looked more beautiful,” he said.

She slipped her hand into his and lowered her eyes. She was still a maiden, and this was to be their consummation evening.

“I want to walk,” she said.

Watched by all the village, they went up toward the Wheat Road that led into their fields, where they harvested the grain that was the staple of their lives. The dream—the awful, monstrous dream—was awash in blood. She felt it trickling down her arms, glutting her mouth, roiling in her belly. She pushed away that madness.

But it did not leave her. No, her hour beneath the plum-blossom tree had changed her, just as the boy master had told her it would. “God has chosen you for reasons that are God’s. But a world depends upon it, Lilith. Say yes.”

Was that really just yesterday that the sacred child had come knocking, so terrifying her parents and causing her fiancée to beg her to stay?

“I’m so glad,” she said.

He took her hand, and when he did, she felt how profoundly she was changing. The terrible dream was lifting as a veil lifts, releasing her from a burden that seemed ages long and horrible.

As they passed the briar-rose tower her great-great-grandfather had made, every rose entered her heart. She became roses. As they passed the bakery where the twisted loaves had been put out for taking, she became the fragrance of twisted bread. So also, passing the toy shop with its painted dolls, she became a bright-eyed toy lying in the lap of the lonely child who had made the universe.

When they returned to the fountain, the purple of evening had risen in the east, and the fields were shuddering off the heat of the day.

“In my dream,” she said, “I was a monster.”

He laughed and splashed her with water from the fountain. “You’d never be a monster. You’re remembering somebody else’s dream.”

“I am a monster.”

With all the town come quietly around, the women in their aprons and the men in their harvesting smocks, the children, some naked, some in play clothes or work clothes—with everybody drawing near—they kissed. Softly, softly came the wordless humming of the marriage song, as they drew closer and closer yet. She who had become the rose and the bread became now the pleasure of their love.

Later, when they were eating bread with their candle on the table between them, he asked her, “What was your dream, then? What’s the secret of the plum-blossom tree?”

“It was only a dream.”

“Do you miss it?”

“It’s over and done now. Time for me to forget.”

And so he kissed her again, and she surrendered to his kisses, and they went before the fire and cuddled together in the fleece rug that had come in her dowry. Gently, they came together naked, the innocent girl shown by the innocent boy what he knew of the way of naked pleasure.

Late and very late, while he lay softly sleeping, a shadow stole into the firelight. She sucked a startled breath when she realized that the boy master was there, gazing down at her with grave eyes.

“I come to tell you of the girl-child you are carrying, that she will follow in your path, and sleep beneath the plum-blossom tree.”

“I am not carrying a child.”

The eyes now laughed a little, and she understood, suddenly, that she was. She had been for a few hours already, since the moment her marriage had been consummated.

“It worked the first time?”

He nodded.

Just for an instant, she looked directly and deeply into those impossible eyes of his, and her heart almost cracked to pieces, for she had seen there the name and past of her child. She sobbed aloud, but he took her in his arms and quieted her against his narrow breast.

“I’ll never be able to love her!”

“You will love her. You will serve and protect her.”

“I don’t want her! Not that—creature.”

“Leo has fought hard and suffered much in my behalf. She spent a whole life without love. Lilith, she has so much to offer.”

“Please, give her to somebody else.”

“All the bells of heaven are ringing,” he whispered. “Can you hear them?”

It was true, there were bells greater than the one in their signal tower, ringing somewhere very high.

“Oh, master, master, I did evil. I did horrible, dark things to them. Please, how can I ever forgive myself? And how can I ever love that child?”

“I’m not a master,” he said. “I’m only a weaver’s apprentice. Don’t you remember me, coming with my rugs to your village?”

“You’re a great master, and you can help me. You have to, because I’m in agony, I can’t bear what I remember, I can’t bear what I was!”

“If I told you that you had left behind a couple who will give to earth a whole new evolution of man?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Then know this, the secret of the enemy: it’s the pressure of battle that makes us strong, and victory that gives life its sweetness, which is why I always tell my clients to love their enemies. You were their enemy, child. You gave them their strength, you and those creatures you made.”

“I made?”

“In our dream, we made them, you and I. We made them and flooded man’s world with them, and when he found them, he found himself.”

She shook her head. “I just want to forget.”

He kissed her forehead. “Then only remember that you did my work well.”

A great light came splashing like a wave across the raw and jagged wound of her memory, leaving it cleansed as if with sweet sea foam. His kiss also put her to sleep like a rocked baby. He covered her with the fleece blanket, close beside her husband. None saw him go down the Wheat Road, then out beyond the red pyramid to the edge of the world. While they all slept, he crossed the bridge of the rising moons, then went along the star path that carries the eternal children between the worlds, on their dark mission of awakening.

Lilith slept at last, a sleep that had seemed an eternity in coming, the warm and blessed sleep of a girl in her marriage bed. Her dream slipped backward in memory, its voices of Egypt and Rome and America fading, of Ian and Becky and Paul, of the kings and pharaohs and vampires, of the crackle of torches and the hissing of the ocean, of the laughter of the jackal—all those strange, improbable voices—called ever more distantly, echoing and then not, slipping away. They were lifted from her spirit at last, as the veils of night passed swiftly and softly over the land, blessing all who rested therein with healing sleep.