The Last Vampire

by Whitley Strieber

  When, just after being resurrected, Sarah had looked upon her savior for the first time, she had spontaneously dropped to her knees. She was Lazarus, was Dr. Sarah Roberts, enslaved by gratitude to she who had returned her to life. To try and find some sense in the servility that she now felt, she had read long and carefully in the literature of sexual enslavement and finally into the lore of zombies. She worked hard to free herself, even going to Haiti to interview a man who had been killed in a zombie ritual and brought back by a witch doctor. He, also, was mysteriously bound to the man who had dug him up and resurrected him by rubbing him with a foam made from the blood of rats. The moment this man’s teary, passive eyes had met her own, she had known that they were kin.

  Miriam drew back from her, whispered to her, “I ought to really punish you, you devil.”

  Sarah turned to her, looked into her amazing eyes, with their child’s fresh intensity. You would think she was just a girl, to look at those eyes. There was not the slightest trace that this was an ancient being. If you were observant, you would see that the lipstick was painted on a strangely narrow mouth, and you might suspect that some inner thing had been done to fill out the cheeks. But that would take a very acute observer. To most people, Miriam appeared to be a ravishing, wonderfully dressed, wonderfully affluent young woman, still dewy from girlhood.

  Miriam sighed, her breath’s heavy sourness filling Sarah’s nostrils. “Bring me vodka,” she said.

  Sarah got up from her seat, moved down the aisle toward the steward, who was serving meals in the second cabin. “Oui, mademoiselle?”

  “Madame in Seven-A wishes vodka, very cold, served without ice.”

  “Oui, mademoiselle, a moment.”

  “Immediately, please.”

  The steward understood her tone and poured the drink, a large one. Sarah took it to Miriam, who emptied it in an instant.

  It was clear that Miriam had been through absolute hell over these past days. Sarah had suspected that her odyssey to the conclaves would be a disappointment, but whatever had happened was far worse than that.

  “Another?”

  “Perhaps in a few minutes.”

  “I know how you hate this thing.”

  “I just wonder if the repairs are satisfactory.”

  “We have to hope.”

  “Another vodka. Bring the bottle.”

  Sarah went back to the steward. “She wants the bottle.”

  “A service of caviar, perhaps?”

  “No, only the vodka.”

  “Mademoiselle, is madame afraid? Would she like the pilot to come and speak to her?”

  “That I cannot ask her.”

  “I understand,” the steward said. He had concluded that Sarah was a personal servant, and that madame would be taking all her service from her, and gave her the vodka on a small tray. “Will you want me to call you for her meal?”

  “Madame will not be taking a meal.”

  “Very well.” He returned to his passengers. The service in the three cabins of the Concorde was exactly the same, but by tradition the third cabin was for tourists, the second for business people, and the first for personages. Air France might not know just how distinguished this particular passenger was, but Sarah had made sure, as always, that Miriam was treated with the greatest respect.

  The fact that Sarah was not privately reconciled to Miriam’s way of life and even doubted her right to her prey did not mean that she did not respect her. Miriam was a creature of God, also, and a triumph of nature. To a scientist, which Sarah most certainly was, her blood was one of nature’s truly remarkable organs. It had six different cell types, including one that Sarah had watched under the electron microscope trapping and destroying virus particles, transforming them back into the chemicals out of which they were constructed.

  The blood sometimes seemed almost intelligent, the way it laid traps for bacteria. And the cells were remarkable, too. Unlike human cells, they did not scavenge for free radicals with mechanisms that grew stiff and unresponsive with age. Instead, the blood converted them into nutrient components, actually changing their atomic structure.

  Sarah had allowed herself to imagine that Miriam was her blood, that the body was only a receptacle for this brilliant organ.

  She had watched it as it worked in her own veins, how after a period of acclimatization, it had adapted itself to her needs, preserving those parts of her own blood that were essential to her life and adding most of its strengths as well.

  It could not change the structure of her cells, though, which continued to try to destroy free radicals. What Miriam’s blood did in Sarah’s veins was to destroy so many of them that little more was necessary. Still, Sarah aged. Just very, very slowly.

  Sometimes, she would go to the attic and whisper to the others, “John, I’m coming, Lollia, I will be here soon.” She would tell them of Miriam’s doings. She would tell them of her own work, trying to find a way to bring them back to life. How it must be in those coffins, she could scarcely imagine. To have been like that for even a few days had been so extremely awful that she still had nightmares about it. But Lollie had been there for three hundred years. And there were others who were little more than teeth and long strings of hair, who had worshiped at Miriam’s feet when she was pharaoh’s daughter.

  The selfishness of Miriam’s making herself gifts of these “lovers” had crossed Sarah’s mind. This was an unambiguous evil, and for a time she’d believed that she could find in herself moral ground to sabotage Miriam, on this basis.

  But the nights in that bed of theirs, the nights . . . and living Miriam’s exquisite life with her, playing their violas together and going to the club, and seeing the world through a Keeper’s eyes, as if everything were always new-washed with rain — she did not have the strength to say no.

  She wanted Miriam right now. To lie naked in her steel-strong arms, to taste of the kisses of a mouth that killed — for her it was an ecstasy more appealing, she suspected, than that of being lifted in the arms of God.

