Christopher Buehlman - The Lesser Dead

The tablet’s on his lap where he sits Indian-legged, hunched like I said as if he’s doing something bad. Which I guess he is. Biting people is bad, right? Even if they’re lonely or crazy enough to give you permission, which, believe it or not, some are. He’s got three or four letters already in their envelopes, red because it’s Valentine’s Day, stamped with identical thirteen-cent Washingtons praying at Valley Forge like holy little old men in miniature. Normally he’d only send about four letters out, but he likes Valentine’s Day so he’ll probably do like ten. Yep, look at all those stamps. He’s not fucking around.

Polaroid’s over. You get it.

“You speak differently than you used to. This word, retarded , I think you say it too much.”

“Just write your retarded letters.”

“You’re always picking up new words and using them too much. I think it is the effect of television.”

“What do you know about television?”

“I know that between the ages of five and fifteen—or perhaps it was sixteen—the average American child will witness, on this television you love so much, the killing of thirteen thousand persons.”

“Where did you get that BS?”

He put his may-I-bite-you love letter carefully aside, walked on his knees in front of his bowed-in-the-middle bookshelf full of egghead books over to one of his stacks of papers, and shuffled in them until he pulled out a mimeographed copy of something. He held it up for me to squint at.

“Oooo, that’s fun. What are you doing reading stuff like that?”

“I read about such things because I am concerned about your habits.”

“What, are you afraid I’ll turn violent? Guess what? I already am violent. And so are you.”

“You’re going to have your brain for a long, long time. I do not think you should rot it with unhealthy habits.”

I looked out the door to his room: a big metal door on a wheeled track. I wanted to go get dressed up for the hunt. Actually, I wanted to shut his door real hard and stomp off to show him how boring he was. But I wasn’t quite that crappy. And he wasn’t done yet.

“You are addicted to the television.”

“Bullshit, Cvetko.”

“You watch it every night.”

“So what?”

“So don’t watch it tonight.”

“I’ll watch if I want to. And I want to.”

“It controls you.”

“No, I just want to.”

“You have no choice.”

I really hated it when he started dad-talking me. He was a little older than me—he was born in like 1890-something, turned when Ike was in office, when he was as old as I should have been this particular Valentine’s Day. But I had been a vampire longer. Doesn’t that count for something?

“Fine. I won’t watch television tonight.”

“Do you promise?”

“Sure. If you let me read one of these.”

I snatched his letter off the floor.

It made him uncomfortable, but he didn’t try to stop me.

I held it up and read from it like a beatnik poet.

“‘Dear Mrs. Greengrass.’”

(Really?)

“‘Although you do not know me, I hope that you will forgive me for saying that I have for some time now been impressed from afar by your charm and bearing. It is evident to me that you emigrated here from the British Isles; I gather this less from your accent (Buckinghamshire?) than from the old-world discipline you show in taking your nightly walks and the grace with which you…’”

He just blinked at me, smiling nervously. I could see the tip of one fang.

“So when do you get to the ‘would it bother you ever so much, Mrs. Greengrass, if I poked holes in your jugular vein and sucked black heart’s blood out?’ part? And what is she, like ninety?”

“Eighty-five. And I will not admit to vampirism in the letter; I will only hint at it. I will tell her that if she wants an early-morning visitor, she need only close a handkerchief in her window so it is visible from the sidewalk. We will talk about the world outside her neighborhood, and about times others are too young to remember. The specific language in the letter will make her understand on a subconscious level that this is a supernatural opportunity.”

“This is really creepy stuff, Cvets. Like heavy-breather-on-the-telephone stuff. I don’t see why any of them do it.”

“There comes a time when loneliness is stronger than fear.”

“Well, that’s depressing.”

He nodded.

“Which is why sometimes they let me finish it.”

“Even more depressing.”

“They ask me to.”

Now I nodded. I had had that happen, too.

A kid. Just a sick Greek girl in Astoria whose parents were going to the poorhouse taking care of her. Polio. Wouldn’t let me pull my face away from her neck. Held her weak hands on the back of my head, saying, “Take me away, take me out of here.”

I took the part of her I could.

Joseph Hiram Peacock, angel of Passover.

We don’t kill often. Vampires that do kill we call “peelers.” If you peel somebody and it gets in the paper, you get a talking-to. If you do it again, Margaret gets some of us together and comes for your head, or farms it out to the Latin Hearts under Alphabet City. They’re all pretty new; Margaret turned one like ten years ago, then he turned his friends and family. The Hearts were a gang before and they stayed a gang. Smart of Margaret; you weren’t supposed to go turning more than one every ten years or so, but her one multiplied. Now their leader, Mapache, was loyal to Margaret and they were all loyal to him. Instant muscle. There were less of them than us, like five, but they were good at offing vampires, they had machetes just for that. I think they liked it. But even they didn’t fuck with Margaret. She used a shovel. And she had Old Boy. More about him soon.

Peeling was stupid anyway, though. It was better for everybody if we just took what we needed and made them forget. They were cattle, but you took milk, not meat, or the herd might stampede.

Cvetko hated when we did a peeler, which had only been twice for us, and once for the Latins. No, twice for them, too. Killing bothered Cvetko in general, though.

“Promise me you won’t watch television tonight.”

“Fine,” I said, “I promise.”

Imeant it when I said it, but not an hour later I broke my word.

“Took my time? I’m standing on a ledge in a rainstorm and I took my time. What was I supposed to do? Jump down thirty-eight floors on a messenger to stop him?”

That was Eunice.

Eunice was indeed standing on a ledge, Eunice and ledge contained in the frame of the luxurious console television that dominated this modern and well-appointed living room.

“My luck, you’d miss,” Walter said.

This was on Soap , which I love. Nine thirty P.M. every Tuesday, A and the B and the C. If I was really going to break myself from the tube, and I wasn’t, it would have to be on some weekday other than a Tuesday.

I was lying back on the couch, holding Mrs. Baker’s arm in my lap, a sort of ugly orange-and-brown knitted couch cover under her arm because her wrist was bleeding and I didn’t want to get it on my faded bell-bottoms. I held the wrist up every once in a while to drink from it, wiping my lips with a paper towel. I’d had quite a bit from her already; she was looking a little peaked, although everybody looks peaked with that blue television light washing over them. Her head was lolling a bit and she had the drool-strand you always saw on the chins of the heavily charmed. All three of the Bakers were in la-la land, hardly aware of my presence, completely unaware of the context, ready to forget me the second I slipped out their window. At the commercial I’d change seats and start working on Mr. Baker, and when he was good and sponged, I’d bite the fat, surly preteen boy with all the football posters in his room. Even charmed, he was a pain in the ass.