Christopher Buehlman - The Lesser Dead

If I can, if I’m not too hungry, if I have time, I lick before I bite, with the flat of the tongue like a dog. Maybe your eyes are half-closed because this is sexual for you, or maybe you’re good and scared and making that ripe, rotten fear sweat I shouldn’t love but do. Maybe my hands are tangled in your hair so you can’t run, or maybe you’re so charmed you’re smiling like an idiot and leaning down to me so if anyone sees, they think I’m telling you a secret. In a way, I am.

The secret is vampires are real and I am one and no cop is coming and no doctor can help you and your own mother won’t believe you if you tell her . The secret is I look like a high school freshman but I’m pushing sixty . And the secret is I’m stealing from you what is most truly yours and I’m not sorry .

My name is Joey Peacock. I live in the tunnels under the subways. And don’t go thinking the underground is so bad for us. It would be for you, if you’re still warm, but things change when you’re turned. Darkness isn’t so dark anymore. Everything seems candlelit, even the blackest black, so that what looks to you like black dirt and a wall covered with black mold takes on a kind of warm glow for us, full of layer and detail like modern art, not that Guggenheim shit, but the pretty stonework-type stuff. Or like Rothko. You know Rothko? He’s at the Guggenheim, but he’s different. First time I saw one, I thought, What’s the big deal, squares of color, so what? But there was something about it. A foxy European chick with a scarf and high boots was staring at it and I said, “What do you see?” and she said, “Just keep looking,” so I did. I think she was French. But she was right. The edges of the square of color started waving and then the painting glowed, like it was full of radiation. She said, “Did a door open for you?” and I said, “Yeah.”

Night’s like that now. It’s always been there, full of radiation or whatever, and maybe that’s what cats stare at when they look off into nothing but now I see it, too. When I first changed, I used to spend hours under bridges and down under manholes just trying to count the different kinds of black. Only none of it was exactly black anymore. I know I can’t make you see it, but it’s like The Wizard of Oz , only flipped. Above the tunnels in the neon and lightbulbs, that’s like black-and-white, boring-old-uncles Kansas. Down in the tunnels isn’t exactly exploding with Munchkinland colors, but it is… incandescent. That’s a pretty word. That’s a five-dollar word, but it works. The tunnels are gently, subtly incandescent. They breathe. They are most certainly not ugly.

Know what’s ugly? Sunlight. Even looking at it indirectly is like staring into the jet of a welder’s torch, all that light bouncing off the sidewalk and off the chrome of cars. Even peeking at it from the shadow of a manhole cover hurts. Overcast days make us queasy, unless we wear sunglasses. We all have sunglasses.

And don’t go thinking that because I live underground I let myself go. I’m a good-looking kid, kind of young Frank Sinatra–ish, and I’m not going to spoil all that by letting myself get ratty-looking. The Hunchers, they don’t care, they’re here because they’re running away or sinking or already sunk. They live on flattened-out pieces of cardboard because they’re too lazy to steal rugs and they camp out in Grand Central or Penn Station where people can see how dirty and sad they are and they beg. They let their hair knot up and their fingernails have quarter moons of muck under them; they run around covered in grease and filth and they crawl under their sleeping bags with rats peeping at them and drink brake fluid or sniff glue or cut themselves with broken glass or whatever, but the point is they’re nasty. They eat rats, call them track-rabbits. Not all of them are so bad, but most of them. There’s one black woman living up above us, mostly on the streets, sometimes at Union Square station, I don’t know how she keeps the weight on, but she’s like an island. Won’t look at any of us directly, I think she knows what we are, everyone calls her Mama. Mama has two shopping carts full of stuff, all organized though, like neat. Shoes in one bag, shirts in another. But filthy.

I don’t have anything to do with Hunchers, except to feed on them sometimes. Just sometimes. They’re mostly full of booze, and booze hurts on the way out, or drugs, which give me a headache. We’re much cleaner. Like cats. That’s it, they’re rats and we’re cats. None of them have nice clothes, but that’s maybe not their fault. They’re poor.

Me, I got money. I charm people out of it all the time, and I use most of it to keep myself looking sharp. I have three mirrors, and don’t go believing that baloney about us not reflecting. We reflect. We just don’t show up so good in photographs. We blur. You know that guy who never takes a good picture? Ask yourself if you only see that guy at night. If the answer is yes, maybe don’t spend any time alone with him, you know what I’m saying? Maybe only hang out in big groups.

Nice clothes are important to me, even if they’re hard to keep clean down here. There’s a big trough or basin not far from my room; everybody uses that to wash clothes and bathe. Fill it up and you could only just keep your chin above water sitting down, not that we fill it all the way because the spigot’s not hooked up and it takes so long to get water from the busted pipe we use. Somebody sunk a big hook in the roof above the basin, a long time ago; it’s rusty now, and there used to be a pulley and a rotten old rope hanging from it, but it was in the way so Margaret got rid of it. There’s like twenty bars of soap around the tub we use and share, plus a couple of boxes of detergent and an oldey-timey washboard. Me, I hate doing laundry by hand. I keep a jar of quarters for the Laundromat and I use a dry cleaner on 3rd Avenue who doesn’t ask questions. I like the mod look: tight coats, paisley, zipper boots. I know I look a little dated when I walk into the disco, and like a throwback when I hit the punk club. Sometimes I wear a fedora, which looks funny on a young guy, but I remember when you’d sooner leave your house without your nuts than without a good hat. I remember when you used to have to take your hat off in elevators and houses and when you spoke to a woman; some people still do that. I don’t bother.

We get water from a pipe that’s probably been busted fifty years. Just enough water gets out of it to run down the wall and somebody chiseled out a kind of groove near the bottom, like a niche just big enough to fit a bucket into. It takes about a minute and a half to fill a bucket. We have a cheap fold-up table for folding laundry and whatnot, we keep it near that big concrete trough; I think this place, our common place, used to be some kind of a cleaning station. Anyway, there’s mold and dirt all caked on the wall except where the water runs out of its rusty pipe, but the wall is clean where the water washes down in a footlong track. The pipe is really rusty, that’s how you can tell it’s old. Some joker even wrote RUST where the water runs, chiseled it into the wall and there’s still flecks of white paint in the letters, but the water washed most of it away. People must have been using this for a long time. It’s kind of beautiful there, the way we see, though you would probably think it was just a wet wall with crap all around it and a busted pipe. You’d probably rather have a milk shake than a quart of blood, too, so we’ll have to agree to disagree. Anyway, I’m glad I have a way to wash my hair. Having clean hair is maybe the most important part of looking attractive.

I love long hair, if it’s clean. I don’t have long hair myself because it makes it too hard to pass as a kid, and little-lost-soccer-boy is my favorite disguise. Just after sunset I dress out down in the subway, slip my little plastic shin guards under my knee socks, carry cleats in my free hand, and then it’s I got separated from my mom and dad, help me find their hotel across the park . Works like a charm. I could pass as a little girl, but damned if I’m wearing a dress.