She stood on the bandbox stage looking out over the floor and contemplated a larger question: Why did she do this at all? She had a ridiculous amount of money, three houses she hardly ever lived in, her own plane, cars at every house just sitting there being maintained by a faceless horde of people who quietly kept everything just right—she literally had it all.
So, therefore, she was going to come out here on this stage in a few nights and bare her soul to a bunch of fat-faced rich people and reviewers whose talentless, disappointed lives and insupportable arrogance required them to dump on her. Was it really because she cared about the Environment Fund? Well, she did care, but not enough to risk all that you risked in front of an audience—smoke in your throat, nasty reviews in the Times or Rolling Stone, or even some kind of weird embarrassment, like nobody shows up. Or some asshole with a gun.
She watched Hillyard doing the lights, watched Sam Hitchens fooling with the sound. She didn’t need to watch them—they’d do everything perfectly. She could afford the best.
Monty came sailing in with the presells, which mostly consisted of ten-thousand-dollar checks made out to the Environment Fund. He looked terrible, Monty did, but he always looked terrible. He smoked constantly, and his daily rest consisted of a downer at four in the morning. “Two million dollars,” he said, handing her a blue packet of checks. She gave him his own check, a hundred and seventy thousand dollars. The show would ultimately net the Environment Fund $3 million. As for Leo Patterson, she would just about break even.
“How many are really coming?” she asked.
“That’s an interesting question, actually.” He shuffled his papers. “The issue is who’s seated—” He nodded toward the floor. “And who’s consigned to the dustbin of history. I seated Jewel and her truck driver and put Kitty Hart in the balcony. Ain’t I bad?”
“Jewel’s friend is one of the world’s great bull riders, not a truck driver, and do I really want to put Kitty Carlisle Hart in the balcony?”
“She’d be ancient history if she wasn’t so old, my dear.”
“Bring me the seating chart.”
He ran off, his shirttail flying behind him. Idly, she picked up the paper he’d had under his arm and left on a chair. Monty read the Post. Okay. Personally, she preferred the Times. Except for page 6, of course. The celeb gossip page of the Post was required reading for anybody doing the public-eye thing in New York.
She would have turned straight to it, but she dropped the paper. When she’d gathered it up, she found herself staring at something that was horribly, darkly familiar to her. For a moment her mind was blank; it was something she could not be seeing in a newspaper. But the picture could not have been more clear: it was of a man who had been consumed by a vampire—not one like her, who left a lot of the blood, but a real, natural-born vampire with an ebius powerful enough to suck a human being absolutely dry.
She realized simultaneously that she was no longer alone, and that this vampire—so heedless that it would leave a kill right out in the open—was in mortal danger. She crumpled the paper. Involuntarily, she moaned. Monty, George, and Monty’s assistant, Fred Camp, all turned toward her. They’d been huddling together, frantically plotting how to keep the seating chart out of her hands.
“Leo?”
“I’m okay.” She plastered a smile on her face. She had to get out of here immediately. She needed something, anything—a drink, a toke, a tab of Special K—to put her down. Way down.
“I’ve got some coke left over from last night,” Monty suggested confidentially, seeming to sense her need.
George, who was far more perceptive, realized that something in the paper had shocked her. He picked it up. “Jesus Christ,” he said. He looked at her, his eyebrows raised. Then he showed the paper to the others. “Look at this. They shouldn’t print shit like this.”
“Oh, our poor baby,” Monty said, enclosing Leo in a long, thin arm. “This must have really shocked us.” Then, sotto voce, “She’s so sensitive, Georgie, I don’t know how you manage her.”
George said nothing. He knew well that Leo could probably have watched gladiators slicing each other up without batting an eye. So he simply stared quietly at her, his face betraying fascination and a little curiosity.
Leo fought for composure, but the walls were throbbing, the place felt like the interior of a coffin, the air was dense and foul, and she wanted only one thing: find and save that vampire.
