“Sorry,” she said, like really she wasn’t.
Was this how she flirted?
The girl from King Kong danced away.
Now the Fifty-Foot Woman grabbed my hand, danced me off the floor, danced me almost into one of the short-shorts-wearing busboys holding a tub over his head, danced me up against the wall. Don’t get me wrong, I like a woman who knows what she wants, but I really had a crush on what’s-her-name, so I craned my neck around trying to keep a bead on where she went. She was at the bar, doing that incredibly sexy thing where she lifts up one foot and lets the shoe dangle off her toes. I wanted to bite her ankle, her heel, I was drooling.
The tall woman grabbed my cheeks in her hand and pointed my face toward hers. Her face looked young, vaguely Liza Minnelli, but she didn’t smell young. I caught a whiff of her breath. It smelled like a dead dog in a Dumpster.
“Jessica Lange wouldn’t give you the time of day unless you charmed her,” she said. Her voice was lower than I would have thought. “And I’m not having that. Not here.”
She lifted her lip in a brief snarl, gave me the fang-tip fuck you.
“Holy shit,” I said.
“That’s right.”
Now she took my hand and put it palm-down on the front of her dress. There was a rather large dick there.
“Holy shit,” I said.
“That’s right, too. Now run back home before you get stepped on, little cockroach. You’re dirty, you smell like trains, and you don’t belong here.”
She/he (I’ll stick with she for simplicity’s sake) stepped back and gestured at the door.
“But,” I said, just about to protest that all I wanted to do was dance, but I didn’t get past but before she grabbed my hand again, her grip as hard as pliers.
“Wrong answer,” she said. Out came the fangs and she bit me. Fucking hard.
All the way through the bones of my hand.
My eyes teared up from pain, not from wanting to actually cry or anything. The dead shouldn’t cry, not even the lesser dead, which I clearly was next to her.
She was stronger, older, and it was her place. His place, whatever.
I grabbed my hand to keep from bleeding all over myself, licked it so I would heal faster.
And I left.
DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE
A lot happened while I was gone.
Nobody had heard from the Latins, for one thing, but I’ll get to that.
The first thing I saw when I got back was Peter and Alfie sitting back against the rock wall looking sleepy, holding hands. Camilla had already gone to her locker; she was singing a song, but too softly for me to understand any of the words. It sounded like a lullaby.
“You guys all right?” I asked.
“Yes, Joey,” Peter said, but it looked like he was having trouble keeping his head up. It was still a good hour till sunrise.
“Hey, Cvets,” I called into Cvetko’s room, “did these kids eat?”
Cvets wasn’t there.
“Joey,” Peter said, sounding almost as quiet as his sister.
“Yeah, kid?”
I walked closer, noticed that they smelled bad, like sewage, and their pants were wet at the bottoms.
“What have you guys been doing, playing in the toilets?”
The ghost of a smile crossed Alfie’s lips.
“We’ve been talking about you,” Peter said.
Alfie nodded gravely.
“All of us.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes,” Peter said.
Alfie whispered, “We even asked the god of small places.”
“Who’s that?”
“It’s the god we talk to since Yayzu doesn’t want us.”
Yayzu?
“It’s really just pretend,” Peter said, “there are no gods.”
“You’ll make him mad!” Alfie said.
“Let him get mad,” Peter said, looking at me. “The point is, we were all talking about Joey.”
This god of small places shit creeped me out. I changed the subject.
“Well, what did you say? About me, I mean. Nice things, I hope.”
“We’ve decided that we quite like you.”
“That’s good,” I said.
“It is,” he agreed in that serious way kids have.
“You sure you’re okay? You look wiped out. Did you eat?”
He nodded, then stuck out his tongue to show me the back was still bloody.
“As much as I could,” he said.
What the hell did that mean?
“Would you hold my hand, please?” he said, holding his small, white hand up. There wasn’t a lot of light down here, just Cvetko’s lamp, which was always on, but that was far away so everything had that pretty cat’s-eye candlelit look. It would have looked solid black to you, assuming you’re alive.
