Christopher Buehlman - The Lesser Dead

Action: We would take turns riding the cars in pairs, fanning out to different lines, looking for groups of unescorted children. Upon sighting any, we were to follow them as discreetly as possible so we could see where they were holing up. In the event of trouble, the pair would beat feet back here as soon as they could be sure they weren’t followed.

“Everybody pick a partner,” Margaret said. I picked Luna, but she picked punked-out Chinchilla, who was turned at eighteen or so. Cvetko picked me, so I picked Cvetko back.

“When do we start, Mama?” Billy said.

“Tomorrow night, Mr. Bang. Two hours of riding, then the rest of the night is yours. And you’ll be going with me.”

He performed a brief soft-shoe and bow.

“And please knock off that jigaboo shit,” she said, smiling inscrutably. He smiled back, just as inscrutably. To this day I don’t know much about their relationship, except that I think he got her. Billy Bang got everybody.

Well, not everybody. He never got Chloë. Chloë was my secret. I went to see her after the meeting. It wasn’t so easy to get to Chloë’s place; you had to take an abandoned subway tunnel all the way to the Manhattan anchorage of the Brooklyn Bridge. They had all these vaults there, beautiful brick vaults from the 1880s, I swear we forgot how to build nice things. They were nicer than a lot of apartments, only underground, so they were dark and some of them were wet. Hunchers slept in a couple of them; one guy who lived there used his as a carpentry workshop. Made cabinets and tables and stuff; he was the one who made Cvetko’s coffin. I liked that guy. I called him Blond Jesus even though his name was George, because he kind of looked like Jesus, except blond and half-blind, had big, thick glasses. A very accepting guy, like you’d expect Jesus to be. Here’s an example: This guy really was almost blind; he had to get close enough to his work it looked like he was doing it by smell. No power down there; he lit like twenty oil lamps so his place looked like a cathedral. Used oldey-timey tools. His eyes got a little worse every year. He was thirty now, figured he’d be completely blind by forty, but did he cop an attitude about it? No.

He said his eyesight got him out of the war, and he was really eager to go when the draft board sent for him. Said he was a different person back then, grew up on stories about Mount Curry-botchy or whatever where John Wayne put up the flag on Okinawa. He had been counting the days until he could be a Marine. It broke his heart when the sawbones at the induction station declared him 4-F. He thought he could make it with glasses. His little heart had thrilled every time he saw the evening news and spotted a soldier with glasses, thinking, That’s gonna be me one day! But his eyes were truly bad—even with glasses, he wouldn’t have known Ho Chi Minh from Santa Claus, and Uncle Sam knew it. After he got 4-effed, he was wrecked. But then he had a “holy vision.” He understood that he would have “done bad things, really bad things,” and I had to wonder what he thought those bad things were. I just couldn’t imagine this guy doing stuff Old Boy talked about. I don’t think he would have made it out of basic training, he was so high-strung. And gentle. Weirdly, nervously gentle, like couldn’t stand the idea of hurting a rat, though everybody underground has to hurt some rats sometimes. In any case, in this “holy vision” he understood that he was supposed to do the work of Jesus on the earth and read about the Buddha, that the only way he could get to heaven or enlightenment, either one was fine by him, was by climbing a tower of cabinets and bookshelves that he built with his own sweat and charged fair prices for. Also, he shouldn’t buy the flesh of pigs, though it was all right to eat it if someone gave it to him because it was worse to be rude. Not that people were lining up to hand Blond Jesus pork chops. I know, bugshit crazy, right? But what do you want from a half-blind carpenter who lives in a hobbit hole under the Brooklyn Bridge? You’d have been crazy, too.

Anyway, I tell you about Jesus-George because he was Chloë’s closest neighbor. Once you got to George’s flickering, lamplit vault and heard him planing away at a long slice of pine, you were almost to Chloë.

Beautiful Chloë.

She had a vault in this same anchorage, only it was set off by itself and hidden. You had to get on your hands and knees and slither through a rusty-ass pipe; seriously, you didn’t want to wear nice clothes to see Chloë, but she didn’t care about clothes. Once you were through the pipe, you dropped down a crescent-shaped hole into a kind of brick anteroom facing a wall of newer bricks, like somebody had partitioned a bigger room, which they had. There was a place in the wall, about six feet up, where a couple of bricks didn’t lie flush, and these were loose, you could see them. If you pulled these out, there was just enough space so a skinny guy could crawl in without getting small.

And that was Chloë’s room.

Chloë sat up on a sort of bedrock ledge chest height to me, tucked back in kind of a brick recess. She had a dress on, an old dress from the ’30s or ’40s, and a bobby pin stuck through her hair; there was still some hair on her, brown and dusty. Though she was mostly a skeleton. Yeah, it’s fair to say Chloë was a skeleton. She was small, but not a child, not completely. Maybe a teenager. She huddled against the back of the brick alcove and held her bone knees with bone hands that had the nubs of the fingers worn off. There was dried, old blood on the dress. She was missing teeth, too; she only had a few teeth left in her head.

It seemed to me that Chloë was some kid who got trapped in here and starved. Maybe somebody worked her over at home, maybe her mom found a gentleman friend who knocked her teeth out for her, and she went exploring, found a place to be alone, but couldn’t squeeze back out of the hole she had crawled into. Maybe she was too weak. Maybe she was already starving, who knows? Anyway, there were scratch marks on the walls, lots of them. That’s what made her fingers shorter. Nasty stuff.

Anyway, I wasn’t the first one to find her. Or to take pity on her. She was crowned with dried flowers, had flowers stuffed in the niche behind her, all around her; it was creepy and sad and beautiful. Sometimes I would get flowers for her, too, walk them all the way from Chinatown or Little Italy with old ladies smiling at me like they knew I was on my way to see a dame, and bring them to her. The only bits of real color in Chloë’s room were the sunflower I had left behind her and the red roses I had gotten her last Valentine’s Day and woven into her head garlands with the drier, brown ones. Mine had dried extra vibrant.

There were other offerings near her, too, cups and saucers with what looked like dried-up wine, coins, a toy horse from way back in the day. Like maybe whoever else found her loved her as much as I did.

This was my favorite room in all of the underground; I came here whenever I was sad or lonely or had to think. There was something so beautiful about the way she sat, sort of defeated and yet like she had kept just enough of her dignity. Something like a kid and a young woman at the same time. When I first found her, her mouth had been frozen open like she had been wailing or sobbing when she died. I remember how carefully I closed it. How tenderly. Like this was the closest I was ever going to come to handling a baby. I wished I had known her. I might have saved her. Might have turned her. She might have been my girlfriend.

Though I never told anyone else about her, I talked to her all the time. About Margaret and about Cvetko, about everything. Even really bad things.