Lilith’s Dream: A Tale of the Vampire Life

by Whitley Strieber

  “We need to get a tail on both cars,” Becky said.

  “That’s out.” They had never used outsiders in their work, never.

  “It’s not out, Paul, goddammit, it’s Ian’s life!”

  “Becky—”

  “Paul, shut up. General—”

  He had gone back in the van and was already on the phone. Paul keyed in the code that caused the drone to return to base, then followed Becky toward the van.

  “You don’t need to control it anymore?” Jean asked.

  “They say not. We’ll see if it lands or crashes.”

  After the white sun of the desert, the van’s interior seemed almost black. Karas offered Paul a Coke, which he took and knocked back almost in a single swallow.

  “We’re following all the Range Rovers in the area,” Karas said, “the old-fashioned way.” He smiled. “We don’t really have one of your planes.”

  “Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

  “We need to move,” Becky said. “Why don’t we just get a car and tail these people ourselves?”

  “Becky—”

  “Paul, he’s your son!”

  “Goddamn it, I’m suffering just as much as you are, Becky.”

  She glared at him.

  “Hey, this is me.”

  “Paul, excuse me, but you’re playing with model airplanes, and he’s out there all alone with that damn thing.”

  “The plane is coming in.”

  “You gave him no knowledge, and therefore he has no defenses. Paul, he’s not an experiment, and you have no right to play God!”

  The edge of hysteria in her voice scared him, because whenever he opened his mouth, he could hear it in his own. Their judgment was impaired by panic, both of them.

  He said, “I want him back as bad as you do.”

  “Then act like it!”

  “Becky,” Karas said gently, “if we commit ourselves to following a car before we have a definite confirmation and it’s the wrong one, then where are we?”

  “Look, we know the license of the car they rented. So we get an ID on it and go after that vehicle. It could not be more simple.”

  “Until the creature observes that it is being followed,” Jean said gently. “As it will.”

  Nobody spoke. They all knew just how hard this was going to be. You could not trail a vampire without being noticed.

  “Her plane has to be dealt with,” Becky said firmly, “in case she has access to other pilots.”

  “I’ll have it drained of fuel,” Karas said. “If anybody attempts to use it, they’ll have to buy more. We’ll be alerted.” His cell phone warbled, and he extracted it from a side pocket. He spoke on it in Arabic for a full minute, then closed it. “The vehicle we were observing stopped for petrol, and the police got a good look at the occupants. Only one now, a driver of Al Ireya. They gave up the Range Rover in Beni Suef. They are no longer using it.”

  Becky’s face turned pink. Her hands were clutched into fists. Paul wanted to be sick.

  “And their movements?” Jean asked.

  “Only this is confirmed: there are three of them, believed to be Americans. Two young women and a young man.”

  “You’re on them? Following them?” Her voice sang like wind slicing wire. She was on the far edge, about to break, Paul could hear it.

  Karas looked toward him. “We could try it.”

  “No,” Paul said.

  “You do it, General.”

  “I—”

  “Do it!”

  “Becky, it won’t work!” Bocage’s voice caused her to whirl round. But it also caused her to pause, to think.

  The vampire’s great intelligence meant that you surprised them in their lairs or not at all, and you relied on their two weaknesses: the predator’s instinct to live in isolation, and the vampire’s arrogant certainty that he could always outwit the human being.

  “Then what’s next?” she asked. Paul tried to take her hand. She pulled away from him.

  It was late in the afternoon, and the lengthening of the shadows meant a quiet increase in the terror of the two parents. Becky was smoking again, and the lower the sun went, the more she puffed and strode back and forth. Paul knew how fearsome she could be in battle. The woman would not stop, not for anything, but she had to have something to fight.

  “I say we go to Cairo,” she announced.

  “And leave our access to satellite information, the drone, all the electronics?” Jean loved electronics.

  “If they’re going to Cairo, they’re going to eat,” she said. “We will find evidence—murders.”

  “Perhaps, and perhaps not,” Karas said.

  “You don’t investigate murders in Egypt?”

