Lilith’s Dream: A Tale of the Vampire Life

by Whitley Strieber

  Paul Ward: was he close by, watching her now? Could be…easily. She had come in by the front door, but now the idea of leaving that way made her gut churn cutting, bitter acid. No matter what she did, though, how could she ever hope to escape the man who had taken Miriam?

  She went out the back door, into the concrete side yard. From here, she could see one end of the garden, with the hibernating roses along the north wall of the house.

  She lingered there, if only because the spot was hidden and felt safe. She had to take a sort of journey. It was a long, strange journey into the life of a man, but it was urgently necessary if she was to be saved. She had to do what Miriam had not been able to do, nor any of the Keepers that Ward had so far confronted. She had to hunt the hunter, kill the killer. She went along the alley, to the high gate that prevented access from the street. Unlocking it with a key from her ring, she passed into Sutton Place. Now she was just another well-dressed woman on the sidewalk of the exclusive neighborhood.

  She looked up and down, alert for any lingering figure. Then she went two doors down, crossed the street, and entered the Hildridge Apartments, which had doors both on Sutton Place and East Fifty-fifth Street. She went in one and out the other, looked back, and saw nothing unusual.

  Her unpracticed eye failed to notice the almost motionless figure at the dead end of Fifty-fifth Street, aiming a small video camera at her. But she didn’t expect a woman. In her mind, Paul was the threat. She knew nothing of the life or feelings of a wife, or what she might do to protect her man.

  Chapter Eight

  A Ruined World

  Machines screamed, men in overalls sent nets thundering down into the hold, and a cursing crew of loaders shoveled fish. The smells of fish blood and burning fuel and sweating workmen assaulted Lilith’s nostrils. She’d expelled Kurt during her ordeal, and she was absolutely famished. When humans came near her, it was all she could do not to leap out of her hiding place in the bilge and devour them in an instant.

  To her great annoyance, she saw that the closest to her was a bearer of Searcher blood, which meant a miserable meal. The Searchers had been a great disappointment.

  She’d lived then along the banks of a quiet inland sea, in a land of grasses and oaks, where lions roamed and the humans traveled in packs, gathering berries and roasting wild fowl. While there, she had heard of a remarkable event among the Egyptians, and traveled to see. They had become sun worshipers, following the idea of a clever pharaoh. This sun-worshiping group was of exceptional intelligence, being composed of the best of the Egyptian herd, the lords and scribes, and the cleverest of the priests. Lilith saw that they could be the beginning of a new evolutionary thread in human life.

  Posing as a human, she had become Akhenaten’s wife, calling herself Nefertiti. As Nefertiti, she had contrived to gain power. Then she had secretly encouraged the return of the old Egyptian priesthood of Ra. The people of Akhenaten were expelled from the country, meaning that they became an isolated tribe, and absolutely devoted to their god…and their new, more accurate idea of god.

  Under their leader Thutmose, they had gone into the Sinai, where she had bred and rebred them until they were truly brilliant, easily able to survive without Keeper shepherds. For two generations, they had been tested by being made to wander the desert. The survivors were the cleverest of all, and she had given them a land called Kana, populated by a ragtag of berry and rodent eaters. Sadly, though, theirs was a bitter blood, which she discovered when she ate Thutmose himself, who had been driven mad by all the adversity in the desert and come to espouse inconvenient ideas.

  To this day, over all this vast gulf of years, the Searchers, now called Israelites, still remembered her by her name of Lilith, and told stories of the goddess who had given birth to demons on the shore of the Red Sea, known then as the Blood Sea.

  The demons were merely the children of other Keepers. Even she did not know exactly where the Keepers had come from—where she herself had come from. Sometimes she thought they had fallen from the stars; at others, that they were part of the earth. But the Searchers were full of imagination. They filled every blank space in every story with an invention. And so she became an impertinent wife, then a night-hag wandering the world, ever on the hunt to drink the blood of children.

  Ironically, she had done just that. All the Keepers had done it. Children were easy to capture, pleasant to eat, and the parents soon got over it.

