She raised his chin, looked down into his eyes—and slapped him hard enough to snap his head to one side. He yelped, and she said, “It’s as illegal as hell, mister. I’m your dream, mister. Your fantasy, am I right?”
“Fantasy—”
“To be like you are, a scumbag—say you’re a scumbag.”
“…scumbag…”
She slapped the other cheek. “I don’t hear you!”
“Scumbag! I’m a scumbag!” He took her hands. She drew them away. On his own, he went down to the floor. He embraced her feet.
In that moment, she felt a vast loneliness within her, something akin to sorrow and beyond sorrow, beyond the tears and the pain in her bones. “Strip,” she ordered. She laughed, a girlish tinkle.
He got up and took off his sports jacket. “If there’s a—you know—do you have a special room?”
“You’ll do as you’re told right here.” She folded her arms. “This is where.”
He went down to his skivvies, then stopped. She drew them off. She’d seen so many naked men in her life, dozens and dozens of them, it seemed, more when she was a sort of half-star, less later, far less now. Now, in fact, the only naked men she saw were guys like this, who were dying.
She reached out, took his dick in her hand. It shot up to full stiffness. His eyes got kind of glassy. He looked as if he was turning into a fish. Pulling him by the dick, she led him to the main staircase, then upstairs.
Although he was apparently to play the slave, she hated him with the dull, hopeless hatred of a captive who understands that no escape is possible. What flowed in his veins was more important to her right now than heroin to a strung-out junkie.
He said, “Hey,” and she gripped the hot, dreary thing harder and pulled at him more roughly. Come on, come on, don’t talk anymore, just let’s get it done.
She didn’t take him into the master bedroom. She hadn’t been in there in years. Instead, she went to the smaller of the four bedrooms on this floor, the one toward the back where she had lain in anguish while the new blood had been pumped into her veins, in the most loving, dearest, and cruelest act that perhaps could be done on the earth.
“Oh, man,” he said, “this is nice. Are we really the only people here?”
“Just you and me.”
“Because—”
Now he would say his dismal, boring fantasy, face flushing, eyes all moist, trying to make whatever sordid, disgusting thing he wanted to do seem somehow reasonable and viable. But it would not be reasonable, it would be infantile and grotesque, maybe extremely grotesque. But she would do it, some of it, if only to disgust herself more and hate herself more.
“What’s the game, honey? We can’t do it if you don’t say it.”
He remained silent.
She sat down on the bed, drew him down beside her. Then she saw that his face had changed, that he was not a sweating, nervous fool anymore, that there was something acute in his eyes, and something inside him that seemed to be in motion, as if he contained another, darker version of himself that had been waiting for this moment to reveal itself.
His hands, which had seemed as soft and loathsome as the rest of this bloated maggot, came around her throat, and proved to be not at all maggoty. No, the pudgy fingers concealed iron.
She felt her throat closing, heard her breath start to hiss. Outside, the wind hissed against the window. He rose up and plunged down on her, crushing her beneath his weight. He stank of cigarettes and stale, unwashed skin. His erection pushed against her thigh.
“Fuckin’ cunt,” he snarled.
“What are you doing?”
“You stupid piece of filth!” His fingers pushed at her windpipe.
“You’re killing me!”
“So. The fuck. What?”
She writhed. He was strong, dammit, real strong. “You’re a—”
He smiled, thrust against her. “You’re number twenty-one, filth! You goddamn fuckin’ piece a shit, in this nice house, how dare you. How dare you!”
As his fingers jabbed deeper and her windpipe threatened to collapse, her mind registered the truth: she had picked up a serial killer. He was strong, too. He was very strong. He was humping her, not entering her but thrusting against her as he killed her.
She could let him. She could do that. But then where would she be? Sarah had taught her carefully: We do not die. No matter how shattered the body, it lives on. Twilight world. Half life.
His eyes bulged with rage, and his breath went fast. She tossed her head and writhed. He was strangling her quite seriously now, and it was time to put a stop to that. His weight, however—and to her great surprise—prevented her from moving but one of his hands away.