  “Of course we do, Becky, come on. But it’s an immense city. Extremely complex. A remnant—you know how well they hide them, or destroy them.”

  “I hate this damn third-world crap! If somebody disappears, surely there’ll be a police record.”

  “We all have the same problems,” Jean said. “Even in France, missing persons investigations are less intense.”

  “Even in France,” Becky said bitterly. The fact that Jean Bocage’s unit had remained intact all these years was a source of bitter jealousy.

  “You know,” Karas said thoughtfully, “it took a child last time. Maybe it prefers them. If so, then we will certainly have an investigation. It’s not like some old fellow who sells cigarette papers evaporating from his accustomed street corner, the disappearance of a child.”

  “Yeah, in NYC it took a damn fisherman, of all things. Do you investigate the disappearance of fishermen?”

  “Sir, there’s a call from police communications.”

  Karas grabbed the telephone. This time, the conversation was more terse. He hung up. “An officer reports three Americans, two women and a man, came down off a bus from the south just a short time ago. A blond woman, a dark-haired woman he recognized as Leo Patterson, and a young man.”

  Becky’s hand clutched Paul’s.

  “They’re in a taxi. We have its number. We’re watching its movements.”

  Paul said, “They’re not being careful.” An ordinary tail was working—for the moment. But how long would it last?

  “How much underground in Cairo, General?”

  He shook his head. “Vast amounts, stretching even under the Nile. A fantastic labyrinth.”

  “Let’s move,” Becky said.

  This time, nobody argued.

  * * *

  Lilith’s course was clear: she would teach the boy to feed, then kill the father, who would be nearby attempting to reach his son. Already, some of his lieutenants were following them, thick creatures in a small car. She said nothing of them to Ian and Leo. Why should she? She could shake off human followers whenever she needed to.

  She reflected on how much she had changed since she was last in this city, the confused mistress of a world she did not realize had ceased to exist. In the past weeks, she had absorbed knowledge as well as languages. Human life was far more complex than it had been when she used to walk the streets of man. There was much more ritual. In addition to religious ritual, there was economic ritual. She understood that she had not been involved in religious activity in the New York hotels, but in the economic process of buying hotel space and transportation with credit cards, which withdrew funds from the accounts of the creature she had consumed at the Royalton Hotel, Genevive Perdu. She also knew that Genevive Perdu’s cards would eventually cease to function, when her absence from the life of the community was finally noticed.

  Leo had explained about passports and visas, but so far she had solved all their problems with money. She sat now beside the driver, a small book opened on her lap. “Old Cairo,” she said.

  The driver increased the speed of the vehicle. Lilith observed by the lack of tension of his body that he was unaware of the police tail.

  “Have you never seen Cairo?” Lilith asked Ian.

  He was silent, staring out
the window, sheathed in the cloak she had given him. She touched his shoulders. How she enjoyed being tentative with him, lowering her eyes at his approach, drawing command from his unsure young voice.

  “We’ve got to get some more ordinary clothes,” Ian said at last. “We look like circus freaks.”

  “Freaks?”

  “You know what it means,” Leo murmured.

  Lilith did not reply. When she first laid eyes on Leo, she had loved her immediately, for the blood that flowed in her veins. But Leo wasn’t working out; she was not the loyal servant that Keepers expected when they infused their blood into human veins. She did not want to kill Leo. In fact, without Leo, she wasn’t at all sure how to get out of Egypt, if that should be needed. There would be no more boat trips, not after the experience of the airplane. She’d seen much larger ones, too. Huge ones. They must be palaces within, palaces indeed. Egyptair—the very word was magic.

  “That’s a mosque,” Ian said. “It’s magnificent.”

  “That’s the Al-Muayyad Mosque,” Leo said, “I think.” She was consulting the illustrated guide she’d bought from among the hundreds frantically offered in the bus station. “He’s taking us to the bazaar section. Are you taking us to the bazaar section?”

  “Bazaar, yes, as you say.”

  Ian leaned forward, touched Leo’s shoulder. “Are you okay?”

  “Quit asking me that!”