Or no. No! God, what was she thinking? She couldn’t become part of that world again. It was dead, and the vampire that had blundered into New York was doomed.
She sucked in breath, twisted her hands together, tearing at them until her knuckles sounded like snapping twigs.
She had to go into the tunnels. That’s where the vampire would be, imagining itself safe in that charnel hell where Paul Ward ruled.
“If you’d rather do this another time—”
“We’ll be back tomorrow,” she heard George saying.
“Okay, that’s good. It’s fine.”
If she didn’t want to think about anything—and she really, really did not, not just now—well, she didn’t have to. “Take me home,” she said vaguely.
“To the Sherry?” George asked as they left the club.
Oh, God. This was an incredible moment. In her mind’s eye, she saw the iron door to the tunnel. She could not go down there, dared not. But there was somebody needful, and she had to at least try. “My house,” she said. “I’m going to spend the day at the piano.”
“Beautiful,” George said.
“Alone. No kibitzers.”
They got in the limo and rode silently uptown. Leo closed her eyes. What if it was a man, a beautiful male of the vampire species? One of her deep night fantasies was that a male vampire, tall and powerful, showed up in her bedroom, and was so strong he made her feel like a leaf.
“Hon, do you have any food in there? Do you want me to send Bobby over from the hotel with lunch?”
“Lunch?”
She realized that the strange jittering she was feeling wasn’t the car, it was her. She felt like she had a fever. George looked carefully, professionally concerned. She knew that he was thinking about what he’d do on the day off he’d just been granted.
“I want Kitty Carlisle Hart down in front. And Jewel and her boyfriend. Monty’s too contemptuous. All he’s ever done is throw around Daddy’s money.”
George remained silent.
“But it’s a beautiful club, I have to agree with that.”
“It’s beautiful. Also good acoustically. You’ll barely have to whisper.”
“You know how long it’s been since I sang in front of an audience?”
“Twenty-one months, including two missed informal dates. Except if you count the time at Katz’s.”
She’d burst into song one night at Katz’s Delicatessen on Houston Street. It had quickly become a bizarre media thing, with camera crews coming in from all sides. They ruined that fun fast.
The car turned onto First Avenue and headed uptown. “Get me a Daily News and a Newsday,” she said.
She held the papers tightly, not reading them, forcing herself not to think about what might be happening right now beneath the streets. Because you could bet that Paul Ward had read the paper, and he would be down there right now, an expert hunter in a territory he knew well.
Would she be able to find this vampire at all, let alone first? What if he or she didn’t know anything about what Miri had done to her? Could they tell, or would he simply take her?
“Who is Miri?”
“Miri?”
“You just said a name: Miri.”
She shook her head. Now she was talking to herself. That was all she needed. “Got a cigarette, George?”
“We’re quitting, remember.”
“Which means you haven’t got one, or you’re holding back?”
He held out a pack of Galoises. She took one, and he lit it. She dragged in the smoke gratefully.
As far as she knew, smoking couldn’t hurt her, not with Miri’s blood flowing in her veins, but she was convinced that it was reducing her vocal range. Something was. But no matter, she needed this now.
“Gimme,” she said.
He held the pack away from her, but she took it, and the lighter. “You quit,” she said.
When the car arrived at the house, she got out and went up the steps without another word to George. She knew that she ought to be more careful, that Paul Ward and his team of murderers could be watching, but she couldn’t deal with that right now. The first thing she had to do was to try to rescue that vampire. Maybe he was sick. Did they get sick? Or hurt. They could certainly be hurt—she knew that too, too well.
She unlocked the door and stepped into the house. Waving at George, she closed it behind her. God, how quiet could a house be? It was as if the very air of this place absorbed sound. There was a timelessness to it that was just awesome, as if you were floating in eternity as soon as you crossed the threshold.
