“Help! Help me!”
Her cries echoed away into the distance. She’d been blundering along this messy tunnel for a long time now, dodging pipes and sagging wires and rusty machinery. There were rats literally everywhere, a whole city of rats that must be going up at night and feeding on garbage, then coming down here during the day. They were big, fearless, inquisitive rats. They weren’t particularly aggressive or anything, but their casually interested stares left no doubt about what would happen to her when her light went out.
“Help! Help me!”
The echo called back to her, of that voice of mixed youthfulness and age that had made her so famous. What damn difference did it make now? All that fame and money and her eternal youth were just generally worthless here.
Her flashlight finally did what it had wanted to from the beginning—it went out. She shook it. Nothing. She burst into tears. Standing in the middle of this dark and treacherous place, hugging herself, cold and completely helpless, she cried like people must cry on the night before execution. She cried for a long time, bitterly and angrily, until there was nothing left but snuffling and choking.
When she stopped, she heard a sound at her feet. It was close, a sort of frantic sputtering noise. But what was it?
A pain shot up her right leg. Instinct caused her to slap at it, and her hand encountered rough fur.
It was rats, rats all around her and now nipping at her, trying to draw blood so that they could get more.
Her hands shaking so much she could hardly control them, she got the gun out. Holding as far from her as she could, she fired it.
The roar was mind boggling, it made her scream, it made her ears ring, but what she saw in the flash made her whole heart and soul howl with sheer, blinding terror, because it was a seething, tumbling, circus of rats.
She fired. Again. Again. Again. And in each flash she saw them, she saw them turning tail and running. Fired. Fired. And then it was clear. No more rats.
Kicking, shrieking at the darkness, she moved slowly along. She waved her hands in front of her, fighting the persistent sensation that they were going to drop down on her from above.
“Help! Help me, please!”
Another sharp, twisting pain in the fat of her calf. She swung around, fired again—and they were back, a stormy gray ocean of them swarming toward her in the flash. Again she fired. Again. They kept coming. Again, again, again, click click clickclickclick.
She hurled the empty gun at them and tried to run, shuffling along, scuttling, waving her hands in front of her. She gagged, retching up the acid that was making her stomach twist itself into burning knots.
She fell, crashing to the floor with a dry, scraping thud. They seethed over her, covering her in an instant.
What would happen? Would she die, or would she become part of them, of their stomach and their shit—what would happen?
She clawed her way to her feet, dragging them off her like leeches in the Congo, bellowing like a wounded heifer, begging God for deliverance.
Then she remembered something. She thrust her hand into her pocket, and there it was, the lighter she’d taken from George back in the limo. Crying, screaming in her throat, she pulled the little Bic out and raised it high and lit it, grotesquely mocking Lady Liberty out there in the free air of the harbor.
The rats didn’t like that, not really. But they sniffed into the pool of light. They would get used to it.
Bending low, she thrust the flame at them, screaming as she did so like a Valkyrie…a very scared Valkyrie.
Then she felt something, a new sensation. It was deep under her feet, a throbbing that came and went. She moved a bit more, going toward a pile of debris that choked the tunnel ahead. As she was walking, she felt the throbbing again. It had a rhythm to it, and she thought she knew what that rhythm was: she was hearing a subway.
Everybody knew about the old Second Avenue Line, which had been abandoned and left unfinished back in the 1970s or ’80s. Somewhere back then, anyway. Was that what she was in, and therefore she was hearing the Lex, somewhere nearby? She moved a little farther ahead. Seeing that she was active again, seeing the fire, the rats had backed off once more. But not far. They were everywhere, looking at her like pedestrians watching a burning building.