“Please,” he said again. “I’m cold.” I realized I had just been looking at him. I wasn’t much of a hand-holder, but he seemed so sad. And so small. They were all so small. It seemed like a miracle they’d made it as long as they did.
“Yeah,” I said, and slipped my bigger hand around his. His was cold. Colder than mine, anyway. Vampires normally only get that cold when they’re starving.
“We’ve decided,” Peter said, with some effort.
“All of us,” Alfie interrupted.
“Yes. All of us have decided . . .”
“Except half of Sammy.”
“But mostly Sammy, too.”
Alfie considered this, then said, “Maybe mostly Sammy, he did say yes.”
“We’ve decided that we want you to be one of us.”
“That’s funny,” I said. “I thought you guys were becoming part of us.”
“Yes, of course we are,” said a very sleepy Camilla, holding a Raggedy Ann doll. This was her third or fourth one since they came to live with us; she stole them whenever she could. No one ever saw her take them. She was standing right behind me; I hadn’t even noticed her song had stopped. I hadn’t heard her walk up. “But while we’re all joining your group, you should be joining ours, too.”
“But only you,” Alfie said.
“Yes,” Peter said, his eyes closing like he was in his mother’s lap trying to make it through the late show, my hand still holding his up. Like a little dead fish out of a lake.
“Only you,” Camilla said.
“Why,” I said, “something wrong with Cvetko?”
“He’s old,” she said, wrinkling her nose.
She hugged me.
Then she helped her brothers to bed.
* * *
I went to ask Luna if she knew where Cvetko was, but he was already there; I heard them talking but they were talking so low I didn’t understand them till I climbed up. There was no ladder or stairs; you had to be a vampire or a rat to get up to Luna’s cell, and rats weren’t interested. Luna’s room was really like a half-cave with wires dangling out of the roof, I have no idea what it was for, and lots of movie posters. Luna liked movies almost as much as I did, especially movies with Paul Newman. You never met a pair like Butch and The Kid, one poster said, Paul Newman and Robert Redford running and shooting in that browny oldey-timey color. Other posters crowded that one, lapped over it where she’d glued them onto the rock: A Streetcar Named Desire, Super Fly, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean. That one I saw with Luna; we used to crack each other up saying, all serious and proud, “I am a Bean,” like his daughter does in the film. Maybe you had to be there. The walls were swimming with band posters, too, but nobody you’ve heard of. The Boats, Pissnuts, Jesus and the Iguanas; she saved any flyer any tight-pants kid handed her on the street, and she hadn’t gotten around to gluing them all up. Her place was full of papers like a loose carpet that stuck to her bare feet and came away with charc
oal footprints because she never wore shoes in the tunnels. Not the best housekeeper, Luna, especially after she lost Clayton. The cleanest spot was where his box used to be.
Her box was an old hutch lying on its back with a dirty green sleeping bag tucked sloppily into it, and she had a yellowish pillow crammed into a too-small flowered pillowcase that had been bled on and washed a dozen times, but you could see where the blood had been. There was a metal folding chair, we all had those, we had pinched a bunch of them from a Universalist Unitarian church on East 35th Street, but nobody was using it. Cvetko stood while she squatted. She was crying.
“Don’t you get it?” she said. “They’re still doing it.”
She shut up when she saw that I had crawled up her wall.
They both trusted me enough to keep talking, which made me feel good.
“How many?” Cvetko said.
“I don’t know. Maybe six,” she said, wiping runny mascara with the backs of her hands. She sniffled a wet one and said, “She’s gonna kill them, isn’t she?”
Cvetko didn’t say anything.
“Isn’t she?”
“Tell me exactly where it is.”
* * *
The Balworth Theater was a little black box in Chelsea that couldn’t make its rent and ended up closed. Nothing unusual about that. What was unusual was that its basement had a tiny half door that opened on a crawl space down with iron rungs drilled into it, and this crawl space led to a section of sewer that led to a boiler room that led to a length of active subway line that, in turn, led to the inactive subway lines, experimental subway lines, and defunct underground workspaces where we lived. The shinbone’s connected to the collarbone, you know? The whole underground’s like that; you can get anywhere in New York without seeing daylight if you’re willing to get dirty. This particular crawl space looked like Prohibition stuff to me, like maybe the building with the theater had been a speakeasy and the customers needed a back door out when the cops came knocking.
