Lilith’s Dream: A Tale of the Vampire Life

by Whitley Strieber

  Destroyed Keepers and their collection. It was the habit of her people to collect from earlier generations of humans and sell to later. Time made things rare among the humans. Their generations were so short and their lives so violent that treasures were quickly lost.

  What kind of human beings would do something like this, though, and not also loot the place? Unless these were the things not worth taking. She raced around the miserable space, trying to think what to do to alleviate the suffering here. The only thing would be to burn them—to burn her own, dear creations, the almost-real beings she called her children—but she had not any fuel. Real, thorough killing was hard work. It took time, it took care. All she could do for them was to survive.

  She scrambled to a chest, opened it. Herein were clothes. She grabbed a dress, held it against her, then another, until she’d found one that was the correct size, more or less. It was complicated and fragile, but she had to dress so that she could go among the humans. She had work to do, and there could be no delay.

  Just now, in this horrible place, she faced the fact that a world catastrophe had overtaken the Keepers. Mankind had risen up against them and destroyed them with exceptional, savage cruelty, and that was why she had ceased to be attended: there was nobody left.

  Shaking, her body roiling and heavy inside with the meal she’d eaten, she drew the dress over her head, struggling with the tangle of damnable petticoats and lace. Oh, she should never have just tossed that remnant back in the boat aside; what had she been thinking? They’d find it, and when they did, somebody who knew a lot about Keepers would know that there was one here, and they would hunt her down.

  How did they do it? How could they? She had bred man to intelligence, but not that much intelligence.

  She found sandals of a sort, odd things that closed with little hooks, completely encasing her foot. They weren’t comfortable, and they made her feel as if her legs were the stilts of a lotus gatherer, but never mind, they were what was here. She had learned enough in Cairo to know that she would need the paper the Egyptians called “pounds.” Gingerly, she probed into the clothing that hung on the torso of one of the victims. There was nothing there. Disgusted, her hands shaking so badly she could hardly control them, she went to another poor man. In his pocket was a leather case containing many greenish colored pounds, marked with various Arabic numerals.

  She found something else there, a black tube, one end of which was fitted with a tiny version of the light balls used by the humans. It was not lit, though, and she could not think how that might be done. She turned it over in her hands. She could use the light it might make, if she was to learn more about the place in which she found herself. As far as she was concerned, she would be pleased never to go to the surface again except to eat. She well understood why the Keepers had retreated beneath the earth.

  She turned away, stuffing the packet of pounds into the belt of the garment she was wearing. As she did so, there was a brief clatter and a flash of light. She turned. The glow from the wall revealed that the little tube was lying on the floor. It had dropped, and in doing so, had flashed. She picked it up, shook it. Again, it flickered. Again, she shook it and got the same result. What was to be made of this? Surely it wasn’t necessary to shake the light out of it. No, it rattled when it was shaken, meaning that there was something loose within. What might it be? Perhaps—well, she didn’t know. The fuel for the fire in the tiny globe, she supposed. Then she noticed that it had a raised bezel, and that this could be tightened.

  Light came—not strong, but definitely usable. So, she had managed to prepare herself a little. She was dressed in human clothes, she had pounds, and she had portable light. Now she needed water to drink and bathe in, and a place of rest. The idea of making herself beautiful again, though, seemed very distant.

  In the objective part of her mind, which was as cold and clear as a mind could be, she thought that this journey would soon be over, and it would conclude in the same way it had for those around her. Somewhere out there in those tunnels lurked her fatal end.

  Becky ran the videotape again. Why would Leo have come out the alley door? Why not simply leave by the front? She’d almost missed her, had caught her only because of a flicker of movement out of the corner of her eye.

  It was time for her husband to discover that they were still very much partners. “Paul, could you come in the den, please?”

  There was no response; then she realized that he was on the phone in the kitchen. As she went in, he was concluding his call. “Bocage,” he told her. “They’ve analyzed a cloak worn by the one in Cairo. It’s made of you know what kind of skin.”

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  “That’s not all. There was something in a pocket. More human skin, Becky. Off somebody’s back.”

  They made purses, wallets, you name it. So he had been right, just as she’d told Briggsie that he would be.

  “Are they close to it?”

  “According to Bocage, the trail’s gone cold.”

  She looked into his eyes. When she had first begun loving him, she had also begun fearing for him. They had gone shoulder to shoulder in the Paris catacombs, sterilizing them of vampires in the company of some of the bravest people in the world. Again, here in New York, Paul had found a way into the lairs, which were laid in abandoned subway tunnels and cunningly disguised pipelines.

  After New York, they had believed that the vampire was extinct. Leo—if she was really blooded—was a leftover. But now, with this new case, and with the vampire disappeared—well, everything had changed.

  “I’ve been watching Leo,” she said.

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “I just did a stakeout at the Sutton Place address a couple of times.”

  “Thank you for telling me.”

  “I am telling you. I’m telling you now.”

  “Becky, it’s dangerous.”

  She didn’t even bother to shrug. “I saw her once. She had a bag. She carried it into the house.”

  “It is dangerous!”