Again she heard the sound, and this time it was a little louder. It was definitely the subway, that was clear now. She moved more quickly, clutching the lighter, afraid that it, too, would soon go out. Every few steps, the sound was a little more distinct. She knew a lot about the subway. She hadn’t always been a little rich girl. Life for Leo Patterson had started out in Bronxville, but by the time she was fourteen, her whole existence was centered on Metro North and the subway, her umbilical cord to Manhattan. She’d dress up in her stardust gown and go from club to club with the other bridge-and-tunnel girls, trying to suck, fuck, or bribe her way into someplace worth going. And failing. Always. You had a mark on you that only Manhattan could see, you who crossed the bridges and slid through the tunnels.
The lighter was getting hot. She turned the flame down. Another train passed, going pretty fast. She must be somewhere near one of the crosstown lines. She looked for some kind of a door or something, some way of getting into the living part of the subway.
She thought that the line was actually above her. Raising the light, she looked up. And there, she saw something that might matter. Along the roof of the tunnel were dark rectangles, possibly openings of some kind. They were dripping, with long stalactites hanging from them. Her guttering flame couldn’t reveal much about where they went, if anywhere, but at least they weren’t here on this floor amid the confederacy of the rats. She went to the concrete wall and looked upward. She was tall enough by half a hand to grasp the edge of the sill above.
She turned off the lighter and put it in her pocket. Immediately, rustling began. As she reached up and grasped the edge, they reached her, and when they did, they began to scream. They did not squeak like the rats one might find behind a country woodpile. They screamed with the harshness of their lives and their hunger, and perhaps some nameless change that had come to them from whatever nibbling they did on the remains of vampires.
As she pulled herself up, her naked arms wallowing in thick greasy debris that immediately made her itch, they leaped at her like raging dogs, snapping and grabbing at her jeans, her boots, her exposed skin. Revolted, choking back her own cries, she kicked them off as she drew herself into the space above.
She fell, and hard—it felt like a good three feet, hitting a concrete floor. Behind her, the gun fell into the mass of rats far below. So, no gun now and no way to get another. Empty anyway, empty and now gone.
Wallowing in the filth that had cushioned her, she struggled to her feet. Her head cracked the ceiling so hard that there was a flash in her eyes. But at least there were no rats here. Rubbing her head, she was gathering herself together when something flew at her out of the blackness. Pain shot up her neck, and she grabbed into the black, finding fur, a thick, squirming body, a wildly whipping tail. She dragged the rat off her and dug her fingers into its neck until the screaming was reduced to a low crackle, then to silence, and the squirming gradually became disorganized, then ended.
She listened. Nothing, not around her. They didn’t infest this place, they couldn’t get up here. This one must have come up clinging to her jeans. She threw it down and got out the lighter. Holding it high, she lit it again.
She was in a sort of room…and all around her were wonders. Gilded frames glowed in the half-light, knights marched across a rotting tapestry, golden objects lay in a pile against the far wall. Amazed, her hands shaking, she put down her lighter and lifted one of them from the heap.
She recognized it at once, and what she saw stabbed her heart through with the dear torture of fond memory. She was holding a monstrance, used in Catholic benedictions to display the communion wafer, called by Catholics the host, and believed to contain the actual spirit of Christ.
&nbs
p; Leo had not laid eyes on a monstrance since she was twelve years old. She had been a member of the choir at St. Agnes School, Bronxville, and the sudden, totally unexpected appearance of this object in this impossible place shocked away a lot of years and a thick crust of life.
She held the heavy object, gazing into the dark crystal porthole where once the white wafer had been placed by reverent priestly hands. She saw there her childhood face, its heart shape so perfectly beautiful that she groaned aloud.
“It’s gold,” she said to the darkness. She had come upon a horde of stolen treasure. And what treasure. The paintings were ruined, just rotting canvas and a few pitiful, flaking patches of paint. But they were magnificent examples of the Hudson River School, revealing the ghosts of grand Catskill vistas and distant, sunny days. It was the world in its truth and perfect beauty, and she saw with total clarity that the hand that had painted it was guided by something that could only be described as sacred—deeply sacred—and she regretted deeply that these miraculous creations had been left here to their ruin.
