The Lesser Dead

by Christopher Buehlman

  He waited.

  “And then you say . . .”

  “What?” I said.

  “Anything you like. So long as it is entertaining.”

  “Oh, you want me to lie.”

  “A mundane lie hiding an exotic truth is deception; an exotic lie hiding a mundane truth is storytelling. Deception may be necessary to preserve life, but storytelling makes life worth living. So make my life worth living.”

  “I shot a tiger. Like that?”

  “Yes,” he said, looking at me now, pleased with me. “Exactly like that.”

  “I shot a tiger in the ass.”

  “You don’t have to be vulgar.”

  “What?”

  “You could shoot the tiger anywhere you wanted to.”

  “I shot a tiger in the poontang.”

  “What is poontang?”

  I smiled a fangy smile at him so he guessed what poontang must be. He sighed deep, stale lung air and went back to his National Geographic, where, I guess, tigers only get shot in legitimate body parts. He was pissed. I scooted around in front of him, pulled his magazine down with my finger so he was looking me in the eye.

  “I shot a tiger straight through the heart. It yawned a big whiskery yawn and stretched and died. It was as long as a small horse, and the raja was happy. He gave me opium to smoke and then the coolies picked up the tiger, only it wasn’t really dead, and it clawed a man who died later. Infection. Now everybody shot the tiger. And the raja made the man’s family rich beyond their dreams, with rubies and emeralds and pearls and coral. Especially coral.”

  Cvetko smiled. His eyes twinkled.

  “I think there is hope for you. Not much. Just a little. But enough so we may not yet declare you an American savage.”

  I made like an Indian patting my open mouth and going woo-woo-woo.

  “It’s almost sunrise,” he said, a little sadly.

  I wasn’t sad. I was full of blood, ready to curl up in my fridge like Oscar the Grouch in his can and get some sleep, maybe dead-dream about getting me some little vampire kid scalps on the subway raid.

  Cvetko closed his book, crawled into his coffin. For the record, he was the only one of us who slept in an actual wooden coffin, but that’s just how he was.

  After he tucked in, I picked up his magazine. Wrinkly old Irish fuckers from the Dingle peninsula, a San Antonio colored girl who looked a lot like Elise (only nobody let their nipples show through their dresses back then), and an article about Brazilian killer bees. How they were coming north, all pissed off, how amateur beekeepers were going to have to find a new hobby. Nearly identical in appearance to gentler honeybees of European origin, the African bees quickly dominate the hives of the less aggressive strains. But that’s nature, isn’t it? Nice guys really do, really always finish last.

  * * *

  We didn’t see anything on the subway the next night. Well, no creepy little kids. Just the usual weirdness; punks, dudes with big Afros, women in pantsuits, guys in sideburns, cops. New York cops always impressed me by looking bored and dangerous at the same time, like big, sleepy crocodiles who probably wouldn’t notice you, but could really fuck up your evening if they did. Big asshole crocodiles in their chalky blue shirts and stop-sign black hats, silver badges shining like a lie only kids believed. I always smiled at them, broad enough to show my fangs, confident the constant low-grade charm was humming along, hiding them. One cop, kinda meaty in that used-to-play-football way, woke up a sleeping pot-smelling kid with long hair and a yellow but stained Pittsburgh Steelers T-shirt. He woke him up by poking him with his nightstick. “Hey,” he said. “My partner wants to know if you got a joint on you.”

  “No, man, I’m clean,” he said reflexively, rubbing his eyes.

  “He’s clean,” he said to his partner, who barely looked. You could tell he wished he had a different partner. “Too bad. We wanted to party. Anyway, sit up. No sleeping on the cars.”

  “Okay,” he said, and sat up.

  But the cop kept looking at him. He wasn’t done. “You got your terrible towel on you?”

  “Excuse me, sir?” the sleepy kid said. The cop gestured at the T-shirt, so I guessed it was a football thing. Have you noticed that most bullies are boring?

  “Oh,” he said, getting it. “No.”

  The cop saw me looking now, looked back. I grinned at him. “How about you, kid, you a Steelers fan?” The train turned, everybody shifted. I let my charm drop for a second, just a split second, giving him a flash of the fangs. He blinked twice. Looked at his partner to see if he saw, but he wasn’t paying attention. I kept smiling at him, no fangs. He looked at me, mouth-breathing. The Steeler kid nodded off, started slumping. The train pulled into Penn Station. The cops got off.

