Christopher Buehlman - The Lesser Dead

A ghoul, that’s the word for it.

We’re ghouls.

What the fuck was I doing, I had no time to read! I snapped that book shut, put it and the other two under my arm, caught sight of Margaret’s shovel leaning against the wall.

Exactly, now get the fuck out.

The problem of how to get back in here and return the books was one I would have to solve later; now I had another nut to crack. Go out the way I came or take my chances with the narrow door? I might run into her, face-to-face; I might get lost. But I would know how to get back in without pulling up the trap. I would learn something about how Margaret moves around so fast down here. That was something. That was worth the risk. But how to close the trap and still get out? Drop it and jump? Was I fast enough? If I wasn’t, I might get my legs pinched by that monster of a door. I might get pinched in the middle, stuck dying but unable to die until Margaret came home and found me there.

“I am that fast,” I told Margaret’s room. “I am.”

So I put The Codex (es) on the bar and got a good running jump that let me skinny up out of the hole. I looked at the chain on its wall hook, going up to its pulley. How like the mouth of a giant, biting clam the door looked. Fuck it. Two steps and a belly-dive. I could do this.

I grunted and strained as I unhooked the chain and the weight of the door immediately yanked it out of my hands. I moved faster than I ever had before. I moved like the shadow of a plane on the ground. I felt the door nip at the heel of my boot as it closed and I just missed flattening Margaret’s couch as I hit the floor, coming face-to-face with the faded bloodstain from the black Huncher Margaret had brained.

Go, now!

I grabbed the sketchbooks and slipped into the slot of darkness in Margaret’s wall, having no idea where I would come out. There was a story, another Greek story, about a guy in a cave maze with a ball of yarn, looking for a monster with a bull’s head. These guys in stories, running in looking for monsters. I was a monster, but I knew when I was outgunned. If I still did anything like praying, I would have prayed to the god of small places not to meet Margaret McMannis in that tunnel.

“Did you?” Cvetko asked.

“What?” I said, looking at a picture of a dog. It was a German shepherd, watercolored in, sitting on the trunk of a big 1950s car with fins on the back. His tongue hung down like a piece of ham at the deli. This picture was unusual because it was full of daylight. “How did he do this?” I said. “The dog’s not growling or anything, and the sun’s out.”

Cvetko pointed at a faint crease on the opposite page.

“What?”

“Paper clip,” he said. “Photograph.” That kind of deflated me. First, because I had liked the idea of Clayton breaking the rules, walking in the afternoon, making eye contact with a dog without it going apeshit. I always liked dogs, hated having to cross the street to avoid them, hated their barking and trying to bite me as much because I felt rejected by an old friend as by the unwanted attention it always brought. Daisy’s such a nice girl, but she wanted to kill that kid. Must be some kind of creep for sweet little Daisy to act like that. But I also felt deflated because I should have known better. Suns and friendly dogs only existed in photographs, of course that’s how he did this. I wondered if the pooch was on the trunk or if Clayton stuck it there, if there were separate photographs of dog and car. Only one crease. Clayton could work from life, too. It suddenly struck me as unfair that I’d never know if that dog actually sat on that trunk or if it was just something Clayton made up.

Now the kids stole up, all of them like a little pack. All of them but Peter. They gathered around Cvetko like he was Grandpa showing vacation pictures. Which I guess these were. They sure as hell weren’t the medical encyclopedia about being a vampire I’d hoped to find. What was more, and Cvetko didn’t say it, there were pages missing. Lots of them, I think. Did Clayton tear out paintings he wasn’t happy with? Did somebody get to these first and yank out the good stuff?

“I like the look of that dog,” Alfie said. “That’s a good-dog, guard-dog, keep-you-safe.”

“Not me,” said Duncan, shrinking away from The Codex as though even a picture of such a dog might bite, hiding his little hands in the blanket he had taken to carrying even on the hunt. It wasn’t the cleanest blanket in the world.

“You ignored my question,” Cvetko said.

“Which one?”

“The one about our esteemed leader bumping into you in the tunnel. Did she?”

“Oh,” I said, “no.”

“No, I don’t imagine that would have gone well.”

“Turns out her tunnel splits into three. The way I took dumped me out in an air shaft near Penn Station.”

Cvetko looked at the children.

“If I promise to show you some of the pictures in these books later, will you all leave us alone for a little while?”

“If you show us properly,” Sammy said, bending and unbending his small toes against the concrete beneath him. “And not just for a moment to send us away again.”

“I will show you properly, and answer whatever questions I can about them. But first I must speak to Joseph Hiram Peacock.”

Sammy kept looking at him.

“Alone,” Cvetko said.

The little girl walked away, and the rest did, too, Sammy last, looking again over his shoulder, but more at me than Cvetko. I’d have paid ten bucks to know what that little shit was thinking. If he hadn’t gotten his clock stopped, he would have grown up mean and clever. He would have made a good criminal.

“These paintings are quite expressive,” Cvetko said. “I think our Clayton would have been remembered as a notable, if minor, early American painter had he not had the sun stolen from him.”

“Yeah,” I said, “they’re great. But what’s wrong with these kids?”

“I share your disappointment. I was hoping for more insight into our condition. But, really, these are quite pleasant. There was a painter, a countryman of mine, Anton Ažbe, who had the ability to put the soul of the subject into the eyes. His painting of a Negress still haunts me, her gravitas, her eyes. Ažbe knew eyes. I wish I had met him but he died in Munich. This painting, of Clayton’s, Arthur 1922 ”—he traded books and flipped until he found what he wanted—“has much of the same power. Don’t you agree? You don’t know Ažbe, of course; Clayton had none of his training or photographic mastery of detail, but the sense of weariness is perfectly communicated. I suspect our Arthur did not survive long after this was painted.”

“Are you really going on about creaky old commie painters? What are we going to do?”

Now Duncan was at the door.

“Peter needs a bath,” he said. “He needs one.”

“No,” Camilla said, coming up behind him and snatching his hand, hard, making him show his fangs at her.

“But he does ,” Duncan said.

“You’re the stinky one,” she said, and pulled him away, his blanket dragging behind him. I watched them go.

“You’re feeding them, aren’t you?” Cvetko said.

I trust Cvetko, I do. But I was so scared of Margaret finding out I just lied.

“No.”

He looked me in the eyes, tilted down his glasses to do it, smiled at me like my uncle Walt used to. Like he knew I was naughty but it was okay.

“Interesting.”

The next night I woke up starving.

Feeding the munchkins really wore me out. I had to bleed somebody, and I remembered it was Tuesday night. Soap ! Gonzalo! I schlepped through the tunnels till I got to the 23rd Street platform and took it north all the way to the Bakers’ stop. It was beginning to feel like work, keeping up with them, keeping blood in my stomach. All those paintings of Clayton’s had really gotten my wheels turning. Manhattan wasn’t the only place to be a vampire. What was it like out in the Ozarks, wherever those were? Down in Florida? Nah, too sunny. But Vermont, up in the mountains? Virginia? This had possibilities. Not too many people around, just you in a cave or a snowy cabin, creeping down at night to terrorize the villagers like Dracula. That sounded like the life. Except, where would I go to see a movie? What if the girls nearby were ugly, like with moles and country accents? Country accents drive me nuts; so does the music, I can’t even listen to it. Want to chase me out of a room, don’t bother with garlic or a cross, just put some George Jones or Conway Twitty on the jukebox. Not that “Have You Never Been Mellow” is musical genius, but Olivia Newton John (a) is foxy and (b) doesn’t twang. No, I keep an eye out for Kenny Rogers down in the tunnels, I’d love to decorate his life.