There were craters in the walls, each one filled by a dark lead meteorite, and she knew what those craters were. Bullets, huge ones, had blasted this place. They accounted for the ripped sockets in the paintings and the unrecognizable colored glass fragments on the floor, and the pearls and rubies and emeralds rolling in the dust, and the oddly twisted frock coat and splayed cellophane collar that she knew contained a broken body, gray with dust and torn full of gaping holes, but undecayed.
Then she saw something gleaming there that she thought was a diamond, and instinctively reached out, drawn to the glitter as men have been to shiny objects since we swept the forest tops of the past in screaming packs. And when she did, she reached toward the living eye of a vampire who had lain here these long years, too broken to mend himself, but still possessed of a deathless consciousness.
Don’t ever touch them, Sarah Roberts had warned her, and when the arm moved and cold, bone-hard fingers closed around her wrist, she knew why, for she was trapped as certainly as she would have been by a blue steel handcuff. And then she saw the teeth appearing behind the crackling, shattering lips, as the black, dry-cured ropes of muscles twisted the parched skin in a smile that managed to communicate hate and cruelty and wicked, sneering irony. How could you do this, it seemed to say, you wretched little animal?
Instinct took over, and she hammered at it and shrieked and threw herself back. The body came to pieces, the whole arm coming with the hand that had grabbed her, ripping off the shoulder with a dry, crunching sound, and the dull pop of the bone leaving its socket.
When she dragged it off herself, the fingers began clattering like a scorpion’s pincers as the hand expended itself helplessly in the muck that covered the floor.
She leaped up, clawing at the ceiling as a drowning submariner might claw at the iron that confined him. She stumbled forward, falling toward and then through a rotted Gobelins tapestry. She staggered, fell again, hit a wall, and slid along it. She turned, feeling something soft, then pressed deep into some kind of material.
Light appeared, light! The lighter was gone, but it didn’t matter now, because there was light behind this wall of cloth. She pushed her way through and suddenly was in a place so altogether different from where she had been that she wallowed in confusion, tumbling to the floor in a heap of cloth. Swimming, struggling, she tore the material away from her face and dragged herself to her feet—and found herself standing in the lower-level men’s department at Bloomingdale’s, which she had entered by crashing through a rack of overcoats that had been recessed into a wall.
The monstrance still clutched tightly in her hands, she looked from face to face—an elderly customer whose tongue was slowly passing behind his lips, a woman who barked out a sound somewhere between laughter and terror, a salesman whose face filled with question so innocently pure that it melted the years in an instant, and turned him into an astonished little boy.
A tall man, black, who had been trying on the jacket of a very fine suit, had the presence of mind to say, “Well, damn.” Then his teenage daughter, fumbling in her purse, asked in a sweet, neatly composed voice, “May I have your autograph?”
Chapter Eleven
The Music Room
Lilith clicked a button on the thick wand again, surfing as fast as the controls would allow. It still seemed slow, as the screen changed from image to image. When she had calmed down enough to explore her new surroundings, she had understood that the SONY wasn’t a window, but rather that it contained thousands upon thousands of pictures painted in such extraordinary detail that they seemed real. They were being run rapidly together to create the illusion, in a slow-registering human eye, of movement. If she unfocused, she would also see them that way. However, a little attention revealed the truth: she was really looking at streams of discreet images.
It was hard to imagine the number of people that must be involved in creating them, but the motive was clear enough. The pictures were used to inform. Although there was writing involved in human life as well, this seemed the more important means of communication. Using the clock that she’d found on the wrist of the woman who had occupied this chamber, she had counted 750 of the pictures in half a circuit of the sweep hand across its face. She did not measure time in such detail, any more than she could imagine anybody making so many pictures. And they flowed onto the screen from many different directions. How there could be so many in the SONY and yet it not be filled was quite a mystery.
