Also by Whitley Strieber
FICTION
The Last Vampire
The Forbidden Zone
Unholy Fire
Billy
Majestic
Catmagic
The Wild
Nature’s End
Warday
Wolf of Shadows
The Night Church
Black Magic
The Hunger
The Wolfen
SHORT STORIES (PRIVATE PUBLICATION)
Evenings with Demons: Stories from Thirty Years
NONFICTION
Confirmation
The Secret School
Breakthrough
The Communion Letters
Transformation
Communion
The Coming Global Superstorm
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2002 by Whitley Strieber
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Atria Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
ISBN-13: 978-0-7434-5309-7
ISBN-10: 0-7434-5309-3
ATRIABOOKS is a trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Visit us on the Word Wide Web:
http://www.SimonSays.com
This book is dedicated to the memory of JS,
with deepest thanks.
I would like to acknowledge the support of
Mitchell Ivers, my editor;
my wife and lifelong muse, Anne Strieber;
and my agent Sandra Martin.
Judge not the Lord by feeble sense,
But trust him for his grace;
Behind a frowning providence
He hides a smiling face.
“Light Shining Out of Darkness”
—William Cowper
Chapter One
A Different Dust
It was silver and very high, the thing that Lilith was watching. She wondered what it might be. Really, she couldn’t remember ever seeing anything quite like it. Of course, she hadn’t been here in some time, not out here.
She focused on the gleam in the sky. It implied things, things that disturbed her almost as much as the reason she had come out to the surface.
Last night, she had slept as she always slept, for a few deep, echoing hours. She had awakened at the far edge of a heartbreaking dream—one she’d had far too many times—and known immediately that she had been left alone too long.
She directed her attention to the lilies that crowded the entrance to her cave, listening to the whisper of the lives that transpired among them—the drone of the bee, the shuffle of the beetles, the snickering movement of the little shrews that hunted the beetles.
Her lilies were a great comfort. They made the unending journey of her life much easier to bear.
The passing of the silver object brought behind it a low and subtle sound. She listened to it gradually fade, like the roaring of a distant waterfall. Memory flashed: water dropping over a cliff, pearls of fire in the blue light of another sun.
A thrall lay upon the air, as if far away some great violence had trembled down to its end. She raised her long hands, held them out in the comfortable light. Then she clapped her hands together, the sound echoing flatly off the walls of the small canyon that surrounded her cave. A pair of jackals that had been sleeping beneath an acacia bush raised their heads and regarded her with their wary jackal eyes. Her stomach asked again for food.
A sadness came upon her and she began to sing, no particular words, just a humming that seemed to fit her mood. The male jackal became excited, and began to pace back and forth, panting. Then he rushed the female and rutted her. The bees began to whir and the beetles to stride, and their rodentine oppressors dashed about, squealing and copulating. A confused shrew mother, deep in her burrow, frantically ate the runt of her litter.
When Lilith stopped, the beetles curled their legs beneath them and the shrews tucked their noses into their breasts. The jackals went back beneath the shrub where they shaded themselves, and the droning of the bees grew low. A memory came to her, of walking narrow streets when the shadows were long and the grinders were lying at rest in their mud houses. Her life revolved around these curious memories—indeed, they felt more alive than the vespers of the days. This life was the dream; the flashes of memory, the shimmering dreams—they were her real life.
She got up and went inside, rushing so fast that the air sped past her face and made her linens shudder around her body. Then the words burst out of her as if they had been waiting in a cage to be released. She cried out, her voice so high with fright that it surprised her: “I’m starving!”
She threw herself down, grabbed a cloth to her face, and sucked in air that was ever so faintly scented from the little bit of blood she had spilled during her last meal. She tossed from side to side on the bed, admitting at last that she was not only starving, she was in agony. She had been so long without pain that she had not at first understood what it was. But yes, this congealing fire in her stomach—this was pain. It swept along her legs and up her spine, radiating out from a belly that felt as dry as ash. Runnels of sweat came from her pores, and a thick, sour sensation, as if a rat was cavorting in her stomach, made her gag.
Hunger was a danger. Hunger came upon you by inches, then exploded unexpectedly. Beyond it lay the worst of all the oblivions her kind could suffer: she would become too weak to eat, but remain unable to die. Her body would sink to a dry and helpless stillness, her muscles becoming as ropy as smoked meat, her eyes shriveling until they rattled in their sockets like stones in the pocket of a child.
The whisper of her heart became noticeable, rising to a whir of uneasy noise.
“Where are you?” Her voice had a flat echo to it. “Hello?”
The only reply was the rushing of the desert wind high above, communicating down the intricate tunnels that ventilated her cave.
