Then she thought, No. She just thought, Absolutely not, no. She turned up an alley, easily leaving the cops behind. Being that she’d just fed, she was at her physical and mental best. What Miri had said was so true; the blood did indeed take care of itself. That was why she’d made this escape, and why she now thought she’d be able to follow vampire sign, at least for the next few hours. She could follow them into the tunnels, and her superacute senses would enable her to find them.
She found a crack, pushed at it, then noticed something. There were no cops behind her. They hadn’t even turned up the alley. Had she been so fast that they’d already lost her? She slid her fingers along the crack, feeling for the right spot. Lilith could have done this in an instant, so fast she would seem to literally disappear before your eyes, but Leo was not nearly as skilled, not even at her peak.
Finally, though, she found the single loose place in the masonry and shook it. The crack widened, and she stepped through.
Behind her, the masonry silently slid closed. For hundreds of years, vampires had been carrying their victims down the steep stairway that she now descended, into the dark depths.
This must not be a repeat of her blundering failure in New York. She had to save this boy. It felt like the most important thing she’d ever done—maybe the only important thing she’d ever done.
She listened—off in one direction, dripping. She scraped at the wall, was rewarded with a single strip of faint green light. It was enough, though. She took a few steps deeper into the tunnel. She could not get lost here, because if she did, she would sure as hell not end up blundering out into any men’s departments.
Paul and Kari could both, as it turned out, enter the vampire’s hidden world. Paul wondered how much vampire blood ran in Kari’s veins, and what his history was. But there was no time to discuss that now, not as they dropped down the steep, curving steps of a vampire hole.
He and Becky, Kari and Jean—at least this was true: this was probably the best damn team that had ever been assembled.
Becky was following the signal from Ian’s transmitter on one of the modified PalmPilots provided by Jean. “Over there,” she whispered. “Twenty yards.”
They pulled on night-vision equipment, got out their guns. They moved fast, Kari at the lead. In these tunnels, it would be all too easy for the telltale to go out of range, which would be an unthinkable disaster.
From now on, nothing would be said. The least sound could spell disaster. A vampire that was aware it was being chased was a dangerous creature indeed, and Paul would never assume that this one would be so stupid as to imagine they wouldn’t be trying.
The telltale’s signal indicated that Ian had suddenly slowed.
The tunnel, which had been dropping steeply, began to become wet. Soon, they were treading six inches of water. Paul knew that they were passing under the Nile, heading toward the Giza Plateau, where the pyramids stood.
Then the green dot on the telltale began going faster, then much faster. Ian had gotten through the water and was running. The group sped up as much as they could. It seemed like ages before they were finally out of the water.
As they were going up the far side, a sound came back to them, a long, echoing cry. Becky gasped. She was behind Paul, and he could feel her pressing against him. Another cry, and this time there was a responsive sound in her throat. Paul knew what he himself was going through. A mother’s pain had to be worse.
They were running now, and Paul became aware of his heart, which was laboring noticeably. The tunnel was too narrow for him to drop to the back, so he had to keep up Kari’s pace. “You need a heart cath,” his doctor had said. “Within a year, for sure.” Pain started, a band around his chest. It rose into his jaw. He did not slacken his pace.
Suddenly Leo came into a gleaming, shimmering wonderland. She did not at first know what she was seeing…and when she did realize that they were pictures, then she didn’t understand. They were shining like mirrors that reflected the day. Each one was huge, forty or fifty feet long, twenty feet high. In them, figures drifted slowly along, flags waved as if underwater, the sun flared down on temples and palaces and long-walled cities.
She saw the Pyramid of Cheops flaring white and new, on its pinnacle a huge golden stone with what looked like an eye carved in it. On the Nile stood graceful ships, their sails painted with the images of gods.
It was the past, captured in some sort of frozen mirrors.
Then she heard a cry, just a short distance away.
“Ian!”
“Leo?”
“Over here!”
He came out from behind one of them. “It’s incredible, Leo. Look at it all. Look at it!”
The whole of man’s past was here, preserved in wonderful detail by a mind that collected things and obsessively kept them, even things as ephemeral as the light of other days.
“Ian, I’m here to—”
One of the mirrors exploded, crashing to a million pieces as Lilith came flying through it, leaping like a maddened panther straight at Leo’s throat.
Leo took the blow against her upper chest and head and went down like a rock, smashing into another of the mirrors as she fell. Then Lilith was astride her.
“Ian, run, get away from her!”
“My folks are coming! It’s okay!”
When she heard that, Lilith began shaking Leo by the shoulders, slamming her head again and again into the stone floor. Shards of mirror, still blazing with the light of the past, flew up around her like a multicolored halo and then were stained with pink, then with thick red.
Leo felt her skull being shattered, her brains growing loose in her head, then splashing out in chunks. She tried to stop Lilith, but she couldn’t even begin.
“You did it, you ruined it all,” Lilith wailed as she smashed Leo again and again into the floor.
Then Leo saw Ian behind her with a large piece of mirror. As a stately procession moved across it, he lifted it high and smashed it downward, crushing it into Lilith’s back.