  For the most part, the Keepers were known to humans only in vague legends. The Searchers knew of Lilith, though, had known of her across many generations. To explain her apparent age to themselves, they theorized that she must have been the first wife of the first man. But since she now lived near the Blood Sea, she must have left him.

  She had never been a wife. She loved the idea of being one, though—but not to one of these humans, and certainly not to one of her own spawn of keepers.

  Now she was down here in this filth, naked and cowering, desperate for food, with only a bitter Searcher to eat. He spoke to the others in the guttural language called English. She’d been listening to this whorish polyglot ever since she got on the boat. It was far debased from the English she had learned in Cairo during the last century. Only the lowest of the low would jabber in such an argot, so at least she would not be hearing more, not in the magnificent city of palaces that stood just beyond the quay to which they had docked.

  The Searcher had his back to her now. He was but three feet away. She could hear his blood racing. He was working hard. He was also, now, almost alone. Two of the other workers had climbed to the deck of the ship. He yelled, “Get ’em in, Rini.”

  “You get that lift going,” the other man shouted back from above, and the Searcher pushed a round, black button. Cables tightened, and the fish, now gathered into a net, rose dripping out of the hold.

  In that instant Lilith darted forward, grabbed the Searcher, locked onto his neck, and drained him dry. She practically gagged the blood back up, it was so foul, but she managed to control herself and toss the remnant, now nothing but a spider of narrow bones stretched with skin, into the dark bowels of the hold. She threw on the man’s overall and his hat and climbed the ladder to the deck. Behind her, she heard Rini call out, “Hey, Jew-boy, whaddaya gonna get, ham and eggs?”

  She crossed the deck. “Hey, Jake,” somebody called. She waved vaguely, huddling under the hat. She strode down the gangplank and off into the teeming fish market, losing herself among the stalls, never stopping, looking for Keeper sign.

  But the place was huge, it was completely confusing. “Hey, lady,” somebody said. She passed quickly on. She’d seen how easy it was to attract attention in Cairo, and she did not want to try to cope with another strange human community. Then, abruptly, she was in sunlight. She looked up a narrow street between two rising cliffs. The humans must have carved this whole place out of a gigantic rock. What patience it must have taken—and look, the street positively swarmed with vehicles and people. But there was a distinct order here, none of the madcap of Cairo’s streets. Still, though, the motors bleated at each other.

  She looked up and down the street for sign, saw none. Usually, there would be some marks along the byways of a dockland. She went up the street, and soon found herself facing a wide stairway down. There was a sign on it in the Latin alphabet: “Fulton Street IND.” Along with it were other words. She decided that they were incantations and spells to protect those who descended into the underworld.

  She went down. There was a female in a cage, sitting quietly. She was probably being punished for some infraction, going uncovered or some such. Women had originally covered their heads because they did the picking and the harvesting, and were thus out in the sun more than the men, who hid in shady brush to hunt. Why covering of the head had become a religious law for human women was a matter for scientists to debate.

  She yanked the fisherman’s hat off her head and shook out her blond hair. If any approached her with a protest that she was unco
vered, she’d suck them dry.

  Another room, a sort of corridor, lay beyond a barrier. She peered over the barrier and saw that it was a tunnel. This was well. The Keepers would certainly have put sign in a tunnel.

  She examined the barrier. It came up only to her waist, but the circular gates would not move when she pushed them. It was so low, its only purpose must be to keep out wandering animals, cattle and no doubt the odd lion. So she simply vaulted it.

  Behind her, the woman in the cage began to chatter in English. She didn’t listen. The poor creature was probably praying to the grand goddess in the harbor, and very justifiably wondering why such a magnificent female deity would not help a woman in need. Apparently they still did not know that their deities were only stone and mortar, the poor creatures, and this despite thousands of years of the post-solar god YHWH.

  A moment later, two males dressed in similar blue clothing came hurrying toward her. One of them was from the land of Punt or perhaps Nubia. The other one, quite pale, belonged to a northern tribe. “Slow down, sister,” the dark one called.