  The truth was that she revered this creature, whom she ought to hate. She had not the moral strength to hate the pleasures of being Miriam’s possession. Had she been the maid of Hera or Proserpine’s sotted girl, it would not have been different. A human being had fallen in love with a terrible god.

  When Miriam traveled, Sarah made all the arrangements. Normally, she stayed beside her lady, making certain that everything was perfect, that all was as she desired and deserved. It filled her heart with a deliciously awful joy to serve Miriam. She understood her history and her sig-nificance to mankind. Miriam’s family had invented Egyptian civilization. Her own father had moved the Israelites into Canaan. As far as he was concerned, he was only expanding his holdings, but the significance to human history was, of course, remarkable. Miriam herself had created and nurtured dozens of different aspects of western civilization. Her image haunted our literature. She was the Shulamite maiden, she was Beatrice, she was Abelard’s Heloise and Don Quixote’s Dulcinea — or more accurately, she had once sung a song for a hopelessly smitten Miguel de Cervantes, and become the model for his character.

  She wasn’t Shakespeare’s Dark Lady, but she had known the girl. The story of her mother, Lamia, had inspired Greek mythology. It had emerged in the seventeenth-century Anatomy of Melancholy and the whispered legends of Lamia had inspired John Keats’s Lamia and Other Poems in 1820.

  There were many Keepers, but Miriam and her parents had been more influential in human affairs than any of the others.

  And now she was the friend and lover of a humble doctor from Queens, whose highest ambition should probably be to make her happy and keep her safe. Instead, Sarah was caught in an eerie web, unable to believe that Miriam had the right to kill, but also unable to do anything but serve her.

  In a year, a Keeper took perhaps twenty lives. Sarah herself took ten . . . and each squirming, weeping victim consumed part of her heart. After a murder, she would weep for days. She would resol
ve to quit. She would renew her efforts to find a way of feeding on blood-bank blood.

  Sarah returned with the vodka and served Miriam a second drink. “I wish I could comfort you,” she murmured. “I know something’s wrong, something more than just the flight. Please tell me what it is.”

  Miriam knocked back the drink. “Five thousand dollars a seat and still I cannot smoke.”

  “You can in the car.” She glanced up at the map that was set into the bulkhead. They were traveling at Mach 2, just passing over the Irish coast. “Just two more hours, madame.”

  “Why are you calling me that?”

  “Because you seem so regal today.”

  Miriam took her chin and turned her head until they were sitting like two intimate girls, face-to-face, their noses almost touching. “I have been through unbelievable hell. And I am angry, Sarah. I am angry at you.”

  “I know you are.” She’d gone to spend a few days in the Berkshires, away from the club, away from Miriam’s demands. She had not taken her cell phone.

  “Love, if I can’t count on you, who can I count on?”

  Sarah felt her cheeks grow hot, as they had in the hotel room when she’d been bathing Miriam and had seen the rough areas and angry blushing of her skin. That was healing trauma. Because Sarah knew the power of Keeper blood to overcome injury, she was aware that Miriam had suffered fearsome damage.

  “Tell me what happened, love.”

  Miriam turned her face to the window.

  Sarah touched the black silk arm of her blouse, but Miriam said nothing more.

  Very well. Sarah had learned to accept Miriam’s moods. “You look so extraordinary in those clothes,” she offered, gently flattering her, hoping to win a more full response. There was none.

  Whatever had happened in Paris, at least it had brought those archaic Chanels to an end. They had gone to Maria Luisa and gotten some delicious Eric Bergère designs. Miriam had been extremely compliant at the shop, spending twenty thousand dollars without complaint, and revealing truly wonderful taste and an extraordinary awareness of what might flat-ter her the most.

  Sarah gazed at her. She was so splendid that you never got tired of looking at her, and in that fabulous black blouse of sheer silk with a bloodred satin body shirt beneath — well, the effect was almost perfect. The way it held her breasts high and suggested her curves was marvelous. This ensemble had been created by a hand that loved and understood the female form.

  “I was nearly killed.”

  Sarah leaned close to her, kissed her cold cheek, laid her lips there a long time, until she felt her body tickling within itself, lusting for the quick finger, the deep tongue. “Don’t say that if it isn’t true.”

  Miriam bridled at the statement. “How dare you!”

  “I’m sorry! I — just — please forgive me.”

  Miriam leaned back,closed her eyes.“Is the passport going to be all right?”

  “Perfect.”

  “Why so?”

  She had asked this about the passport ten times. It was a perfect passport because it belonged to a real person. “Leonore is a master of disguise,” Sarah said.

  “Leonore,” she said. “Do you think she would be a good meal?”

  “Miriam, you know I don’t find that sort of thing funny.”

  “Maybe she’ll replace you, then, and you’ll be the meal.” She smiled that slight, fetching smile that looked so innocent and concealed such danger. “That might be best.”

  She was truly a mistress of verbal torture. “I would open my own veins for you,” Sarah said.

  “I suppose so.” Miriam’s voice was leached of emotion. “You’re certain of the passport?”

