Free Lilith’s Dream: A Tale of the Vampire Life by Whitley Strieber Page B

as big as the striding horrors who had once used this tunnel.
    The long downslope led to the water, the upslope to the house. Paul went to the stone steps that rose into the cellar, climbed them, and confronted an ancient door with a cunning lock. He knew the secrets of these locks, with their gravity-driven systems that would defeat any normal means of opening them.
    He leaned against the door. His eyes closed, his jaw hanging with his concentration, he made a series of movements, alternately pressing the door and then releasing it. As he did so, he could hear the tumblers clicking. He’d learned this technique from his French colleague and dear friend, Colonel Jean Bocage. Bocage had learned it from the vampires. They did not travel with keys; knowledge of the locks and the tunnels meant that their whole secret world was always open to them.
    The door swung softly back, and the cool air of the house surrounded him. There was a scent, very subtle, not pleasant. What was it? He inhaled again, realized that he was smelling age—old cloth, old furniture, things so ancient that they were part of a kind of twilight. It was the scent of memory, this sweet, sad odor, and it filled the house.
    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