The Last Vampire

by Whitley Strieber

  He thought that there might be a million skeletons here. No rat came for them, no maggot, for they were too dry even to attract vermin — only little running things, nameless beetles of some kind, that were slowly turning them to dust.

  As he walked slowly along shining his light, he became aware that this place was easily half a mile long. Face after face stared out at him, each with its goggled eyesockets and bucked teeth. They were stacked twenty high.

  Here was where lay the real dead of Paris, the anonymous, the disappeared, the forgotten. Ironic that this other, more terrible ossuary would lie deep beneath the Denfert-Rochereau, almost as if its human builders had known by some kind of race memory, or the whispered intelligence of the dead, that somewhere beneath their feet, there lay an even greater grave.

  How many of these people had left weeping lovers behind, people who never knew whether to mourn them for dying or despise them for running away?

  Such an anger filled Paul now that he trod steadily, uncaring of his own life, forgetful even of the vital importance of the book he had with him, marching like a soldier bent only on victory, going step by step toward his next kill.

  In all this time, there had not been one more turning, not one place to hide. So all the vampires in this place must be ahead of him.

  He had two shots left in his clip. He pulled it out, reached back and dropped it into the rucksack, grabbing a fresh one and jamming it in. If it came down to it, he would use the two shots left in that clip to blast the damn book to bits and then kill himself. He might not get it out of here, but they damned well wouldn’t get it back, either.

  The idea of being sucked dry like these poor people made a taste rise in his throat so vile that he had to choke back his own vomit. He would never, ever die like that, with the lips of a vampire pressed against his neck.

  He had to get out of here. The air was sickening. The place was claustrophobic. The bodies were twisted in a hundred postures of struggle and suffering, the faces still radiating horror, agony, and surprise.

  Eventually, he saw a door ahead. He hurried to it, looked for a knob. There was a silver ring. When he pulled it, the door slid smoothly back on perfect hinges.

  There had never been any place like this in Asia. At least, they had never uncovered such a place. But they had been on a killing spree, hadn’t they, compared to the subtle, expert French? He was good at dealing death, not at the cat-and-mouse game that Bocage was playing with these very much more dangerous vampires of his.

  His light played on the walls — and he saw a human face staring at him. He gasped, momentarily disoriented by the eyes that looked back at him … from the incredibly distant past. No human being had ever before looked upon what this must be, a vividly lifelike portrait of a Neanderthal, appearing as if it had been painted yesterday.

  The picture was painted on what looked like a slab of highly polished stone, maybe using some sort of wax process. But when he looked closer, he realized that this was not a painting at all but an incredibly fine mosaic. It was constructed of bits and slivers of stone so tiny that to his wondering fingers the surface appeared absolutely smooth.

  What a very fine hand had made this, and so long, long ago. Beside it there was another mosaic, this one of something he thought must be some sort of genetic map — incredibly intricate, incredibly detailed.

  Was he was looking at a Neanderthal with its genetic map beside it? If so, then what was this room? What had been done here? All around the walls were more such images, some of even more ancient creatures, in which the shadow of man was dominated by the staring savagery of the ape. If you looked from first to last, there was a logical succession from a small ape with frightened eyes all the way to modern people. There were at least fifty of the pictures. They went on until they ended with a woman so beautiful that she seemed to have been born of the angels.

  This looked like some sort of record of the evolution of man . . . or our creation. Quite frankly, it looked like a record of creation, the way one form followed another in close succession, each with its genetic plan beside it. For years, humankind had been sifting the dirt of Africa and searching the caves of France for its past. But we had never been able to find ourselves, had we? Never quite.

  He went to the last figure. Even her green eyes were rendered to the tiniest nuance. Her face was so alive that she might as well have talked to him. She was a girl, maybe twenty, with dusty blond hair and an expression on her face of a sort of delight . . . as if she were beholding everything new. Maybe, he thought, he should call her Eve.

  The vampires must be very much older than he had imagined. If this place was what it looked like, then they were also very much more important to us. In which case, we had not evolved through the accidents and ideas of God, but rather had been maneuvered out of the apes by another and terrible hand.

