The Ultimate Undead

by Anne Rice

  I was the strongest. Not the oldest in living years. Captain Crow, Andrea, and Damon were older than I was. But I was the most stable. I was balanced, sane. That’s why Madam had picked me to follow her as head of the house. She’d said I was her only choice.

  For some reason, Marky’s stomach had begun to rot faster than the rest of his body. A thick, black goo oozed up from the cracks in his dry flesh. The smell had driven Damon from the room.

  “Pretty disgusting, huh?” Marky said.

  “I’ve seen worse.” He was my youngest, only about thirteen or so when he died. Most of us were in our twenties. Captain Crow was the oldest at thirty-six.

  The dressing on Marky’s stomach had soaked through, so I changed the gauze and taped him back up. It reminded me of Damon and his pictures. He was always plastering the walls of the gallery with his art.

  “Is this the end?” Marky said.

  Why do they all think I can judge that? “Nah, you could be around for years and years,” I said. It felt like a lie.

  Marky looked serious for a minute, considering my words, then nodded and stood to button his shirt.

  In the early hours of morning, Damon and I lay talking. We didn’t sleep. We never slept, couldn’t really. The closest I ever got was just zoning out for a while, getting inside my head and going somewhere else. But it had to be quiet for me to zone, and silence was rare around here.

  The TV blared from one of the rooms down the hall.

  “Fly’s back,” Damon said. He meant Butterfly, one of the angrier, more reticent members of the house.

  “I wish she wouldn’t go off like that. It worries me.”

  “What’s to worry about? She’s found something to do. You should be happy for her. It’s not like she doesn’t have a lot of time on her hands.”

  We were sprawled on the dais in the gallery. I think the place was once a studio or convention hall or something like that. The House of Lazarus occupies the third floor of an old building that was abandoned by the city and claimed by homesteaders. Damon liked the gallery best of all the rooms on the floor, so we spent a lot of time in here.

  He turned on his side to look at the collage he worked on perpetually. “You like her, don’t you?”

  “I like all my children,”

  I said. “Yeah, but you really like her.”

  “She’s interesting. She’s different. Her problems seem more related to her attitude than to any mental impairment. She has a lot of potential.”

  “Maybe.” Damon gave a kind of half laugh, half snort. “But you think all your children are special. Brighter than the rest.”

  “Certainly. Why else would they have chosen my house?”

  He laughed for real then, got off the dais and went over to his collage. Reproductions of classic paintings, pictures from magazines and books, sentences pieced together with words in various typefaces, Damon’s own drawings—all this came together to paper an entire wall of the gallery. The whole changed constantly as Damon added new bits every day. In some places, the collage was nearly an inch thick with layers. Death and the infinite ways of dying dominated most areas of the piece. Of all Damon’s art, I liked this best.

  A photo of James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause had come loose at one corner, and Damon picked at it until the picture peeled away. He stood scratching at other cutouts or smoothing down edges. It took me a while to realize he was hurting.

  “What’s wrong?” I said.

  “Marky’s deteriorating,” Damon said, pressing his forehead against the wall.

  I rose and moved next to him.

  “It’s speeding up,” he said. “Marky’s not going to last much longer. Before long, it’ll all be over for him. It’s not fair, Richard.”

  Damon looked at me. “Why does Marky get to perish? Why does he get to leave all this behind? Why should he get to go when I have to stay? I’ve been like this five years longer than he has. When will I start to go?”

  I didn’t know what to say. We’d been though all this before, and nothing I said ever made any difference. All I could do was listen.

  “Sometimes I think about leaving. Just going out and walking the streets until I get attacked. Maybe they would cut me up into such small pieces that I’d be nothing that could ever move or think or feel. Or maybe they’d crush my head so my brain would stop working. Or burn me up into ashes and smoke. I think about it a lot.”

  “You wouldn’t though,” I said, gazing into Damon’s eyes. Expressionless, black eyes. Dead eyes. Looking deep into the dark emptiness. “Would you? You wouldn’t leave.”

