Christopher Buehlman - The Lesser Dead

“Oh,” he said, getting it. “No.”

The cop saw me looking now, looked back. I grinned at him. “How about you, kid, you a Steelers fan?” The train turned, everybody shifted. I let my charm drop for a second, just a split second, giving him a flash of the fangs. He blinked twice. Looked at his partner to see if he saw, but he wasn’t paying attention. I kept smiling at him, no fangs. He looked at me, mouth-breathing. The Steeler kid nodded off, started slumping. The train pulled into Penn Station. The cops got off.

Cvetko had watched the whole thing, knew what I had done; I felt him disapprove, but he kept his mouth shut for the moment, went back to reading his book, not a National Geographic but some pervert book about naked apes.

I looked at the sleepy kid with his thin, shitty blond mustache, so long it fluttered in his breath. He must have been a mess eating soup. This was a newish style, just the mustache, long hair. I’d seen a lot come and go, hats, no hats, short ties, thin ties, wide ties. I wondered about really old vampires, if they even noticed anymore.

“I want to get really old,” I said to Cvetko.

“Why?” he said, without looking up.

“I don’t know. I just do.”

“You can’t bear to think of the world going on without your contributions to it?”

“Ha-ha. I just mean, I’m glad I got bitten, you know? If I hadn’t, I might, I mean I would …”

“Look like me?” Cvetko finished. That caught me up short. He was about the age I should have been, after all. Poor Cvets, stuck in that old body. Stronger, more vital, sure, his arthritis went away and all, but he looked old; worse, he thought old.

“You know what I mean,” I said.

“There are compensations for aging. Children. Grandchildren.”

“You didn’t have those.”

I winced when I said it, I shouldn’t have said it like that, but he didn’t make a big deal out of it. He was good like that.

“Status in society. Pride in accomplishment. I had those things.”

Now three thug-looking teenagers got on the train. They started laughing about Steeler guy, sat around him. One of them reached into his pocket, pulled out his wallet, looking at me and Cvetko with an I-dare-you-to-say-a-word look on his face. Stuck it in his own pocket while his impressed friend stage-whispered, “Oh shit, man, you didn’t !” Cvetko smiled pleasantly at them, checked his watch. The thief smiled back, mocking, making bug eyes. Cvetko’s nostrils flared a little, so I sniffed, too. No beer. He was checking to see if they were drunk or high. He hated biting anyone who was drunk or high.

“Our two hours are nearly up,” he said. “Will you finish without me?”

“You bet,” I said.

They got off at the next stop, still giggling. Times Square. Cvetko followed them off, keeping a discreet distance. I watched Steeler kid snore his mustache into his mouth, thinking it was quite likely he was going to get his wallet back in the mail.

Now’s a good a time as any to tell you about night fever. You might guess it’s kinda like cabin fever, and, yeah, that’s close. Night fever is what happens when a vampire can’t take being in the dark anymore, but it’s more than that. It looks neuro-whatsical, but Cvetko says it’s a disease of the soul.

The guy who brought Luna here from Milwaukee, Clayton? Clay, really. He was smooth. He was from Boston, though he’d lost the accent. Born around 1820, turned before the Civil War, traveled around on trains, developed all kinds of tactics for sheltering during the day while on the road; he would do anything, submerge himself in mud bogs, sink himself with a big rock and sleep in a lake, dress as a cop to get himself invited in someplace, then hide in the attic or basement and sleep there. He knew a lot about vampires, kept a book just full of notes describing some of the vampires he met, where he met them. Margaret was keeping it now, had been since Clayton died last summer, we called it The Codex , and what sad bookworm bastard do you think came up with that? Cvetko is right, sixty-four dollars to you.

The first symptom of night fever: increased desire for blood. You can’t stop drinking. This is dangerous because you end up killing people. Killing people means you risk making more vampires. Clayton made two new vampires, both in ’76 when he was starting to slip his chain. Billy Bang is one. The other didn’t make it.

Second symptom of night fever: desire for abasement. As opposed to what you get in Kansas when you see a tornado coming, which is the desire for a basement. Don’t worry, Cvetko didn’t laugh either when I told him that one. But you start feeling dirty, like you’re no good, like you don’t deserve to drink human blood anymore. Clayton started bringing food down here on purpose, stuff he got out of the trash, but any kind of food is a big no-no in the tunnels because it brings on rats. Lots of them. Carpets of them. But that’s what Clayton wanted. We’d find him sleeping outside his box, just surrounded by dead rats like pistachio shells or something, smiling and shaking. If you’re in a neighborhood where pets start to go missing, you got either a psychopath working his way up to people or a vampire working his way down from them.

The third symptom is the worst. Tremors. I’ve seen a vampire pull out of night fever before, but not once they started rocking and rolling. It’s like they just can’t hold still anymore, not their head, not their limbs, you hear them scraping around in whatever they’re sleeping in.

Symptom four? Not really a symptom, more of an event. You go sunbathing. For real. Not just tooling around Washington Square Park when it’s raining and the sun won’t come out; not getting yourself sick by going out without sunglasses when it’s overcast and the bright gray clouds press a headache behind your eyes; I mean stepping right into full-on sunshine naked as a jaybird and dying forever. The newspapers never cover it or, when they do, they make up some normal explanation or call it spontaneous human combustion, which is right except for the “human” part.

Anyway, Clayton. One day I was walking near his and Luna’s cavelike place and I heard him moving around, dragging his limbs and whimpering. Luna was outside his box crooning down mother-tones to him even though she was so sleepy she could barely stand from the last two days. He finally convinced her he was all right and she collapsed into her junkyard armoire. I went to my room, but I heard him. He went.

Next night there was a bit in the Times about a guy who doused himself in gasoline and jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge. “Fell like a comet,” the Times said; “Blazing like a star,” said the Post . Coincidence? I don’t think so. They said it was some other guy, a Steven Bergman or something, who also went missing, but newspapers are like cops, they just don’t like loose ends.

It had been summer, bright, warm. That matters; what kind of sun you get hit with, I mean. Cool winter sun makes you smoke; you can actually get a dose of that and live, if it’s hazy or misty at all. Bright summer sun, you catch fire. Takes a couple of seconds. I hear in the desert it’s almost instant, you go up like a torch. Not a lot of vampires in the desert. We like it up north.

I had bright winter sun on me once, thank God it was through a window, glass helps just a little. A normal kid I used to hang out with and pretend to smoke cigarettes, his name was Freddie, played a nasty trick on me once. I actually told him what I was, this was like five years ago. He was kind of a nerd, went to Stuyvesant not too far from us. He kept me out after sunrise in his room, had the blinds down. There was a manhole cover just outside his house I figured I could get to when a cloud passed, it was stupid. But the bastard actually lifted the blind on me because he thought I was bullshitting him. “Vampire my ass,” he said. I still have the scar from it, a permanent pinkish-gray triangle on my left elbow that’s really intense and knotted at the point, then fades out as it goes. It smoked like a bitch, hurt like a bitch. I punched him in the nose and took the blanket off his bed, busted out the window, and went down the manhole. Who was he going to tell? Who would believe him? Fuck Freddie, I never saw him again.