  He was not a man who often felt like crying. He’d done a lifetime’s worth of crying when he’d lost his dad. But tears came now, rolling down his hard, silent face.

  Why had they done it? Why not leave us as we must have been — helpless, two-legged cattle? One day, the secrets of the vampires would all be known. Only then, he suspected, would mankind truly come to understand itself.

  He had the chilling thought that maybe they were our creators. He’d known that they lived a long time, but this was totally unexpected.

  He went on, deeper into this cave of secrets. Now the chambers he found were rough, and here also the hidden past disclosed a story. This was human work, full of gouge marks. In some incredibly distant time, human beings had dug to this very room, to the center of the secret. Had they died here, in some forgotten effort to throw off our slavery?

  There were no records of other vampire hunters in history. He and his team had read volumes of old histories, attempting to see if organizations like the Knights Templar or the Egyptian priesthoods might have known something. But they didn’t.

  He moved through the rubble of the human tunnel — and, very suddenly, he found a lot of vampires. They were moving quickly, just disappearing around a corner ahead of him when he saw them.

  They were running. He’d never seen that before. But there were a lot of things about the Paris vampires that were new to him. He sped up, jumped into the corridor they had gone down and fired. He ran, fired again, waited. Scuffling ahead. He fired. Sounds — gabbling, gasping noises. And then a vampire loomed out of the dust. Its chest was open like a cabinet. It came for him, but buckled, its lips working, its mouth sucking air. Another was behind it, and another. He fired. He fired again.

  There was one bullet in the clip. He had to reload. He backed up — and tripped, falling onto the one he had just killed. He fell hard, and heard the clips clatter off behind him. As he was scrambling up, a hand grabbed his flashlight . . . and crushed it. The dying vampire’s last act had left him completely helpless.

  He scrambled to his feet, then kicked into the dark, kicked at the softness of the creature’s wrecked body. He heard hissing and bubbling. The damn thing wasn’t dead, despite its wounds. He backed away, lest it regain its strength and attack him. Then he squatted, sweeping the floor for his lost clips, finding nothing. And then he heard before him:

  “Come here, child.”

  Was there another of their kids here? He backed up again, trying to get a wall behind him, to gain some kind of defensive advantage.

  “Your end has come, child.”

  He would have turned his last bullet on himself, but that would leave the book. He’d have to destroy it and just suffer the damn sucking death he loathed.

  The one that had spoken was coming closer; he could hear it. Should he shoot it? Was it the monster, the queen? Was this her lair? No, he thought not. That voice had been low and musical, but male, very definitely.

  He’d lost his gamble, then. He held the book before him and pressed the barrel of the gun up against it.

  But before he could shoot, light burst out around him. He saw a crowd of vampires, all
watching him with their grave, strangely empty eyes. He saw them in jeans, in tattered clothes from olden times, in dresses and the shorts of tourists. Their faces, though, were filled with hate, and they were not human faces. Down here, they didn’t need to bother with makeup and disguise. All the lips were narrow; all the eyes were deep; all the expressions were the same: calm, intractable hate.

  Becky was suddenly beside him, her gun flaring. He fired, too, his last bullet.

  As he reached around for another clip, a flaming pain shot through his left side. The arm that held the book went limp, and the book thudded to the floor. He saw why — the handle of a knife was protruding from his shoulder.

  From the crowd of vampires there came shots. These had some guns — another surprise for Paul. He heard a grunt behind him, saw Des Roches crumple. He and Bocage had come up behind Becky.

  The guns fired again, from both sides. Becky moved to protect him with her own body. “Fall back,” she snapped as she shot again and again.

  Then there was silence. She said, in a quavering, incredibly tender voice, “You’re hurt.”

  That was a lover’s tone, and it touched his heart unexpectedly deeply. “I’ll be okay.”

  Her finger quivered along the protruding handle of the knife. “Oh, Paul, oh, God.” She kissed his cheek, and his heart seemed to turn over within him. Thrumming through his pain, he felt a kind of contentment. He could see her rich eyes in the dark, full of tender concern. And he had to admit, it felt damn, damn good.

