The Lesser Dead

by Christopher Buehlman

  I hit the tracks blind in one eye, my nose about an inch from the third rail. I literally peeled myself up enough to roll away from it. The most solid thing on my person was the hair spray can, and I was so dazed I stuck that can down the front of my pants like I was shoplifting it. I tried to stand up but my broken legs wouldn’t hold me. Everything hurt and itched at once as my insulted bones already tried knitting themselves together. I heard a plap as the skin of my scalp stuck itself back to the top of my skull. Sammy had gathered himself now, and he ambled over, laughing.

  Then he licked me. No shit, he licked my face and scalp, not like a pervert, but like a dog licking a bone. He was tasting my blood. I tried to push him away, only my arm wasn’t ready for pushes and I rebroke it.

  “Oooo, that was nasty,” I heard another one saying. Manu. No trace of sarcasm like Sammy might have delivered; he said it like he really felt bad for me. No surprise there, I felt bad for me, I might have felt bad for Manson watching him take the up-against-the-tunnel-roof train-grind. Duncan lurked behind Manu holding an adult’s bloody sweater against his cheek as if for comfort. I thought of Linus in Peanuts. I tried to stand but still wasn’t up for it. Sammy straddled me and licked me again.

  “Knock it off,” I tried to say, but the sound I made was all vowels. He understood anyway.

  “Or what?” he said, and I didn’t have a good answer.

  “Leave him be,” said Manu.

  “I’m older, I don’t have to listen to you,” the smaller Sammy said.

  That was when it hit me. Margaret was right. These kids weren’t kids at all. And I was completely at their mercy.

  My mouth had formed up enough to speak.

  “What now?” I said.

  “Perhaps you’d like to hit your pipe so the others will come. We’d very much like the others to come,” Sammy said, showing fangs and drooling. Remember, vampires drool when they want to bite, which means when they want to attack. I imagined Billy Bang walking up on them, or Luna. I shook my head.

  “Good,” said Manu. “The First Three want to see you.”

  The First Three.

  My legs were strong enough for me to stand. I could see out of my left eye again and my headache was getting better.

  Just as I began to contemplate making a run for it, bastard Sammy picked up a brick and broke my legs again. He took a pencil out of his pocket and blinded me. I screamed, so he jammed gravel in my mouth.

  The two of them picked me up and ran off with me.

  Fast.

  A THRONE ROOM IN HELL

  Everything in me hurt when they set me down.

  I didn’t know where I was, but it stank like hell. Maybe it was hell. Except it was cold.

  I felt something crawl over my face.

  “Joey-Joey-Joey!” I heard. Peter.

  “Joey,” a little mouse-voice echoed. Camilla.

  “He still can’t see,” Duncan said. “But look, the right one’s almost whole.”

  “That’s the left,” Camilla said.

  “Oh, right. The left, then. He’ll be able to see us in no time at all. When his peepers heal.”

  “Had you to hurt him so badly?” Camilla mewed.

  “He tried to twist my head off.”

  “I want to twist your head off sometimes, Sammy,” Peter said.

  Manu said, “You should have seen it! It was brilliant! That was the worst I’ve seen someone hurt who still lived after.”

  “You’re forgetting the British officer and the elephant.”

  “It was very much the same sort of thing, only topsy-turvy. Instead of an elephant mushing him groundwise, the train mushed him roofwise. Anyway, that officer never lived.”

  “Did so! My pretend-father spoke to him after, they joked about the fat in the bullets.”

  “Anyway, he never got out of bed.”

  “That’s true.”

  “And they shouldn’t have made them bite the bullets.”

  “That’s also true.”

  “Shh, he’s about to see us.”

  I became aware of music in the background: Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street.”

  My left eye fuzzed in, everything bleary. The room around me was unfamiliar. I heard someone blowing bubbles, like in the bath, but it was thick and sloppy-sounding. Duncan was closest, inches from me, looking down at me like I was a schoolyard bug dying in an interesting way. His big, blue eyes shone faintly in the dim light, somehow innocent. Sammy behind him, not innocent at all. Manu passive, observing. I heard the bubbling again. I looked over and saw a big, industrial trash barrel with two little heads poking out of it. Make it three. Alfie surfaced now, blowing out horsy-lips and spraying a fine mist. You know what the trash barrel was full of. Sure you do. If you don’t, allow me to point out the meat hook hanging still but wicked about six feet over the barrel, the rusty old chain leading up from it, the anchor hook someone nailed into the concrete roof and the little brown hand- and footprints up there, the stack of naked dead in the corner with their throats cut and their feet bound together with straps. The three kids in the trash barrel had their hair slicked back with it, they were slathered in it, they all looked like they had just been born.

  Sammy came up to the trash barrel, cupped his hand, and slurped from it. Peter, a very healthy and robust Peter, splashed at him, laughing.

  “Have a care!” Manu said, suddenly animated. “You’ll ruin the radio!”

  “It’s a cassette player,” Alfie corrected, now splashing Manu.

  “Anyway, stupid to ruin it.”

  My other eye fuzzed in.

