Careful in his method, he looked along the baseboards, then the crown moldings, then up and down the walls. He was seeking the glitter of the camera’s eye, the dot of the laser’s source, any sign of alarm equipment. There was nothing, though, not this deep in the house.
He remembered this room—there was the door into the little infirmary where Sarah Roberts had been his doctor and Leo Patterson his nurse. They had subtly tormented him with desire, these glorious women, their dresses whispering as they moved, the sun from the high, barred windows playing in their hair.
Down the lower stairs and around a corner was another sort of a room altogether, and it was there that Paul went first. Above, the clinic had retained its pristine, starched appearance. Obviously, somebody was keeping the place up. Here, though, things were different. An iron bedstead sat against one wall, on it a rusty set of springs. The chosen had been bound to this bedframe, Paul knew, left to await their end while screaming themselves hoarse. Was it used still? He could hardly imagine somebody as soft and sweet-looking as Leo putting other human beings through that, but look at her onstage. Onstage she was blue steel.
Paul put his hand against the black door of the furnace. This was not the same as the furnace in his own basement, a great can of iron. This was a very different design, ostensibly built to fire a high-pressure boiler. But its interior was no compact firebox.
He drew the bar that closed it back, listening to the high grinding of iron upon iron. The door swung silently and easily open onto an absolute blackness. He shone his penlight in—and saw there dozens of gas jets and what looked like some sort of forced air device. Firebrick lined the interior, which, he was surprised and disappointed to see, contained not even ash. The thing was so clean, it was as if it had been built yesterday. Had it not still been warm, he could have made himself believe that it hadn’t been used in years, if ever.
He drew back and slammed the door. The clang echoed off through the house, was instantly absorbed. He looked up the stairs that led into the basement proper. At first, he trotted. Maybe she’d kept some sort of a souvenir—a damned ear or a finger or something.
He stopped on the wider stairway that led up to the pantry. She hadn’t kept a crumb of evidence; he knew it without looking. Further exploration would gain him nothing, and expose him to the very significant risk of being discovered. After all, this was Leo’s place. She might be living at the Sherry just now—she migrated restlessly from hotel to hotel—but she could come and go from here whenever she pleased. The front door could fly open at any moment.
He mounted the stairs, went through the hospital-clean pantry and into the breakfast room. These rooms had never been used, of course. They were here because Miriam could never have built a house without a kitchen and dining areas.
He went into the wonderful front hall, an ivory-colored oval with a grand, sweeping staircase behind it that led up to the festival areas, the ballroom and the large banquet room. On this floor, the closed double doors before him led to Miriam’s favorite music room, as lovely a private space as existed in New York.
He drew the doors back.
Oh. Oh, God. It was absolutely, exactly as it had been so many years ago. In this room, Paul had fallen in love, deeply, madly, with what turned out to be a murderous, cunning monstrosity…that had swept his heart away and then crushed it dry between her vampire fingers. The ancient pianoforte still stood overlooking the back garden, and before him, the great window of mullioned, leaded glass saw the side garden, and farther off, the prancing East River waters. There was no hint that the FDR Drive even existed.
He walked into the room. His eye was attracted by a particularly fabulous chair, as wonderful a piece of furniture as had ever been crafted. Miriam had said that it pre-dated Egypt, this marvel of the cabinet maker’s art. Paul had sat in it, had felt the way its grace added to its function. It was as if it had been tailored not only to fit the body, but to ennoble it. Where it had been made, she had never said.
His eye was drawn, then, to a face. He found himself looking up into something he had entirely forgotten was there: the portrait of Miriam that had been painted by Vermeer. He gasped as a blade of longing sliced his heart. He had forgotten, quite forgotten, the beauty, the majesty of the creature.
And he had also forgotten just how much he loved her. It shook him, it made him groan a little. She had the finest face he had ever laid eyes upon, her nose thin and sculpted, her lips at once laughing and set gravely, her eyes infinitely gentle, heartbreakingly gentle…and as hard as diamonds.
He sank down into the chair, not because he wanted to but because his legs failed him. He bent forward, his face convulsing, then rigid. He wanted her, just to see her once again crossing to the pianoforte, to hear her playing with those long, angelic fingers of hers, to see the tilt of her chin and the glow of the sun upon her brow.
For a long time he remained there, fighting to control himself and failing. The painting was a trap that had closed him up in the prison of his own denied love. He remembered the touch of her fingers upon his thigh, he remembered her voice as she said from the Bible on one of those dear nights, “I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valley….”
Across the echoes of the years, he sat before this sacred painting in this sacred place, and knew that his heart was ruined for love, had always been ruined for love.
The thing was, had he really killed her? He had shot her, but he had not shot her head, had not been able to. He listed her as dead, and there had never been a sign of her, but the real reason that he kept his investigation going was not Leo Patterson, it was the knowledge that he had not done his duty with this vampire.
Becky said he had. Becky said she was dead. But could he really trust himself, this man who loved too easily, to have properly killed the love of his life?