  The beam of Bocage’s flashlight played across the room. In the smoke and the haze of blood, there were easily a dozen dead or damaged vampires, all heaped against the far wall. “It’s good,” Bocage muttered. Then he went down to his man. Des Roches was pale, his face frozen. He was in agony and trying hard to suppress it. Paul was in exactly the same situation.

  The question wasn’t whether they could go out and regroup, then do what needed to be done, which was to get back down here to spray these creatures with acid. The question was whether anybody was going to live long enough to get out in the first place.

  “Bocage, are we all hurt?”

  He shrugged. “I’ll live.” His right leg was sheeted with blood.

  “Becky?”

  “I’m good.”

  “We must get out,” Bocage said. “Des Roches is going into shock.”

  Becky was playing her light across the broken mass of vampires. “Eight,” she said. “That’s a total of seventeen in this action.”

  “We killed a conclave,” Paul said. “Half of Europe, maybe.”

  “The Germans are doing the same in Berlin,” Bocage said.

  “The Germans! Why don’t we Americans get told anything any-more?” Paul asked.

  “You have Echelon,” Bocage replied. “It’s supposed to put the rest of us in a fishbowl.”

  “Apparently it doesn’t.”

  Bocage smiled a careful smile. “No, it doesn’t.”

  Paul was beginning to feel the shuddering cold that came with shock. He took deep breaths, trying to stave it off.

  Becky went over to the vampires. “Bocage,” she said, “we need to blow their heads off. In case we can’t come back and sterilize.”

  They rounded up his lost clips, and Bocage and Becky went among them, blasting first one and then the next. Paul wondered what it would be like with a woman who could do that.

  The knife was beginning to hurt a great deal. A wound that penetrated a bone into its marrow, which this one certainly did, was exceptionally painful. On his side he had the fact that he was an exceptionally fast healer. But that came later. Now, there was only the pain and danger of the wound.

  “We’ve gotta get moving,” he said.

  The little band of them ascended slowly, everybody trying to keep their suffering from everybody else.

  Despite the waves of searing pain that swept his whole body every time he took a step, Paul felt like laughing. The damn queen of the vampires, or the traveler, or whatever she was — was somewhere in that pile of broken bodies. No more perfumed innocence walking the streets.

  Between this and what the Germans were doing, Europe was likely to be free of the pest. And the book under his arm would soon free the Americas — if they acted fast enough.

  He coughed long and hard, experiencing such great agony as he did so that Becky had to hold him up. “There’s blood aspirating into the lung,” he said as she helped him to the car.

  All the way to the hospital, she held him tight to her, so that the bumps would cause him as little pain as possible. It was still a lot. But he didn’t mind all that much. This was not a bad place to be, not at all.

  ELEVEN

  Queen of the Night

  In the hours since she had first looked into the haunted eyes of Miriam Blaylock, Sarah Roberts had become more and more afraid. Now she held Miriam’s hand; Miriam lay against her friend’s shoulder.

  Sarah had never seen her like this and so far had not been able to find out what was wrong.

  Incredibly, they were using the Concorde, a plane Miriam had vowed she’d never fly again. Groaning and thudding came from under the floor where the four engines lay embedded in the wings close to the fuselage. For the first ten minutes of the flight, the cabin smelled of jet fuel. They’d taken this plane for years, believing it to be safe. Then had come the crash and a morbidly careful period of evaluation on Miriam’s part. She’d gone over every detail a thousand times, imagined herself in the cabin of a plane she took often, looking out the window at the fire, hearing the awful roaring, feeling the vibration and then the sickening moment of free fall.

  For the human beings in it, death would have been instantaneous. Miriam would have lost consciousness only slowly, as she was inch by inch consumed by the flames.

  She’d had Sarah get every document there was about the refit. Despite all that had been done, she was still in a fright over flying on it. But she had insisted, absolutely.

  Sarah thought perhaps the other Keepers had assaulted her. If so, it would be an anecdote for the book she’d been secretly writing about the Keepers for these twenty years of her captivity.

