The Lesser Dead

by Christopher Buehlman

  “Ow,” I said, only now I was really saying it. I was awake. Only it wasn’t night yet, or I don’t think so. I felt something moving in my head. Above my eye.

  “Ow,” I said again, reaching up for the door of the refrigerator by habit, only it wasn’t closed. I sat up. Whatever it was, was wriggling and I knew; I had bugs in there. “Goddamn it,” I said, pressing one nostril shut and blowing. Three or four roaches skittered out; I slapped them off me, but there was another one in there, and he went into a panic.

  “Ow, fuck!”

  Took me two or three snotty honks before I shot this one into my lap and then I picked him up, clapped and smashed him. Sometimes bugs crawl into us because, if we’ve fed, we’re a little warmer than the rocks, and a nostril or an ear is a very tempting hidey-hole. We mostly don’t sleep naked, you can figure that one out for yourself.

  But who opened my door? That’s what let the little bastard in. Now I saw him. Sammy. He was squatting down on his haunches against the wall.

  “Did you open my door?”

  “No,” he said, but defiantly, meaning yes.

  “Well, don’t.”

  Nothing.

  His eyes shone in the darkness.

  We want you to be one of us.

  Except half of Sammy.

  “What do you want?”

  He didn’t talk for a second or two, like he was weighing me.

  “Peter hurts. He needs you.”

  A flame flared up as Sammy lit a lighter. Closed the lid on it. Opened it and lit it again.

  “That’s my Zippo!” I said.

  The sneaky little fucker.

  He considered it, placed it carefully, maybe sarcastically, on the floor like a little tombstone, then walked out, looking after me to see if I was coming.

  I got up, thought about waking Cvetko, didn’t. I followed Sammy into the little honeycomb of rooms where we’d put them and saw that Peter was sitting up in his locker, watching for me.

  “He’s hungry,” Alfie said. Alfie stood nearby, just next to Camilla. “Me, too,” she peeped.

  “It’s going to be night soon,” I said.

  “I can’t wait,” Peter whimpered. He really did sound pitiful. Tears streaked his cheeks. Hunger for a vampire is an awful thing, worse than it ever gets for a boy—at least an American boy, I can hear Cvetko saying. Blood hunger sits in your guts like a rock. Then after a day or two that rock heats up and your limbs get cold and they hurt. If people talk to you, they just sound like insects buzzing or dogs barking because all you can focus on is that coal burning in the middle of you; you have to put it out. And every living neck is a fire extinguisher. If you let it get to that point, you just drink and drink and you don’t care about peeling people, you’d peel them all to close that smoldering hole in you. I could see in Peter’s eyes that was where he was. And he’d fed, they’d all fed. They confessed to the killings in the theater, told me they would sneak down there in the middle of the day to fill up again, like raiding the fridge when everyone else was asleep. I didn’t bother lecturing them or warning them; it was clear they couldn’t help it.

  “Where are the others? Manu and Duncan?” I said.

  “Sleeping,” Alfie said. “They don’t eat so much.”

  “And you,” I said to Sammy, “are you hungry, too?”

  “Not like them. But yes.”

  Not like them. Them meaning Alfie and Peter and Camilla. The siblings. I could almost hear Cvetko telling me to think; I was tempted to wake him up, but he would want me to work this out on my own. Was it hereditary? Your argument is sound, I could hear the old egghead saying. But hereditary would mean unfixable, which would mean Off with their heads!

  “Have you always been like this?” I asked.

  Peter shook his head.

  “How long?”

  “I don’t want to talk. I want to go to the theater,” he said.

  “But they’re all gone,” Alfie said. “Dry-dry-dried up.”

  “Even the rabbit,” said Camilla.

  “Because you took his eyes,” said Peter.

  “It was only a game,” she said.

  Alfie said, “Anyway the rabbit was already dead.”

  “Poor rabbit,” Camilla agreed. “But I don’t want to talk anymore, either.”

  Now her belly hitched and she held it and sat down, a tear spilling down her cheek.

  “May I . . .” Peter started.

  “What?”

  But I knew what he was going to say.

  “May I bite you, Joey? Only a little?”

  “No!” I said while he was still saying little.

  That was absolutely against the rules. Margaret laid down the law on that at our very first town meeting and said it again every time somebody new came in. Her rap went something like this:

  “This colony is hunt or die. Nobody asks to feed off another, nobody lets anyone feed off ’em. I hear about anybody doing that, they’re out. I’ll have no dependents and no weaklings here. And don’t go cryin’ charity; all charity died with the hope of heaven.”

  That bit about dependents and weaklings rang false with me; what happened between two of us wasn’t any of her beeswax as far as I could see.

  I figured out the real reason later. When I broke down. Of course I broke down. The hope of heaven may have died (like when I was nine), but I still couldn’t listen to a kid whimper in pain like that when I might do something to help him. Or her. But I wasn’t stupid about it, at least not completely. I wasn’t going to make myself that vulnerable with half-of-Sammy watching. I went to Luna. She was a softie like me. I told her what was happening, what I was going to do, asked her to watch and make sure I didn’t get in trouble.

