Christopher Buehlman - The Lesser Dead

After Valentine cooked, Messer didn’t have any use for me and that was okay by me. When Margaret decided to go underground like fifteen years ago, she found me in the Warehouse District basement apartment I was renting and we told him, asked him to join us. He said no. We were sitting in the basement library on a couch almost as nice as Margaret’s, surrounded by swords and pole-arms and oldey-timey maps on the walls, this guy loved a map. His tall brass hat and Prussian-blue uniform hung in a glass case, all lit from below like in a museum. The uniform really brought home how big the guy was. It was jarring that he had been so massive even at twenty years old, even back when everybody had little tiny shoes and chairs like for dolls, when a shrimp like me was average-sized. No wonder he didn’t want to go into the tunnels. I wondered if he even could get small. Probably not very.

He said, “It is undignified to live in the sewers and unsafe to live under the trains.”

Did I mention this guy had a mustache? Huge fucking mustache on him, like Burt Reynolds, only sandy-red. Probably used to twirl it on the ends back in the day.

“What do you mean, unsafe ?” Margaret asked.

“Mrs. McMannis, I mean that it is not safe ,” he said, a little crazy in the eyes. “Vampires have disappeared down there, many vampires, as anyone of a certain age can tell you. Your youth and enthusiasm are attractive”—it sounded like attractiff —“but tunnels are for vermin.”

An awkward moment passed. “Is there any other way in which I might assist you?” he said, leaning forward and putting his hands on his seat like it was time for us all to stand up now.

“No,” she said, a little pissed. Truth was, he didn’t need us. He had been doing just fine for a very long time, and if Margaret thought organizing underground was smart, she could hardly say his way was dumb.

Oldest, richest monster in a city of monsters, and as big as Mean Joe Green to boot.

“Then it is my pleasure to wish you both a good evening,” he said, just like Dracula, if Dracula were a kraut. The new servant opened a white-gloved hand and gestured at the stairs. His old servant, back in 1940, had been a light-skinned colored that could have been mute for all I knew; this 1960s servant was a young German-sounding guy, though he didn’t talk much either. If listening to a clock tick was your idea of a good time, this was the house for you. Anyway, quiet young German guy showed us up and out, opening a door for us with another “Good evening.” Handsome guy, kind of Luftwaffe-looking. Both of the servants had been real handsome. I think maybe Wilhelm the subway-hating Hessian swung AC/DC, just a feeling I got.

But kids?

I never saw him being into kids.

“Those kids know how to eat ,” Billy said. Luna, Billy, and me were sitting in the Empire Diner in Chelsea drinking coffee just before tucking in. There was already light in the sky, just that little bit so you can’t call it blue yet, just like dark with a glow to it. No sweat, though, there was a manhole cover just outside and the traffic wasn’t bad. I had money and tip lying on the ticket. We could be underground within sixty seconds; by the time somebody notices one of us slipping under, all three of us are under, and what are you going to do? Call the cops?

The waitress came by; she hadn’t come by for a while and Luna said it was because I hadn’t been remembering to blink, only now I think I was doing it too much, but still she came and poured a little more thick black coffee in my cup. We were all filling our bellies with warm java so we could sleep better. We were all hungry. I was so tired I just watched the steam rise from my cup and said, “Yeah. That they do.”

Watching the six of them nearly peel the Bakers the other night had convinced me we needed to split them up, so Luna had taken Camilla, Cvetko had taken Duncan and Alfie, and Billy had taken Manu and Peter. I got stuck with Sammy.

Cvetko was with the kids already, getting them squared away in their little metal bunks.

Billy said, “Manu ain’t too bad, but my man Pete? He starts bitching and moaning after an hour or two. He don’t take much, but he takes often .”

Luna nodded. “The girl’s the same. We almost got caught because she bit a guy on the subway, said she couldn’t wait. I charmed three people who got on while she was doing it. But, no, she doesn’t take much.”

I was thinking about Sammy. Little redheaded Sammy with a belly like a camel. He didn’t need to feed all the time like Peter and Camilla, but getting him off somebody before he drained them was hard; he’d fight you, try to take a quart.

“We hit three cabdrivers, two around here, one down by the Brooklyn Bridge. The third time I said, ‘Lay off, it’s my turn,’ but Sammy jabbed him anyway, latched onto his wrist while I was on his neck and sucked so hard the guy arched his back and rolled his eyes back in his head, so I stopped. The meter was running the whole time. I didn’t pay.”

The waitress passed by again and I waited till she was out of earshot.

“What do you think it is? Because they’re kids?”

“Maybe,” Billy said. “Maybe not.”

“Well, what else?”

Billy grimaced and washed down the last of his coffee. He made sure nobody was listening.

“What if they’re another kind of vampire?”

“What, like a different species or something?”

“Yeah,” Billy said, standing up and hefting his guitar case, “just like that.”

They were snoozing in their lockers. Cvetko had taken to sleeping in a big blanket by the turnstiles; he wasn’t about to drag his coffin out here any more than I was about to move my fridge. He just wrapped himself up good and tight so no light got in, making kind of a turban around his head. But he wasn’t out yet, just sitting up Indian-style, looking for all the world like a guy who smoked. I wondered if he used to smoke.

“Did you use to smoke, Cvetko?”

“Yes,” he said. “But only socially, never as a habit.”

“You wanna walk with me?”

He nodded, got up.

Someone kicked inside one of the lockers.

Someone kicked back twice.

“Settle yourselves and go to sleep,” he said. A halfhearted kick followed like a mild act of rebellion, but then they fell silent.

We hopped down onto the tracks and into the darkness of the tunnel.

“Billy said they might be another species of vampire,” I said.

“What are your thoughts on the subject?”

“I don’t have any. It’s why I’m asking you.”

He walked, his hands in his pockets.

“Mr. Bang is an intelligent man. It is possible that there are different strains of vampirism, though it must not be thought of as a disease.”

“You’ve said before you think it’s a curse. Magic.”

“Yes.”

“What is magic, anyway?”

“In my opinion, it is simply a series of phenomena or forces that science cannot now explain and might never be able to explain. Phenomena that are not subject to rules as we understand them, that may, in fact, change the rules we pretend to understand. Pretend in the French sense, as in to claim .”

“Why not just say claim ?”

“ Pretend is a more elegant word, as there is a sort of elegance in the best science. A child watches his parents dance a complicated waltz. The mechanics are beyond his power and will be for many years. But he may sketch a few steps of it, his head erect, his arms almost in the right position. He says, ‘I am dancing!’ One may say that he claims to dance, but really he pretends .”