  Sarah could tell that Miriam was awake. She was always awake unless she’d fed or done opium in extraordinary quantities. Miriam’s hand was soft and cool. Sarah lifted it to her lips, enjoying the heft of it, the taste of the skin, the softness against her lips. She inhaled the sweet smell of her friend’s skin. Miriam sighed and laid her lips upon Sarah’s neck, sucking until it almost hurt.

  Sarah closed her eyes, listening to the howl of the engines, feeling the great soul beside her, loving her deeply and dearly . . . and feeling the evil of her at the same time.

  Sarah told herself that a wolf might kill a deer, but never would it be murder. She told herself that. As a doctor, though, she was committed to human welfare, and that certainly did not include killing. The creature beside her had eaten children and fathers and mothers — had eaten them. As had she herself . . . in the shame of her secret life.

  And yet, this was the agony of it: nature uses predators to ensure balance. One reason that human overpopulation was destroying the world was that the Keepers had failed in their natural mission. There were not enough of them to make a difference.

  Miriam called herself part of the justice of the earth. And Sarah could not deny that. She had looked into the teary eyes of victims, seen them fade as she did her own clumsy sucking. She had known what it was to be engorged with human blood. Afterward, you felt as light as air. Any small imperfection disappeared. You became supple. Your skin regained a girl’s flush and milk. And your heart — it beat with a happiness that seemed founded in something that was deeply right. You had dared the abyss, to do the bidding of nature. What an addiction it was, the addiction to death.

  Sarah knew that she was using her strange new relationship to the laws of nature to justify herself. But she had not been given a choice. Miriam had fallen in love with her and had infused her own blood into Sarah
’s veins without her permission, putting her to sleep to do it. Sarah had awakened exhausted, aching in every bone, not knowing what had happened.

  There had begun an awful struggle. She had tried to live on blood bought from commercial blood banks. She had tried to live on animal blood. Then she had refused to live at all. She had actually died and been put in a coffin and slid in among Miriam’s other expended lovers in her attic.

  But Miriam had used Sarah’s own research to bring her back. Sarah had eaten, then. She had not been strong enough to return to the terror of the coffin. Because, when Keeper blood flowed in human veins, you could live for centuries, but you could never really die.

  Sarah had experienced the silent, trapped sensation of being unable to move, to breathe, to so much as flutter an eyelid in that coffin. She had been aware of the dark around her, of the lid above her, of the rustle of insects along her skin and the murmur of street traffic outside.

  She’d heard Miriam playing her viola, had heard jets passing overhead, had heard the lapping mutinies of the East River and the hiss of the FDR Drive. She gone mad a hundred times, mad in the locked-up remains of her body. All around her, there had been other such coffins, some of them thousands of years old, that contained other trapped souls.

  Then she had heard the tap of heels on the wide attic boards, and light had swept in, and her vague eyes had seen a smooth shadow, and life, life, had come marching up her arm like a grand orchestra pounding a grand tarantella.

  Miriam had read Sarah’s studies and her papers, and devised an experiment that had worked. For the first time in two thousand years of trying, she’d brought a lover back. She’d tried with the others, too, but it had been too late even for the most recent one, John Blaylock.

  Alive again, Sarah had wandered the streets of a new world. She could be entranced by the play of sunlight on the edge of a spoon. A child’s rude singing sounded the carillons of heaven. Each breath that swept her freshened lungs felt like the caress of an angel. She had learned to live in the cathedral of the moment, for the supple touch of fine leather and the sweet of morning air, for the fluttering of a bird in the birdbath or the drip of water in the kitchen sink. She had given away her doubts and her fears with her lost past (where there had even been a lover and a little apartment and a spreading career). She had given away her terror of the coffins upstairs, to the extent that she would sometimes go and lie in her own and draw the lid down and stay there until the rigors of asphyxiation thrilled her throbbing sex and made her frantic. It was sick, she knew that. Miriam’s love had transformed her from a healthy young physician into a decadent, murdering libertine with a sick and sorrowing soul. But it was so beautiful . . . or it had been, until this awful thing happened, whatever it was.