Lilith’s Dream: A Tale of the Vampire Life (5 page)

He smiled, thrust against her. “You’re number twenty-one, filth! You goddamn fuckin’ piece a shit, in this nice house, how dare you. How dare you!”

As his fingers jabbed deeper and her windpipe threatened to collapse, her mind registered the truth: she had picked up a serial killer. He was strong, too. He was very strong. He was humping her, not entering her but thrusting against her as he killed her.

She could let him. She could do that. But then where would she be? Sarah had taught her carefully: We do not die. No matter how shattered the body, it lives on. Twilight world. Half life.

His eyes bulged with rage, and his breath went fast. She tossed her head and writhed. He was strangling her quite seriously now, and it was time to put a stop to that. His weight, however—and to her great surprise—prevented her from moving but one of his hands away.

Incredibly, she actually
was
in trouble. Then his mouth came down on hers and covered it, and suddenly his sour, smoked breath was gushing into her, penetrating her with the spittle and phlegm of his soul.

She lay still, and in his eagerness he shifted just a bit. This gave her the chance to use her hidden strength, and she exploded out from under him. He flew up and back and landed with a thud that shook the house.

The vampire blood made you strong. It made you much stronger than anybody thought you would be.

Snarling with surprise, shaking his head in confusion, he leaped at her. Her hands shot up as quick as the flicker of a falcon’s wing and took his wrists in a grip that he would not be able to break.

His eyes bulged with the effort. He growled and shook and struggled until purple veins throbbed in his delicious neck. She watched, waiting until he bent down, preparing to throw himself back away from her. Then her knee came up and connected with his face. Howling, his teeth bared, he flew back ten feet into the wall, which his head hit with a sound like an egg cracking. As he sank down, she took handcuffs out from under the bed and snapped them around his wrists.

She marched the astonished, spent man straight down to the basement and hooked the cuffs to an eye in the wall. It wouldn’t be long, now. She wasn’t cruel, she didn’t like them to suffer…although with this one, she was tempted to prolong his agony just a little bit. How pleasant it would be if all of her victims were as worthy of death as this one. She took the fleam out of its case. He stared at it.

She went over to the furnace and pulled the firing lever. Then she started the high-pressure gas, which made a cruel hiss. She fired the thing, then adjusted the gas while her victim shook and kicked and snarled like a wild animal. She went upstairs and got his clothes, which lay in a pile in the music room.

Entering it, she stopped. She stood surveying the intricate parquet floor, the Fragonard murals on the walls, of a garden musicale that Miriam had actually attended, at Le Petit Trianon in 1769. She sat at the piano and played a few bars of Chopin, some prelude, she didn’t recall which one.

She realized that she was making him wait, contemplate the fleam lying in its case, and listen to the furnace that would soon consume him. Still, it was essentially just another person going to die because she had to eat.

She held the clothes to her face and inhaled. God, but he was foul. She forced herself to suck the air in again, to smell the greasy, rotted essence of him, to smother herself in it. Maybe she did it because it revolted her, and maybe she liked that. She wanted more, to inhale more, to feel more, to suffer more. Maybe she should have let him rape her longer. Now, was
that
a sick thought.

She took the clothes down to the basement. He watched her with the empty eyes of a shark. “Look,” he said, “I got overexcited. It’s my fantasy, that’s all. I never hurt anybody. Oh, I couldn’t do that. It’s my fantasy, is all.”

She opened the furnace, tossed in a shoe. It evaporated in a white flash.

“How am I gonna get down the street, you bitch?”

“It’s okay. It’s all okay.” She tossed in the other shoe.

“Oh, no. Oh, God, please, please.”

She got the rest of the clothes.

“Don’t do that!”

She threw them in, wallet, belt and all.

“Listen, please, this is crazy.”

She took the fleam from its case.

“Shit! What is that thing? Oh, Christ, put it down! Oh, Christ, Christ. Hey. Help! HEY! HEY! HELP!” He shook and he kicked and he twisted against the steel that held him pinned to the wall.

“It would’ve been nice to make love,” she said as she slapped his neck with two fingers to bring up the vein, holding his head still via a fistful of hair.

“We can make love! Oh, I’m good, I’m beautiful. Please, lady. Oh, shit, why did I ever do this?”

She laid the fleam against his neck, flicked it into the vein, drew it out.