  She’d listened to enough English to know that he was directing a threat toward her. But the exact context was elusive. “I am not your sister,” she shouted, her voice echoing up and down the tunnel.

  The men ran faster, drew closer. She came to the end of the raised platform, jumped off, and went down into the body of the tunnel itself. Two bars of iron ran away into the distance. A third one, hidden under a wooden lip, followed them.

  “Come on, lady, you don’t wanna do that.”

  “Aw, shit!”

  She saw guns. She had not the slightest doubt that they intended to put her in the cage with the human female, no doubt for the absurd infraction of not having her head covered. She would not go in a cage. When she heard them scrambling down to the floor of what she had decided must be some sort of a mine, she ran faster.

  From the distance ahead, there came a clanging noise. Soon, she saw two lights. A load of ore, and it wasn’t being drawn by donkeys. It was coming fast, and there was no obvious way to get around it. The two men were gaining on her.

  “Get off the line, lady!”

  “Come on, lady, we ain’t gonna hurtcha.”

  “Jesus God, she stinks. Christ, I can smell her from here!”

  Stinks. That, she understood. She’d learned all about it on the Seven Stars.

  The thing that had been in the distance was now close by. It began to bleat, signaling, she realized, that she must go to one side. She stepped up on the wooden bar that covered the third of the rails.

  “Oh, Jesus, get offa there! Lady—”

  She stepped back, then went into the farther side of the tunnel. The next moment, the machine with the lights went flashing past. The din was so amazingly loud that she screamed against it. The noise blanked her mind, blotted out her being. It was like death itself, this shrieking, ringing, roar.

  As the thing passed, she saw in brightly lit windows a fantastic sight: human beings. Not ore, but people. There were masses of them, packed together more tightly than the fish in the hold of the boat had been, or the coach riders in Egypt. More incredibly, they were not suffering from the roar, but rather eating, staring at the same sort of paper flags she’d seen them carrying about in Cairo, or chatting amiably.

  She stepped out onto the other rails, only to hear a huge blast of noise. She looked behind her, and found herself staring right into the lights of another of the machines. She stood, transfixed, as the man driving it stared down at her.

  And then she did the only thing she could—she leaped forward and threw herself against the low wall on the far side. Here, the sound was more than sound, it was a pulsating thunder, the voice of a raging storm.

  Then gone. And, before her eyes, a slender, perfectly straight line. She gasped, cried out. Her fingers scrabbled along the surface. Keeper sign!

  “Okay, sister, it’s over.”

  “Come on up. Here, hon, I’ll help you.”

  She felt hands upon her, the hands of man. But she could also lay her hand on that line, could touch it three times just right…and roll.

  “Holy shit!”

  Then, muffled, “Beats fuckin’ all! What in fuck’s under there?”

  There came hammering, but she wasn’t interested. This was a Keeper place in here, and those two creatures would not be able to enter it.

  “Lady, are you okay?”

  “It’s the electricals in there. Somethin’.”

  She went on, moving slowly in the absolute darkness. She raised her hand to draw some light out of the ceiling, but when she rubbed, nothing glowed. So she had to go ahead in darkness. She drew air deep into her nose, but could smell no telltales. Behind her, quite far now, she heard the men still hammering and yelling, trying to break into the tunnel.

  Her hand brushed something soft. She felt it again—a thick hanging of some kind. Why didn’t they have any light in here? What was the matter with these Keepers, that they would not provide even the minimal light that their eyes needed? Feeling along the cloth, she thought that it must be a curtain. She dropped to the floor, felt for the hem, found it, and lifted it.

  There came a different scent now, something hard to define—mildew, certainly. But also something else—what? She went past the hanging, and dropped it behind her. This muffled the clamor being raised by her pursuers, who were now hollering like madmen and pounding on the wall. They had realized that they could not follow her, and they did not understand. Ahead, she smelled closeness, a smell of old cloth, and again, that indefinable odor. She also heard something. Was it the sound of somebody moving?

  “I greet you,” she said in Prime.