  “How long do we carry them?” she said.

  We.

  Just that fast, she was on board, too.

  “I don’t know,” I said. She nodded. We went. So now I was protecting peelers, hiding their crimes from Margaret and letting them feed from me.

  She had plenty of reason to kill me if she found out.

  And that was before I stole her book.

  THE THING IN THE TUNNEL

  Getting that Codex from Margaret wasn’t going to be easy; she never left anybody alone in her place and she kept irregular hours. She was funny about her stuff, too, like with that couch of hers. I had the feeling she would know where everything was, would smell where your fingers had touched her things. The only thing I had going for me was that she had just torn the joint up killing the Hunchers; she might not have everything in its place in her mind, you know? She might not think twice about my scent because I had been down there, too. Now what I needed was an opportunity.

  Be careful what you ask for, right?

  Gua Gua came back. He was the only one of the Latins who came back.

  It was daytime when he found us; he woke us up. He was yelling.

  “I smell you, you whore! You’re going to look at me before you kill me. Do you hear me, puta madre, te voy a mostrar mi cara.”

  “Joey?” one of the kids said from a locker, I’m not sure which one.

  I heard Cvetko getting up; I always forgot how fast he could move when he had to.

  I went out to the tunnel, followed it around to where the noise was coming from. Gua Gua was in the tunnel not far from us, down in the trough of an unused section of track not far from Luna’s cave.

  It had taken him days to get back to us because he did it blind, feeling his way along the tunnels and following scent. He was blind because he’d been burned. Missing an ear, half his scalp, both eyes. Old Boy said everything above the nose got fucked-up because somebody shorter was standing in front of him. Old Boy said it was Willy Pete, white phosphorus, a kind of grenade they used to kill VC in tunnels. Supremely nasty stuff, it would stick to you and just keep burning.

&n
bsp; The Hessian.

  This is what happens when you fuck with the Hessian.

  Old Boy was stalking the Puerto Rican, just walking behind him barefoot with his knife out. How long had he been following him? I almost said it. Gua Gua was an it now. This was one of the worst things I’d ever seen; this guy should have been dead, he should have been dead twice, but here he was moving around, all pink and black and puckered. Coming for Margaret. Coming for us.

  “You told him,” he shouted. “You told him we were coming. He was ready! You’re up there laughing at us, but you’ll get yours, too. I don’t know how, you bitch, but you will. And the last thing you’ll think of is my face.”

  I was hypnotized, everyone was. The whole neighborhood crowded on the rise above the tracks, looking down at the shouting thing with three-quarters of a head. But that’s when it hit me. Everybody was here: Ruth, Old Boy, Margaret. This was my chance, but who knew for how long?

  Gua Gua was getting close now, feeling his way along and yelling himself hoarse.

  Margaret nodded at Old Boy, and Old Boy moved fast. I didn’t watch. I hightailed it back to Margaret’s place; it only took me a few minutes. I flew like the shadow of an airplane; my feet barely touched the ground.

  The chain was the first problem; Margaret was strong enough to pull her trapdoor up with a little effort. Me? It took a lot of effort. I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to do it, but I got the image of her finding me here and my heart beat once or twice and I pulled that chain with all I had. Up it came with a groan and a shudder; I hooked the chain so it would stay open. Down I went.

  I had never been in here alone before. It struck me again how well put together this vault was. If the Big One fell, it might just be Margaret crawling out of the rubble like a big angry cockroach in a bathrobe. I knew she had other clothes, but she rarely wore them. Where did she even keep her clothes? Probably in the big armoire. It had never occurred to me to wonder what she had stuffed in the cabinets behind the bar or in the honeycombed wine shelves or in the big steamer trunk. The trunk had a lock on it. Was The Codex in there? Or was it near her fur-lined sleeping box behind the bar? I didn’t know how big the book was, I had never seen it. The chest made more sense. But I would need the key.

  Just leave, forget it.

  Let her kill the kids, they’re sick anyway.

  I hated that last thought. I closed my eyes for a second and saw Peter crying, heard him whimpering. The reason Margaret didn’t want us feeding off each other was that it made you care about the one you gave your blood to. It was that simple. Margaret didn’t think it was going to make us weak, she thought it would make us love each other more than her. She was right. I had held Peter’s little white hand while he fed from my wrist and I had done the same for Camilla. Luna did it for Alfie, let him take from her neck while she cradled his head like a mother. Now both of us were in their corner. I wanted to help those kids, and any chance I had of doing that was in that book.

  Hurry.

  It occurred to me to break the lock, but that was stupid, I couldn’t cover that up. Was it even in the chest? Cvetko would have said to look everywhere else first, or would he? No time. Best guess and go for it. Back to the chest I had no key for.