Lilith grunted but didn’t even slow down. The vampire could take far more punishment than that. But not the human being, and the agony of the blows began to seem to Leo to be farther and farther away. Then she felt sphincters give way, felt warm liquid flowing out of her down below, heard Ian’s cries as he strove to pull Lilith off her.
Lilith stood up. Leo felt a curious, electrical tingling all over her body. She lifted herself, confused that Lilith had let her live—and then realized that she had not risen, had not moved at all. Lilith had let her live, all right, but like this, in the undead state, lying here amid the stars of the mirrors, in this great hall of the human past.
“Why did you kill her? Why did you have to do that?”
“She’s dangerous, Ian. She’s dangerous to us.”
In her helpless mind, she called out to Ian—get away, run, do it now!
There was no sound.
“Come with me, Ian, come here.”
Run, Ian!
He turned away. But Lilith had him, snap, her hand around his right arm. He tugged, but it was no use. In a moment, Ian’s face was thrust down into Leo’s. She was looking straight into his terrified eyes. Then his face was being pressed past hers into her neck. For a long moment, he did not breathe. Longer. Longer still. He squirmed, he tried to twist his head away.
No, Ian, don’t, no, Ian!
He took a long breath gurgling with her blood, and as he did, she heard him groan and felt him begin to tremble.
Lilith backed away.
Ian, no! Don’t taste it, Ian!
She felt his tongue darting out, touching it, felt his arms coming around her, getting purchase. Then his teeth, he was tearing into her, and it hurt but she could not move, he was biting right through to the artery. Then he was shaking, he was struggling, she could feel it, she could hear soft, desperately urgent sounds as she knew his mind screamed no to his ravenous gut, no, no Ian—
There was a roar, a vast shatteri
ng of glass, a whole cosmos erupting around her and over her. Lilith passed overhead in a graceful arc, a comet trailing blood and smoke.
It is always complicated until the defeat, and then it is always simple. So it had been for the others, and so it was for her. Lilith knew that she was tremendously damaged. She knew that one entire side of her body was not working. She saw the guns, the humans behind them visible only as dark hulks, so covered with equipment that they weren’t even recognizable.
How odd that her dream would come back to her now, of something so simple as a dusty yellow road that crossed a field of wheat, then wound off toward a village. But it was all in fog, unfocused, hard to see.
Riding on another great roar which she knew came from the barrel of a gun, the dream got clearer. She saw now the shady bower where she had been sleeping, saw the sun peeking in around the plum blossoms. Far from feeling the pain of the bullets that were disintegrating her, she felt the pleasing stiffness that follows good sleep.
In the roaring and the smoke, she stretched deliciously. At the same time, she was aware of blood spraying everywhere and voices and shattering glass and a terrible and yet beautiful death scene, with her broken body blowing like a leaf amid myriad tiny reflections, a rainbow of color and red death.
Her eyes fluttered open. Bees hummed in the flowers of the tree that concealed her. Far away, she heard a bell tolling. She had to go, she’d overslept.
She stood, went to the edge of the shade, and pushed aside some of the long, loose branches that hung like a concealing curtain around the base of the tree. She stepped forth into the sleepy thrall of a summer afternoon.
The moment Becky saw Ian crouching there, the dying vampires dropped into the past for her. Paul and the others would finish them off. Her mission was to help her son. She yanked off the night-vision goggles, unneeded in this miraculous place, and rushed to him.
He knelt beside Leo, his face covered with blood.
Paul came, as she knew he would.
“Dad?”
The pistol moved, the barrel pointed.
“Dad?”
She heard the click of the action being cocked, soft, efficient.
“Dad?”
Silence.
She looked at Paul. His face was hard—sad but so very hard. “Kari,” he said hoarsely. “Jean. We have this one to do.”
Becky was stunned, totally. “He didn’t feed!”
Paul closed his eyes, shook his head slightly.
She put her hand around the barrel of his gun, forcing herself to bear its heat. But she didn’t turn it aside.
“Dad?”
It was like a dance, slow dance in a sea of blood, as they came forward, came toward Ian. Ian began to get to his feet. It looked like he’d been at Leo, looked exactly like that. She heard the snicker of rounds being chambered. They would all fire at once. He’d be gone in an instant. They would leave nothing to linger, they would not be cruel.
Becky knew what had to be done. Trembling, the sorrow pouring through her like a Niagara Falls of pain, she removed her hand.
“Mom?”
The guns came up.
She couldn’t look. She averted her eyes—and saw that Leo’s body wasn’t desiccated. For an instant, this seemed simply a little wrong. Then it seemed a lot wrong.
“He didn’t feed!” She grabbed him and went for the floor.
The guns roared, sending more of the precious mirrors shattering into ignorant rainbow shards. Heat seared her back, then she lay in a galaxy of sparkling instants, red flowers shuddering in ancient breeze, a dog’s hip, a golden broken eye. And beneath her, the gasping, gagging, crying body of her son.
