Christopher Buehlman - The Lesser Dead

Then I read the note.

Dearest Joseph,

I am writing this letter in some haste, so please forgive me if it is difficult to read. I have deduced the nature of our small friends and I believe our situation is hopeless. Peter, Alfred, and Camilla are quite old, and quite vicious, and they are working with outside assistance. They are coming for us and they mean to kill us and claim these tunnels as their own. I have tried to convince Margaret to flee, but there is more of Boudica than Moses about her, which is to say that she would rather die in her chariot than wander in the wilderness. I have determined to leave these tunnels and would like it very much if you and I should travel together; provided, of course, that your previous statements about finding my company tedious were, as I dearly hope, meant in jest.

I shall return here at midnight for the next three evenings, tonight being 24 March. If you come too late, do not seek me in Manhattan, but let us resolve to enquire after one another wherever we may go. I suggest Boston. If I do not come to meet you here, it means I have died the death.

In that event, please know that I have great affection for you, and that I have tried to serve you in some small way as I would have served my own child had I been blessed with one. I think the closest any of us may come to lasting happiness is in seeing to the needs of others; I think the same may be true for those who go in sunlight, though their lives are so short that many will not discover this in time.

Meet me here, Joey, and I shall take you to my wife.

I have left your fine clothes and your dirty magazines with the girlfriend you thought I never knew about.

I enclose a small gift so you will know my heart in this matter.

All right, I wasn’t the shiniest knife in the drawer, I knew that. I would never be some super-genius egghead like Cvetko; I sucked at crossword puzzles and would have sucked worse at chess, which is why I never bothered. But hanging out with him had rubbed off on me a little bit—I could almost hear him whispering in my ear, Think, Joey, think—what does this mean?

His wife was dead. She died in the war, killed by mixed-up guerrillas who thought he was ratting them out to Italians who were like pint-sized Germans you could actually beat sometimes. Anyway, she was dead. Meet me here and I shall take you to my wife meant I would die . He was telling me to get the hell out of here!

I looked at the white cameo standing out against her coral backdrop. Medusa. I’d put it in Margaret’s purse to get her canned from her job at my house forty-five years before. And she’d kept it, maybe to remind herself of something; not to be in the wrong place, not to trust Jews, who knew? I had no idea how Cvetko got it, maybe he poked around her apartment after she was dead. Anyway, he knew what it meant.

“You’re a poison pill, aren’t you?” I asked it. It didn’t say anything back, just turned and turned, this way, that way.

The walk back to Chloë’s place was one sad-bastard march of doom. I took back alleys and little streets, wending my way toward the anchorage under the Brooklyn Bridge, my head full of grief and shame. They got Cvetko. They got him and tried to use him to get me, but he outsmarted them and warned me, which meant, in a way, that I outsmarted them, too. But they got him. He was probably already finished, and, if not, he would be soon. Do not seek me in Manhattan meant don’t look for him. I looked at how he signed it, noticed he didn’t capitalize the sincerely after Yours . He was serving me as he would his own child. He couldn’t get out, but he bought my ticket out for me. Right under their noses. I could picture Manu reading it out loud for the others, laughing with them while Cvets hung from a pulley waiting for the little asshole queen to whisper Off with his head!

I was still crying when I got to Blond Jesus’s place.

He was pretty nocturnal. I expected to see his lamps blazing, but they were out. Could he have been off getting himself a beer? He liked beer okay, but he did that in the afternoons if at all. It hurts me to confess this, but I did bite him a couple of times, and he wasn’t what you’d call boozy; he didn’t see well enough at night to go too far, either, so his being out would have been weird.

I listened hard, trying to hear sawing or planing or hammering or any other carpenter stuff, but his little brick workshop was all quiet, all still. Too still. All I heard was the endless dragon-hiss of cars on the bridge above.

Why aren’t you working, George?

I stopped.

I looked at the entrance to the pipe that led down to Chloë’s place. If Cvetko and Old Boy had figured out I went there, maybe they had, too. Maybe they were waiting for me. My head told me I was being paranoid. But when I tried to move my feet toward the pipe, they wouldn’t go. What was down there, anyway? A bag of clothes? One last look at my girlfriend? This didn’t feel right, not by half. I walked away, backward, slow and quiet, still keeping an eye on the pipe. Now I turned and started off. Then I heard it. A little huff of disappointment and impatience. The sound a whiny kid makes when he’s told he has to do his homework before he gets to listen to the radio.