  Cvetko had watched the whole thing, knew what I had done; I felt him disapprove, but he kept his mouth shut for the moment, went back to reading his book, not a National Geographic but some pervert book about naked apes.

  I looked at the sleepy kid with his thin, shitty blond mustache, so long it fluttered in his breath. He must have been a mess eating soup. This was a newish style, just the mustache, long hair. I’d seen a lot come and go, hats, no hats, short ties, thin ties, wide ties. I wondered about really old vampires, if they even noticed anymore.

  “I want to get really old,” I said to Cvetko.

  “Why?” he said, without looking up.

  “I don’t know. I just do.”

  “You can’t bear to think of the world going on without your contributions to it?”

  “Ha-ha. I just mean, I’m glad I got bitten, you know? If I hadn’t, I might, I mean I would . . .”

  “Look like me?” Cvetko finished. That caught me up short. He was about the age I should have been, after all. Poor Cvets, stuck in that old body. Stronger, more vital, sure, his arthritis went away and all, but he looked old; worse, he thought old.

  “You know what I mean,” I said.

  “There are compensations for aging. Children. Grandchildren.”

  “You didn’t have those.”

  I winced when I said it, I shouldn’t have said it like that, but he didn’t make a big deal out of it. He was good like that.

  “Status in society. Pride in accomplishment. I had those things.”

  Now three thug-looking teenagers got on the train. They started laughing about Steeler guy, sat around him. One of them reached into his pocket, pulled out his wallet, looking at me and Cvetko with an I-dare-you-to-say-a-word look on his face. Stuck it in his own pocket while his impressed friend stage-whispered, “Oh shit, man, you didn’t!” Cvetko smiled pleasantly at them, checked his watch. The thief smiled back, mocking, making bug eyes. Cvetko’s nostrils flared a little, so I sniffed, too. No beer. He was checking to see if they were drunk or high. He hated biting anyone who was drunk or high.

  “Our two hours are nearly up,” he said. “Will you finish without me?”

  “You bet,” I said.

  They got off at the next stop, still giggling. Times Square. Cvetko followed them off, keeping a discreet distance. I watched Steeler kid snore his mustache into his mouth, thinking it was quite likely he was going to get his wallet back in the mail.

  NIGHT FEVER

  Now’s a good a time as any to tell you about night fever. You might guess it’s kinda like cabin fever, and, yeah, that’s close. Night fever is what happens when a vampire can’t take being in the dark anymore, but it’s more than that. It looks neuro-whatsical, but Cvetko says it’s a disease of the soul.

  The guy who brought Luna here from Milwaukee, Clayton? Clay, really. He was smooth. He was from Boston, though he’d lost the accent. Born around 1820, turned before the Civil War, traveled around on trains, developed all kinds of tactics for sheltering during the day while on the road; he would do anything, submerge himself in mud bogs, sink himself with a big rock an
d sleep in a lake, dress as a cop to get himself invited in someplace, then hide in the attic or basement and sleep there. He knew a lot about vampires, kept a book just full of notes describing some of the vampires he met, where he met them. Margaret was keeping it now, had been since Clayton died last summer, we called it The Codex, and what sad bookworm bastard do you think came up with that? Cvetko is right, sixty-four dollars to you.

  The first symptom of night fever: increased desire for blood. You can’t stop drinking. This is dangerous because you end up killing people. Killing people means you risk making more vampires. Clayton made two new vampires, both in ’76 when he was starting to slip his chain. Billy Bang is one. The other didn’t make it.

  Second symptom of night fever: desire for abasement. As opposed to what you get in Kansas when you see a tornado coming, which is the desire for a basement. Don’t worry, Cvetko didn’t laugh either when I told him that one. But you start feeling dirty, like you’re no good, like you don’t deserve to drink human blood anymore. Clayton started bringing food down here on purpose, stuff he got out of the trash, but any kind of food is a big no-no in the tunnels because it brings on rats. Lots of them. Carpets of them. But that’s what Clayton wanted. We’d find him sleeping outside his box, just surrounded by dead rats like pistachio shells or something, smiling and shaking. If you’re in a neighborhood where pets start to go missing, you got either a psychopath working his way up to people or a vampire working his way down from them.