She caught the spray of blood in her mouth, even as he jerked his head to the side and shrieked, his eyes screwed shut. It was always like this. She stopped the stream with a fingertip. Male or female, young or old, they all reacted, at this point, exactly the same way. “Calm down,” she said. He lurched away and started spraying again. Again, she blocked the flow. “Don’t move,” she said. “Stop. Just stop.”

He snarled at her.

“If you don’t let me control this, you’ll die.”

He became still.

She drew closer. She watched his teeth, his glaring eyes. With her free hand, she stroked him down below, and actually got a bit of a rise. Now, that was impressive. Brave man, for a serial rapist or whatever he was. She exhaled to the point of almost collapsing her lungs, then withdrew her finger in favor of her mouth.

With all her might, she sucked. He realized what was happening and gave out a high, frantic yell and lurched away from her. She was on him, though, like a leech stuck to a hippo.

The blood came in slowly at first, annoyingly so, but then some inner resistance collapsed and it flowed, then gushed, sluicing down her throat like water down a rapids. It shocked her from her toes to the top of her head, a bolt of electric life. The sensation was so magical—his living, squirming essence transferred into her thirsting organs and bone-dry bones—that she groaned with pleasure as she sucked. Waves of vibrant new life swept up and down her, from her toes to the top of her head, great, white waves sighing ecstasy as they broke on the shores of her starvation.

The fire entering her bones turned to sweet vibration, the itching that had been driving her mad ended as moist softness suffused her skin. Beginning down deep below her navel, where lay her body’s center of gravity, there spread outward in every direction a sense of well-being so profound that it was like an actual glow.

She withdrew her mouth from the neck, and looked upon a body transformed. What had been plump was now as shriveled as dry fruit. His pudgy biceps were like ropes of beef jerky stretched along his bones. The bones themselves were black and dry. His eyeballs glittered in his head like moist prunes. The mouth, drawn wide by the sudden desiccation of the jaw muscles, revealed a tongue that pointed straight out, a screaming finger. Pooling on the floor were feces and urine. She cursed mildly. She’d forgotten to put down paper. Miriam used to recommend standing them in a catbox.

She found paper, and got a shock. It was a Sunday
Times
from fifteen years ago—the last
Times
ever brought into this house. Leo had gotten it herself. She even remembered that Sunday, going down to the corner of Fifty-fifth and Third to the newsstand and thinking, I’ll be reading the paper in a hundred years, if there is a paper then, or a thousand…and feeling as if she was rich beyond calculation or dream.

She got the mess cleaned up and thrust the paper into the fire. Then she unhooked the body. It dropped into an angular heap. She opened the furnace door again, opened it wide. The corpse was still somewhat pliant, so she straightened it out, arranged the hands down the sides, and slid it in like a log.

She closed the door quickly on the hissing and spitting of the grease, and trotted upstairs.

A body meant homicide detectives. A missing person meant that the case would be filed and forgotten in seventy-two hours. Never, ever leave a trace.

She went to the second floor, careful not to turn on lights, and stood for a moment in the pregnant silence of the back hall. Then she entered her old room, sat on the narrow bed of her girlhood. She took off her shoes, then stripped naked.

Lying back on the bed, touching herself with idle fingers, she giggled a little. Something of him, a slight dampness, still clung to her down there. Usually, she was pensive at this point—feeling absolutely marvelous, but also a little sad. A life, after all, had been destroyed, a human being’s hopes and dreams shattered. People had been left in grief, never to know what had happened to their loved one.

This time, however, she felt much better. She’d actually done some good, killing a man who was at the least a rapist, and most likely a murderer.

She walked into the bathroom, turned on the water. She was careful. From experience, she knew that it would be exceptionally hot when the furnace was running. Miriam would have taken a soak, then wanted an hour of careful massage. Leo wasn’t like that. What pleasure she got from life, she got onstage. The rest was hell, especially this, even when the victim deserved it.

She took a quick shower, using the now dry crust of soap she’d left behind when she was last here. She raised her face into the water, letting the hard, hot stream blush her a little. Then she made the streams into needles and held her breasts so that they pummeled the sensitive crowns and nipples until she squirmed.

She got out of the shower, went to the makeup mirror, and turned the makeup lights on. To make it as brutal as possible, she’d put in two-hundred-watt bulbs. She swabbed away the steam with a towel and beheld the face that looked back at her. Carefully, clinically, she examined the area around the eyes, the corners of the mouth, the tender skin between the brows that could so easily constrict into a frown. What looked back at her was a sensual, vulnerable girl of perhaps eighteen.