Incredibly, she actually was in trouble. Then his mouth came down on hers and covered it, and suddenly his sour, smoked breath was gushing into her, penetrating her with the spittle and phlegm of his soul.
She lay still, and in his eagerness he shifted just a bit. This gave her the chance to use her hidden strength, and she exploded out from under him. He flew up and back and landed with a thud that shook the house.
The vampire blood made you strong. It made you much stronger than anybody thought you would be.
Snarling with surprise, shaking his head in confusion, he leaped at her. Her hands shot up as quick as the flicker of a falcon’s wing and took his wrists in a grip that he would not be able to break.
His eyes bulged with the effort. He growled and shook and struggled until purple veins throbbed in his delicious neck. She watched, waiting until he bent down, preparing to throw himself back away from her. Then her knee came up and connected with his face. Howling, his teeth bared, he flew back ten feet into the wall, which his head hit with a sound like an egg cracking. As he sank down, she took handcuffs out from under the bed and snapped them around his wrists.
She marched the astonished, spent man straight down to the basement and hooked the cuffs to an eye in the wall. It wouldn’t be long, now. She wasn’t cruel, she didn’t like them to suffer…although with this one, she was tempted to prolong his agony just a little bit. How pleasant it would be if all of her victims were as worthy of death as this one. She took the fleam out of its case. He stared at it.
She went over to the furnace and pulled the firing lever. Then she started the high-pressure gas, which made a cruel hiss. She fired the thing, then adjusted the gas while her victim shook and kicked and snarled like a wild animal. She went upstairs and got his clothes, which lay in a pile in the music room.
Entering it, she stopped. She stood surveying the intricate parquet floor, the Fragonard murals on the walls, of a garden musicale that Miriam had actually attended, at Le Petit Trianon in 1769. She sat at the piano and played a few bars of Chopin, some prelude, she didn’t recall which one.
She realized that she was making him wait, contemplate the fleam lying in its case, and listen to the furnace that would soon consume him. Still, it was essentially just another person going to die because she had to eat.
She held the clothes to her face and inhaled. God, but he was foul. She forced herself to suck the air in again, to smell the greasy, rotted essence of him, to smother herself in it. Maybe she did it because it revolted her, and maybe she liked that. She wanted more, to inhale more, to feel more, to suffer more. Maybe she should have let him rape her longer. Now, was that a sick thought.
She took the clothes down to the basement. He watched her with the empty eyes of a shark. “Look,” he said, “I got overexcited. It’s my fantasy, that’s all. I never hurt anybody. Oh, I couldn’t do that. It’s my fantasy, is all.”
She opened the furnace, tossed in a shoe. It evaporated in a white flash.
“How am I gonna get down the street, you bitch?”
“It’s okay. It’s all okay.” She tossed in the other shoe.
“Oh, no. Oh, God, please, please.”
She got the rest of the clothes.
“Don’t do that!”
She threw them in, w
allet, belt and all.
“Listen, please, this is crazy.”
She took the fleam from its case.
“Shit! What is that thing? Oh, Christ, put it down! Oh, Christ, Christ. Hey. Help! HEY! HEY! HELP!” He shook and he kicked and he twisted against the steel that held him pinned to the wall.
“It would’ve been nice to make love,” she said as she slapped his neck with two fingers to bring up the vein, holding his head still via a fistful of hair.
“We can make love! Oh, I’m good, I’m beautiful. Please, lady. Oh, shit, why did I ever do this?”
She laid the fleam against his neck, flicked it into the vein, drew it out.
She caught the spray of blood in her mouth, even as he jerked his head to the side and shrieked, his eyes screwed shut. It was always like this. She stopped the stream with a fingertip. Male or female, young or old, they all reacted, at this point, exactly the same way. “Calm down,” she said. He lurched away and started spraying again. Again, she blocked the flow. “Don’t move,” she said. “Stop. Just stop.”
He snarled at her.
“If you don’t let me control this, you’ll die.”
