Lilith’s Dream: A Tale of the Vampire Life

by Whitley Strieber

  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 h
is 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.

  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.”