That was enough, done. She wasn’t interested in enjoying the miracle, only in doing what she had to do. The idea of getting old and dying no longer horrified her. On the contrary, what horrified her was the reality that she could never do so. Either she must live endlessly or die endlessly. “We linger, Leo,” Sarah had said. “If they kill you or lock you away, you’ll be rendered helpless, but you won’t die. So don’t take any chances.”

She returned to the Sherry, walking through a windswept night. The East River was in tidal flow and covered with quick, angry waves. A barge went past, its tug hooting as it struggled against the current. Sometimes she wished that her magical blood could also speed up time. She’d like to go somewhere far into the future where maybe there would be a cure for her, a way to roll back the clock to the time when she had been human.

The Sherry stood above the silent corner of Fifth and Fifty-eighth. A cab drifted past, a prowl car slid around the corner. Malcom and George would have made their discreet exits by now. Mr. Leong would be asleep in his chair.

Still, she entered the Sherry by the employees’ door, slipping in with her key. At this hour, there was little chance of encountering a waiter in the halls. She didn’t dare to use the elevator, though. That was pressing luck too far. Instead, she went back up the stairs. The way she felt now, the climb was effortless. Her hearing, also, was a hundred times more acute than it had been before the food, as were her eyes and ears and smell.

She listened ahead, but no security man was afoot in the building. She returned to her suite, closing the door behind her. All quiet, all well. She went into her room, lay facedown on the bed, and cried and cried and cried.

T
he radio turned on at six, awakening Paul Ward with the news. As he came to consciousness, he turned to the miracle beside him—the woman who had stayed. She sighed softly, welcoming his invasion of her side. “Uh-oh,” she said when she felt him slide over her. Then he was looking down on a flickering morning smile, eyes half opened or half closed. As he settled into her, he kissed her lips.

The familiar wonder of the sensation enveloped him, rising from his loins. She sighed a little, laughed a little—and the voice of Leo Patterson blared through the house.

He felt himself faltering, then stopped. “Oh, God,” he whispered in her ear.

“Oh, Paul…Paul.”

He ended up on his back, glaring up at the ceiling, listening as “Grrl, Grrl, Grrl” sneered to its bitter end, to be replaced by the blunt irony and rage of “Evil Doll.”

“Why does he do this?” he muttered, rising out of bed. He dragged on his underpants and stormed down to his son’s room. Paul was a huge man, a poor fit for the narrow halls of this ancient dwelling. Dutch farmers had built it in 1653, and Dutch farmers had been compact. He stopped outside his son’s room.

“Ian!” No response. He hammered on the door, then tried the knob. It was locked. “Turn that thing down!”

“Evil Doll” rolled into “Catch Me If You Can,” and Paul considered breaking the door down. It wouldn’t be hard at all for him to smash the big oak door—just a little push.

“Open up!” It was a highly specialized skill to love a teenager, even as hard-won a child as Ian. “Catch Me If You Can” screamed and warbled and roared.

Why her, of all the damn singers in the world?

If what he was beginning to fear about Ian was true, it wouldn’t be a matter of wanting to throttle a kid who blasted his peace all to hell at six in the morning, it would be a matter of carrying out the most agonizingly painful duty in his life.

“Ian! Ian, please!”

The music went away. Paul waited into the silence for the voice of the boy-child he had adored, or the cry of the baby he had held beneath his robe on cold mornings. The silence extended.

Paul returned to his own room. Becky was sitting up, and tried to soothe him with a come-hither smile. She was not by nature gentle; she was as tough a cop as you would ever find, every bit as tough as Leo Patterson pretended to be in her music. But there were many layers to Becky’s personality, and right now his ruthless professional killer of a sexy lady was pink and soft. “I think he heard us,” she said.

“I was being quiet.”

“He’s got your hearing, Paul, you know that.”

Paul went into the john, turned on the hot water until it steamed up from the sink, then covered his cheeks with the luxurious Italian shaving cream that he favored. Shaving mechanically, he tried to push back his concerns about Ian. The boy was just a teenager. Leo Patterson was all over the television, in all the magazines. She was the girl that every redblooded seventeen-year-old in America—or the world, for that matter—dreamed about.

He dressed and headed down to make his eggs. Before descending the stairs, he paused and listened at Ian’s door. He heard breathing—very soft, very close.