  No reply.

  She waved her arms around…and struck something, which went over with a clatter. Feeling for it, she came to a familiar shape: the wax body of a candle. She took it in her hands, touching for the wick. But there was no wick. She squeezed it, then felt a harder area on it. She ran her finger along this ridge, trying to visualize what it might be. The base of the object was ragged and dry. There were places along the shaft where rats had gnawed at it. But they had not found it appetizing, apparently.

  She noticed that it had curved slightly. Now, this was odd. It had a sort of animation of its own. She laid it in her palm. The slight tickling she felt told her that it was continuing to move. She picked it up, gingerly took it to her nose. There was a slight—very slight—smell of rot. She sniffed the ragged end.

  She threw it and leaped up, flailing, struggling, trying to find her way in the blackness. But she could not find her way, and fell over something else, fell hard, landing on her back, hitting her head with a hard crack that left her momentarily stunned.

  All around her, she heard rustling. She knew what it was, exactly what it was—the tiny movements of the dismembered body of the Keeper whose ripped-off finger she had been holding. Sensing her presence, it had begun to stir. She scrambled to her feet, crying out in this hellhole, screaming her pain and her agony and her monstrous fear.

  What she had seen in Cairo had been so horrible that she simply hadn’t made sense of it. It was possible for humans to hurt Keepers. Every few hundred years, some Keeper—usually one of the ones who disregarded warnings and lived too close to human society—was caught out and killed. But this—this was something worse than killing. This poor Keeper—man or woman, she could not tell—had been torn to pieces by someone who knew well how to torture her kind. Like the ones who had spiked Re-Atun to a door in Cairo, they had understood what you needed to do to leave a person in a hideous, lingering state of half-life.

  “Oh, please, please be at rest,” she moaned. “I cannot help you, my love. I cannot even help myself!” She sobbed—then stopped. She shut her mouth tight. Listened. Nothing…except the hopeless, whispering struggle on the floor and in her heart. But humans had been in this place, for humans and only humans could do this. Had it been the man of Punt and his northern friend? No—if they knew how to c
ross the barrier, they’d be chasing her now.

  In Cairo, then, and also in this colony, there were killer humans. She shook her head, trying to shake out the confusion that it was bringing her. The humans were so alive now, so conscious, and yet also so cruel. You wanted to despise them, needed to fear them, but even that poor Searcher she’d just eaten—even that wretched fisherman—seemed to be worth so much more than his food value that killing him was rather awful.

  Man had grown up; that was the only way to think about it. After all these generations, there had been, in just the past few decades, this amazing, explosive change in the human world.

  She closed her eyes. She could have been floating, the way she felt now, as if she was in some way detaching from the world. But this was no place for dreams. She wasn’t going to the home of her dreams, because there was no such place. Keepers had evolved on Earth just like the rest of her creatures. She hadn’t come from some pastoral garden in the sky. And she had always eaten blood, never damned wheat cakes or whatever it was she dreamed about. Wish fulfillment, that’s all it was.

  “I must have light,” she said aloud. She felt the walls, touching hangings, stepping over what she hoped was furniture. There had to be a form of light here, had to be. They didn’t need much of it, but not even a Keeper could see in this maddening blackness. She slapped a wall and rubbed it, crying and begging, rubbed it and hammered at it—and, of a sudden, realized that she could see her hands.

  The glow rose from the wall, just as it should. This painted chemical phosphorescence—it came from a lichen—was universally used by Keepers in their lairs. As the light increased, she saw why it had not worked in the front of the place: the walls were encrusted with so much lime from long abandonment that the paint was coated with it.

  As the glow increased, she could hardly believe what she was seeing. Before her was a pile of body parts—torsos, legs, heads, arms, hands, fingers, strewn about, all seething with hopeless, mindless, tormented life. She gasped, gasped again, staggered back. Then she looked more—the hangings were of the finest materials, and there were lovely objects all covered with lime and rot, jades and dull, golden things, strange paintings of girls in sunlit gardens in some impossible heaven of a world.