  “No, I wouldn’t leave.” He looked away, down at the folding scissors that he pulled out of his pocket. I watched him cut James Dean’s eyes out. Then he stuck the picture back on the wall, over an automobile advertisement so that the blood red of the car showed through the holes where Dean’s eyes had been. “Don’t have the courage,” Damon said. “But it’s something to think about.”

  He moved away to his box of clippings, looking tight-lipped and ashen. And I left him to his art.

  I sat taking apart a radio while Elena read to me from a book she had gotten the day before. Some trashy, pulp novel, but it was entertaining enough. Though Elena died when she was sixteen, she had been converted before any of the rest of us. When I first came to the House of Lazarus, she met me at the head of the stairs.

  As Elena turned the page, I looked at her. The flesh had flaked away from her fingers. The rough white of bone showed through the gaps in her arms. Her hair, which had been blond, was fine and white and almost completely gone. To mask her stench, she doused herself regularly in perfume. But beneath the aroma of lily of the valley—her favorite—the scent of decay was unmistakable. The thinness of her face was alarming, the dusty dryness of her skin disturbing. Yet she had been this way for years. The wasting that took some people with such swiftness in Elena had slowed to a crawl.

  Familiar footsteps sounded outside the door. Elena’s voice faded into the background. And I rose to follow Butterfly down the hall.

  “Hello,” I said, when we ended up in the gallery. No one else was with us. “Haven’t seen you in a while.”

  Butterfly shrugged and moved slowly, looking at all the new things Damon had attached to the walls. She was tall. Six foot four. Dark hair, gray eyes. Bony. Damon had a theory that she chose the name Butterfly to make herself feel more feminine.

  “Where’ve you been?” I said.

  “Out.” Her answer surprised me. My efforts at conversation were usually ignored.

  “What do you do?”

  “Things.” She frowned. “Look, you’re not my mother. I do as I please.”

  “Sorry. I just worry about you.”

  “See, that’s your thing. That keeps you busy. You worry about everybody.”

  “Can’t help it,” I said. “The children are my responsibility. I’m in charge.”

  This was the most we’d ever said to one another.

  She hissed and shook her head, then stepped back to get a better look at the collage.

  “Damon worked all night on this part here.” I pointed at the area around James Dean. “A picture peeled off, and he got started and couldn’t stop.”

  Butterfly didn’t say anything, so after a while I gave up.

  “Well, take care of yourself,” I said.

  “There’s a group of us who sort of patrol the streets. We keep an eye out for bashers. Try to get them before they get us.”

  I looked at her, wondering why she’d told me this. “Then you’re no better than they are,” I said. “You’re bashers, too. Just the other way around.”

  “Better us than them.”

  I couldn’t help smiling. “That’s what they think.”

  “It’s something to do,” she said. “There’s nothing to do here. Sit around watching the others rot. Stare at videos all day like Wizard. Or make stupid art like Damon.”

  I stopped smiling. “Do what you like when you’re out of the house.
Just don’t bring any of that back here,” I said and turned to leave.

  “Richard,” Butterfly said, putting her hand on my arm.

  “What?”

  “When you were alive did you ever see a successful reanimation?”

  “No, but I never really knew anybody who died.”

  “I’ve never seen one either,” she said. “Because there aren’t any. Not like there ought to be, anyway. A person never dies then gets reanimated and returned to their family whole and perfect and complete. It just doesn’t happen.” She was talking fast, like she had to get it all out before someone stopped her.

  “What makes you think that? Why would people keep trying if it never worked?”

  “There are only two kinds of reanimates, Richard. Failures and slaves.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I said, moving out of her reach. No wonder we’d never talked before. Butterfly was a crackpot.

  “It’s true.”

  “If it is then how did you get to know so much about it?”

  “Because, Richie Rich, unlike you and the rest of the household, I’m from a poor family. My parents sold me for slave labor so the rest of their children could have something in life. I was killed, then reanimated to take my place serving society. To fill some job, perform some task that any halfway intelligent human being wouldn’t do in a million years, for any amount of money. Only the programming didn’t take with me, just like it didn’t take with you. Something went wrong and I wasn’t controllable. So they dumped me here in the city.”