“Ian?”

No response.

Paul turned the handle. Locked. “Ian, come on.”

Still nothing. He turned it harder, rattled the door. No response, but he was still right there, literally leaning against the other side of the door. Paul felt the familiar urge to just explode into every direction at once that his teenager was so damn good at evoking in him. But losing your temper with Ian didn’t help anything.

“Come on, guy, let’s get past it.” Nothing. “Hey, we’re on the same side.”

The breathing faded, to be replaced by the small sounds of Ian getting ready for school.

Being ignored did it. Paul kicked the door. From down the hall, Becky said, “Oh, for God’s sake,” as Paul slammed his foot into the door a second time, so hard that it split down the middle and the free half flew into the bedroom.

Ian screamed, and the sound of it—the warbling, boyish surprise of it—set a fire in Paul, and it was all he could do not to tangle with him.

“Goddammit, Ian,” he yelled. “Goddammit!”

Ian slid back against the wall, knocking down his bedside table and radio. His lamp shattered. And then something happened that had never happened before. Instead of cowering, his face covered with tears, instead of Paul getting hold of himself and there developing a trade of damp apologies, Ian laughed. He did not make any sound, but only bared his teeth and shut his eyes and shook in silent laughter.

“Don’t you touch him, Paul Ward!”

Everything slowed down. Ian’s laugh became a fixed, brittle grin of fear. Becky’s hand drifted up, impacted Paul’s cocked arm with all the effect of a landing butterfly. Then his arm began to move, and he could not stop it, he could not because the rage was running him and he—the reasonably civilized man who normally inhabited this big, rough body—was on hold, neutralized, put aside.

The hand—open now, at least, no longer a fist—impacted. It hit not the boy but the table, which hopped and shattered into an explosion of kindling. Paul stumbled, staggered, and then was leaning against the wall breathing hard, feeling his heart go
slamslam slamslam
and thinking, The kid’s gonna kill me yet.

“You asshole,” Ian shrieked, scrambling to his feet and leaping back across his bed, trying to put something more substantial between himself and his onrushing dad. “I hate you, I hate you!”

“You don’t hate your father.”

“He’s a jerk, look, he wrecked my stuff, he’s a total out-of-control jerk, Mom! Why don’t you see that and get us out of here!”

“Ian—”

“You shut up!”

“Don’t you tell your father to shut up!”

“Shut up and get out, old man! Go on, get out!”

“You listen to me. You open your door when I knock.”

“You did not knock, you just kicked the damn thing down, Dad.”

“Why did you turn that goddamn
bitch
on like that at six o fucking clock in the morning?”

“Come on, Paul, for God’s sake, it’s obvious why.”

Paul stopped. He’d overreacted, way overreacted. Ian, blushing bright red now, hung his head. “Son,” Paul said, “look—it’s…nature. Oh, Christ…”

“Dad, just shut up.”

“Why do you listen to that woman?”

“Shut up and go downstairs and eat your damn eggs.”

“Lemme help you, here.” He tried to pick the pieces of the table back up.

“I’ll go to Wal-Mart and get another one, Dad.”

“Listen, son—uh—”

“Dad, forget it.”

“Ian—”

“Come on, Paul, you’re hungry, and you’re mean when you’re hungry.”

Ian said in an undertone, “He must always be hungry.”

Paul’s anger flared again, but this time he managed to grab it and stuff it back into the cave where it lived. He told himself, He couldn’t make you so mad if you didn’t love him. But it sure as hell did not feel like that right now.

He went downstairs as Ian and his mother set about cleaning up the boy’s room. He could hear Ian sobbing now, no longer able to put up a show and, in front of his mom, feeling no need to do so. To Ian, Becky was the mother of his heart and blood. He had no idea that he was adopted, and he sure as hell didn’t know who his real mother was, let alone what.

Paul started the coffee in the French press, enough for the three of them. He hardly thought about his breakfast, making it mechanically. A few minutes later Becky came in, wearing a bathrobe and slippers, and took over from him. Drawing his own robe close around his neck, he went out the back door, stopping for a moment in the larger, colder air of morning. It was absolutely dark and absolutely still, with not even a hint of dawn in the east. The morning star—Jupiter, he thought—hung just above the tops of the pines that crowded the woods. To the north, the Endless Mountains tumbled off to the black horizon. He breathed in the pure, knife-cold air and regretted that he had to be in this wonderful moment while feeling so damn sad.