  Sammy said, “Manu’s just mad because in India a radio costs a prick. I read it in the Mirror. There were too many golliwogs, so Gandhi-girl was giving golliwogs little radios just to snip their pricks off.”

  “Shut your hole,” Manu said.

  “What do you fancy they do with all them pricks? The wogs, I mean? Woglet-woglings wear them for earrings? Kali got a girdle of them, Kali-wolly-oxenfree!”

  “Goolies for your golliwogs,” Manu said, grabbing Sammy’s hair and kicking him between the legs so hard he lifted him off the ground; it looked like he dislocated his foot doing it. Sammy retched and went down, but sprang up grimacing, hitting Manu in the jaw, clearly breaking it. Manu, now sporting an unhealthy underbite, scrambled to the stack of dead, picked up a head that had been sitting loose, and flung it, missing Sammy but clipping Duncan, who blinked and held up a soft little hand, Please don’t. Then he went on all fours to a fresh puddle of blood and lapped at it like a tame little lapdog at a table spill.

  Sammy balled up his fists.

  Manu’s jaw reset itself and he crouched, preparing for a spring.

  Both of them were smiling.

  “Stop it,” Camilla whispered.

  “Stop it!” Peter said, more loudly.

  Then Camilla spoke again.

  “You’ll wear yourselves out for the hunt.”

  She slipped under again. My hip settled back into place, more like wrenched itself back into place.

  The hunt.

  I didn’t have to think too hard to figure out what that was going to mean. Cvetko, Margaret, Luna. I wanted out, but I had no idea where I was, or how to get past these little fuckers. Sammy was strong, so very strong, though he just looked like an eight-year-old kid with skinny arms. Camilla could probably kick my ass. Maybe even Duncan. Old Boy could maybe handle these little things, but Cvets?

  I looked at the dead-pile. The lower ones weren’t so new, had bloated bellies, were starting to juice and get sticky. Slow, fat flies circled like jets in a holding pattern over La Guardia. There were baby flies, too. There’s another word for them, but you might be overdosing on the filth and carnage of this room, so let’s stick with baby flies.

  “Look, he’s whole again!” Duncan said, pointing at me
. I sat up; the spray can I had stashed in my pants was uncomfortable, so I took it out, rolled it against the wall. I cut my eyes at Sammy, ready to scrap if the little fucker reached for a brick. He didn’t. They were all looking at me now. Camilla whispered in Peter’s ear.

  “Joey,” Peter said, “I just want you to know . . . we want you to know, that you are one of us. If you want to be.”

  “You’re young!” Duncan said. “Say your name like a little boy. He said you could.”

  That struck me funny.

  “He who?” I said.

  They all laughed. I didn’t like that laugh.

  “Now say your name like you’re little,” Peter said, meaning it.

  “Joey Peacock,” I said in my falsetto. Peter’s brow unknit itself and he smiled again like the moon coming from behind a cloud.

  “Good enough for me. There’s still boy in you, so you’re in.”

  Camilla said something that sounded a lot like that German-ish thing Gonzalo had said. Now I said it, too, just like Gonzalo had.

  Lext Un-Fayger, the x like L’chaim.

  “Yea!” Camilla said, more loudly, excited, “Leoht Unfaeger!”

  She said more words like that. Peter and Alfie both answered her; Peter looked at me, shook his head.

  “He doesn’t speak it,” Peter said to his brother and sister, “only we do.” Then, to me, he said, “Horrid light. You’ve got a horrid light in your eyes like us.”

  “What is that, German?” I said.

  Camilla laughed.

  “No, silly,” she said. “It’s English.”

  “Bullshit,” I said, “I speak English.”

  “Before it changed,” said Alfie.

  Manu chimed in. “I hate it when they speak all that.”

  “That’s because it’s not for wogs!” said Sammy. Manu pushed his face openhanded, something less than a slap but a little less than friendly, and Sammy did it back.

  “You don’t speak it either,” Manu said.

  “I know! And who says I want to?”

  “Be quiet, both of you!” Peter said, and they obeyed. “Of course, you’d be bottom of the chain. It goes by how old you are.”

  “And how old are you?”

  “Old.”

  “Yeah, but how old?”

  “Second oldest.”

  “After me,” Camilla said, getting out of her gruesome bath now, walking over to a second barrel, and pouring a bucket of water over herself. Duncan retreated from the little wave on the concrete like a kid at the beach. A bunch of roaches retreated, too. Camilla emptied the bucket over her head again, now using a sponge, then dried herself off as best she could with a pair of filthy blue jeans.

  “But you’re . . . smaller,” I said. “Aren’t you brothers and sisters?”

  “She got the Leoht Unfaeger first,” Alfie said. “We were babies then.”

  “You were a baby,” said Peter. “I was a little boy already. She was older-sister-gone-three-winters.”

  Camilla held up three fingers.

  “But she came back for us.”

  He didn’t actually say she, he said her real name, and it wasn’t Camilla. Elf-something. I’ll just keep calling her Camilla.

  Whatever her name was, she sat down cross-legged and Manu, without being told to, found a comb and started combing out her wet hair. He got snagged up in a tangle, pulled at the comb; she grimaced and hit him hard in the leg.