  The third symptom is the worst. Tremors. I’ve seen a vampire pull out of night fever before, but not once they started rocking and rolling. It’s like they just can’t hold still anymore, not their head, not their limbs, you hear them scraping around in whatever they’re sleeping in.

  Symptom four? Not really a symptom, more of an event. You go sunbathing. For real. Not just tooling around Washington Square Park when it’s raining and the sun won’t come out; not getting yourself sick by going out without sunglasses when it’s overcast and the bright gray clouds press a headache behind your eyes; I mean stepping right into full-on sunshine naked as a jaybird and dying forever. The newspapers never cover it or, when they do, they make up some normal explanation or call it spontaneous human combustion, which is right except for the “human” part.

  Anyway, Clayton. One day I was walking near his and Luna’s cavelike place and I heard him moving around, dragging his limbs and whimpering. Luna was outside his box crooning down mother-tones to him even though she was so sleepy she could barely stand from the last two days. He finally convinced her he was all right and she collapsed into her junkyard armoire. I went to my room, but I heard him. He went.

  Next night there was a bit in the Times about a guy who doused himself in gasoline and jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge. “Fell like a comet,” the Times said; “Blazing like a star,” said the Post. Coincidence? I don’t think so. They said it was some other guy, a Steven Bergman or something, who also went missing, but newspapers are like cops, they just don’t like loose ends.

  It had been summer, bright, warm. That matters; what kind of sun you get hit with, I mean. Cool winter sun makes you smoke; you can actually get a dose of that and live, if it’s hazy or misty at all. Bright summer sun, you catch fire. Takes a couple of seconds. I hear in the desert it’s almost instant, you go up like a torch. Not a lot of vampires in the desert. We like it up north.

  I had bright winter sun on me once, thank God it was through a window, glass helps just a little. A normal kid I used to hang out with and pretend to smoke cigarettes, his name was Freddie, played a nasty trick on me once. I actually told him what I was, this was like five years ago. He was kind of a nerd, went to Stuyvesant not too far from us. He kept me out after sunrise in his room, had the blinds down. There was a manhole cover just outside his house I figured I could get to when a cloud passed, it was stupid. But the bastard actually lifted the blind on me because he thought I was bullshitting him. “Vampire my ass,” he said. I still have the scar from it, a permanent pinkish-gray triangle on my left elbow that’s really intense and knotted at the point, then fades out as it goes. It smoked like a bitch, hurt like a bitch. I punched him in the nose and took the blanket off his bed, busted out the window, and went down the manhole. Who was he going to tell? Who would believe him? Fuck Freddie, I never saw him again.

  But Clayton, he got the full treatment.

  Those Hudson River frogmen weren’t going to find a damned thing; when sunlight torches one of the family, it even torches the bones.

  Clayton was the second-oldest vampire I knew about in New York.

  The oldest was a Hessian. Like, played for the other team in the Revolutionary War. Big bastard, pale as death, never fully lost his German accent. Had a house in Greenwich Village, beautiful place with bars on the windows and a servant; the Hessian is stinking rich and nobody fucks with him. Or at least they didn’t for a long time. More about him later, much later.

  But enough about night fever and Hessians.

  You probably want to hear about the next time I saw those kids.

  Okay.

  But the story jumps ahead now.

  THE RAIN SONG

  You know how when you’re a kid a rainy day seems like the end of the world? You press your forehead to the window and sigh, fogging the glass, drawing squiggles in the fog with your pudgy little finger or maybe writing the word BORED but not backward so a woman walking by on her way to the bank or somewhere errandy glances at it but doesn’t take the time to work it out, just clip-clops along hunched under her umbrella, those perfect, temporary circles pinging in the puddles at her feet. And the sun, fickle in this gray city, always a flight risk, seems gone for good. No note, just went out for cigarettes and never came back. Your dad and mom are seething with some just-under-the-skin fight and they wish you could go play even more than you do, if that’s possible, cause they’ve got awful things to say to each other, things you can plaster over maybe but they’re part of the architecture now. And you? You’re tired of your toys and nobody will play a game, and you’ve read everything twice and the dog barely wags at you, barely cocks his eye at you, knows you’re dangerous somehow.

  That’s a rainy day for a kid, a rainy Saturday anyway.