He became still.
She drew closer. She watched his teeth, his glaring eyes. With her free hand, she stroked him down below, and actually got a bit of a rise. Now, that was impressive. Brave man, for a serial rapist or whatever he was. She exhaled to the point of almost collapsing her lungs, then withdrew her finger in favor of her mouth.
With all her might, she sucked. He realized what was happening and gave out a high, frantic yell and lurched away from her. She was on him, though, like a leech stuck to a hippo.
The blood came in slowly at first, annoyingly so, but then some inner resistance collapsed and it flowed, then gushed, sluicing down her throat like water down a rapids. It shocked her from her toes to the top of her head, a bolt of electric life. The sensation was so magical—his living, squirming essence transferred into her thirsting organs and bone-dry bones—that she groaned with pleasure as she sucked. Waves of vibrant new life swept up and down her, from her toes to the top of her head, great, white waves sighing ecstasy as they broke on the shores of her starvation.
The fire entering her bones turned to sweet vibration, the itching that had been driving her mad ended as moist softness suffused her skin. Beginning down deep below her navel, where lay her body’s center of gravity, there spread outward in every direction a sense of well-being so profound that it was like an actual glow.
She withdrew her mouth from the neck, and looked upon a body transformed. What had been plump was now as shriveled as dry fruit. His pudgy biceps were like ropes of beef jerky stretched along his bones. The bones themselves were black and dry. His eyeballs glittered in his head like moist prunes. The mouth, drawn wide by the sudden desiccation of the jaw muscles, revealed a tongue that pointed straight out, a screaming finger. Pooling on the floor were feces and urine. She cursed mildly. She’d forgotten to put down paper. Miriam used to recommend standing them in a catbox.
She found paper, and got a shock. It was a Sunday Times from fifteen years ago—the last Times ever brought into this house. Leo had gotten it herself. She even remembered that Sunday, going down to the corner of Fifty-fifth and Third to the newsstand and thinking, I’ll be reading the paper in a hundred years, if there is a paper then, or a thousand…and feeling as if she was rich beyond calculation or dream.
She got the mess cleaned up and thrust the paper into the fire. Then she unhooked the body. It dropped into an angular heap. She opened the furnace door again, opened it wide. The corpse was still somewhat pliant, so she straightened it out, arranged the hands down the sides, and slid it in like a log.
She closed the door quickly on the hissing and spitting of the grease, and trotted upstairs.
A body meant homicide detectives. A missing person meant that the case would be filed and forgotten in seventy-two hours. Never, ever leave a trace.
She went to the second floor, careful not to turn on lights, and stood for a moment in the pregnant silence of the back hall. Then she entered her old room, sat on the narrow bed of her girlhood. She took off her shoes, then stripped naked.
Lying back on the bed, touching herself with idle fingers, she giggled a little. Something of him, a slight dampness, still clung to her down there. Usually, she was pensive at this point—feeling absolutely marvelous, but also a little sad. A life, after all, had been destroyed, a human being’s hopes and dreams shattered. People had been left in grief, never to know what had happened to their loved one.
This time, however, she felt much better. She’d actually done some good, killing a man who was at the least a rapist, and most likely a murderer.
She walked into the bathroom, turned on the water. She was careful. From experience, she knew that it would be exceptionally hot when the furnace was running. Miriam would have taken a soak, then wanted an hour of careful massage. Leo wasn’t like that. What pleasure she got from life, she got onstage. The rest was hell, especially this, even when the victim deserved it.
She took a quick shower, using the now dry crust of soap she’d left behind when she was last here. She raised her face into the water, letting the hard, hot stream blush her a little. Then she made the streams into needles and held her breasts so that they pummeled the sensitive crowns and nipples until she squirmed.
She got out of the shower, went to the makeup mirror, and turned the makeup lights on. To make it as brutal as possible, she’d put in two-hundred-watt bulbs. She swabbed away the steam with a towel and beheld the face that looked back at her. Carefully, clinically, she examined the area around the eyes, the corners of the mouth, the tender skin between the brows that could so easily constrict into a frown. What looked back at her was a sensual, vulnerable girl of perhaps eighteen.