We had to wade through some ankle-deep unmentionable stuff in the sewer part, and I remembered Peter and Alfie’s pants cuffs. I opened up the door, Cvets was right behind me, and I crawled in like a cat through a cat door. I remember having this fear like a guillotine blade was going to pop down and cut my head off. But of course it didn’t.
The first thing I saw was the puppet, like a big papier-mâché Humpty Dumpty figure. A couple of painted wooden spears and swords, too, a rack of wigs and shoes. Prop room. Then I realized it wasn’t Humpty Dumpty at all, it was Tweedledum, and there was Tweedledee behind and next to it. A huge Queen of Hearts crown and gown hung up on the wall, too, the wig under the crown all done up like Marie Antoinette. A pair of red ladies’ pumps sat in the middle of the floor, one turned on its side. I could almost hear the actress, one of these waitresses who can’t get commercials and only does plays with five-dollar tickets, plays only other actors go to, yelling Off with her head! to an audience of ten, eight of them friends of the cast. So the last thing they did was Alice in Wonderland. But they left half their shit here. A folding table, a heater, a makeup box. Maybe somebody died? Maybe the place got foreclosed on? Could be that nobody wanted these costumes; they were kind of high-school looking.
Then I saw the writing.
Not very big. Waist high, on a wall that might have once been light brown but had faded to the color of a tobacco stain.
The writing was so small I almost missed it.
I DO NOT LIKE THE WAY HE LOOKS AT ME
nor I
SHALL WE MAKE A RABBIT OF HIM?
Yes a blind rabbit
YES!
Small fingers had painted those letters on the wall. You know what they used for paint. Sure you do. On the wall nearby, dozens of round blotches like polka dots, browny-red but fading, some of them barely there. Like the wall had the measles.
Now Cvetko was in, too. We hadn’t brought Luna or anybody else, just us. A fly, a fat one, drowsy with the cold, came through the open door at the top of the stairs and buzzed around the room making lazy circles. He landed on the letter Y in WAY, his little mouth dabbing down on it like the sucker end of a kid’s toy arrow. Neither one of us said anything. We went up the stairs.
The body sat in in the front row, as if watching a play. Fit young guy, or had been fit, but now he was bled out white, almost as white as the rabbit’s ears that sat on top of his head, though the tip of one of those was bloody. The man’s eyes were gone, just two holes, and it looked weird, looked wrong that he had eyebrows over the holes. His mouth had been stuffed with socks. Vicious little bites cratered his neck, wrists, and inner thighs. Two seats away from him, a bucket. A trail of blood led from the floor in front of him up the raw concrete stairs toward the sound and light room. A bloody handprint on the glass. Grown-up-sized; a crack webbing out from it made me think of Spider-Man.
“Spider-Man,” I said before I could stop myself. It sounded stupid in that room. Cvetko didn’t say anything, just walked up the stairs and looked into the booth. I went behind him. Five more bodies lay in there, half-undressed, but only to get at their arteries. These had their eyes, though. They were stacked. The one on top, an Asian woman, had her eyes open and cut to the door like she’d been waiting for us, like maybe we’d set her loose and tell her she could tidy up and go back out shopping for lychee nuts or whatever she was doing when they got her. And how did they do it? When it was just them? Charm them off a train like the guy on the 6, Come and help us find our mommies? Leave your briefcase, you won’t need it.
Cvetko bent over and picked something up. It was my superball, sticky from the puddle of blood it had been sitting in. Now I understood the blotches on the wall of the prop basement; I closed my eyes and heard the ball thump-thump-thumping, saw Peter and Sammy taking turns catching it, Camilla clomping around in the Queen of Hearts’ shoes, Off with their heads, out with their eyes, make him a rabbit!
“This is bad, Cvetko.”
“Do you think so?” he said, with that tired sarcasm he uses when I say something obvious.
“What do you think?”