  “What was odd is that she came out through that alley that fronts on Sutton Place. Instead of the front.”

  “Becky, goddammit, this is rule one we’re looking at. Nobody operates alone.”

  “I’m an expert.”

  “Becky, if anything happened to you, I don’t know what I’d do.”

  “Come on, Paul, it’s a dangerous business we’re in. Live with it. Anyway, I got her on tape.”

  He sighed. “Good work,” he said after he’d watched it. “The bag was full on the way in?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s still full here. Either it has nothing to do with the house, or it’s equipment that she used in the house and took away with her.”

  “Any way we can enter the house?”

  “The tunnel in from the garden.”

  Her gut tightened. That tunnel communicated with all the other tunnels.

  “What’s on your mind?”

  “Oh, Paul, I’m just remembering.”

  “Yeah, it’s rough. I’ve been remembering ever since that bastard thing killed my dad.”

  “I think we should go into that house.”

  There was a silence.

  “Paul?”

  “I’ve already been in the house.”

  “Why, Paul, we don’t operate alone. Remember rule one?”

  “I’m a goddamn expert,” he rumbled.

  They ran the videotape again. Leo came out the little door in the wall, looked up and down the street, then hurried off.

  “Maybe she’s making it ready,” Paul said.

  “The house?”

  “Sure. There’s a vampire on the run, and Cairo to New York is twelve hours. They’ve got phones, e-mail, same as everybody else. Cairo was too hot for whatever’s out there, so it’s coming to New York.”

  “Why not Beijing or Rio or Mexico City? Any one of them’d be a damn sight easier than New York.”

  “Leo’s here, and she’s rich
and she’s powerful.”

  “What’s it like—the house?”

  “Even that portrait of her—Miriam, I mean—it’s in the living room.” He looked away.

  Becky knew that she could never replace Miriam in his heart. “She was a beautiful creature,” she said softly, “until she kissed you.”

  He laughed a little. “What I want to do is wait and hang back, and keep our eye on Leo. Then, when the two of them meet up, we can do them both.”

  “Leo is a citizen. She gets due process.”

  “She’s a—God, I don’t know what to call her. Whatever the hell they made of her. But she’s not a human being, Becky, not anymore.”

  “I said citizen.”

  “We do with her what we did with the other ‘citizen.’ That Roberts had been a doctor, for God’s sake.”

  The phone rang. Both of them moved toward it with the same thought: Ian. Becky picked it up. “This is George Fox,” the voice said. “Is this Mrs. Ward?”

  “Hi, George.”

  “I need to talk to Paul.”

  What the hell was this about? Inspector Fox had provided lots of support during the sterilization of the city, all without knowing—or asking—exactly what a bunch of CIA officers were doing in concealed tunnels under the streets. “George Fox,” she told Paul.

  He pressed the speaker-phone button so she’d be able to hear the call. “George, hello,” he said.

  “He’s in custody.”

  Becky’s heart froze.

  “Okay.”

  “He was apprehended in a raid on a rave in Chelsea. We have him in Central Holding. You gotta get down here, or he’s gonna go to Rikers. I can’t control it past booking.”

  What the hell was this?

  “I knew it,” Paul said.

  “Just a second.” She turned to him. “Give me that.” He held the phone away, but she took it. “Okay, George, what’s the situation?”

  “It’s a felony count of Ecstasy possession. He had a tab.”

  “That’s a felony?”

  “Class C, but it’ll put him in Rikers overnight unless you get him out. And if he goes in there—well, you can’t allow that.”

  “We’ll be there in an hour.” She would do the driving. He was good, but she was damn good. She hung up the phone. “He’s in on an X charge. They’re gonna ship him to Rikers.”

  “We gotta post bail. I’ll call—”

  “You’ll call Morris Wheeler from the car. I have a feeling that somebody’s gonna have to talk the night court judge into dropping charges, and a lawyer can’t do that. That’s a job for parents.”

  “You’re gonna drive us down to the city in one hour? It’s a two-hour drive, even with me behind the wheel.”

  “But you won’t be behind the wheel.”

  She hung out her blue light and made sure her credentials were in her purse. Strictly speaking, this wasn’t official business, but it was hard to tell that to the mother in her. Her boy was not going to go spend the night getting raped, for the love of all that was holy.

  Rounding the first curve, Paul grabbed the handle above the passenger side window. “We gotta get there alive,” he muttered.

  “Never you mind.”

  When they reached the parkway, she accelerated to 120, then settled in at 115. This would give her just enough anticipation time to cope with traffic ahead. Any faster, and her reflexes wouldn’t make it. Hopefully, no trooper would be dumb enough to try to pull a blue light over, not when he saw the plates and knew this was a federal car.

  Not five minutes later, she had a siren on her tail. She left it there for a while, hoping he’d read the plate and peel off. But she could see the rigid face under the Smokey the Bear hat. This guy was steamed. He was not going to peel off.

  “Goddammit!”

  Paul said nothing.

  She pulled over so fast the cop practically overshot her. He came out, walked up to the window.

  “This is official business,” she barked.

  “Driver’s license and registration.”

  She pulled out her credentials.

