Christopher Buehlman - The Lesser Dead

The Hessian.

This is what happens when you fuck with the Hessian.

Old Boy was stalking the Puerto Rican, just walking behind him barefoot with his knife out. How long had he been following him? I almost said it . Gua Gua was an it now. This was one of the worst things I’d ever seen; this guy should have been dead, he should have been dead twice, but here he was moving around, all pink and black and puckered. Coming for Margaret. Coming for us.

“You told him,” he shouted. “You told him we were coming. He was ready ! You’re up there laughing at us, but you’ll get yours, too. I don’t know how, you bitch, but you will. And the last thing you’ll think of is my face.”

I was hypnotized, everyone was. The whole neighborhood crowded on the rise above the tracks, looking down at the shouting thing with three-quarters of a head. But that’s when it hit me. Everybody was here: Ruth, Old Boy, Margaret. This was my chance, but who knew for how long?

Gua Gua was getting close now, feeling his way along and yelling himself hoarse.

Margaret nodded at Old Boy, and Old Boy moved fast. I didn’t watch. I hightailed it back to Margaret’s place; it only took me a few minutes. I flew like the shadow of an airplane; my feet barely touched the ground.

The chain was the first problem; Margaret was strong enough to pull her trapdoor up with a little effort. Me? It took a lot of effort. I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to do it, but I got the image of her finding me here and my heart beat once or twice and I pulled that chain with all I had. Up it came with a groan and a shudder; I hooked the chain so it would stay open. Down I went.

I had never been in here alone before. It struck me again how well put together this vault was. If the Big One fell, it might just be Margaret crawling out of the rubble like a big angry cockroach in a bathrobe. I knew she had other clothes, but she rarely wore them. Where did she even keep her clothes? Probably in the big armoire. It had never occurred to me to wonder what she had stuffed in the cabinets behind the bar or in the honeycombed wine shelves or in the big steamer trunk. The trunk had a lock on it. Was The Codex in there? Or was it near her fur-lined sleeping box behind the bar? I didn’t know how big the book was, I had never seen it. The chest made more sense. But I would need the key.

Just leave, forget it.

Let her kill the kids, they’re sick anyway.

I hated that last thought. I closed my eyes for a second and saw Peter crying, heard him whimpering. The reason Margaret didn’t want us feeding off each other was that it made you care about the one you gave your blood to. It was that simple. Margaret didn’t think it was going to make us weak, she thought it would make us love each other more than her. She was right. I had held Peter’s little white hand while he fed from my wrist and I had done the same for Camilla. Luna did it for Alfie, let him take from her neck while she cradled his head like a mother. Now both of us were in their corner. I wanted to help those kids, and any chance I had of doing that was in that book.

Hurry.

It occurred to me to break the lock, but that was stupid, I couldn’t cover that up. Was it even in the chest? Cvetko would have said to look everywhere else first, or would he? No time. Best guess and go for it. Back to the chest I had no key for.

Margaret had the key.

But Margaret left in a hurry.

The key’s in here!

It sure was. On a ring of three keys hanging on a nail on the wall, next to the narrow door she actually used to get in and out, though nobody but her knew where it led. The trapdoor was just for moving stuff through.

Three keys. I knelt down in front of the cedar chest.

I tried one, too big, it didn’t work.

Hurry.

I tried the second one. Little key.

It worked.

I lifted up the lid.

Yarn? Are you kidding me? I’ve never seen her knit, not once, what does she wear, socks? I guess I have seen her with a scarf once or twice.

Margaret McMannis, the queen of the underworld, at least our mile or two of it, knitted socks. And scarves. Yarn in brown, gray, and blue lay rolled in balls on one end of the upper tray of the trunk, along with a collection of knitting needles, two of them crossed midknit and capped off with pencil erasers. The other end of that tray was filled with money, mostly American fives and ones, but a few pounds, Deutschmarks, and Canadian dollars lay stacked in small but tidy bundles. Coins in a jam jar. A little Japanese figure, like a frog or a dog, I can never tell with that Asian stuff. Rings and earrings stood in tiny rows like Cvetko’s chess pieces, grouped by size and type. I had a moment of confusion where it seemed like I was back in my house in 1933, standing near Margaret’s purse, looking at the gorgon cameo I was about to plant her with to get her canned, starting all of this business for me in the first place. Here I was again, violating her personal property for the second time ever, and if she caught me the consequences would be just as dire. Here’s to Joey Peacock, the boy so nice I killed him twice.

I pulled out that tray (carefully, so carefully) and what do you know, more money. Twenties this time, she must have had fifteen, twenty thousand dollars bricked up with dry, yellowing rubber bands about the same color as her fangs. Her murderous, sharp panther-fangs. I picked up a couple of thin little books, like sketchbooks, and looked under them; a nickel-plated revolver and a box of bullets, another couple of boxes, one locked, but too small for the Bible-sized leather book I was imagining. A crucifix sawn in half, that was weird. Seashells. Seriously, seashells? Did she go down to Coney Island at night and wade out in the water?

Wait a minute, I thought.

I took another look at the sketchbooks, opened the top one up. A watercolor painting, not bad, showed some kind of mountain with a couple of shacks just at sunset, a rusty pickup truck. Really spiky cursive script in pencil next to it, Clayton’s writing; I recognized it because he had left me notes.

Ozarks, 1953, November

Milo and his brother sleep in basements by day beneath the houses of their mother and aunt, who know what they are. The brothers drive by night into Eureka Springs (?) and feed on women they pay for the privilege. “Blood whores” they call them, and at least one of these women also helps them fence stolen jewelry. They make most of their money through theft, as neither of them is particularly good at charming. How much easier their lives would be if they could simply convince people to give them what they wanted, as I am blessed to do. I never would have met them but that I sighted on one of their women. They were too bewildered at meeting another vampire to take

The page after that was missing.

Hurry!

I shut that book and opened another; more paintings, more writing, all Clayton’s. A swamp with a man holding a pot to collect blood from a mule’s neck; six figures standing around, looking down into a hole; an old man in a chair, his pants almost up to his tits and a fedora on his head—I couldn’t see his fangs, but knew he was one of us by the light in his eyes. The writing on that one said:

Arthur, 1922. I should like to know how old Arthur really is, but he will not say. If only I could see him under a strong light; you can tell much from a shadow.

I cracked the third book, carefully, this one was older, and saw a moonlit field of dead and dying men, belly-shot horses all unstrung, a woman bending down to bite the neck of a fellow in a dark blue uniform against a tree. This painting bothered me. There was one word next to it, an Indian-sounding word that started with Chick , like Chicken-sausage , but that wasn’t it. The woman was biting the man but looking at you, as if out through time, through the paper at you. His hand was tangled in her black hair; her free hand cupped his chin like he was her lover. Like she was showing Clayton what she could do. His lover? A woman who picked over battlefields.