Lilith’s Dream: A Tale of the Vampire Life (22 page)

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 raised 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.

Why hadn’t they asked for advice? Her knowledge of the past was greater than anybody’s. From the time she’d left Eden, she had been—

She stopped, froze in her sidling progress. Somewhere ahead, busy little water tinkled. Eden?
Eden.

She had not thought of that word literally in all of her time on Earth. But now suddenly it returned, bringing with it incredibly ancient memories. She whispered it,
Eden,
said it aloud: Eden. It was a name—of a place, yes, the mythical garden of the Hebrew Bible. But it wasn’t really that, no. Eden was home. In Prime, the word meant “granary,” but it called to memory a specific place. She saw wheat fields waving in the wind, and birds sailing in the tall clouds, and she heard the cries of children….

She wept, standing there alone in the tomb of her children, hearing the name of home in her mind and heart for the first time since she had—had—

What had she done?

Why was she here?

Who were these people who were here with her, the Keepers? Had been here…

Eden of the heart, Eden of the long nights, Eden lost…

A slow hand came around her ankle, the dry tips of the fingers clinging like a beetle’s claws. Stifling a cry of revulsion and sorrow, she shook it off.

The long, lacy dress hissed as she hurried along. Her progress was aimless. She was looking for life, but she smelled only death in this place, only death and an occasional whiff of dirty human skin. They were down here somewhere, she knew it, and so flashed her light only as needed, to see a turning or thread past an obstacle.

She really had no idea where she was going. She was running, that was the truth of it—running in fear through a death trap, not knowing who had killed the Keepers who had lived here, knowing only that her own danger right now must be very great.

She did not want to remain in these tunnels, not given that who or whatever had been killing Keepers might still be about. She sought ways upward, but each time she approached an exit, she was confronted with a fantastic, blasting hell unlike anything she had ever seen before, a hell in which she felt she would be entirely helpless. She watched vehicles careening past, pedestrians swarming the streets, all unfolding amid the most extraordinary chaos of noise she had ever heard, far louder than Cairo.

Then she smelled something. It was a new odor, warm and smoky, very different from the sodden stink of death that pervaded the black walls of this enormous tomb. She took a deep breath of it. Yes, there was heat in it, and smoke, and also some sort of meat.

Human cooking. She took the odor in, raised her head high and sniffed again, seeking for its direction. The scent was warm, running along the top of the tunnel.

She moved in the direction of its greater strength, thinking that she would kill them, for the first time in all her years taking life for a reason other than the need to eat. In Cairo, she had seen the brightness in their eyes, and actually been unable to eat a human child. She had put it down. And she regretted Ibrahim, and even Captain Kurt.

No more. Re-Atun had been bad enough, but the horror of this place was beyond forgiveness. Now she hated man. Man was the enemy.

Surrounded by the seething ruins of her beloved people, she made a shaking vow to kill them, to kill them all.

Soon she saw ahead of her a dull light. It was flickering, of lower frequency than the globes and tubes. A fire, yes. It was firelight. She came to a narrow stair, barely wide enough for her to ascend its steep upward curve. As she negotiated it on the narrow, slippery boots, she began to hear voices, low and brutal—the voices of human beings. Now the cooking odor was strong. There was a faintly familiar aspect to the scent, an odor that clung greasily to her tongue. She approached carefully, until she was at the top of the stairway. A tight squeeze would be required, but when she moved slightly to the right and backward, she would be in a space that, from the way it sounded, was just beside the human chamber. At all costs, she did not want to appear suddenly among them. If she did, they would certainly blow her to pieces.

Light flickered against the sides of large, silent machines. The great iron boxes had circular wells on them, and doors along their fronts emblazoned with the words ROYAL ROSE. She did not know what these things were, and could not discern the meaning of the words imprinted in the Latin alphabet, but the pots hanging from the ceiling and scattered across the dusty floor made it plain that this was—or had been—a kitchen.

The cooking odor was not old, though. Whomever was doing it was just beyond the next passage, near the glow of the fire. Seeing no sign of a human in this room, she slipped around the corner. Here was a much larger space. It was furnished with many tables and chairs, all broken and atumble, and centered on a large U-shaped counter that was covered with dust and bits of glass.

Behind the ruined counter, four dark forms were huddled around a kettle that was placed on a brazier. Under the brazier there danced a merry little fire. The kettle boiled, and the humans kept dipping and sipping its contents from chipped white cups. Three males and a female, she observed. The female was a splendid specimen, arrayed in a glittering gown that revealed plums of breasts and pale shoulders. Her blond hair hung down gracefully, but without her eyes properly made up, her lovely face seemed expressionless. Two of the males were identically dressed in black jackets and white shirts. The third, by contrast, was a scruffy, scabrous mess…but he had the face of a boy-child. In human years, he looked not fifteen.

He had a knife, and was cutting something and dropping bits of it in the pot.

“Come on, man,” one of the males said to him.

“I’m givin’ you what you bought, man.”

“Goddammit, Henry,” the female said, “I want this to work, man. It isn’t going to on a damn nickel.”

“Fuck—” the third male said, removing a leather case from his breast and giving the boy some pounds from it. The boy got up and went over to a dark stack of something. He used a small lamp, and in its light Lilith saw what they had.

He cut a bit off an arm and returned to the fire. He dropped the bit into the cookpot with a faint splash. “That’s good,” the female whispered, “oh, that is good….”

Those were the remains of her people—her children—in that pile. But what was this unholy horror? They were making a stew of them, infusing their cells into the water with heat.

And then she understood. Over the years, Keeper and man had grown close genetically, so close that a Keeper could infuse his blood into a human being’s veins. The human would live in perfect youth for about two hundred years, but only at the price of drinking the blood of its own kind. Then it would die, aging the whole two hundred years in a matter of days.

Lilith had forbidden this practice if it was done to save money on slaves. Only doing it for love was permissible, but those who did it—who fell in love with the prey—were considered a little…well, off.

But what were these humans doing? Why did they make this foul soup?

Then it hit her—slapped her across the face, slugged her in the stomach.

To stifle the cry that leaped to her throat, she thrust her fist into her mouth.

“What was that?”

“What?”

“Somebody out there?”

“Shit, man.”

What these creatures were doing was extracting the still-living essence from ripped-apart Keeper bodies, and drinking the liquor to make themselves young for a month or a year or so, until the pale whisper of Keeper blood they would absorb had gone.