That was enough, done. She wasn’t interested in enjoying the miracle, only in doing what she had to do. The idea of getting old and dying no longer horrified her. On the contrary, what horrified her was the reality that she could never do so. Either she must live endlessly or die endlessly. “We linger, Leo,” Sarah had said. “If they kill you or lock you away, you’ll be rendered helpless, but you won’t die. So don’t take any chances.”
She returned to the Sherry, walking through a windswept night. The East River was in tidal flow and covered with quick, angry waves. A barge went past, its tug hooting as it struggled against the current. Sometimes she wished that her magical blood could also speed up time. She’d like to go somewhere far into the future where maybe there would be a cure for her, a way to roll back the clock to the time when she had been human.
The Sherry stood above the silent corner of Fifth and Fifty-eighth. A cab drifted past, a prowl car slid around the corner. Malcom and George would have made their discreet exits by now. Mr. Leong would be asleep in his chair.
Still, she entered the Sherry by the employees’ door, slipping in with her key. At this hour, there was little chance of encountering a waiter in the halls. She didn’t dare to use the elevator, though. That was pressing luck too far. Instead, she went back up the stairs. The way she felt now, the climb was effortless. Her hearing, also, was a hundred times more acute than it had been before the food, as were her eyes and ears and smell.
She listened ahead, but no security man was afoot in the building. She returned to her suite, closing the door behind her. All quiet, all well. She went into her room, lay facedown on the bed, and cried and cried and cried.
Chapter Three
The Endless Soldier
The radio turned on at six, awakening Paul Ward with the news. As he came to consciousness, he turned to the miracle beside him—the woman who had stayed. She sighed softly, welcoming his invasion of her side. “Uh-oh,” she said when she felt him slide over her. Then he was looking down on a flickering morning smile, eyes half opened or half closed. As he settled into her, he kissed her lips.
The familiar wonder of the sensation enveloped him, r
ising from his loins. She sighed a little, laughed a little—and the voice of Leo Patterson blared through the house.
He felt himself faltering, then stopped. “Oh, God,” he whispered in her ear.
“Oh, Paul…Paul.”
He ended up on his back, glaring up at the ceiling, listening as “Grrl, Grrl, Grrl” sneered to its bitter end, to be replaced by the blunt irony and rage of “Evil Doll.”
“Why does he do this?” he muttered, rising out of bed. He dragged on his underpants and stormed down to his son’s room. Paul was a huge man, a poor fit for the narrow halls of this ancient dwelling. Dutch farmers had built it in 1653, and Dutch farmers had been compact. He stopped outside his son’s room.
“Ian!” No response. He hammered on the door, then tried the knob. It was locked. “Turn that thing down!”
“Evil Doll” rolled into “Catch Me If You Can,” and Paul considered breaking the door down. It wouldn’t be hard at all for him to smash the big oak door—just a little push.
“Open up!” It was a highly specialized skill to love a teenager, even as hard-won a child as Ian. “Catch Me If You Can” screamed and warbled and roared.
Why her, of all the damn singers in the world?
If what he was beginning to fear about Ian was true, it wouldn’t be a matter of wanting to throttle a kid who blasted his peace all to hell at six in the morning, it would be a matter of carrying out the most agonizingly painful duty in his life.
“Ian! Ian, please!”
The music went away. Paul waited into the silence for the voice of the boy-child he had adored, or the cry of the baby he had held beneath his robe on cold mornings. The silence extended.
Paul returned to his own room. Becky was sitting up, and tried to soothe him with a come-hither smile. She was not by nature gentle; she was as tough a cop as you would ever find, every bit as tough as Leo Patterson pretended to be in her music. But there were many layers to Becky’s personality, and right now his ruthless professional killer of a sexy lady was pink and soft. “I think he heard us,” she said.
Lilith’s Dream: A Tale of the Vampire Life Page 4
