She ran her fingers along the cunning mortise work, then tapped softly three times, causing the concealed mechanism to give way with a soft click. It was a little surprising, the way the mechanism felt. It was almost as if the lock were sprung. She thought she might have been able to open it just with a push. You’d never find this kind of carelessness in Europe or America.
She went down the steep, curving steps. She didn’t need illumination, of course. Theirs was a nocturnal species . . . miserably enough in this electric era. How her father had moped when the humans had discovered electricity. “We should have kept it from them,” he’d said.
Keeper men and women did not live together except during pregnancy and, to some extent, child-rearing. But the love between them could be great, and he had never recovered from the loss of his Lamia. “I find myself searching the world for her,” he would say. He’d persisted in doing dangerous things — climbing mountains, dueling, and traveling, endlessly traveling. It was death he sought, when he sought the far hills.
Her father had died in the explosion of the Hindenburg in 1937 — taken like his Lamia by fire. He saved human beings from the flames, and those he helped can be seen in the newsreel film scrambling from the windows as the ship descends. He comes out last, and his form disappears in the fire.
Over and over and over again, she watched that film, longing for one more rolling murmur of his voice, one more touch from his kindly hand.
She stopped on the fourth step. There was sound down below, definitely. Good, the conclave was in session. For most of the Keepers down there, this would be the first contact in a century with any of their own kind. Lovers met in sweet battle, and mothers lived with their children. But for the most part, they were a species as solitary as the spider.
A little farther along, she stopped again. Something she was hearing below did not seem quite right. Her people didn’t laugh. She’d never heard anybody laugh except her mother and herself. Not even her dad had done it.
She went a little farther — and then she saw something incredible. On the dark wall there was a figure drawn. Or no, it was painted — spray-painted. She had to raise her head to see the whole of it. When she did, she saw that it was a crudely sprayed painting of a human penis in full erection.
Graffiti?
Farther along yet, there were paper cartons from a restaurant, still smelling of pepper and garlic. Nobody ate human food. They had no way to digest it. Inside, they were not made like humans at all. Liquor, however, was a different story. They could get drunk, fortunately. The others disdained alcohol, of course, but Miriam enjoyed fine wines and adored every form of distilled liquor from Armagnac to Jim Beam.
She moved a few more steps down, getting past the odor of the cartons. Her nostrils sought scent ahead.
Then she stopped. Fear did not come easily to her kind, so she was not frightened by what she smelled, only confused. She smelled humans — the dense odor of men, the sweet-sharp scent of boys.
A shock went through her as powerful as one of the lightning bolts that had been tearing through the clouds. She saw, suddenly and with absolute clarity, that the reason for all the odd signs was that there were human beings in this secret place. She was so surprised that she uttered an involuntary cry. The sound shuddered the walls, the moaning, forsaken howl of a tiger at bay.
From below there came a rush of voices, then the wild flicker of flashlights. Footsteps pummeled the stairs, and suddenly two Occidental men and three Thai boys came racing past her, cursing and pulling on their clothes.
Behind them they left a greasy silence, interrupted after a few moments by the scuttle of roaches and the stealthy sniffing of rats. Treading as if her feet were touching sewage, Miriam descended into the sanctum. She growled low, striding about in the filth and ruins.
They must have moved the sanctuary. But why hadn’t they told anybody? Keepers might be a solitary lot, but ancient custom dictated that everybody be informed of something so basic as this. Unless — was she really that shunned, that they would move a place of conclave and keep only her in the dark?
Surely not. They were far too conservative to alter an ancient convention. So maybe there had been an emergency. Maybe the sanctuary had been discovered and they’d had to move it suddenly.
That must be it. She hadn’t gotten the message because there’d been no time.
But then she saw, lying in a corner beneath the ruins of a shattered bookcase, a familiar red shape. She caught her breath, because what she was seeing was impossible. Her skin grew taut, her muscles stirred — the predator sensed danger.
She picked up the red-leather book cover and held it in reverent, shaking hands. From the time their eyes came open, Keepers were taught that the Books of Names were sacred. By these books, a whole species knew itself, all who lived and had died, and all its works and days.
That red leather was unmistakable, as was the inscription in the beloved glyphs of their own tongue, glyphs that no human knew. The Names of the Keepers and the Keepings.
They called themselves Keepers because they kept herds. If the rest of the book had been here, there would have been descriptions of the various territories that belonged to the different Asian Keepers and who had the right to use which human herd.
She ran her fingers over the heavy leather. It had been cured from the skin of a human when they were still coarse, primitive creatures. These books were begun thirty thousand years ago — a long time, even in the world of the Keepers. But not all that long. Her great-great-grandfather, for example, had been able to imitate the cries of the Neanderthals. Buried in the Prime Keep in Egypt were careful wax paintings of the human figure going back to the beginning.
She crouched to the crumbled mass of paper, tried to smooth it, to somehow make it right. When she touched the pages, roaches sped away. She spread a crumpled page to see if any useful information remained.
The roaches had eaten the ink, what hadn’t been smeared by the vile uses to which the paper had apparently been put. She laid the page down on the dirty floor, laid it down as she might lay to rest the body of a beloved friend.
She made another circuit of the chamber, looking into its recesses and crannies, but not a page remained.
She was face-to-face with what was without a doubt the greatest astonishment of her life. Some of the richest and most ancient Keepers were Asian. There had been — oh, easily a hundred of them.
She slumped against a wall. Had man somehow done this, simple, weak little man?
Keepers could be hurt by man — witness her mother and father — but they couldn’t be destroyed by man, not this way. They owned man!
She looked from empty wall to empty wall and fully grasped the fact that the Asian Keepers must have been destroyed. If even one was left alive, this book would be safe.
When she grasped this enormous reality, something so rare happened to Miriam that she lifted her long, tapering fingers to her cheeks in amazement.
Far below the crazy streets, in the fetid ruin of this holy place, a vampire wept.
Look for
THE LAST VAMPIRE
Wherever Hardcover Books Are Sold
Whitley Strieber, The Hunger
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