Christopher Buehlman - The Lesser Dead

“Yeah, kid?”

I walked closer, noticed that they smelled bad, like sewage, and their pants were wet at the bottoms.

“What have you guys been doing, playing in the toilets?”

The ghost of a smile crossed Alfie’s lips.

“We’ve been talking about you,” Peter said.

Alfie nodded gravely.

“All of us.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes,” Peter said.

Alfie whispered, “We even asked the god of small places.”

“Who’s that?”

“It’s the god we talk to since Yayzu doesn’t want us.”

Yayzu?

“It’s really just pretend,” Peter said, “there are no gods.”

“You’ll make him mad!” Alfie said.

“Let him get mad,” Peter said, looking at me. “The point is, we were all talking about Joey.”

This god of small places shit creeped me out. I changed the subject.

“Well, what did you say? About me, I mean. Nice things, I hope.”

“We’ve decided that we quite like you.”

“That’s good,” I said.

“It is,” he agreed in that serious way kids have.

“You sure you’re okay? You look wiped out. Did you eat?”

He nodded, then stuck out his tongue to show me the back was still bloody.

“As much as I could,” he said.

What the hell did that mean?

“Would you hold my hand, please?” he said, holding his small, white hand up. There wasn’t a lot of light down here, just Cvetko’s lamp, which was always on, but that was far away so everything had that pretty cat’s-eye candlelit look. It would have looked solid black to you, assuming you’re alive.

“Please,” he said again. “I’m cold.” I realized I had just been looking at him. I wasn’t much of a hand-holder, but he seemed so sad. And so small. They were all so small. It seemed like a miracle they’d made it as long as they did.

“Yeah,” I said, and slipped my bigger hand around his. His was cold. Colder than mine, anyway. Vampires normally only get that cold when they’re starving.

“We’ve decided,” Peter said, with some effort.

“All of us,” Alfie interrupted.

“Yes. All of us have decided…”

“Except half of Sammy.”

“But mostly Sammy, too.”

Alfie considered this, then said, “Maybe mostly Sammy, he did say yes.”

“We’ve decided that we want you to be one of us.”

“That’s funny,” I said. “I thought you guys were becoming part of us.”

“Yes, of course we are,” said a very sleepy Camilla, holding a Raggedy Ann doll. This was her third or fourth one since they came to live with us; she stole them whenever she could. No one ever saw her take them. She was standing right behind me; I hadn’t even noticed her song had stopped. I hadn’t heard her walk up. “But while we’re all joining your group, you should be joining ours, too.”

“But only you,” Alfie said.

“Yes,” Peter said, his eyes closing like he was in his mother’s lap trying to make it through the late show, my hand still holding his up. Like a little dead fish out of a lake.

“Only you,” Camilla said.

“Why,” I said, “something wrong with Cvetko?”

“He’s old,” she said, wrinkling her nose.

She hugged me.

Then she helped her brothers to bed.

I went to ask Luna if she knew where Cvetko was, but he was already there; I heard them talking but they were talking so low I didn’t understand them till I climbed up. There was no ladder or stairs; you had to be a vampire or a rat to get up to Luna’s cell, and rats weren’t interested. Luna’s room was really like a half-cave with wires dangling out of the roof, I have no idea what it was for, and lots of movie posters. Luna liked movies almost as much as I did, especially movies with Paul Newman. You never met a pair like Butch and The Kid , one poster said, Paul Newman and Robert Redford running and shooting in that browny oldey-timey color. Other posters crowded that one, lapped over it where she’d glued them onto the rock: A Streetcar Named Desire , Super Fly , The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean . That one I saw with Luna; we used to crack each other up saying, all serious and proud, “I am a Bean,” like his daughter does in the film. Maybe you had to be there. The walls were swimming with band posters, too, but nobody you’ve heard of. The Boats, Pissnuts, Jesus and the Iguanas; she saved any flyer any tight-pants kid handed her on the street, and she hadn’t gotten around to gluing them all up. Her place was full of papers like a loose carpet that stuck to her bare feet and came away with charcoal footprints because she never wore shoes in the tunnels. Not the best housekeeper, Luna, especially after she lost Clayton. The cleanest spot was where his box used to be.

Her box was an old hutch lying on its back with a dirty green sleeping bag tucked sloppily into it, and she had a yellowish pillow crammed into a too-small flowered pillowcase that had been bled on and washed a dozen times, but you could see where the blood had been. There was a metal folding chair, we all had those, we had pinched a bunch of them from a Universalist Unitarian church on East 35th Street, but nobody was using it. Cvetko stood while she squatted. She was crying.

“Don’t you get it?” she said. “They’re still doing it.”

She shut up when she saw that I had crawled up her wall.

They both trusted me enough to keep talking, which made me feel good.

“How many?” Cvetko said.

“I don’t know. Maybe six,” she said, wiping runny mascara with the backs of her hands. She sniffled a wet one and said, “She’s gonna kill them, isn’t she?”

Cvetko didn’t say anything.

“Isn’t she?”

“Tell me exactly where it is.”

The Balworth Theater was a little black box in Chelsea that couldn’t make its rent and ended up closed. Nothing unusual about that. What was unusual was that its basement had a tiny half door that opened on a crawl space down with iron rungs drilled into it, and this crawl space led to a section of sewer that led to a boiler room that led to a length of active subway line that, in turn, led to the inactive subway lines, experimental subway lines, and defunct underground workspaces where we lived. The shinbone’s connected to the collarbone, you know? The whole underground’s like that; you can get anywhere in New York without seeing daylight if you’re willing to get dirty. This particular crawl space looked like Prohibition stuff to me, like maybe the building with the theater had been a speakeasy and the customers needed a back door out when the cops came knocking.

We had to wade through some ankle-deep unmentionable stuff in the sewer part, and I remembered Peter and Alfie’s pants cuffs. I opened up the door, Cvets was right behind me, and I crawled in like a cat through a cat door. I remember having this fear like a guillotine blade was going to pop down and cut my head off. But of course it didn’t.

The first thing I saw was the puppet, like a big papier-mâché Humpty Dumpty figure. A couple of painted wooden spears and swords, too, a rack of wigs and shoes. Prop room. Then I realized it wasn’t Humpty Dumpty at all, it was Tweedledum, and there was Tweedledee behind and next to it. A huge Queen of Hearts crown and gown hung up on the wall, too, the wig under the crown all done up like Marie Antoinette. A pair of red ladies’ pumps sat in the middle of the floor, one turned on its side. I could almost hear the actress, one of these waitresses who can’t get commercials and only does plays with five-dollar tickets, plays only other actors go to, yelling Off with her head! to an audience of ten, eight of them friends of the cast. So the last thing they did was Alice in Wonderland . But they left half their shit here. A folding table, a heater, a makeup box. Maybe somebody died? Maybe the place got foreclosed on? Could be that nobody wanted these costumes; they were kind of high-school looking.