  “Look at it. It’s you.”

  The instant Sarah had understood that Miriam was without a passport, she’d gone down to the Veils, where Leonore was supervising the cleaning crew, and gotten her to make herself up to resemble Miriam. A slightly fuzzy passport photo had been taken to an expediter with a two-hundred-dollar fee and a thousand-dollar bribe. Miriam’s new passport — in the name of Leonore Patton — was in Sarah’s hand by five that afternoon. The next morning, Sarah had come over on the Concorde to rescue their distressed lady. That was yesterday.

  Word had passed through the upper echelons of New York society that something untoward had happened to Miriam in Paris.

  The whole club was in vigil, CEOs, aristocrats, celebrities, the brilliant and the beautiful. There would be a hundred of the most fashionable people in New York waiting to greet the queen when her plane landed.

  “Please tell me what happened.”

  Miriam’s eyes met hers. Sarah forced herself not to look away, but Miriam was certainly furious. “In good time,” she said.

  “I wish you could be at peace.”

  “I cannot be at peace.”

  Miriam’s hand came into hers. Her eyes became like penetrating needles. “You remember I have spoken of Martin Soule,” she said slowly, evaluating Sarah, trying to look into her mind.

  “He inspired Baroness Orczy. He was the real Scarlet Pimpernel.”

  Quick as a flash, Miriam’s iron fingers were crushing Sarah’s wrist. “You’re not sad,” she snarled.

  “I’m scared! What’s happening?”

  “I ought to put you back in the attic with the others, you ungrateful bitch!”

  “Miriam?”

  Miriam released her wrist, tossing it away from her with a contemptuous gesture.

  “Miriam, please tell me what’s wrong!”

  “My French has become archaic,” she snapped. “I want a teacher standing before me at ten tomorrow morning. Ten exactly.”

  “Yes,”Sarah said, aware that her voice was shaking badly,“a teacher at ten.”

  There was a silence, during which the jet shuddered slightly. “I needed you, Sarah, and you weren’t there for me.”

  Sarah closed her eyes. Tears swam out beneath the lids.

  “You weep for me?”

  Sarah nodded. “You’re the love of my life.”

  “And yet you ignore the emergency number. You love me, but you want me dead, Sarah. That’s the truth of it.”

  “I don’t want you dead.”

  “You’ve hated me ever since I gave you my blood.” Her lips curled. “The gift of eternal life!”

  “You ought to have asked me.”

  “You’re an idiot, Sarah.” Then, unexpectedly, she smiled. “But I do enjoy you. You’re such a scientist!”

  “You’re a murderer, Miriam.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “And I love you, too.”

  Miriam said, “The vodka’s warm.”

  Sarah got up like a robot and moved down the aisle. The faces of the other passengers seemed vividly alive, their cheeks rich with blood. Sarah knew that this was an early sign of her own hunger. In a week, she would need to feed again. She’d try to stave it off, as she always did, with the blood she bought from the little blood bank on Thirtieth Street.

  “I need a colder bottle,” she said to the steward.

  “Of course, mademoiselle.” He drew a new one out of the refrigeration unit in his cart, put the old one in.

  She took it back to their seats and poured Miriam another drink, then sat down. “I want to help you,” she said.

  “You’re dangerously incompetent.”

  “I’m the best you’ve got!”

  “For the while,” Miriam said, her voice almost indifferent, as if the subject was no more than dull.

  A shock passed through Sarah. “If you’d tell me what I’ve done — ”

  “I called you and called you.”

  “You’ve told me that fifty times! But you have to tell me what happened. Why did you need me? Why are we running like this? Miriam, for the love of God, what’s happening?”

  The pitch of the engines changed, followed by the angle of approach. “Finally,” Miriam said, “you agree that you’ve proved yourself hopelessly incompetent.”

&nb
sp; Sarah nodded.

  “So you agree that I can’t take the risk of relying on you.”

  Sarah nodded again, and this time tears sprayed her breast. “Miriam, no matter what you decide —”

  “It’s decided.”

  “At a time like this, you need me. Whatever it is, I can help. I can correct my mistakes and do better.”

  “Yes, indeed.”

  “You’re being chased. We’ve got to get you out of the house. Hide you.”

  “Do we?”

  The plane roared, made a steep turn into its final approach. “It’s all right,” Sarah said automatically, “everything’s fine.”

  The steward reminded them to place their seat backs upright and fasten their seat belts. He came past and collected the vodka. “Will Madame be wanting a wheelchair?” he asked.

  “Mademoiselle will not,” Miriam said.

  A short time later, the plane was drawing up to the gate. The moment it stopped, Sarah stepped into the aisle in order to prevent any passengers behind them from pushing past Miriam or impeding her way.

  As far as the world knew, two resplendently beautiful young women stepped off the plane, one discreetly attentive to her companion, who walked with her cool gray eyes fixed to the middle distance, emeralds and gold glowing around her neck, a wide-brimmed Philippe Model hat on her head. The other girl might have been a friend, slightly less wealthy, or even an indulged secretary or servant. Indulged, because she was so well kept herself, with her superbly tailored green peau de soie suit and her fashionably tousled hair.