She crossed the chamber, nervously aware that she felt a little weaker, a little more earthbound, than she had felt even when she awoke. It was nothing more than a certain increase of definition where her feet pressed against the soles of her sandals, but it was a signal that she was dealing with one of the rarest things that she knew—limited time.
In one sense, she had always thought of her time in this life as being limited. In her dream, millennia passed in moments. Her captivity in this life had been not yet an hour…according to the grammar of dream. The mystery of this was the mystery of her hope. Lilith did not think she had been born here. She thought she had been sent here. She had been here since the Mammoth trembled the air with his booming call.
She’d had children, but her memory of their creation was a secret she kept even from herself. They had come about in a stone building beside the Blood Sea, but not by her giving birth. She had told her children that she’d left their father, had explained them to themselves in that way. She had always felt that there was something missing in them, something in their eyes. It was why men said that she had given birth to demons.
A tickling sensation caused her to touch her chin. It was drool, thick, pouring from her mouth. She snatched her fingers away from the grotesque warning, then drew cotton cloth across it to dry herself. Soon she would have too little energy left and would be unable to move.
She strode upstairs and threw open her chests, l
ooking for her cloak. It had been a long time since she’d taken a journey, a very long time, and she certainly did not want to do it now. As the human population had grown, she had come to find their filthy, jangling, squalling hordes impossible to endure.
One of them alone might smell sweet and taste delicious, but wallowing through the huge nests of cities that they made—it was too much to bear. They used rough animals for food and transportation and lit smoky fires at night to mark the way, and some of them came to cut the purse or cut the throat, and they hung one the other or whipped them or bound them upon stakes and burned them, and the smell of that would leave a nasty grease on the afternoon air. They rotted and died and were left in heaps, and rats and cats ran about making their lives in the filth.
She did not want ever again to go to dreadful Alexandria or Rome, or sit in a wagon or a litter carried by sweating men, or lie in terror upon the deck of a groaning ship. But she had to forage. To do that, she needed to go to a city. It could not be done among the few who lived in the desert, not if she expected to conceal her cull.
She groaned, the sound coming out so unexpectedly that she was startled. It had come from deep, deep within, down where her body sensed that it was dying. Why had they forsaken her, who had tended her for so long? Where was Re-Atun, who had been bringing her food for a thousand years?
She lifted a dress from the cedar chest. It floated on the air, settling slowly to the floor. She searched deeper. Now here was a cape made of the skin of a bear. It was quite old, though, and not as supple as it had been when it was still full of the animal’s grease. Too long, also, it trailed the ground. In the cold times, the bears had been quite large.
Finally she chose a dress of fine linen and her traveling cloak of human leather, made from a species that she had extinguished. Though gentle, the heavy-jawed creatures had been dangerously strong, and their blood was bitter on the tongue. She’d preferred the tall, thin-skinned ones, who were not only sweet-blooded but intelligent enough to be a good beginning for her work.
She went to her table of oils and began to disguise herself as a human being, drawing eyebrows on her smooth forehead, then applying kohl and gilding the lids in the manner of the pharaohs. The Egyptians were a docile people who respected their rulers, and she would appear to them to be a great lady, and they would drop their eyes and let her pass. She would find a dark corner, make quick work of one of them to regain her strength, then go on and locate her own kind.
The cloak settled around her shoulders as if the former owner of the skin had been bred to cover her, such was the expertise of the tailor who had made it.
She went out into the mouth of her cave, pausing there for a moment to listen. She knew every detail of the silence of this place. It had been many, many years since any human intruder had appeared here, and there was no sign of one now. She proceeded down through her lilies, then paused again.
She took a single step. It felt almost ceremonial. From this point, she would be in the world of beings she had created, both human and Keeper. She felt a profound love for all of them, a complicated love, of both mother and predator.
Moving quickly now, she ascended from the humid draw that marked her home. The going along these hills was harder than she recalled. On the expedition to Rome, they had carried her in a litter. More recently, she had been taken to Cairo in a carriage with horses. This contraption had carried her into the great city by night, where she had observed creatures called Englishmen, who had arisen in the north and were of interest to some people. They were not a new breed, and thus could not be claimed by Drawghera, who had wanted to add them to his keepings and take them from those of Gilles. Drawghera had claimed that they were related to the tribes he kept in Carpathia, but it was not true.
She had been in Cairo for just a few days, and had never gone out of the palace in which she had been made resident. She remembered, and not with pleasure, how the place had rung with a din of iron wheels, the clatter of horses and the braying of mules. Its air had been a fetor of smoke and manure. Re-Atun had wanted her to live here, near him, and had brought her a gift of two luscious males to tempt her to stay. From one she had learned the language of the Englishmen, which contained only a few echoes of her own tongue, Prime, upon which all human languages rested. When the creature’s time came, it had given its life unwillingly, this one. The other had dallied with her for days, and from it she had learned the language of the Arabs, which had in it Egyptian, and much subtle Prime.