One or two of the picture sequences were in other languages, but most were in English. She’d heard nothing else spoken here, so she had used the SONY to improve her smattering. She had followed conversational exercises with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, Robert Mitchum and John Wayne. These were distinguished from other material in the SONY by the fact that they involved long dialogues about the persons and items pictured, and so could be used by the student to learn the language. She would stop at the images in gray tones, as they afforded the best likelihood of getting useful conversation.
From looking at the pictures, she had concluded that mankind’s world had become vast indeed. Cairo wasn’t the center of anything. This mighty place was the center. Or another one, full of white monuments, perhaps was the center, or a third, distinguished by a great, tapering tower called an eiffel. She had seen trains for the first time, planes and plane crashes, Ted Heath and Rosie O’Donnell and Louis Pasteur, George Costanza, Oprah Winfrey and Queen Noor, Wolf Blitzer and Adolf Hitler, all for the first time. She had understood Adolf Hitler immediately, wondered if he wasn’t in some way a creation of Keepers, placed in a position of power to cause mayhem and slow the growth of human population. Stalin the same, and communism, which had obviously been contrived by Keepers to reduce human economic vitality.
She could see that they had worked hard, all through the last century, to stop the march of man. As they had failed, they had been forced to hide in the tunnels that were their traditional means of movement through cities, and there they had been trapped. She’d seen enough in the dungeons below this city to know what had happened. The humans had invaded their places, somehow getting past the ancient blinds that concealed Keeper passages from man’s eyes.
Then she clicked past a picture that startled her. She went back to it. A huge room, a woman on a stage singing. The music was of no importance, but the leather-clad creature had a glow about her that Lilith recognized instantly. She watched. There came a close-up of the woman’s face. Lilith watched with the greatest care. Because this…no, the woman wasn’t a Keeper. Then the picture flashed to another view of the woman singing in another context. Words began to move up the screen: “Silver Dreams,” and the woman on the screen sang, “Silver dreams fly me away, silver dreams save my soul…” Her voice was hard-edged and yet resonant, much richer than a normal human voice. It was interrupted by a hollering male: “Call 1-800-999-0020 right now, and you get not only Leo’s greatest hits, we’ll add Leo Patterson Int
imate Moments, both for $19.98. Remember, these special Leo editions are not sold in stores.”
Behind the screaming words, the voice of Leo Patterson continued. Slowly, Lilith came to her feet. She knew what she was looking at, she knew precisely. This lovely creature was a blooded human being. Then, abruptly, the scene changed to an idiot kissing a crocodile.
Lilith sat stunned. Blooded! Oh, joy, there was life yet in this benighted world, and look how they loved her! There had been a huge audience, the man screaming his words from excitement! And blooded, blooded, so feeding. Yes, she would be an ally, she must be.
Lilith paced, thinking how to get into the SONY. How to go in the pictures? Was there a tunnel inside? Oh, she had to go!
She rushed to the SONY, but it was attached by mere rope to the wall. Nobody could be inside, it was too small. So, by what enchantment, then…
Oh, the humans were so great, and she was so small, but there was this blooded woman somewhere, somebody to help her, to love her.
She rushed up and down the floor, up and down, trying to think, to understand. But she understood nothing, she knew that.
There had been a number. “Call,” he had said. That was it, the thing that contained voices that stood on a small table—it also had a pad arranged with numbers. She went to it, pressed the correct sequence.
Nothing happened. She did it again. Still nothing. A hard knot evolved in her throat. She might survive if she found this bloodling. Survive! She had not thought of this possibility. She’d been trying to understand how to be rendered to ash and not dismembered, that was all she had hoped to achieve.
But now—she pressed the numbers again, then again.
Or perhaps this thing had nothing to do with it. She went to the SONY, held the wand to her face, and shouted the numbers. Then she shouted them at the images on the screen. Then she pressed them into the pad on the wand.