  “Driver’s license and registration!”

  “Are you nuts? This is an official vehicle, and I’m an officer of the law! Get the hell out of my face, and do it NOW!”

  “Lady, you were doing a hundred and twenty.”

  “And if you don’t move your hiney outa here, I’m gonna have to do a hundred and forty, and if I have to do that, I’m putting you up on charges, buster, and those charges will be serious.”

  “An Audi won’t do a hundred and forty.”

  Oh. An asshole. Now she understood. “This one will,” she said as she rolled up the window. She accelerated into traffic. He did not follow—surprisingly, given that he was a complete prick.

  “You scared him. Impressive.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Becky knew damn well that he wouldn’t have come near them if she hadn’t been a woman.

  Fifty-two minutes later, they were in front of the municipal building in lower Manhattan. The place was a maze, but they finally found Part 176, Judge S. Gutfriend presiding. As soon as she threw the swinging glass door open, she saw the back of Morris Wheeler’s head, and beside him, sitting tall, her son. She strode past the lounging cops, the miserable families, the sullen defendants—or defen dants, as they were called here—and put her hand on Ian’s shoulder.

  He turned. How young he looked—just a damn baby. Salt trenches gleamed on his cheeks, where tears had flowed and dried.

  Morris shook their hands. “I was afraid we were gonna go it alone,” he said. “I think you guys can figure out what to say—honor student, made a mistake, don’t give him a record. Momma, you say, ‘He’s a good boy.’ You use those words.”

  “The judge must hear that fifty times a night.”

  “You’d be surprised at how little he hears it. There are sixteen other kids on this docket, and exactly two parents have shown up. You two. And Paul, you say how proud you are of him.”

  “He’s not proud of me,” Ian muttered.

  Becky squeezed Paul’s hand, but she felt like wringing his damn neck. This absolutely would not be happening if Paul Ward would just let himself trust his own son. A trusted Ian would have followed his dad to Choate. He would not have been left to rot and fester and fill with hate for his own father.

  Then suddenly Becky was being called. There was a little podium to stand before. “He’s a good boy,” she intoned into the microphone, her voice echoing oddly. She told how he was an honor student, how they’d just moved to Manhattan, and he’d gotten overexcited and made a mistake. She defended him, she thought, eloquently, before the dead eyes of Judge Gutfriend.

  Then Paul took the stand. “Ian got hijacked by hype,” he growled, his voice rumbling with such power through the courtroom’s speakers that every single soul there fell silent. Even the judge’s eyes seemed to spark a little. “He’s got a midnight curfew, which he’s busted for the last time. You don’t wanna give this boy an adult felony record. He has the makings of a good lawyer, among other things. But you and I both know the licensing requirements. No felonies need apply. Let me take my son home and give him what he needs.”

  “What’s that, Mr. Ward?”

  “I think—to be frank, Your Honor—I think that he needs more of my time. He’s been getting shortchanged.”

  “And so you’re here.”

  “We’re here.”

  The lawyer for the state read the charge but offered no argument. A mumbled couple of words and a snap of the gavel later, and the case was dismissed.

  They were in the hall before Becky threw her arms around Ian.

  “Does this mean I have to go back?” he asked.

  She looked around for Paul. He should be here. He should help her make this decision. But he was standing at the end of the corridor like a statue. Of all the damn things, he was reading a newspaper. Becky thanked Morris for getting out of bed for them. Then she marched down the hall with Ian.


  “Paul Ward—”

  But he was pale. His face was frozen. He looked like he’d had a stroke. In his hands was the early edition of the New York Daily News. Wordlessly, he handed it to her.

  Under the headline “Dried Body Apparent Accident” was the following story: “The body of fishing boat captain Jacob Siegel was found in the hold of his boat, the Sea Bream, after a search at the Fulton Fish Market today. Siegel’s crew had reported him missing and presumed overboard when he disappeared from the boat at approximately 5:15 A.M. while it was unloading its cargo at the market.

  “Mr. Siegel’s body had been completely exsanguinated and was reduced almost to a skeleton in what police believe was a freak accident. ‘I never saw anything like it,’ said police superintendent B. J. Harlow. A coroner’s report on the death is expected to be filed today.”

  Long before she had finished reading it, the world around Becky had slipped into silence, Ian and Paul and the corridor had slid away, and her mind had gone back again to the terrible times under these streets.

  “Mom? Dad?”

  She looked at him as if across a gulf of shadows. “Ian,” she said, “the apartment isn’t going to work.”

  He slumped down on the bench. But what could she do? She would never, ever leave him here to wander these streets, knowing that the vampires had returned.

  Chapter Nine

  Eaters of the Dead

  The Music Room was the hottest intimate club in New York. Monty Sauder had put millions into it, banishing the awful hugeness that made so many faux café gigs so unpleasant. Who wanted to sing to an ocean of a thousand little tables, each one with its dinky little lamp? The only way you were going to sing like you were in a café was if you were. Monty had solved this problem. There were just sixty tables on his floor. The rest of the place was all balconies, so there might be a thousand people there, but you felt like you were in this really intimate space.