It was a very wide house, seventy feet, a true mansion rather than an expanded row house. Silvers Phillipot had told her that it was worth $15 million, maybe more, and that was unfurnished. She didn’t know what the furnishings might be worth. She dared not have them appraised. How could she explain chairs from ancient Egypt and Rome, or the Greek krater that stood against the far wall of the sitting room, or the Delft and the Dresden and the nameless wonders from across the length and breadth of the world? There were Titians and Canalettos on the walls, a Reubens and a Rembrandt, all portraits of the same person spanning centuries. It would be completely inexplicable to an art historian. And upstairs in the sun room, the mystery would deepen. There was an Alice Neel of the same woman sitting naked, with that same grave, infinitely noble face. How could Leo explain the fact that the great artists of the world had painted the same woman over a period of seven hundred years?
No, the house remained closed, its collections secret. But she had always wanted to make a grand entrance down the central staircase, before the assembled cream of the world. When she was just a girl here, running along behind Sarah and Miri, serving them and hoping to be blooded, she had dreamed of the dress she would wear—she thought a Hardy Aimes would be fitting—and of just how she would walk, casually but grandly, as she descended into this wide foyer, with its pink marble columns and gold-inlaid marble floor.
She went through the dining room with its fabulous Tiffany glass ceiling, of doves in clouds floating on an azure sky. The table was so impossibly wonderful that she’d longed to have it identified and appraised. It was not of recent manufacture—not, that is, from the past three or four centuries. The teak actually glowed, it had been so deeply and lovingly rubbed. And yet it seemed light, almost as if it would float. She thought that it might be from some unknown culture, perhaps an ancient Indian civilization that had been entirely lost.
When you gazed into its surface, it sometimes seemed as if memories or dreams might flutter there, slipping in and out of visibility as you watched. Had she not seen a city in that reflection once, rising like a memory and then gone? Or maybe it had been just her imagination.
She climbed the back stairs into the long, narrow serving corridor that opened into the various second-floor rooms. Then she went into Miri’s magnificent bedroom. This was untouched, waiting for Miri to return. As far as Leo was concerned, it would wait another thousand years, or forever. She went to the Roman cedar cupboard that stood against one of the eggshell blue walls and opened it. She slid back a drawer and put her hand into the place where a Roman senator had kept his most precious documents. From this hidden cranny she withdrew a black pistol, a weapon that Sarah had commissioned especially from the High Standard Custom Shop in Montana. She’d fired it, they all had, back when it had still seemed possible to survive. They had brought in a master gunsmith from the manufacturer especially to teach them, so that they would be the equal of their adversaries.
It had never been used. There hadn’t been the chance. She hefted it, opened and inspected the ten-bullet magazine. The pistol was fully loaded. She chambered a round and turned off the safety. The trigger pull was tuned to four pounds, so she would have to be careful. She liked guns, truth to tell. Loved this one, because it was just so superbly made. They should have all had them and kept them on their persons all the time. Then they would have had a chance. Too bad Miri hadn’t been able to believe in the danger, not really, not until he started firing.
Striding now, Leo went into her own room, got her shoulder holster off the top shelf of her closet, and put it on. She changed from sneakers to boots and holstered the pistol. Then she got her long, black leather coat and leather hat and put them on.
She went back downstairs, opened the tool cupboard behind the pantry, and got the flashlight.
So she was ready. Her legs felt heavy as she went down the cellar stairs and into the other part of her world, the dark part, where real life was lived. How many men and women had been sacrificed down here? Hundreds, possibly thousands, since Miri had bought the house. To her, the process had been so completely casual that it had seemed almost normal. She’d enjoyed seducing them, then terrifying them, to season the blood with a flood of adrenaline. Leo was not so skilled. Hers just died, usually in total confusion and panic.
The thing was, she liked it when they were scared. She’d been brought up under the heel of her dad, and she liked it when she had the power of fear over them.
