Christopher Buehlman - The Lesser Dead

Then I saw the writing.

Not very big. Waist high, on a wall that might have once been light brown but had faded to the color of a tobacco stain.

The writing was so small I almost missed it.

Small fingers had painted those letters on the wall. You know what they used for paint. Sure you do. On the wall nearby, dozens of round blotches like polka dots, browny-red but fading, some of them barely there. Like the wall had the measles.

Now Cvetko was in, too. We hadn’t brought Luna or anybody else, just us. A fly, a fat one, drowsy with the cold, came through the open door at the top of the stairs and buzzed around the room making lazy circles. He landed on the letter Y in WAY , his little mouth dabbing down on it like the sucker end of a kid’s toy arrow. Neither one of us said anything. We went up the stairs.

The body sat in in the front row, as if watching a play. Fit young guy, or had been fit, but now he was bled out white, almost as white as the rabbit’s ears that sat on top of his head, though the tip of one of those was bloody. The man’s eyes were gone, just two holes, and it looked weird, looked wrong that he had eyebrows over the holes. His mouth had been stuffed with socks. Vicious little bites cratered his neck, wrists, and inner thighs. Two seats away from him, a bucket. A trail of blood led from the floor in front of him up the raw concrete stairs toward the sound and light room. A bloody handprint on the glass. Grown-up-sized; a crack webbing out from it made me think of Spider-Man.

“Spider-Man,” I said before I could stop myself. It sounded stupid in that room. Cvetko didn’t say anything, just walked up the stairs and looked into the booth. I went behind him. Five more bodies lay in there, half-undressed, but only to get at their arteries. These had their eyes, though. They were stacked. The one on top, an Asian woman, had her eyes open and cut to the door like she’d been waiting for us, like maybe we’d set her loose and tell her she could tidy up and go back out shopping for lychee nuts or whatever she was doing when they got her. And how did they do it? When it was just them? Charm them off a train like the guy on the 6, Come and help us find our mommies? Leave your briefcase, you won’t need it.

Cvetko bent over and picked something up. It was my superball, sticky from the puddle of blood it had been sitting in. Now I understood the blotches on the wall of the prop basement; I closed my eyes and heard the ball thump-thump-thumping, saw Peter and Sammy taking turns catching it, Camilla clomping around in the Queen of Hearts’ shoes, Off with their heads, out with their eyes, make him a rabbit!

“This is bad, Cvetko.”

“Do you think so?” he said, with that tired sarcasm he uses when I say something obvious.

“What do you think?”

“I think we must tell our esteemed mayor that the children are incorrigible, and that they are going to get us found out. And I think we must burn this place.”

I pictured Margaret like the real Queen of Hearts, rather the Queen of Spades, coming down the tunnel with the shovel over her shoulder. Would she do it one at a time, in separate places? Or all lined up, with us holding them down? Old Boy and Ruth would be on board, maybe Cvetko now that he’d seen this. But Luna? Forget it. Billy, too. Baldy and Dominic would say no just to make trouble, take advantage of the rift. And me. Could I do it? I pictured sleepy little Peter, holding up his white hand. Camilla clutching Raggedy Ann and crying. But sleepy Peter. It was like he was sick.

“Cvets, I think something’s wrong with those kids. The way they eat. How hungry they are.”

He looked at me like go on .

“I mean, what if it wasn’t their fault?”

“Intent doesn’t matter when the results carry consequence.”

“Yeah, but what if we could fix it?”

“I am skeptical.”

“But you can’t rule it out. Night fever is a vampire disease. What if there are more of them? A disease might be fixable.”

He considered this. A fly lit briefly on his head, then decided it didn’t like him and flew away. He absentmindedly touched the spot where the fly had been.

“It is possible that some of them are starving despite their feeding, which would explain their carelessness and excess. It is possible such a condition could be reversed. Your argument is sound,” he said. In Cvetko’s world, there was no higher praise. “But, as you noted, we need more information.”

“That book,” I said, “the one Clayton made.”

“ The Codex ,” he said, “may or may not contain answers to this problem.”

“We’ll ask Margaret for it.”

He scoffed.

“This is important, Cvets. She might.”

“She trusts no one with that book.”

“Then we should borrow it.”

“Are you talking about theft?” he said.

“Theft’s when you don’t give it back.”

He nodded slowly.

“Even so, we must burn this place.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess so.”

I didn’t like fire so much. None of us did. We made our way out of the theater, back down to the basement.

Shall we make a rabbit of him?

“And we must remove the door to the sewer, brick up the wall.”

“I don’t know shit about laying bricks.”

“I was, for a short time, a gardener.”

“Figures,” I said.

“I think this place will keep one more day. Tomorrow night. Tonight we get the bricks and mortar.”

“Tonight hell, it’s almost morning.”

“I will place the masonry, you will only be in my way. I can set the fire without assistance, too.”

Fine by me.

“Yeah, but how will you get the bricks? In the daytime?”

“You’re wasting time. Go home. Make sure they’re all there. Make sure they don’t leave.”

“And if they get hungry?”

“Feed them. Or else they will feed themselves.”

Iwas dreaming about a game I was playing with the devil. This was your typical red devil with goat feet, horns, big backward-curving horns like on one of those African antelope things, but not an antelope. I don’t know what the point of the game was; it was like dominoes, which I never played, because we each had stacks of little stones or pieces of ivory, or tiles, definitely square. He had a big pile and I had a little one. He kept rolling dice and every time he rolled, he did something different with his other hand, made some sort of Freemason sign or something. It was fascinating. Only while I looked, with his dice hand he’d steal away another couple of tiles from my pile, then roll again. I realized I wasn’t ever going to get a turn at this rate. Hey! I said, but when I said it, it wasn’t the devil, it was the Hessian. Bigger than death and all dressed up in his Prussian blues. He rolled the dice again, a twelve, then did the thing with his hand and I looked, like a dog at a treat, and there went more of my tiles. I don’t want to play this anymore, I said, and it was the devil again. This pissed him off, so he turned over the table and the tiles poured on me like an avalanche. Only now I was lying next to Margaret in a bed, which was creepy by itself. She looked dead, like Ruth, gray and clammy. I said, “Today’s your death-day,” and I don’t think I told you about that. That’s the day you figure you would have died. I picked January 9, 1999; I would have been eighty, and that’s how long my grandpa Peacock lived. But she said, “You’re coming with me.” And she took a soda straw and shot something up my nose; I thought it was a BB. It hurt. It went up into my sinus, like above my eye.