Becky knew, in the patient way of a woman who must conduct her own love affair in the shadow of another, greater one, that he still loved Miriam Blaylock. Paul saw how she had crafted their life together by details and particulars, creating little islands of closeness, waiting for his sex to swing round with the slow seasons, taking advantage when she could, making something for herself that way, and for the boy.
He sank forward, overwhelmed by the explosive emotions of desire and loss that were sweeping him, and knelt there, his graying head bowed, his hands clenched as if in abject prayer.
The silence of the house was profound. More time, it seemed, rested here than it did in other places, spreading across the glowing furniture like a fragile, infinite snow.
Then he heard something, as subtle a sound as had ever penetrated his consciousness, like the distant tap of his own heart, or the slow of his breath in the deep night. It was a long, expiring sigh, as if a sheet had been dragged across a polished floor, or somebody who had been sleeping for a very long time had sighed in the first gray of morning.
Slowly, he got to his feet. He looked up into the ceiling of billowing clouds and angels rising. No matter how hard he tried, he could not entirely rid himself of the notion that there was, somewhere in the nature of the relationship between vampire and human, some deep peace or goodness that transcended the violence and the horror. But surely that was just sentimentality, an echo of lost and foolish love.
He went quickly across the quieting carpets and the slick marble floor of the foyer, and down and back the way he had come, disappearing as swiftly as a shadow, leaving the house to its silence, its lost mistress, and its dreams.
Chapter Four
The Blood Eagle
Lilith awoke in the man’s arms, feeling the delicious tickle of his hand running up and down her thigh. At once she was glad, she was grateful…and she was lonely. His attentions had drawn her to enter what she thought of as her life’s dream, which had been unfolding as long as she could remember, of an afternoon in a place of perfect joy.
In this part of the dream she is leaving. To do this, she steps beneath a plum tree covered with blossoms, into its f
ragrant, bee-humming bower. As she leaves, a man lays his fingers on her cheek and touches her tears. He says, “Only an hour.” His strong, sweet voice, when she hears it in her dream, makes her glow with the vanishing light of longing.
She’d heard it just now, “Only an hour.” It had become for her the watchword of the eons, this enormous hour.
“You are my passionflower,” the man breathed into her ear in his own poetry, his slippery, jaunty Arabic.
Instantly, there came a silent riposte, You are my dinner. She gazed at him, thinking that they did not have such complex faces in the long-ago. “Ibrahim,” she breathed, “love me.” And he did, oh, he really did. His eyes bulged, and his lips hung slack as he pumped away at her. But he also tried to pleasure her, speeding up, slowing down, watching to gauge it in her eyes. And he did see it, because it was there. He was giving her pleasure, enough pleasure to make her feel a most unaccustomed feeling, which was regret.
She had come to feel a certain tenderness toward him. He sang, he told her stories of his youth among the camels, he bragged to her about his little possessions, his auto, his timepiece, the black “business suit” he kept in a bag. “I am a businessman. In Cairo, I am respected. I must wear such a suit.”
She felt him swell within her, saw his eyes flicker as he experienced the little death of coitus. Then he sank down upon her, and she enjoyed his weight. Her pleasure in him was not physical. It was, and this was a surprising truth, a pleasure of the heart.
He rolled off, breathing hard. “Oh,” he said, “oh, my. Was it so good for you?” It could not feel for him as it would with a human woman, but he said nothing, so neither did she. She turned to him and kissed the edge of his beard.
In recent years, she had taken less of an interest in the prey species. At home when she fed, she had come to prefer that they bring it to her wrapped in linen and so trussed that it could not even struggle. She would see only the neck, taste only blood drawn from carefully cleaned skin.
She did not want to experience Ibrahim in such a detached and sterile manner. She wanted to take him in the old way, with loving gentleness, even a sweet touch of regret. That was the way to eat, with respect.
But even so, look at his dark and shining eyes. He was so pleased with her, so grateful. Perhaps, as hungry as she was, she could delay a little more. If she began to lose too much strength, she could always just reach over and do him. It only took a moment.
She lay her fingers along his carotid. “Boomboom,” she said, “boomboom.”
“What do you feel?”
“Your blood.”
He threw himself on his back and began to laugh silently, his beard bobbing, his face twisted with pleasure that was also pain. “I am not a good Muslim,” he said. “I am not a good Egyptian.”
“You keep saying that. What would a good Muslim do?”
“Not fornicate. And a good Egyptian would not consort with a djin and bring misfortune on himself and all his family.”
“You think me a demon?”
He scoffed. “I know it.” Then, suddenly, he rose. She went up, too. They sat face to face, naked, in the smoky light of the one old lamp that lit the caravan. “Your skin is not like ours,” he said. He reached out and touched her hand. She looked down at his fingers, then up to his face. In it, she saw a dangerous wonder.
“If I am a djin—”
“I did not know that such things could be.”
“—you should run for help.”
“But your…eyes…I am enchanted.”
She did not think that his enchantment was centered on her eyes. “It’s dangerous, is it not, to love a djin?”
“It is not something I thought was possible, because there are no djin. But your body is so cold, and you have the name of a great djin.”
“Lilith…”
“The first wife of Adam. She divorced him and spawned a race of demons.”
