Christopher Buehlman - The Lesser Dead

“This is a good place for conversation,” Cvetko said. “The temperature is agreeable and there are no unwanted listeners. Mrs. Dunwitty is an expert at keeping secrets. Do you know, she used to work in a speakeasy frequented by underworld figures. She was in charge of the coat room, and also the firearms of guests.”

“I fellated Lucky Luciano!” she said.

“Yeah, she’s buttoned up as tight as Fort Knox.”

“She won’t remember our visit.”

“Of course I won’t. Are you a vampire like Mr. Štukelj?”

“Yes.”

“That’s fine. Are you a Jew?”

“Shut up and knit.”

“That’s fine, too.”

She went back to her needles. The cat yowled. Another joined it. She had at least two of them in there.

“So you believe them to be feral?”

“What?”

“Your little associates in the park.”

“Oh. Yeah. Wild, untrained.”

“Did you ascertain how many there are?”

He said the word ascertain like he was smearing butter on fresh bread. He gave it like a gift.

“I saw six. I asked if there were more. They said no.”

Cvetko nodded.

“What do you think Margaret’s going to do if we tell her?” I said.

“You have known her for longer than I. I turn the question around on you. And please stop agitating your knees in that fashion; it is obvious that you are stimulating yourself.”

I hadn’t realized I was doing it. I got up, paced around, looking at the pictures on the walls. Guy smiling in a U.S. Army Air Corps cap, black and white and dead, nice chin on him, though. Really old people in sixties shots, young people in really old photos, one of them water-stained, showing a pretty couple, big mustache on him, hats like the Gay Nineties. Three babies, all in dresses, even the boy. Bet one of the girls was her.

Hey, Dad! She’s going to blow a gangster! Marry a pilot! End up as a midnight snack for a dead guy from, what, hungry-Austria!

“Joey.”

“Huh?”

“Stay with me, please. This is important.”

“Oh, Margaret. I don’t know.”

“Most important is the question of who turned them and then let them go with no knowledge of what they are or how to survive in the world as it is now. This individual is dangerous.”

I considered a fern hanging in macramé from a hook on the ceiling. I pushed it, set it swinging. I set another one swinging, too.

“I really don’t know what she’s liable to do, Cvets.”

Let’s go back to 1933.

All those years ago.

Margaret wheeling me through the streets of Manhattan in the Beth Israel wheelchair, my belly full of nurse’s blood, the darkness of the morgue drawer still sitting at the center of my mind like a base a runner can’t quite steal away from, always back to it and back, I’m dead I’m dead I’m dead .

I remember the slow parade of streetlamps over me, the tide of car headlights in the street, brighter now than they had seemed before, the only suns I would ever know.

“I would have left you there,” she said. “I wanted to, believe me.”

“Why didn’t you?” I said.

“I’m responsible for you now. At least until you learn.”

“Learn want?”

“Learn how. The how of it. He’ll show you.”

I started to ask another question and she cuffed my ear, hard.

“Shut up now. I don’t like your questions, and neither will he.”

“Hey,” a woman with a grocery bag said to Margaret. “What kind of nurse are you, smacking that kid like that?”

Margaret ignored her, but the woman trotted up next to her.

“I mean it, what’s wrong with you? You don’t smack a sick kid.”

Never slowing down, Margaret turned her head, looked her in the eye, and the woman stopped and tilted her grocery bag so an apple fell out and rolled, just stood in the sidewalk with her mouth open, making a sound I’ll never forget. Almost a cow sound, full of despair, the sound of a woman who hadn’t realized that behind every face was a skull and behind every skull, worse than the skull, was nothing. Just nothing. Margaret could show you that in a second.

One thing I need to say about Margaret’s family situation is that when she worked for us, I pictured the Irish stereotype, house full of kids, drunk husband, you know. Turns out I didn’t know a thing. When she left my house that day, the day of the gorgon, she had gone to her wretched Brooklyn tenement building with few windows and coal soot on the burlap walls, and she had passed the night staring at her son, a pale, freckled boy of six named Liam who had fallen from a snowy rooftop and lost the use of an arm. Worse, Liam was simple now. No school, no work, no wife for him. Ever. She had driven her violent husband off the year before and had leveraged herself as far into debt as she could go before finding the job at my family’s house. Things had started to get better. Just the week before the incident, she had paid one dollar fifty cents on the sixteen dollars she owed the grocer, given her sister a dollar against the ten she owed her and gotten her ice skates out of hock. Turns out Margaret in her daylight life wasn’t a half-bad skater.

And then?

“I tried being a whore,” she told me once. “I went with a fella, but ended up changing my mind about it halfway into the thing. He punched me good a few times and tried to take what he wanted, but I waited until he had his pants down and cut his mickey with a razor in my shoe. Not off. Just nicked it, but you know how they bleed, or maybe you don’t, but I do, and he wasn’t for fighting anymore after, and wasn’t worried about getting his money back neither. Just ran out into the street howling, holding a towel bunched up on it. Still, my eyes swelled up near shut and I knew I wasn’t no good for whoring. I didn’t know what I was good for.”

The food had run out and eviction was looming. They were living on soup kitchen and breadline charity. Margaret’s sister, who had five kids of her own, wouldn’t take the boy permanently, and neither would the home for boys. Not while Margaret was alive.

“So I did it.”

Picture this. You’re a vampire. You’ve bought a tenement building in Brooklyn, some leaning-over piece of shit waiting to collapse or burn to the ground. You’ve got some schmuck who collects rents and manages things so nobody has to meet you. You live on the top floor with the windows boarded up and a pipe leading down to the ground and into the sewers, and that’s how you get out unseen. You make a point not to hunt in your own building, but there’s a wrinkle. There’s this woman. Irish, like half your tenants, but she doesn’t walk around beat-up looking and sad with a scarf around her hair waiting for her teeth to fall out. She’s got spirit. Like some old Irish clan chieftess or queen or something, she could walk down the sidewalk naked and never drop her chin. She had a piece-of-shit man who tried working her over with his belt one time too many, meaning once, and he ended up pushed down the stairs with a meat fork in his belly, went septic, almost killed him but he got better. Somebody said he went to Ohio because Pennsylvania was still too close to her. Only she’s got a sick kid and a perpetual case of bad luck.

You look in her window sometimes, watch her comb out her reddish-brown hair, you notice that her big blue eyes never look far-off or dreamy but like there’s work to be done and she’s going to do it. When she goes to bed she doesn’t read or pray—just washes up, combs her hair, lies back straight as a board in the middle of the bed (now that she can) and off goes the lightbulb behind its ratty shade. Only you can still see because you’re a vampire, and you just watch her in the dark, watch her close her eyes like a dead soldier, watch her chest rise and fall and think about how clean her neck is, how hot her blood is, how good it would be. She’s a beautiful woman, but not in the way the girls in the magazines or paintings are. She’s beautiful like a horse is beautiful, in her veins and the shape of her head, and her eyes. Especially her eyes. You want her in all the ways you can want a living woman. Only you never do it, any of it. Not here. Not where you live.