She went through the infirmary where she usually did her killing, and down to the iron door that led into the tunnel. Fingerprint powder still covered it. She drew back the bolts and pulled it. It opened easily on its carefully oiled hinges. She stood staring into the blackness. How could a place be so dark? It was as if the air absorbed light. A faint wind came out, as it always did, smelling of mildew and water and the indefinable, cinnamony rot that she knew came from the remains of vampires.
How would she ever do this? The tunnels were full of switchbacks and cunning turns, including many that a human being like her would have trouble even seeing.
She stepped across the threshold and turned on her light. When she shone it into the dark, what she saw seemed straightforward enough. She’d been in here with Miri, gone through and up into the garden with her. The brick tunnel, seven feet high and wide enough for two people to stand side by side, sloped gently downward. In the distance, she could hear rushing water. There were openings along the East River, she knew, but she’d never seen them.
Paul Ward had been almost in Miri’s hands when things had suddenly changed, and she’d had to escape through this tunnel. Leo and Sarah had prevented Ward from following her then, but he had tracked her like a hellhound for months, following her across the world.
Leo entered the tunnel. She started along it, then hesitated. Maybe this was a mistake. Maybe the vampire didn’t know about the tunnels. But no, they all knew about tunnels. They’d dug tunnels under ancient Rome, for God’s sake, and Paris and Tokyo and London. They lived in tunnels. So it would have come here by ship, which is how most of them preferred to travel, and somehow ended up on the Fulton Street Pier, probably after making its way along the Manhattan waterfront from the West Side piers where ships like the QE2 docked.
She went a few steps farther along. Suddenly she was facing the much narrower passage that led up to Miri’s garden. “Never go beyond this point,” Sarah Roberts had said. “You might not be able to find your way back.”
Leo shone her light off into a blackness so deep that it seemed to absorb it. She had the curious idea that she was entering a kind of organ of the world—a hidden part of its circulatory system—that had died. “We are nature’s balance,” Miri had said. “We’re the best friends you have.”
Tell that to Paul Ward, sweet princess.
Moving step by step, dragging her fingers along one wall, she proceeded deeper. I know what to look for, she told herself; that’s my advantage. And indeed, her fingers soon came to a subtly rais
ed area in the masonry. Even under the light, you couldn’t see it. She pressed against it. Nothing seemed to happen. She wasn’t surprised. This was something she’d been told about, not something she’d ever done before. So maybe the ridge had been nothing, just a small defect in the wall.
When she shone her light at it to get a better look, however, she had to stifle a cry. There had been no sound, no sensation of something moving, as the wall had opened. She stepped in, went about five steps along the steep downward slope. Here the air was still and thick. There was no sound of the river. In fact, there was no sound of any kind except her breathing.
This tunnel was narrow, and so low she had to bend. She didn’t like it. In fact, she couldn’t handle it; she was just too claustrophobic, and this wasn’t going to work. She turned around to go back—and confronted a brick wall. She shone her light around, frantically looking for the entrance she’d just passed through. When she saw only brick, she cried out, stifling it instantly. Then she swept her free hand along the masonry, searching for a raised area, anything that would enable her to open it.
When her fingers touched only ordinary brick and mortar, she got sick, she was so scared, bending double and retching. She pulled out the pistol and was going to fire it at the wall until she realized how stupid that would be.
She was totally and completely alone. She’d come here for the same reason that she always did things—she’d just taken the plunge.
There was only one thing left to do, and perhaps she’d known from the moment she’d come in here that this would be what happened. She started off down the tunnel.
All of her life, Lilith had bathed in clear water. Scent derived from her own lilies had filled the wide, airy rooms of her cave, and she had wanted for nothing. Now she was filthy beyond speaking, wandering in this charnel of narrow passages, dirt, and the whispering dead.
Too bad Re-Atun had kept the sorrows of the vampires from her. The human population had been growing fast even as the species became more intelligent. She had believed that she ruled this world, but she had only reigned, a passive empress of hollow edicts. She’d been nothing but a symbol, and a lost one at that.
Lilith’s Dream: A Tale of the Vampire Life Page 19