They sat up. She hugged him. Like soldiers who have been near an exploding shell, they touched each other in the miracle of survival. She looked up at the three men, Kari, Jean, and Paul. “Look at the body,” she said with the thick care of somebody so shocked that they can barely form words, “he did not feed on that woman.”
Paul sank down, had to be held up by Kari and Jean. She thought he was crying, but it wasn’t that. His skin was gray, his breathing sounded shallow, he dropped his gun with a great crash to the floor.
“Chest,” he gasped, “gotta catch my breath, here.”
Then Ian was on him, holding his father in his bloody hands, drawing him down, taking his big head in his lap.
The room still glowed brightly. A few of the strange glass paintings had been shattered, but there were hundreds more in great frames, rows and rows of them.
“It’s all of civilization,” Jean breathed. “This is the treasure house of the ages.”
They gathered, then, around their fallen comrade. They’d done it before, all of them, many times. They were efficient, and in a surprisingly short time Paul was outside, having been taken to the surface through the Queen’s Chamber beneath the Pyramid of Cheops, which held the hidden door to this extraordinary place of record.
As they moved up the narrow, spiraling tunnel to the surface, Kari and Ian carrying Paul, Jean’s gun sounded again and again behind them. He was destroying the two vampires utterly, pulverizing them, making certain that no trace of life remained in them. If they had souls to release, they were released. The blood sank into the earth and deeper, even more secret chambers.
Then Jean, also, went to the surface. In the dark and silence he left behind rats came, and cats came, and long albino crocodiles.
Chapter Seventeen
The Veils of Night
Lilith crossed the dell where the plum-blossom tree grew, and made her way along the ridge that swept downward to the fields of Eden, and beyond them their village nestled among its trees. On the shimmering distance stood the red pyramid, glowing in the late sun. None knew who had built it, or any of the pyramids that were scattered across the countries of the sky, but they were said to be the knots that held the carpet of the universe together.
Two columns of smoke rose, one from the inn and one from the baker’s. Skyward, white clouds dreamed along the blue, and great, dark birds circled lazily.
The bell kept ringing and ringing. Then she saw snatches of color appearing along the road near the village gate. What was this? People were coming out. She looked around, but there was nobody else here. They were coming out to meet her, and ringing the bell for her.
And then she remembered something that it seemed very strange to have forgotten, it having happened only an hour ago. She had come here with her husband—been brought here, in fact, weeping and afraid.
She touched her cheek. Oh, yes, she had been weeping, and so recently that her eyes were still damp. As she kept making her way down the hillside, the ringing of the bell got louder, and the voices of the townspeople rose to an excited chatter.
What was this? There was nothing in the wedding rite about this. So why were they…why? She stopped, attempting to understand what was happening. And then, in that moment, maybe because she noticed and maybe because it was just time, she experienced the true vastness of her own memories of the past hour, and immediately sank down in the road.
There was a world inside her, a huge world in all its gaudy and terrible ages. Still on her knees, she turned, looking back toward the plum-blossom tree, thinking that something in the fruit had made her swoon. But no, this was no ordinary fever. Under the tree, she had dreamed a magnificent and terrible dream, the whole life of a world.
Then everyone was there, the children sweating from their play, the adults dusty from scything the fields. A man came to her, whom she knew was her father. “Have you forgotten Adam?”
Adam!
The group parted, opening her way to the square around which the village was built. There was the fountain, playing merrily in the late light, and sitting beside it was a tall young man with the powerful shoulders of a hardworking farmer.
As she went forward, he came to his feet. He gazed down at her. “It’s been more than an hour,” he said.
“I slept so hard! I feel like I’ve been up there for
ever.”
He took her in his arms. It was—oh—like magic to feel the strength of him draw her up so easily so close. When he laid his lips upon hers, she felt as if she had truly come home. But when they stopped, she felt a fearsome thirst, as if she was dry to her marrow. She leaned to the fountain and drank of the clear, cold water. Down at the bottom, she could see the bright fish speeding, the ones that generations of children had tamed until they could hold them cupped in their hands.
The water seemed to flow directly into her veins, cleansing her.
“What happens?” he asked.
“Happens?”
“You remember…you went on the wisdom journey.”
How long ago that seemed—as if yesterday was somewhere off in history, before their world had been shattered by its wars, and the survivors had rejoined God.
“You have a dream. It’s a very long and terrible dream.” She stopped, then. She could not tell him the truth of what she remembered—that she had been asleep not for an hour, but for eons…and what had transpired in those terrible times, in that place that was beyond the beyond. “In your dream,” she said hastily, “you wave a magic wand, and a world full of simple creatures becomes a world full of searchers like we were, before God embraced us.”
“What is the secret? Why is it so dangerous?”
“It’s God’s business,” she said nervously. How could he understand that his young wife had woven good out of threads of evil? How could she ever say what she really remembered? “Ur-th,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“The name I gave it, the place I dreamed about.”
“One Place All? That’s a good name for a world.”
For the breadth of an instant, she seemed to hear the great roar of an ocean, but she knew that it was another sea, the sea of humanity that had been spawned in her dream.