  “Ow,” he said mildly, not worried about it, combing away.

  Where the hell were we, anyway? This brick-and-concrete space was new to me. Something about it made me think of movies I had seen with kings and queens, how they would receive hoity-toities while they sat up on their thrones. That’s what this place was like, a throne room, with the royal family bobbing around in a plastic trash bin.

  I didn’t know when I’d get the chance to ask again, so I asked.

  “What’s with the blood? In the barrel, I mean. I understand drinking it, I do that, we all do that, but why . . . swim in it?”

  A snatch of DJ blather played from the cassette deck; somebody must have been taping off the radio. Did someone make this tape for them or was it just lifted off one of the dead? I felt paralyzed, like I was standing in front of this canyon of how little I knew about them.

  “Feeding’s not enough now,” Alfie said.

  “Our stomachs are smaller than they were,” said Peter.

  “It happens when you’re old.”

  “And they leak,” Peter said, making a face.

  Camilla said, “Don’t tell him everything.”

  “I’ll tell him if I want, he fed us,” Peter said. “Baths help us move again. When we don’t have enough blood, we get slow with arms and legs like sticks. Baths help us save up. The more we soak, the longer we can go.”

  “It’s like batteries,” Alfie said. “You know what batteries are?”

  “Course he does,” Camilla peeped. “He’s new and lives in a city. Now shut up.”

  “Easy when you’re new,” Manu said. “You can last for nights without eating. You can sleep in the woods, sleep near little villages or in a temple, come in from time to time like a tiger, at your ease. But these geezers? They need a city. Lots of poppets. Every four hours or so they got to swig or they stiff up. Sometimes they stiff up anyway, but after a bath year, they got a few years. Like they soaked their bones new again.”

  A bath year!

  How many people were they planning to peel, Brooklyn?

  “It’s why we need the Tube,” Alfie said.

  “Subway,” Peter corrected.

  “Right, subway.”

  America’s “Ventura Highway” came on, with its high, pretty strings and beautiful images describing a sunlit California that was as far away from this place as heaven.

  In case I had any doubts I was actually in hell, bored, shitty Sammy went to the dead-pile and kicked a young woman the color of a cod belly, causing a pile of beetles to tumble out of the gash in her throat and a hole under one of her deflated breasts.

  “Stop messing about with the poppets,” Peter said.

  “Now make him drink,” Camilla said.

  “I’ll make him!” said Sammy, bounding over.

  “No,” Camilla said. “Peter will.”

  “Peter will,” Duncan said, looking up at me hopefully. “And Joey will take Millie’s place.”

  “Millie died the death in Wessex,” Alfie said.

  “Hampshire,” Camilla corrected. “Joey won’t know Wessex.”

  “I liked Millie,” Duncan said, suddenly very sad.

  My eyes were sharp again now; I got a better look past Duncan at the head Sammy had thrown. It hadn’t decayed like some of the others, though it didn’t look fresh either. That’s because it was a vampire’s head, and we don’t rot, we burn or dry up. I saw the mustache riding over the huge fangs, the face frozen in a sneer of pain or defiance, the empty sockets where its eyes should be.

  SHALL WE MAKE A RABBIT OF HIM?

  Yes a blind rabbit.

  It was Mapache. My heart turned over and beat twice, three times, then stopped again. With or without Wilhelm Messer, the kids had killed the Latins, right under our noses, too. How truly fucked I was hit me then, and you know what? It was almost a relief.

  “Come on,” Manu said, pulling me over to the barrel where Peter waited patiently, his hands cupped and full of blood.

  “What about Varney?” I said. “The Hessian? You said he turned the bunch of you. You said he did other things to you, not nice things.”

  Alfie and Sammy giggled now.

  “You mean that he diddled us,” Camilla said. “Fucked us in our mouths and holes.”

  The others giggled at her swearing. She laughed a little, too, then turned serious.

  “It
makes me sad,” she said.

  “What does?”

  “How easy it is to lie to you.”

  The little monsters. All that filth they said was just one big lie. I knew Messer wasn’t into that shit. I was really starting to hate them.

  “First say after me,” Peter said. Then he pronounced some words in their language, English-before-it-changed. I said the words after him. They broke it up real small; I clearly wasn’t the first to say them. I saw Manu and Duncan mouth the words with me. I almost recognized the words, they were kind of like English. I think I promised to be with them forever and to share what was mine with them, including my blood. I drank the blood from Peter’s hands, then Alfie’s, then Camilla’s. Then, in what could only have been a fuck-you to baptism, Sammy ducked my head in the blood barrel three times.

  I know what you’re thinking, that I sold my soul, only I didn’t have one to sell anymore. You’re thinking I sold out my friends. But I didn’t. I said the words, whatever they meant, but who cares? They were just words. And as far as I saw, these little monsters didn’t have any monopoly on lying. If I could keep Margaret and Cvetko and Luna out of the dead-pile, I would do anything I had to.

  Or so I thought.

  * * *

  Have you ever been argued about while you were sitting right there? That happened next.