  “You’re nuts,” I said. What Butterfly was trying to make me believe was monstrous. And impossible. “You’re saying there’s some company, some governmental agency turning people into slaves? That’s ludicrous.”

  “Haven’t you ever wondered why all the reanimates are so young? It’s because they don’t want old people. They want slaves who are strong, bodies that are young enough to do the work.”

  “You know as well as I do that it doesn’t work on old people. There’re too many unknowns involved once you get past a certain age. Everyone knows that. And if my mind had been tampered with, don’t you think I’d remember it?”

  Butterfly looked at me like I was a little kid who knew nothing. “You were programmed to forget. Programmed to disbelieve. It’s why so many of us are screwed up mentally. Only that part failed with me, too.”

  Her seriousness unnerved me. The urgency of her words was frightening. She really believed what she was telling me. I shook my head and backed farther away from her.

  I was feeling all sick inside, like I was going to vomit. I hadn’t felt that way since before I’d died.

  “That doesn’t even make sense,” I said. “It’s not right. People wouldn’t do that to other people. Why wouldn’t they destroy the failures right away? If what you’re saying is true, then why are we here at all?”

  “The city’s a convenient place,” Butterfly said. “We’re all together. And as long as the deads are hacking each other to pieces, the lifers don’t have anything to worry about. Right now, the failure rate’s fairly low. But if there get to be too many of us, we just might decide to rise up against them. Wipe the lifers out. We’re already dead, so it would be pretty hard to get rid of us, short of dropping a bomb or something.”

  “But not all of us are bashers,” I said. “What about me? What about this house?”

  “Maybe we’re programmed to come to you if all else fails. Maybe you’re programmed to take us. Turn us into decent, law-abiding citizens.”

  “Stop it!” I yelled, suddenly angry, suddenly frightened, and pressed my hands against my ears. “Just stop. I don’t want to hear any more of your lies. Why are you doing this to me? Why are you telling me all this?”

  Butterfly stared at me. “Because I thought maybe I could get through to you. Maybe you’d understand and help me. But I guess not. I guess I was wrong.”

  I felt sick, like there was no way out. Like I’d committed some horrible crime and was awaiting my punishment. I was ready to give up. I felt like I wanted to kill myself and be done with this.

  Like I’d felt the first time. When I was alive.

  “Just let me stay the way I am,” I said, as if Butterfly had the power to change anything. “With Damon and my children. Just all of us together and getting along as best we can. I don’t want to hear any more of this.”

  “Richard.” Damon came striding across the gallery. “What is it?”

  “Nothing,” I said and twisted away, hugging myself like I was cold. I felt tired and empty and stale.

  Damon turned on Butterfly. “What did you say to him?”

  “Nothing,” I said again. “We were just talking and I got sick. Damon … I don’t feel so good.”

  “I’m leaving,” Butterfly said and walked away.

  “Go.” Damon took hold of my shoulders and eased me down to sit on the floor. I leaned back against the wall.

  “She said the government did all this. She said they reanimate people to make slaves that they can program to do all the dirty work no one else wants to do. She said we’re here because our programming failed.” I was shaking. It was killing me just to repeat her lies. My head felt like it was about to split open.

  “She’s a psycho,” Damon said. He put his hand on my cheek, felt my forehead. “I could tell it the first time I ever saw her. Forget her. She’s crazy.”

  “I know,” I said and closed my eyes. Tried to calm myself down. Zone out a little.

  Damon settled down next to me. And gradually his voice filtered into my tension, started to unwind me.

  He’d already forgotten Butterfly and was in the middle of a story about some movie he’d watched last night.

  He was so unlike the way he’d been the night before. His mood was so different.

  A chill spread over me, and I hugged myself tighter.

  Two days later, Marky was dead. My youngest, my baby was dead.

  And Butterfly was gone.

  Marky was dead, and we threw a party for him that night. Celebrated. Damon held my hand and sang the loudest, the most joyously of all.

