Christopher Buehlman - The Lesser Dead

One of them? One of them, who? Inquiring minds want to know. I walked toward them.

“Get on outta here!” the older one said. “Go on back to the castle, now, you don’t want us. We dirty.”

Even as he said that, I heard the crunch of a syringe under my shoe. Dirty indeed, and he was talking about his blood. He knew what I was!

“The rest of us are at the castle? Like, the Belvedere Castle?” I said.

“I dunno, just get on. Please.”

“But at the castle?”

“Some nights.”

I stopped. They both visibly relaxed. The older one took a hand out of a pocket.

“Th’ow me that Frisbee.”

Iwalked up the steps to the Belvedere Castle, a nineteenth-century fairy-tale castle overlooking the turtle pond and the Delacorte theater. The fairy tale had turned dark, though; the windows were boarded up with plywood and the stonework and doors were blemished everywhere with shitty graffiti tags. The plywood, too. The only ones I could read were MASTER in rain-washed labia pink and Lucky I or 1 in Casper-the-Ghost white.

Stay focused, I thought.

Blood.

I smelled blood.

It wasn’t dark yet, but it would be within the hour, normally my time, but I found myself feeling nervous. I had only met new vampires a few times, and always vampires like me. Were there other kinds? I had heard rumors. Vampires that fly. Vampires that are really insects. But who knows? My rumor policy is keep an open mind but don’t believe until you hear it from somebody who saw firsthand. Someone you trust. Still, I found myself looking up in the sky.

It was raining harder now. I opened my mouth and let the water run in; I blinked my eyes against the drops that fell, watching them make their way down to me from on high. Normally I only saw rain up to streetlight height, but here it came, real and ordinary water falling from higher than I would ever reach.

Stay focused.

I knew what I was doing. I was putting it off. My heart beat once or twice like a rusty old engine trying to turn over, which of course it only really did when I jumper-cabled it to a living heart by feeding.

“Hey, kid.”

I turned and saw a husky negro cop. His overlong mustache wasn’t even. Probably a bachelor, a wife would have told him.

“Get outta there. It’s not safe.”

He was genuinely concerned.

“What’s in there?” I said in my best ten-year-old kiddie voice, pointing at the castle.

“Nothing for you. Now get on home. This is no place for kids.”

Not living kids, I thought.

“Okay,” I said. He watched to make sure I went down the steps, then kept walking.

“Thanks,” I said, making as if to take Transverse out of the park like a good lad. Once I was out of his sight, though, I pulled off my shoes and socks and plastic shin guards and skinnied up the wall of the castle: bad cat, bad rat, dead kid. Actually slipped once because of the rain but caught myself so fast you wouldn’t have noticed if you were watching. I went all the way to the top tower, approached the round window upside down. I peeked in. Just weather equipment, no visible way farther down. I went down a half story to a busted-out slot window, too small for a person but I wasn’t exactly a person. I got small, felt my skull squish flat, my vision went screwy until my head formed up on the other side; then I wrestled one shoulder at a time through, mashed my pelvic bones flat, tore up my shorts and soccer jersey real good. But it took less than five seconds and I was in.

Be so quiet.

The landing up top was littered with clothes: a girl’s green sweater, torn and bloody; a suede hippie coat with a fringe, likewise bloody; two pairs of prescription glasses, one broken; some poor fucker’s fake leg, a purse, two wallets, a Timex, a bloody knit hat, a pack of gum.

Oh fuck, this is for real.

I went down the stairs against the wall, one delicate step at a time.

Easy does it, grasshopper. When you can walk on rice paper and leave no mark, it is time for you to go.

I remembered that Margaret had said we should only report where they were staying so we could come back in force, but I was too damned curious. Plus, I knew I could get back up those stairs and out the window so fast nothing could grab me. None of the other vampires I knew were as fast as me. I would be okay.

Breathing.

I froze. Whoever was breathing was barely breathing, and doing it through his nose. I slid up against the wall and took the rest of the spiral staircase sideways, belly against stone. I took it slow.

When I got to the second floor I saw him. A man, stripped to the waist, bloody to the waist, tied to a metal folding chair, gagged with a knotted bandana. He was barely conscious, heavily charmed and dying. His possessions lay scattered about the room like debris, as if he had exploded: keys, a wallet, a corduroy jacket, broken sunglasses, the other Hush Puppy.

Trace light from the failing day leaked in around the edges of the boards over the windows.

His head lolled.

I debated going over to him, looked at the floor. Stained with blood but not pooled; whatever blood had fallen there had been lapped up. I looked more closely. Bloody footprints, bloody handprints. Small ones. Child-sized.

Rather than add mine to them, I crept across the wall, over the boards on the windows.

This poor fucker. I crawled closer. It’s hard to stay stuck sideways on a wall with only three limbs, but I reached for his wallet, the contents of which lay pooled half in it as if the wallet had vomited. I saw his driver’s license and plucked it up.

Gary Combs.

A much younger, healthier Gary Combs smiled at me from the photo on the plastic. The guy in the chair looked like his dad, pale as a jellyfish, his neck and wrists brutalized with multiple bites that weren’t healing; they had made him too weak to heal. He was shivering. His foot twitched and sent a Fanta grape soda can rolling.

Vampires don’t drink soda. I noticed other cans, a hamburger wrapper, a plastic bucket that smelled like piss and hamburger puke.

They were trying to keep him alive. How long had he been here?

I looked behind me and listened—nobody coming. I stole closer to him, stepping on the wallet and Hush Puppy so not to add my size-eight footprints to the smaller ones on the floor. What should I do? Let him go? He wasn’t going to make it unless he got to a hospital right now, and maybe not even then.

Cvetko would let him go, maybe even take him for help. Cvetko didn’t believe vampires should kill. And certainly not like this. This was nasty . It was like they didn’t care what they were doing, or didn’t know any better.

I started loosening the knot of the bandana so he could maybe breathe a little. It was soaked with drool. And blood. Out of nowhere I realized I was hungry, ravenous even, but feeding off this guy would put him under.

“Gary,” I said.

His eyelids fluttered.

“Mr. Combs.”

He looked at me. White guy, a little funky, had a graying goatee. A professor? Bookstore owner? Something smart. I scanned the floor for glasses, didn’t see any.

He looked at me now, afraid but charmed enough not to panic.

I poured a little charm into a harmless lie.

“You’re going to be okay.”

He didn’t nod. He just accepted the sentence, too tired to agree or disagree.

“Who did this to you?”

Mild surprise filtered through exhaustion. I should know very well who did this to him, his eyes said.

“You.”

“Me?” I said, touching my chest exactly like my mom would have, very Jewish.