  “You sound funny, and it’s bothering me, Leo.”

  She turned, and Lilith saw in her eyes hard jewels of hate. Then the eyes fixed on Ian and became instantly soft. “I have a little cold.”

  “Good, because I don’t think you should be crying.”

  “She isn’t crying. She’s happy. We’re all happy, it’s exciting!”

  “I’m happy, Ian. I’m so happy that we’re here, and Cairo is so wonderful, and Lilith and you are so wonderful, and everything is just wonderful.”

  The dullness of her tone communicated the truth: she had become unreliable. But would she betray her mistress, knowing where she would be put? Or did she cherish some absurd hope of escape?

  The taxi stopped. They were disembarking in a region packed with selling booths and humanity. It was a labyrinth, like Rome—although Leo had said that Rome, as Lilith recalled it, with its endless colonnades and soldiery and roaring, fragrant amphitheater, was now in ruins.

  They went out of the vehicle and found themselves surrounded by a great chaos of tiny shops brimming with every imaginable object. If ever anyone doubted that humankind was a trinket-loving species, they had only to come to a paradise of trinkets like this absurd place.

  “We’re getting you out of that awful thing,” Leo said to Ian.

  “Awful” meant that she did not care for the treasure that hung so gracefully on Ian’s broad shoulders. “We will not get him out of it,” Lilith said. “He looks wonderful.” It was the skin of a philosopher called Moses Maimonides, whom she had won in a game of Tarochi with Al-Malik Al-Afdal Saladin, vizier of Egypt. She had particularly wanted Maimonides, because he had been so dogged about spreading the annoying rumor that she was a divorcée.

  “Come on, Lilith, he looks like Dracula’s grandson.”

  “Dracul? What do you know of Dracul?” He was a Keeper of the northern mountains, not somebody whose name this girl should know.

  Leo rolled her eyes, an expression suggesting to Lilith that she thought her a fool. Lilith came another regretful step closer to ending the threat of Leo.

  “Look, Ian, look at this.” Leo held up a white blouse. “This is great, you’ll look wonderful in it. And very Egyptian.”

  When they paused, the three lieutenants of the father who were following also stopped. As Leo and Ian fingered garments, Lilith looked their pursuers over, glancing out of the sides of her eyes. This situation could change very quickly.

  “The thing is wonderful,” she told Ian. “Buy it.”

  Leo did it for him, and he strolled away wearing it, the cloak slung over his shoulder. They moved deeper into the tangle of little shops, the stalkers never far behind. Lilith said nothing about them. She didn’t trust Leo enough.

  Here, there were hanging masses of colorful sweets, there a tiny tea bar, and across the way a coffee room. There were shops with silver and gold, with all manner of smoked eyeglass and walking stick and sash, and shoes of all sorts, black leather, velvet, and the endless, overly elaborate “sneakers.” Lilith wore a sandal, and it served her well. There were also many devices that emitted artificialized music. They piped it from the instruments and singers into mechanisms that transfigured it into spark, the atmospheric vibrations of which were detected by other devices, which were sold in gaudy tin shells, no doubt to disguise the fact that the sound that they emitted was obviously no longer music, but the mere jittering of the spark.

  The stalkers were closer now, pretending interest in the bins of trinkets and baubles to cover their steady progress. Her heart began humming; she had no further illusions about the danger posed by man.

  She gazed up. The sun could not be seen between the rollicking stacks of rooms that wound along the alleyway, but she could tell by the pearl color of the sky that night was already well arisen in the east.

  Sometimes, at a moment such as this, she would sense other vistas, as if she had seen them in some far place, a better place than this. Useless dreams, bitter dreams. But how had she come here? And what of the Keepers? Moses Maimonides had been telling a foolish story, that she’d been the first wife of the first man, but so difficult that he divorced her in favor of Eve—an equally unfortunate liaison, if the Bible story was to be believed. But something had indeed happened in the place where she was supposed to have birthed her legion of demons, her old dwelling on the shores of the Blood Sea. I’m a scientist, she thought suddenly…and suddenly wanted to cry.