  I thought about how wrong all this was—that everyone felt so glad that one of our own had left us—how fundamentally against all laws of life and living. How contrary to the basic instinct for survival.

  I thought about all the things Butterfly had said. Feeling sick again. And uncertain about the purpose of my existence for the first time in years and years.

  And I wondered how hard it was going to be to recall all the things I was never supposed to remember.

  TWO VIGNETTES

  D. F. LEWIS

  WOKEN WITH A KISS

  I am not a human being—positively not.

  My mind is at least clear on that point.

  So, the only element of doubt is why I have a mind at all preoccupied with such a self-conviction.

  Perhaps, I’m imagining the mind—or it’s a ghost of a mind—or it’s someone else’s mind (your mind?) that I’m using.

  I suspect it is a mind of sorts, but an alien template of a human one. I’d be a creature from outer space, if that wasn’t so laughable.

  No, the truth surely resides somewhere else. The best clue is upon looking at myself in the bathroom mirror and seeing a complete stranger there with pouting lips and eyes tightly closed.

  So, it’s all a dream. A dream without a dreamer.

  Perhaps.

  I only know I’ve fallen deeply in love with that zombie in the mirror. I close my eyes and lower my lips toward the glass….

  THE FRONT ROOM

  I knew that they were not called lounges thereabouts, not even parlors, but front rooms. Of course, I didn’t admit to being exactly obsessed about such matters….

  I seemed to have been cooped up in the house since I could remember, permitted to sleep as long as I liked in the king-size bed on the top floor at the back. The sash window looked over disused railway sidings, and I could often hear the voices of kids pretending to be
trains. Very rarely, if ever, did I venture down the steep stairs. I sometimes thought I heard the undergrunt of mindless conversation elsewhere, and feared to meet the people. After all, they might be the ones who kept me upstairs.

  Most people who are confined can remember the contrast with the freedom they once enjoyed. I could only retrieve such blurred images with difficulty, fishing for shadows from the edge of the black industrial rivers that wound sluggishly thereabouts in the outside world.

  It had to be admitted that I was somewhat obsessed with the whole house, which is not surprising, seeing that it had been part of my life for so long—I even began to believe I was born there. But why such an obsession should center on the front room was a mystery. I imagined its decor. The paintings on the wall as run-of-the-mill favorites from the department store—in unreal colors. The seedy loose covers on the three-piece suite, with a design of overlarge flowers. The shag pile carpet bearing a pattern worn out by hobnail boots. The fire tongs hanging above the mantelpiece, gleaming sullenly in the late afternoon’s shafting sun. The ponderous ticking of the carriage clock. The disused monochrome TV with huge knobs. And the people, yes, the people, sitting around on the edge of chairs, balancing bone china crockery on their palms, plates of manicured cucumber sandwiches on their knees, conversing in what, at face value, was sign language. I had a recurring dream that one of these people had a common cold (and thus incurable), a fact that made it almost logical to believe that death itself could in this way be outlawed, with the body growing piecemeal into the actual disease from which it suffered.

  I shook my head. I had never visited the front room. I was convinced I had been to the kitchen, helping a lady stir the innards of a large washing-copper. The memory was that of a small child, whilst the experience was somehow that of an empty-headed adult. I knew the toilet backward and inside out … but as I had never been able to reach the chain, someone, I presumed, must have flushed it for me later.

  One day, I determined to reach the front room, like a more outdoors type of individual might have wanted to climb a mountain. I left the landing where the stairs led down into a dark pool of light. I crawled backward on hands and knees, so that I could avoid seeing my own shadow. I employed the stair rods as a steeplejack would when upon a tall chimney, since from my bedroom I had seen such smokestacks striating the horizon as they rose from the dark mills. I eventually reached the ground floor, where light seeped through translucent roundel windows set into the front door and settled toward the hall ceiling as if it were warmer than the darkness. I stretched up on my body’s hind legs and, with the gait of a clockwork toy, reached the closed door in the side of the hall. Gritting my teeth, I grasped the knob and turned….