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

Author:Whitley Strieber
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2002-02-01T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

Eaters of the Dead

The Music Room was the hottest intimate club in New York. Monty Sauder had put millions into it, banishing the awful hugeness that made so many faux café gigs so unpleasant. Who wanted to sing to an ocean of a thousand little tables, each one with its dinky little lamp? The only way you were going to sing like you were in a café was if you were. Monty had solved this problem. There were just sixty tables on his floor. The rest of the place was all balconies, so there might be a thousand people there, but you felt like you were in this really intimate space.

She stood on the bandbox stage looking out over the floor and contemplated a larger question: Why did she do this at all? She had a ridiculous amount of money, three houses she hardly ever lived in, her own plane, cars at every house just sitting there being maintained by a faceless horde of people who quietly kept everything just right—she literally had it all.

So, therefore, she was going to come out here on this stage in a few nights and bare her soul to a bunch of fat-faced rich people and reviewers whose talentless, disappointed lives and insupportable arrogance required them to dump on her. Was it really because she cared about the Environment Fund? Well, she did care, but not enough to risk all that you risked in front of an audience—smoke in your throat, nasty reviews in the Times or Rolling Stone, or even some kind of weird embarrassment, like nobody shows up. Or some asshole with a gun.

She watched Hillyard doing the lights, watched Sam Hitchens fooling with the sound. She didn’t need to watch them—they’d do everything perfectly. She could afford the best.

Monty came sailing in with the presells, which mostly consisted of ten-thousand-dollar checks made out to the Environment Fund. He looked terrible, Monty did, but he always looked terrible. He smoked constantly, and his daily rest consisted of a downer at four in the morning. “Two million dollars,” he said, handing her a blue packet of checks. She gave him his own check, a hundred and seventy thousand dollars. The show would ultimately net the Environment Fund $3 million. As for Leo Patterson, she would just about break even.

“How many are really coming?” she asked.

“That’s an interesting question, actually.” He shuffled his papers. “The issue is who’s seated—” He nodded toward the floor. “And who’s consigned to the dustbin of history. I seated Jewel and her truck driver and put Kitty Hart in the balcony. Ain’t I bad?”

“Jewel’s friend is one of the world’s great bull riders, not a truck driver, and do I really want to put Kitty Carlisle Hart in the balcony?”

“She’d be ancient history if she wasn’t so old, my dear.”

“Bring me the seating chart.”

He ran off, his shirttail flying behind him. Idly, she picked up the paper he’d had under his arm and left on a chair. Monty read the Post.

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