Christopher Buehlman - The Lesser Dead

“You. Kids. Ghost kids.”

“How many of us are there?”

He smiled and shook his head.

“You’re. Not so bad. Don’t mean it. Can’t help it.”

“How many?”

He looked sad now. Balled up his face to cry.

“Nobody’s… feeding.”

“It sure looks like somebody’s feeding.”

He shook his head.

“My bird. Gonzalo.”

“What kind of bird is it?”

That sounded stupid as soon as I said it, making small talk with a dying man in a vampire lair.

“Pretty,” he said.

He shivered really hard.

“Want. Coke,” I heard. I looked around, found a Pepsi can with a little sloshing around in it. I held it to his lips. He shook me off.

“Cold,” he said. “Coat.”

Duh. That’s what he said the first time. Poor bastard’s in shock. I went to get his coat, but couldn’t pick it up because there was something on it. A foot. Attached to a boy. A very cold, very white little boy, dressed up as if for church but wet, and barefoot. And a little bloody.

He stepped off the coat. I picked it up, my rusty old heart fear-beating now. I draped the coat around Gary Combs, who shivered again, but I kept an eye on the boy.

“Have you come to play?” he asked.

I noticed he was holding a folded-up umbrella.

British? A British kid?

He looked to be about eight years old.

Be friendly. Be sweet. They’re dangerous. He won’t be alone.

“Is this how you play?” I asked, nodding back at the expiring Mr. Combs.

“No, silly. It’s how we eat. We’re like you. See?”

He showed me a vicious set of fangs, showed them to me like another kid might show where a grown-up tooth had replaced a baby tooth. Now a little black-haired girl came down the steps behind him, white and quiet as a ghost, her hair wet from the rain.

It was the girl from the subway. Without her makeup.

Get out.

I looked at the boarded-up windows leading to the balcony on this level, assessing whether I could actually bust through the plywood on the first try. I thought maybe I could. The image of Wile E. Coyote leaving a coyote-shaped hole in the plywood came to me and I almost laughed, but I didn’t.

Now she stood a little behind him, taking his hand. Like siblings.

“I can hear your heart,” the boy said. “You’re affrighted.”

“Frightened,” I said.

“Yes,” he said, smiling a little. “I forgot.”

“I think I just want to go.”

“Please don’t,” the girl said, so quietly I barely heard her. “What’s your name?”

“Joey,” I said, without thinking about it.

“Joey,” the boy said in a childish singsong. “I knew a Joey, push-come-shove he ran very slowey.”

“If you didn’t come to play, what did you come for?”

Gary Combs groaned, pissed himself. The boy said, almost absentmindedly, “You were supposed to ask for the bucket.” Then, to me again, “My name’s Peter.” His little white hand came out. We shook. Two cold boys. He was colder.

“He needs a hospital,” I said, indicating the man in the chair.

“What for?” the girl said.

“He’ll die without it.”

“He’s supposed to die,” she said, all innocence.

“No,” I said. “He’s not.”

“He’s just a poppet. It’s what they’re for.”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because. The police. They’ll find out and start looking. Eventually they’ll find something.”

“Oh,” she said.

Peter said, “How do you not kill them?”

“Nobody showed you?”

He shook his head. So did she.

She said something so low I couldn’t hear. I leaned closer, still standing awkwardly on shoe and wallet.

“Won’t they come looking if we take him to hospital?”

Smart thing, I thought. What was she, seven?

“Maybe,” I said. “You’ve made a huge mess of this.”

“Sorry,” she said, nudging the boy. “Sorry,” he echoed.

Not as sorry as him.

As I went to look at poor Mr. Combs again, I noticed he had a third child in his lap, another boy. This one in dirty jeans and a Keep on Truckin’ T-shirt. Vaguely Indian looking. The man started muttering to the little creature, and at first I thought he was pleading, but he wasn’t. “I just want you to know it’s okay you’re just kids someone did this to you and you’re just kids just kids pretty kids like Gonzalo pretty bird talks and whistles you’d like my bird.”

The boy petted his hair while he spoke, all the while squirming up his lap, positioning himself closer and closer to the insulted neck. Still petting, he bobbed his head once, gouged his outsized teeth into the man’s neck and drank. A weak jet of blood escaped around the boy’s teeth, made him squint and grunt, and the girl darted forward, licked the drops from the ground.

The first boy, hopping from foot to foot, opened and closed the umbrella, his mouth open in a dumb, hungry smile that showed off his fangs and let fall a runner of drool.

Jesus, they’re animals.

But not as bad as whoever turned them.

That fucker needs to die.

Gary stopped talking. I watched his head drop as slowly as a setting moon, so slowly you almost couldn’t see it happening.

Hungry as I was, I didn’t feed on him.

Not with them.

Not yet.

“So what’s your name, ugly parrot?”

It didn’t say anything, just cocked its head and blinked its huge, smart yellow eye at me.

“Say Gonzalo ,” I said. “Gonzalo? Is that you?”

It bobbed its head. Was it nodding? I didn’t think so, they just bob their heads sometimes, right? What the hell do I know about parrots? Why was I here? I looked around Gary Combs’s Chelsea apartment, which was full of all kinds of Japanese and Chinese stuff and heaping shelves full of books and stacks of records. The dominant feature of the room was the cage. It was a big cage.

“Pretty bird,” I said. It scratched its face and stood on one foot.

“I don’t know what I’m doing here,” I said. “I just, I don’t know. Are you hungry? Where’s your food?”

It went back and forth on its wooden bar, clicking and whistling now. It knew what was up. I found a bag of sunflower seeds under the sink and poured some into the feeder. I didn’t know how much to pour. Whatever, it ate, and, while it did, I peeled a magnet of a cockatoo off the fridge and stuck that in my pocket.

I caught my reflection in a mirror, sort of a big tin square thing from Mexico or somewhere. I grinned at myself, stuck my tongue out. My tongue was still bloody, and I had some around the gums. I hadn’t done a great job cleaning myself after biting the man in the park, a big guy I charmed into bending down to hug me. I patted his back in that huggy way while I fed, made sure we were mostly hidden, but just in case I told him, “Sob a little,” and he had. Just a kid hugging his dad, maybe getting over some tragedy. People turn away from a man crying. They’ll watch a woman, but not a man. He was big enough I knew I could take a pint and a half off him, and he’d been okay. Staggered a little, still sobbing, holding his neck. “Put your hand down, stop sobbing,” I had told him, and he had.

“Good-bye,” he’d said sweetly, like he missed me already.

“Yeah,” I’d said, hating myself and what I was, which was something I didn’t feel very often. “Keep walking, go away.”

He went away.

I went to the sink now, splashed some water on my tongue. Evidence, shmevidence, the police wouldn’t find anything, even our fingerprints disappear. Still, I shouldn’t hang out too long.