  Leo said, “Look at that place. No women allowed.” She laughed. “You want to get a coffee, and we’ll sit on the bench with the other gals?”

  That was not needed now, that could not be done, they were in a hurry.

  Ian looked toward the coffee bar.

  “Let’s find him something to eat, Leo. He doesn’t need coffee, he needs food.” She caressed his cheek. She wanted him so badly, was desperate for him, and found herself glorying in that fact. Yes, glorying, that was the right word. It was glorious to want a man, and to have the man she wanted beside her, awaiting only a little change in diet to make him truly hers.

  “Uh, I’ll get a coffee,” Ian said. When they’d been out in the desert living in a cave, he hadn’t thought about calling his mom and dad. There was no phone, and his cell didn’t even come close to working. But here—they were on his mind now, in a very major way. He’d done wrong coming here like this. But the women, God, they were like some kind of wonderful dream. He’d given the dream too much time, though, and he needed to go in there and try the phone. The fact that the women couldn’t come in made it a good place. He wasn’t sure how they’d react to his calling his folks. Probably not real well.

  He entered the smoky coffee bar, where he didn’t want to be at all. A kid in a kaftan or whatever brought him a tiny cup of coffee and a big water pipe. He’d give it a shot, but he’d once smoked part of one of Dad’s cigars, and that was an experience he would never have again until hell froze over. That thing had been—wow. You never forgot something that made you that sick.

  So, okay, he thought, as he took a deep puff on the water pipe, okay, Mom and Dad, how do I do this? I get taken to damn Egypt in this incredible plane by Leo herself and her really cute friend, and we go out and live in a cave and I had no cell coverage. Does that sound believable? Nah, because it’s true. But, Mom and Dad, it was so totally incredible and wonderful, you just have no idea. No idea. It was the adventure of a lifetime, see, and—shit. Shit, the truth of the matter was, when he went home, he was going to be grounded until death us do part.

  So if he pulled out his cell and called, what happened? He looked out
the window. Leo and Lily were on the bench, facing out into the street. He took out his phone. The coffee came. He thought about the phone. Maybe it wouldn’t work. “Thing was, Dad, I didn’t know my cell wouldn’t work.”

  The coffee was real sweet, but actually kind of good. He was sort of fascinated by this situation. The farthest thing in the world from what Leo, or Mom for that matter, would approve of. A man-only place like this was so completely antifeminist that it was almost funny, in his opinion, but this was the Arab world, where women were not considered equal. He’d never say this, but it was actually kind of nice to go in a place and all of a sudden a whole set of tensions and issues that you didn’t even know you had were left at the door. The fuckathons were great, no other way to say it, but having a little piece of time and space to himself, this was also good. So he allowed the kid to pour him another coffee. It deadened his appetite a little, too.

  He looked again at the pay phone. How did you make a call from Egypt? He really had no idea. But he could try. He had to be able to say that he had tried. He got up and went over to it, contemplated how it might work.

  And then Lilith was standing in the door. Her face was as blank as a piece of statuary. For a second, she didn’t even look alive, and it was a little odd—more than a little. Her eyes were just—they were like pieces of stone. For all the world, she looked like she was damn well going to go for his throat.

  Slowly, he put down the phone. His mind hurried along in the situation. Were they prepared to stop him from calling home? Had he actually been kidnapped?

  He left some Egyptian pounds and walked out.

  “Let’s go,” Lilith said. They moved on, but they did not stroll.

  “What’s the big hurry?”

  “You’re hungry.”

  “Look, I was just gonna call my folks. I mean, Jesus, they have no damn idea where I am.”

  “We’ll eat, then call.”

  Now they were getting into a dark area, still full of people, though. They conferred together in low voices, the two of them. They were up to something. Ian had no intention of doing drugs, if that was what this was about. No way, especially not in a foreign country. In East Mill, if kids got caught with grass by one of the deps, they had to, like, share. That was as far as it went. But you might get put in prison here, à la Midnight Express or something. His mom and dad had rented that movie and forced him to watch it, and it had definitely made an impression. You did not want to rot in any third-world jails.