  Margaret had the key.

  But Margaret left in a hurry.

  The key’s in here!

  It sure was. On a ring of three keys hanging on a nail on the wall, next to the narrow door she actually used to get in and out, though nobody but her knew where it led. The trapdoor was just for moving stuff through.

  Three keys. I knelt down in front of the cedar chest.

  I tried one, too big, it didn’t work.

  Hurry.

  I tried the second one. Little key.

  It worked.

  I lifted up the lid.

  THE VAMPIRE’S TRUNK

  Yarn? Are you kidding me? I’ve never seen her knit, not once, what does she wear, socks? I guess I have seen her with a scarf once or twice.

  Margaret McMannis, the queen of the underworld, at least our mile or two of it, knitted socks. And scarves. Yarn in brown, gray, and blue lay rolled in balls on one end of the upper tray of the trunk, along with a collection of knitting needles, two of them crossed midknit and capped off with pencil erasers. The other end of that tray was filled with money, mostly American fives and ones, but a few pounds, Deutschmarks, and Canadian dollars lay stacked in small but tidy bundles. Coins in a jam jar. A little Japanese figure, like a frog or a dog, I can never tell with that Asian stuff. Rings and earrings stood in tiny rows like Cvetko’s chess pieces, grouped by size and type. I had a moment of confusion where it seemed like I was back in my house in 1933, standing near Margaret’s purse, looking at the gorgon cameo I was about to plant her with to get her canned, starting all of this business for me in the first place. Here I was again, violating her personal property for the second time ever, and if she caught me the consequences would be just as dire. Here’s to Joey Peacock, the boy so nice I killed him twice.

  I pulled out that tray (carefully, so carefully) and what do you know, more money. Twenties this time, she must have had fifteen, twenty thousand dollars bricked up with dry, yellowing rubber bands about the same color as her fangs. Her murderous, sharp panther-fangs. I picked up a couple of thin little books, like sketchbooks, and looked under them; a nickel-plated revolver and a box of bullets, another couple of boxes, one locked, but too small for the Bible-sized leather book I was imagining. A crucifix sawn in half, that was weird. Seashells. Seriously, seashells? Did she go down to Coney Island at night and wade out in the water?

  Wait a minute, I thought.

  I took another look at the sketchbooks, opened the top one up. A watercolor painting, not bad, showed some kind of mountain with a couple of shacks just at sunset, a rusty pickup truck. Really spiky cursive script in pencil next to it, Clayton’s writing; I recognized it because he had left me notes.

  Ozarks, 1953, November

  Milo and his brother sleep in basements by day beneath the houses of their mother and aunt, who know what they are. The brothers drive by night into Eureka Springs (?) and feed on women they pay for the privilege. “Blood whores” they call them, and at least one of these women also helps them fence stolen jewelry. They make most of their money through theft, as neither of them is particularly good at charming. How much easier their lives would be if they could simply convince people to give them what they wanted, as I am blessed to do. I never would have met them but that I sighted on one of their women. They were too bewildered at meeting another vampire to take

  The page after that was missing.

  Hurry!

  I shut that book and opened another; more paintings, more writing, all Clayton’s. A swamp with a man holding a pot to collect blood from a mule’s neck; six figures standing around, looking down into a hole; an old man in a chair, his pants almost up to his tits and a fedora on his head—I couldn’t see his fangs, but knew he was one of us by the light in his eyes. The writing on that one said:

  Arthur, 1922. I should like to know how old Arthur really is, but he will not say. If only I could see him under a strong light; you can tell much from a shadow.

  I cracked the third book, carefully, this one was older, and saw a moonlit field of dead and dying men, belly-shot horses all unstrung, a woman bending down to bite the neck of a fellow in a dark blue uniform against a tree. This painting bothered me. There was one word next to it, an Indian-sounding word that started with Chick, like Chicken-sausage, but that wasn’t it. The woman was biting the man but looking at you, as if out through time, through the paper at you. His hand was tangled in her black hair; her free hand cupped his chin like he was her lover. Like she was showing Clayton what she could do. His lover? A woman who picked over battlefields.

  A ghoul, that’s the word for it.

  We’re ghouls.

  * * *

/>   What the fuck was I doing, I had no time to read! I snapped that book shut, put it and the other two under my arm, caught sight of Margaret’s shovel leaning against the wall.

  Exactly, now get the fuck out.

  The problem of how to get back in here and return the books was one I would have to solve later; now I had another nut to crack. Go out the way I came or take my chances with the narrow door? I might run into her, face-to-face; I might get lost. But I would know how to get back in without pulling up the trap. I would learn something about how Margaret moves around so fast down here. That was something. That was worth the risk. But how to close the trap and still get out? Drop it and jump? Was I fast enough? If I wasn’t, I might get my legs pinched by that monster of a door. I might get pinched in the middle, stuck dying but unable to die until Margaret came home and found me there.