  When you’re a vampire, a rainy day is a hall pass.

  This particular day, a freaky warm Saturday in March, I was sitting just inside the entrance to the subway with my soccer gear on and a transistor radio on my lap, not caring that I was in the way, making the wet, grumpy lava flow of mass transit users even grumpier for having to step around me. One lady actually shook her umbrella out practically on me, said, “Oh, pardon me, I didn’t see you.” I thought about following her down but didn’t want to taste her, thought her blood might be rank with all that sourpuss she was pumping out of her sourpuss gland.

  The radio was fuzzy; I twiddled with the antenna.

  “Warmer than normal (pffft) time of year in the greater New York metropolitan area. Expect light rain (pffft) cloud cover for the rest of the day and over . . . (pffft) clearing tomorrow morning. The temperature at Central Park is (pffft).”

  Music to my ears, static and all.

  I slipped out of the Columbus Circle entrance and crossed the street to the park’s southwestern corner. I stayed away from the carriage horses—one tried to bite me once, made quite a scene—and instead steered toward the guy at the kosher hot dog cart, asked him what time he closed. Six? Perfect. Would he mind holding on to my radio till I got back? Drool and nod, surprisingly feminine way of patting his mouth with the corner of the napkin, I think this guy wore lipstick in his free time. It was already after four; I’d probably forget the radio, but I had six or seven more of them in my room—if shoplifting were an Olympic event, I’d be Mark Spitz.

  I tooled around for a while, past the big, useless Maine memorial, I mean, the Alamo’s a good story, I get that, but the Maine? Smelled like an inside job to me.
Fuck the Maine! I went to Umpire Rock to look at the skyscrapers jutting up past the trees, Essex House blazoning its name in hooker red, much less elegant than the Hampshire House next to it; then past the Carousel, the dilapidated Dairy, up and patted Balto’s head. When I was still a real kid, me and a bunch of other small fry hitched our sled behind the big bronze doggie and Dad’s friend Walther took a picture. Must have been 1929, 1930, after the crash because I remember looking at the skyscrapers on Park Avenue, watching for guys jumping. Uncle Walt told me about the jumpers; he was always telling me creepy shit in that matter-of-fact way that made you love him, made you sure everything was all right because all the bad stuff he told you about had to get through him to get to you. I don’t know what happened to that Balto picture. I don’t know what happened to anything.

  I doubled back to the Sheep Meadow; I knew that on this first almost warm day of 1978 I’d see kids playing soccer there, rain or no, and I did, a bunch of them all muddy and swearing and laughing, a few spectators sharing cigarettes on the sidelines. I asked if I could play, and they didn’t let me at first, and then a few of the older ones left when some girls came by and I was in.

  At first nobody wanted to pass to me, younger as I was and dressed in my really square parochial soccer jersey and all, but a ginger kid got in trouble and booted it sideways to me, so I yo-yoed that ball around like Pelé and scored bigger than hell. I dialed it back after that, let kids take the ball off me half the time, but scored twice more. One of the fullbacks on the other team called me “shrimp,” a tall, skinny, bucktoothed kid you just knew would end up in jail. One of my teammates stood up for me, said, “That’s Supershrimp to you! He fucked you up twice now!” and bucktooth didn’t like that. Made a point of tripping me the next time I got near him. I gave him a cleat in the nuts during a big tangle-up later and I could tell he wanted to fight but didn’t want to look like the bully he actually was. The rain got heavier then, and most of the kids left. But bucktooth wasn’t done with me, nor I with him, so we stayed on to keep playing three on three. A Puerto Rican kid split for dinner, so we were left with five. Soccer was out. Bucktooth suggested Smear the Queer, looking right at me, and I said, “Hell yeah!” in my ten-year-old’s falsetto, making the others laugh. One threw me the ball, and off I went, weaving around the dirty, mostly pale legs and twisting out of feeble claw-hands until it began to strain credibility and I let myself get smeared. But something had shifted in the group dynamic; they liked me. I had outmaneuvered seemingly older kids well enough to make them go “Whoa!” and “Damn, Supershrimp!” and then taken my lumps while laughing. They piled on me, sure, but the late knee or elbow from bucktooth never came. Instead, he awkwardly patted my back as I got up. At that moment I decided I wouldn’t follow him home after all.