She had not been in Cairo long enough to meet the pharaoh, but she wondered what he could have been thinking to allow this mad nest of starvation, sickness, and animals to grow up along the banks of the Nile. The Englishmen had claimed that there was no pharaoh. Nothing would have surprised her, in that place, but she thought their assertion an improbable one.
She reached the top of the hill she had been climbing. Here was the plateau where, last time, the carriage and horses had been waiting. But there was only the wind now, blowing steadily in the late afternoon. To the west, the sun was enormous in the sky. A few leagues off stood Mons Porphyrites. She decided that she would go and buy transportation from the Romans who had a stoneworks there.
Not much farther away was the Rohamnu, where she herself had caused beken to be quarried, with which she had built many things. She would have the Romans carry her there, and from thence she would go to the Punt trade road that led into Antinoe. There would be caravans on the road, and seeing her fine dress, they would carry her willingly. She remembered the builder of Antinoe, a Roman covered with sores and full of sickness called Hadrian. He had built the town in memory of a boy he had loved, Antinous, who had been consumed by Eumenes.
As she moved in her steady stride, all of these things passed through her mind. The chronology was vague, but the memories were crystal sharp. Hadrian might have lived yesterday, or still be alive, or dead for eons. But she could see his face, the shattered eyes of the most powerful man in the world.
She came out upon a spreading view, and stopped there in respect for the great world. The westward sun was as red as the blood of an infant. To the east, the moon rose, a silver sickle in a purple sky. Beneath it the land dwindled down into shadows of many colors, grays and golds slipping along the edges of cliffs, and the blood red of porphyry off in the direction of the Roman quarry.
The two jackals had come with her from home, and stood now a short distance away, their eyes blazing in the golden last of the sunlight. They were inhabited, she knew, by the impulse of her journey. The Egyptians would say that they were Wepwawet, the Opener of Ways, and her companion Anubis. They knew the use of the jackal, but were ignorant of the science with which she had made of the creature a tool for travelers of her own kind. She made a low sound, a complex word in Prime. The jackals trotted a distance, but not in the direction she would have thought right.
Nonetheless, she followed after them, confident that the two animals would do their work correctly. Along the way, they caught another animal and ate it while it squalled and struggled. At the moment of last light, she felt the sun go as if it was withdrawing from her heart. She gazed along the eastern horizon, resting her eyes upon the thin net of stars that the Greeks called the Pleiades, the sailing ones.
They always made her feel so sad, those stars, especially one of them, the blue spark of her true home. She felt, sometimes, as if she had just stepped away for a moment, but had ended up here for ten thousand years. She had been a bride, had gone to sleep beneath a plum-blossom tree…and ended up here.
Or had she? It seemed to be part of the basis of memory, the plum-blossom tree, but she could not be sure. Perhaps it was only the desperate dream of a creature without beginning or end, whose greatest need was to have some sort of a foundation in time.
She turned her head away from the sky and went on, following the scent of the jackals’ fur. But where were they leading her? It seemed wrong. In fact, she was sure that it was wrong. The Romans were in the opposite directio
n.
Perhaps they had another, quicker way to the Punt road. That must be it, a quick trip through a crack in the mountains, then down to the road. Maybe they were even going toward the smoke of a resting caravan.
Darkness rose. Now, high above, hung the glowing outer arm of the galaxy, the border of the known world. Her eyes focused, then focused again, until the firmament revealed its wonders to her. The reefs of stars became a jeweled host as she began to perceive each individual strand of light. As the rays entered her eyes, each sent its own message to her heart.
She could not keep from singing, and she raised her voice in the long, rich tones of her kind, a shimmering regiment of notes like the deep songs of the whale and the wind. The jackals laughed and yapped, and when she stopped, she heard them rutting again.
Her songs were not songs of joy, though. When she saw the night, she remembered fields bowing in night’s wind, and being tired after a day of threshing, and the warm scent of bread.
But she did not eat bread. She couldn’t eat bread.
Motionless, she waited for the jackals to return to their task of guiding her. Her stillness was as precise as her movement. Indeed, she was so still that a cruising owl used her as a perch, hooted twice, then swept back into the sky, its wings trembling the silent air. She thought nothing of this, who had slept upon the desert reaches in the company of lions and, in her youth, swum the waters off the point now called Aden, singing until the whales rose from the dark ocean. Aden…she had called it Adam, after the lost love of her dreams, and in the first days had stood there listening to the sea, and called out in her loneliness, “Lest I forget you, O my love, Adam.”