“Adam…” How that name resonated! She had always loved it, had kept it deep in her heart. Adam, a name from her dreams. She repeated it,
“Adam…”
“But I am only Ibrahim. Can you ever say ‘Ibrahim’ with such love?”
She lay back in their ragged sheets, indolent in the lazy light. “I wonder sometimes if ever I knew an Adam. It’s a name that’s just on the tip of my tongue.”
“If you are Lilith the demoness, then perhaps the memory has gotten like that because it is so old. Nobody knows what it would be like to be that old.”
She knew how she appeared to them. Cocking an eyebrow, she asked, “Do you imagine that I am old?”
“‘Love is from before the light began, When light is over, love shall be…’”
“That’s lovely.”
“A foolish Arab wrote it. ‘To lighten my darkness, I look for the red crescent of her lips, And if that comes not, I look for the blue crescent of the sword of death.’”
She found this suddenly quite interesting. “You would die for me?”
He nodded, his face mock-solemn.
It made her laugh, and at first he laughed, too, but then became silent. Late into the night, she lay beside him and felt him watching her. She pretended to sleep, and in her false sleep she falsely sighed his name.
Each morning, a boy-child brought dates and milky tea. At noon, Ibrahim went to a tent with the other men, and in the evening servants even more bedraggled than he was came and set up a table beneath some trees, and she and he would sit together. He would eat and watch her, his eyes shining with desire. He observed that she never ate, but asked no explanation.
Now, as she lay beside him for what must be the fourth night, she thought perhaps the time had come to eat. Gravity was controlling her more and more. She was sluggish.
She went up on one arm. There he lay, his face slightly sweated, his form motionless but for the slight rising and falling of the chest. She ran a finger through the curly, graying hair. He stirred a little. His eyes seemed unfocused, as if he was at large in his inner life.
What might he be looking for within himself—the images of his wives, perhaps? Not likely. When he wept, as he sometimes did, he claimed that he was missing them. “But I have been captured by you, my demoness. I cannot leave.”
She gazed at the flame of the lantern. He had trimmed its wick in the afternoon, and it was very steady tonight. It was run, he had said, by the same oil that ran the unhorsed wagon.
His genital organ glowed faintly pink. It was fully engorged with blood. Without speaking, she mounted him and put him in her. Let him have a last run.
The muscles in the edges of his face tightened, making it seem to extend, gleaming, into the lantern light. He had said that he did not like her to do this. It wasn’t seemly, he said, for the woman to go boldly on the man. So perhaps, this time, he would want to do violence to her afterward. There was a part of her that enjoyed the illusion of helplessness at the hands of a human being. In her inner world, she would imagine being captured by them, and bound so that she could not move. The idea of being carried by them, of suffering pain from their hands with no ability to prevent it, of being ravished by the hurrying little thrusts of the males—these thoughts would amuse her—as indeed, they amused her now.
Tears came into his eyes. But then he expended himself, and sank back. She dismounted him. He made an expression with his face, drawing his lips back across his teeth. Then he sucked in air, hissing like an uneasy snake. “I must pray,” he said.
She laid a hand on his breast. “Not now.”
“Yes, now. The hour is late. If the others see that I do not pray—”
“You don’t believe any of it.”
“But I cannot take the risk of being thought impious. You cannot imagine what they would do, and I don’t want to. Already, they have seen that I pray only once in the day. And they see that a djin is here with me. If I do not pray, they will kill us both, I sense it.”
“Who is your god? Amon-ra?”
His eyes, subtly clouded, looked up
on her with curiosity. But he said nothing.
All of this prayer of his, she wondered, where had it come from? They still had their precious “beliefs,” the humans, that were not grounded in fact. Did they not notice the silence of their gods? Well, Ibrahim did. He prayed only for show. She wanted to be impressed with her Ibrahim, but no, not now. Now, things must change. She put aside sentiment.
“Should I pray?” she asked. “Will they think ill of us if I do not?”
“They will think ill of us if you come out of the caravan but to draw and wash and get supplies. If a woman prays or does not pray, what does it matter?”
She found some dates that he had, and fed him one. As he took it between his lips, his eyes closed. “I am seeing you like the star of heaven,” he said. He sat up on the side of the bed. “But, you know, where are you from? You came out of the desert. Can it be that demons are real? Is that why you have taken me from my family?”
She laid her lips on his neck. He muttered something—a prayer, she supposed, to his silent god. When her tongue penetrated the skin, he made a small, internal sound of surprise. She felt intake of breath, then the beginnings of speech in his throat.
She clenched the powerful muscle that encased her stomach, doing it so tightly that a bit of digestive fluid issued from her nose and ran busily down her jaw, hot and swift. Then the muscle unwound, opening her gut with hydraulic smoothness, the suction swooping his blood from his veins. The poetess Ashtar had called it “that movement beneath all others.”
He made a long, babbling utterance of mixed confusion and fear, high with question, higher with complaint. Then his tongue began sputtering in his mouth, and his heels drummed the sodden bed. A fly rushed about her lips, frantically seeking the blood that bubbled out.