As he hurried along the path that led out to the road, he passed the old tree where his father’s remnant had been found. His dad had been devoured by the East Mill Vampire, long before the existence of the creatures was known. The vampire had operated in the area for generations, ranging as far east as Danbury and Bridgeport, taking its occasional victims from isolated farms, and from the slums of places like Poughkeepsie and Newburgh.

It was disturbing to destroy vampires, because they were intelligent creatures with lives every bit as complex as ours—more so, some thought—but he had found unequivocal satisfaction in the death of the East Mill Vampire. He’d shot it until its head was reduced to chunks, then his team—very efficient by the time they arrived in this comparative backwater—had burned the remains to grease and ash. The site of the thing’s destruction was a hike from here, one that Paul took often. You went across two hills, then through the van Aalten orchard, and finally through a pumpkin patch that belonged, now, to some city people. Beyond the pumpkin patch was Aalten Kill, a speeding little stream of perfect water that was the residence of brook trout far too wise to fall victim to fishermen—including a very frustrated Paul Ward, who’d been working the Aalten’s eddies and pools since he was nine. In a tumble of stones above the brook was the blackened place where the East Mill Vampire had been rendered down. It had died slowly, as they always did, its headless body twisting in the flames like a great decapitated reptile. It had left a tiny, ancient house and a small garden of lilies.

He reached the road and got his papers, the
New York Times
and the
Kingston Freeman.
Returning to the predictably silent kitchen, he ate his eggs without a word from his wife. He pushed away the ritual desire for a cigar that followed every meal. No more cigars, no more steaks, no more Mexican food. He felt great, but the medicos told a different story: his heart was struggling, and he had to take care.

As he started down to his basement office, Becky asked, “Aren’t you going to talk to him?”

“Apologize?”

“You were wrong. Badly wrong.”

“No.”

He arrived at the bottom of the stairs and stepped out into the familiar cellar of his childhood. Here, he had made spook houses. Here, he and his dad had built their train set and played “Trains in the Dark,” with all the tiny streetlights glowing and the tiny passenger windows lit as their train raced through the little town with its garage and its church and its people who had been painted with single-hair brushes, detailed down to the color of their eyes.

The third week after Dad had disappeared, Paul had huddled right over there behind the fat, black furnace and begged the good lord to take him, too. He had been greeted with what he had come to see as mankind’s defining truth, the silence of God.

Becky came down, as he’d known she would.

“Paul, look, Ian’s becoming an adult. You have to make room for him.”

“Ian is seventeen, and he needs to open his door when his father knocks.”

Paul went through another, very different door, that led into a very different sort of a room. He flipped on the lights, which filled the room with a soft blue glow.

“Paul, you need to talk this out with him. Come on, now, this is—you talk about childish.”

“Oops. Nope. Wrong approach. Ian needs to come to me. He needs to apologize to me.”

“Sometimes I have a hard time believing that dinosaurs are actually extinct.”

He was going to control the anger. He was going to get her to see what was needed here.

He waited. He wanted her to show that she at least understood that he
had
a side, that it wasn’t all Ian here and no Paul. But she did not come in. In fact, she pulled his own door closed in his face. He heard her feet on the stairs.

He shut his eyes and took the slow breaths that would ease his aching chest. Far away, as if filtering down from some mad heaven, he heard,
“Love me please love me, love me please love me…”

Who was playing the damn CD this time, her or him?

Christ almighty, of all the singers in the world, why did he have to go for that one? Goddammit, dammit, dammit!

He would have pounded the wall, but his hand still hurt from shattering the table. Instead, he decided that his instinct to come down here had been the right one. Throw yourself into work. He’d been a damn fool up there, it was true. But he shouldn’t have to gobble crow the way Becky wanted. Kids heal, for God’s sake.

Prescription for an upset and regretful old dinosaur: lose thyself in thy work.

He lumbered over to his slot of a desk and pressed a button, which turned on a group of three computer screens. He tapped his keyboard a few times, then stopped, waiting for the New York Overnights. These were crime reports that were on their way into the National Crime Database. He glanced at two murders, one in Brooklyn and the other in Manhattan. A drug dealer had come to his inevitable end in Bay Ridge. On the Upper West Side a man of seventy had killed his cancer-ridden wife. He had given police a tape she had made begging him to do it. Poor damn people.