Christopher Buehlman - The Lesser Dead

Then one day she sends the kid off, borrows a thimbleful of cheap perfume from the young mother two doors down, gets tarted up in torn stockings and shoes you’d never seen her wear. She goes out late. Comes home bruised and bloody. Not her blood. You’re intrigued.

A week or so later she sends the kid off again. It’s a cool, cloudy night. And the Irish queen who seemed to be made out of stone has a breakdown. She doesn’t break with sobbing or hysterics or booze; she starts busting things. Dead-faced, dead-eyed, she breaks her plates and cups and saucers, she takes a soup can to the glass parts of the cabinets and the clock and then chucks the can at the bathroom mirror. The neighbors knock and she tells them not to be concerned, she’s cleaning house, and what can they do? You can’t call the cops on a woman for breaking her own shit, and they’ve got their own lousy lives to worry about.

When she’s busted enough bustables, out comes the razor and she starts in shredding the shreddables: bed linens, towels, dishcloths, a picture of FDR, her underthings, her dresses, isn’t this fascinating? Then she draws her bath, and you have a good idea what’s coming, especially since she’s still holding the razor. A woman who cuts up her towels before she gets in the tub probably isn’t planning to dry herself off after, right?

She seems to think about it for a long time, though. And that’s when she cries. Like how unfair things have been to drive her to this place finally hits her and at last she shows a moment of weakness. It’s not like you really know how to love anyone or anything being what you are and all, but whatever affection you felt for her because of her strength doubles now that you see that strength’s limit.

How fast she does it surprises you. Just one wrist, hard, more of a gouge than a slash, across the wrist like an amateur. And what does she do? Gets out of the tub and starts trying to bind the cut with the strips of towel.

But you can’t help yourself anymore.

Not with all that blood.

“As soon as I clipped myself I saw myself in hell. That’s where suicides go, as I’d long been told, and I supposed I believed it, but not really. It had started to seem to me that the Lord actually wanted it of some of us; that he would just keep shoveling out the misery until we got the idea that we wasn’t wanted here no more. And if he was going to stick us in a second hell because we were sick of the first one, then he wasn’t no better than the worst of us, so what was the point of it? Only, the instant the cold pain of the razor hit me and the blood started fanning out in the water, I saw myself. Jerking like, with my eyes rolled back in my head, in a dark, hot place, my skin as white as ash and burning now, everything burning, and a crowd burning with me. So up I jumped, splashing water everywhere, fetching what was left of a towel and trying to stop it. I started saying Jesus then, but Jesus wasn’t what come through the window.”

So in you go. Nobody’s going to pay attention to the sound of something else breaking here, so you go through the glass. She doesn’t go to scream, just looks at you like you’re something in this life she hadn’t imagined and she doesn’t know where to put you. Still, you jam your hand over her mouth and start lapping blood from her arm, and oh the salty, frothy, watered-down goodness of it, like the faintest memory of hot broth on a cold day, and now you’ve thrown down her poor excuse of a bandage and you’re nursing straight from her gushing wrist, opening the wound bigger with your big yellow teeth, it’s spraying so fast you can’t get it all in your mouth, it jets on your chin, up your nostril, and this is bad because you’re going to kill her. Or are you?

“Live or die, he said, and I said live, not because I wanted to but because I wasn’t ready to go to hell. But he kept taking the blood from me, and I’d been thinking it was the devil, but now I remembered Dracula, and what a silly business that was, or had seemed, but here was one like him. And killing me, too, despite his question. So I made the decision to fight him, but it was too late. I’d no strength left. I clawed at his eye once and he didn’t like that, twisted my arm near off and I wanted to yell but couldn’t through his hand, which I bit, and hard, but he paid it no mind. Just kept draining the life out of me until the darkness rose up like a buzzing mass of flies and took my sight away, but I heard knocking at the door again, and then I felt him spit something back in my arm. Just for a second I got my vision back, got a good look at him. Jesus, I wished I hadn’t. I was hoping that wouldn’t be the last thing I saw before I died. But it was. I died just after I felt the air get colder. I died just about the moment I knew he was taking me out the window. Christ, he was hideous.”

Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you that part of this little make-believe. You’re hideous. Christ, you’re hideous.

The vampire who turned Margaret was named John Valentine. Kind of a bad joke, pinning a hearts-and-flowers name like Valentine on a kid after you reached your great Godly scepter down into the womb and gave him a stir. He looked like he’d been squeezed out wrong, one big goldfishy eye, the other one sunk in his head, and what a head. Broad nose and lips on him like he had a little chocolate in the blender somewhere, but his hair was pure dago, black and greasy and not enough of it. He might have had a widow’s peak once, but that peninsula had mostly sunk, leaving one sad little island of hair, one stubborn patch of it he grew out long and put a ribbon on sometimes. He was half-mad, which you might have been if you had literally been sold to a circus. But he was brilliant, too. Brilliant enough to talk a vampire into turning him so he could escape the freak show. Brilliant enough to run schemes, steal and extort his way into property ownership and never blow his cover.

He was big and strong, almost as strong as the Hessian.

He was the only vampire I knew that horses and dogs were okay with; I saw him ride a horse once.

And if it weren’t for John Valentine, Margaret might have left me in that morgue drawer to figure it all out on my own. But she owed him. He had shipped her kid off to live in a home for people like that and bribed them to favor him. He taught her, and made her teach me, and we stayed together, the three of us, until the bright, sunny day when his building collapsed and his box popped open and mine and Margaret’s didn’t. Dumb luck. That was in 1942. But nobody cared about collapsing tenements then. There was this war on.

NOW

1978

Istood with Margaret in her vault, the mayor’s apartment, surveying the wreckage. Four Hunchers had found their way into the place and it hadn’t gone well for them. She was spitting out the last of the blood from her shot mouth and rubbing her hands, which were sore from what she’d just done to the intruders.

“Never call me your mother again,” she said.

I held up my hands like I wouldn’t dream of it .

“Oh, would you look at this, now,” she said, pointing at a hole in her sage-green velvet couch. Never mind the brain and hair on it, she could clean those off with a stiff brush. And never mind the point-blank gunshot to the face she’d absorbed. It was the bullet hole in her couch that pissed her off.

One of the Hunchers was still alive; she had broken his back and stuffed a sock in his mouth. Now she pinched his nose until he came to, but then she charmed him. “You won’t yell, but you’ll listen and you’ll answer when I ask you something.”