“Nff.”

My head snapped back and I looked at the pipe.

Peter’s little blond crown rose out of it.

His eyes shining like cat’s eyes.

I ran.

I’m a good runner, that’s my biggest strength. Unfortunately, they were damned good runners, too. They kept up with me, sometimes gained on me; I made myself go faster, regained what I had lost, but still I couldn’t pull away. It was anybody’s race—if I stumbled, I was theirs; if they lost sight of me for even thirty seconds, I was gone forever. My instinct for the last fifteen years had been to slip underground when threatened, but underground was where they wanted me, so I ran past the manhole covers and ignored the grates, drains, and dark stone mouths that used to mean sanctuary. I ran up 1st Street, made my way to St. Mark’s Place hoping to lose myself there, hoping there would be a crowd. There wasn’t, not much of one anyway, just a couple of punkish guys smoking outside a dive whose name I couldn’t see. They both watched me sprint by; I’m pretty sure my fangs were showing but I was too freaked-out even to close my mouth. I was halfway to 2nd Street when I let myself look behind me, and it must have been some instinct that made me turn my head just then, because here they came. Three of them, anyway. Oh shit, they’re trying to circle me, the other two are going to head me off at the intersection. Now I risked a glance forward. Sure enough, Manu and Duncan turned right onto St. Mark’s, boxing me in. I looked behind me again and saw that the three had slowed down, spreading out now so Camilla was in the middle of the street and one boy was on each sidewalk. Alfie was skipping. Fucking skipping .

I realized the only way out was up or down. Down sounded bad. Down sounded like getting penned in where nobody could see what they did to me, not that that mattered. Witnesses certainly hadn’t helped anything at Union Station.

Anyway, I jumped. I jumped straight up, grabbed the bottom of an iron balcony, and swung myself up like I was doing a sawhorse routine in the urban Olympics. I skittered up the side of the wall, broke through an apartment window, blundered through dark rooms while a woman screamed, knocked a hatstand full of hats out of my way, and went out the back window. Behind me, barely audible, I heard a child coo something comforting and the screaming stopped. I had no time to use the fire escape so I leapt again, back-down to save my legs, hit the hood of a cab, felt the skin over my spine split and a rib or two break, but I got lucky and the spine stayed whole; the cabbie jammed the brakes, so I spun off, found my footing, and sprinted toward 2nd again, blinking away the memory of the cabbie’s startled jellyfish face bluish behind the windshield. No Manu in front of me, he must have gone for the building, but Duncan came running, his mouth open like a kid running giddy down a hill in high summer or sledding through trees in the snow with a belly full of hot cocoa. He loved this. The hunt. I ran at him, took a swimmer’s eyeful behind me, saw Camilla pointing, the crazy-fast scramble of Alfie turning on the gas, but Peter was bent over, holding his stomach. He’s starving. So soon. I slammed into Duncan, grabbed him around the shoulders, went to chuck him out of my way, but he dug his little hands into my forearms. Someone said, “Stop that. You!” and I couldn’t look but knew by his voice it was a cop. I spun with the kid, tried to chuck him, but he held on, almost pulled me down to the ground. “I said stop !” I got an arm away from Duncan just as Alfie and the cop arrived. Duncan now wrapped both arms around my one arm, became deadweight. The cop grabbed my free wrist. I knew what I had to do. I jerked the cop closer; he was a sturdy guy with bushy eyebrows and salt-and-pepper hair cut short. I remember his surprised eyes when he found he couldn’t stop me from bending him down to me. He smelled like English Leather aftershave and licorice, or booze that smelled like licorice. I saw Alfie’s drooling, hungry face loom up, saw his hand flick as he motioned Manu to go farther up the sidewalk and close off 2nd. Duncan now had his legs wrapped around my thigh as if he were climbing a jungle gym; he sank his teeth into my forearm, hooking them behind the bone. Just like they taught him. Christ it hurt. He wasn’t much good as a fighter, not on his own, but he made a hell of an anchor.