Christopher Buehlman - The Lesser Dead

Billy Bang had disappeared.

Good for him. I mean that. Good for him.

The crowd seethed, unsure what to do now. Some began to snap out of it. A woman screamed, the old woman with the huge purse, but she seemed less like an old woman than like a child who had gotten separated from its parents in a room full of monsters.

“Forget what you saw here,” Peter shouted, his voice carrying throughout the station. All heads turned to him.

“Tell them you just don’t remember what you saw.”

Alfie took Old Boy’s head away from his killer, tore the fangs out with pliers and kept them.

Of course. However the authorities explained this clusterfuck, the explanation was not going to involve vampires.

Camilla told the policeman to shoot himself. He put his gun in his mouth, but hesitated, crying. She stomped his foot and told him to again. He did. His hat flew off. Peter picked it up and put it on.

Duncan saw me now, and said, “Grab him! Bring him here!”

He was drooling, showing me fangs no one else could see.

I ran, up the stairs, over people, out of hell.

He didn’t chase me.

Joseph Hiram Peacock had never been to a foreign city, but that’s what New York looked like to me as I sprinted through her streets. I ran in no particular direction, through the East Village, past the tattoo parlors and record shops in St. Mark’s Place, past seedy bars and into Tompkins Park, then down through Little Italy and into Chinatown where I thought about slipping underground into the tightly packed labyrinth of tunnels used by the Tongs, but Margaret kept us out of those because the Chinese mob still used them, and I kept out of them now because underground didn’t sound so good. So I ran west through Tribeca, then into the warehouses and art lofts of SoHo; I knocked people down, ran over the hoods of taxis, jumped into Dumpsters and hid; I had to keep moving or hide till I found new clothes, I was a mess. But I had an even more pressing need. When I realized I was in SoHo, all the exertion caught up with me and my limbs went cold, the hot hole framed with burning coals opened in my gut; I needed blood. When people get tired, they pant and sweat, they need water and sleep. We need only one thing; all our strength comes from that one thing. Cvetko said it was the life force in blood, the magic in it that kept us alive, since we didn’t have moving parts inside anymore, no circulation, no metabolism, no need to breathe. And where was Cvetko? I immediately felt guilt for leaving him down there, with them. I had the impulse to turn around and look for him; I pictured him hiding underground, touching his face somewhere in total darkness, hoping he wouldn’t see the lights of their awful little eyes coming for him. Probably just like in the war, hiding from Germans, or Italians. Maybe he knew how to survive from the war. But there was nothing practical or savvy about Cvets; I was just making excuses because I was scared. He needed someone to tell him the party was over, help him out of there. You should have seen the state of him when he first came to us from Bushwick because the neighborhood had gone to hell; he was helpless. Like one of those special kids who gets a routine and you’d better not deviate from it. Now the neighborhood had gone to hell for real and everything, but everything had to change.

Whether I was going to find the balls to help Cvets was a problem I would have to work out after I fed. I scanned the windows for one with a light on, found it. It even had a fire escape, not normally a factor, but in my weakened state, sticking to walls wasn’t going to be a picnic. Up I went, using the stairs like a citizen, still cat-quiet. The balcony faced the street, too, so I was going to have to be quick about getting in. I kept my eyes peeled open because when I shut them I saw bad things on the insides of my eyelids. Margaret, Luna, Old Boy. Fuck this whole circus.

It was a war.

We didn’t know it was one until it was too late.

And we lost.

I shook that off, I was starving. I peeped in the window. A woman in an orange raincoat painted a huge, abstract cat in purple oil, a window behind it open on the moon, in the painting I mean, and the yellow on that moon was beautiful. I had seen the real moon through a telescope once, rising, after I was turned so it was very bright to me even though it was still low and yellow, and it was one of the prettiest things I ever saw. This woman, she had the cat, and a table and a teacup, and in the cup, in the tea, the moon shone there, too. It was definitely abstract, definitely what you would call modern art, but it was actually good. Who was this broad, was she in the Guggenheim? Why the raincoat? Was she cold? I touched the glass, felt no warmth in it. I noticed she had rumpled jeans on under the raincoat; I thought maybe she had two pairs on, tucked into the tops of those yellow work boots with the rawhide laces people who like John Denver wear. She breathed out; she had been holding it in, using a tiny brush to put moonlight on a whisker, and I saw her breath puff out. No heat. She was poor. No Guggenheim for her.

She turned around and looked at me then; I think she saw my reflection in the windows opposite. She was maybe fifty, mouse-brown hair, pretty once was my first thought, then I realized she was still pretty. I had just seen such ugly things that this cold loft with its naked brick and bare lightbulbs and a mattress on the floor with a pile of books for a nightstand was beautiful, and she was beautiful for making it that way and keeping it as nice as she could and for not having the heart to throw away the Gerber daisy wilting, already dropping petals from its place in the Coke bottle on the counter by the stove. And she was beautiful for wearing a raincoat with a sweater under it because that was all she had. I didn’t even know I was touching the glass. I didn’t know I was sobbing, either, until she looked at me and I was embarrassed. I was ready to jump because I knew how I looked, that my skin was waxy and dead from hunger and that my hair was dry and dull, that my clothes were bloody, burned, and filthy, hanging off me like I was an accident victim, a bum, and a war refugee rolled into one, which, at this point, I was. I was sure she was going to call the cops, if she even had a phone in this joint. She saw me and froze. Scared, but not for herself, I think. She patted the air twice with her hand like stay there and wiped her brush off, put it in a little jar of cloudy liquid full of brushes. She came over, the light from the bulbs flashing once on glasses that made her look like an owl.

She opened the window.

“Come in,” she said. I hadn’t charmed her, nothing. She just saw me and asked me in. I was still sobbing, so hard I thought I might retch.

“What happened, do you need an ambulance? I don’t have a phone, but my neighbor does, I just heard his door, he’ll be awake.”

I shook my head no. She looked at me more closely. Held the side of her glasses like that was going to help her see some microscopic something she was searching for on my face. Her eyes traveled all over my face. I just sat there, the sobs slowing down. But I couldn’t move. It was like she had charmed me. She put the back of her hand against my cheek, felt how cold I was, then put that same hand under my armpit to make sure. Then she said, “Oh.” She put a finger near my mouth. “May I?” she said, and I didn’t say anything, just sat there. She put her finger under my lip and felt my fangs, like the Wild Kingdom guy feeling around in the mouth of a drugged cat.

“You’re not just cold. You’re starving,” she said.

I nodded my head. I didn’t care that she knew what I was, I wasn’t concerned about how she knew. It was so good to feel safe. But she told me anyway.