“I think we must tell our esteemed mayor that the children are incorrigible, and that they are going to get us found out. And I think we must burn this place.”
I pictured Margaret like the real Queen of Hearts, rather the Queen of Spades, coming down the tunnel with the shovel over her shoulder. Would she do it one at a time, in separate places? Or all lined up, with us holding them down? Old Boy and Ruth would be on board, maybe Cvetko now that he’d seen this. But Luna? Forget it. Billy, too. Baldy and Dominic would say no just to make trouble, take advantage of the rift. And me. Could I do it? I pictured sleepy little Peter, holding up his white hand. Camilla clutching Raggedy Ann and crying. But sleepy Peter. It was like he was sick.
“Cvets, I think something’s wrong with those kids. The way they eat. How hungry they are.”
He looked at me like go on.
“I mean, what if it wasn’t their fault?”
“Intent doesn’t matter when the results carry consequence.”
“Yeah, but what if we could fix it?”
“I am skeptical.”
“But you can’t rule it out. Night fever is a vampire disease. What if there are more of them? A disease might be fixable.”
He considered this. A fly lit briefly on his head, then decided it didn’t like him and flew away. He absentmindedly touched the spot where the fly had been.
“It is possible that some of them are starving despite their feeding, which would explain their carelessness and excess. It is possible such a condition could be reversed. Your argument is sound,” he said. In Cvetko’s world, there was no higher praise. “But, as you noted, we need more information.”
“That book,” I said, “the one Clayton made.”
“The Codex,” he said, “may or may not contain answers to this proble
m.”
“We’ll ask Margaret for it.”
He scoffed.
“This is important, Cvets. She might.”
“She trusts no one with that book.”
“Then we should borrow it.”
“Are you talking about theft?” he said.
“Theft’s when you don’t give it back.”
He nodded slowly.
“Even so, we must burn this place.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess so.”
I didn’t like fire so much. None of us did. We made our way out of the theater, back down to the basement.
Shall we make a rabbit of him?
“And we must remove the door to the sewer, brick up the wall.”
“I don’t know shit about laying bricks.”
“I was, for a short time, a gardener.”
“Figures,” I said.
“I think this place will keep one more day. Tomorrow night. Tonight we get the bricks and mortar.”
“Tonight hell, it’s almost morning.”
“I will place the masonry, you will only be in my way. I can set the fire without assistance, too.”
Fine by me.
“Yeah, but how will you get the bricks? In the daytime?”
“You’re wasting time. Go home. Make sure they’re all there. Make sure they don’t leave.”
“And if they get hungry?”
“Feed them. Or else they will feed themselves.”
THE DEVIL’S DICE
I was dreaming about a game I was playing with the devil. This was your typical red devil with goat feet, horns, big backward-curving horns like on one of those African antelope things, but not an antelope. I don’t know what the point of the game was; it was like dominoes, which I never played, because we each had stacks of little stones or pieces of ivory, or tiles, definitely square. He had a big pile and I had a little one. He kept rolling dice and every time he rolled, he did something different with his other hand, made some sort of Freemason sign or something. It was fascinating. Only while I looked, with his dice hand he’d steal away another couple of tiles from my pile, then roll again. I realized I wasn’t ever going to get a turn at this rate. Hey! I said, but when I said it, it wasn’t the devil, it was the Hessian. Bigger than death and all dressed up in his Prussian blues. He rolled the dice again, a twelve, then did the thing with his hand and I looked, like a dog at a treat, and there went more of my tiles. I don’t want to play this anymore, I said, and it was the devil again. This pissed him off, so he turned over the table and the tiles poured on me like an avalanche. Only now I was lying next to Margaret in a bed, which was creepy by itself. She looked dead, like Ruth, gray and clammy. I said, “Today’s your death-day,” and I don’t think I told you about that. That’s the day you figure you would have died. I picked January 9, 1999; I would have been eighty, and that’s how long my grandpa Peacock lived. But she said, “You’re coming with me.” And she took a soda straw and shot something up my nose; I thought it was a BB. It hurt. It went up into my sinus, like above my eye.
The Lesser Dead Page 18