Christopher Buehlman - The Lesser Dead

Margaret’s hair.

More flowers, mostly red roses, had been laid around us in a circle. Teacups and plastic Slurpee cups full of what looked like red wine sat among a riot of mismatched candles, all burning. My mouth hung open. It hurt. I couldn’t move even my tongue, but I was pretty sure my fangs had been taken out. They wouldn’t grow back unless I got blood, but I wasn’t ever going to get blood again.

A fly flew into my mouth, back out again, landed on my eye.

I couldn’t blink. I wished for it to fly away and, in its own good time, it did.

The kids sat at the bottom of the room, as I had sat so many times communing with Chloë. They sat like a class on a field trip, arranged in a loose horseshoe.

“Are you happy, god of small places?” Peter asked.

“We know Joey isn’t happy, poor Joey, but god-inside-Joey, are you happy?” said Camilla.

“If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands,” Alfie said, quite solemnly, and they all clapped three times hard.

CLAP!

CLAP!

CLAP!

Camilla raised her hands, palms open like a tiny priestess, and said, “Blessed be the tunnels and the staircases going down and the trains that bring us life. Blessed be the mothers and fathers diddling each other so babies might be born and grow and give us life. Blessed be the god of small places.”

CLAP!

CLAP!

CLAP!

“Blessed be Millie, who died the death in Wessex. Blessed be Sammy, who died the death in Manahatta.”

Duncan sobbed at this. Camilla walked over and pinched his cheek so hard she tore it a little, said, “No crying here. Not here.”

“Sorry,” Duncan peeped. She took her place again.

“Blessed be the god of small places.”

CLAP!

CLAP!

CLAP!

Now they all rose at once. Alfie beat a drum and Manu played a little horn and they danced together, wildly, as kids dance, until they got bored with that.

“Now the kiss,” Camilla said. Each of them kissed the others chastely on the lips, little hands holding little cheeks. Then they each, in turn, came up to where we sat.

“Good-bye, Mary,” Camilla said. “Give the god to Joey now.”

“Still funny he calls her Chloë. Joey and Chloë! Ha ha ha!”

That was Manu.

“Not here,” Camilla said, shooting him a look that killed his laughter.

“Good-bye, Joey,” she said, and kissed my cheek tenderly, so tenderly.

They each did this in turn.

My mouth hung open.

Manu took out a Polaroid camera and took a picture of me. The flash blinded me for a moment, but I heard the sound of the camera spitting out my photograph, I heard the flap-flap-flap of Manu shaking it.

“It’s going to be a good one,” he said.

In my head I was screaming DON’T GO DON’T GO DON’T GO but go they did, slipping out of the hole left by the missing bricks in the wall opposite.

NO!

Then I heard a sound that would have made my heart beat if I had enough blood left in me for that. Scraping, but not just any scraping. The scraping of a trowel with wet mortar on bricks. I saw the trowel flashing, saw each brick settle into place. And then they were gone. They left the candles burning. It took about six hours for the last one to burn down. That’s a guess. Without blood, we don’t see in the dark so well anymore.

I had forgotten what real dark looked like.

If you’re the kind of person who believes things are as they seem, and who doesn’t buy it when good things happen at the last minute, then you should stop reading now. It makes sense that I should kick off here, and if you can figure out how I still wrote all this down, or if you don’t really give a shit because you think this is all bullshit anyway, then, yes, stop here.

Everything sucks just as bad as it seems to, no more, no less.

I died slowly, in the dark that has no end, thinking at great length about what a poor show I’d made of my one-song life and its ten-song encore.

Final stop.

Everybody off the train.

This is the real world, right?

Still here, are you?

All right, you sap, let’s go.

So there I was in the dark that had no end, like I said, only it had an end after all. But before the darkness cracked, something metal chip-chip-chipped a chink in the silence and also in the brick wall facing me, and I heard low voices. The smallest bit of light came in then, light from a small flame I think, but whether it was a candle or an oil lamp I couldn’t say. My eyes had dried out enough so everything was blurry; my eyes felt like two blisters. Starving to death is probably never a great way to go, but it really hurts as a vampire.

More bricks came out. A face filled the hole in the masonry, a face bedecked with blind-as-a-mole glasses. George the Jesus-looking carpenter came in and I would have laughed if I could have done anything but stare straight ahead with my matchbook-dry kisser hanging open, I would have laughed myself into a bellyache saying, Hey guys! Jesus saves! No shit, he really saves!

George climbed down with some difficulty, really it was more of a scarcely controlled fall; he was strong in the arms and shoulders but not much in the legs department. After him, I saw the sweetest sight I ever saw—a chump in a suit slipping through the hole, never a guy I thought of as graceful until I saw him follow Blond Jesus’s scuffing, elbow-skinning example.

Cvetko.

No, let me say it more like it sounded in my head:

“Hurry,” he said to himself more than to George, who was slobbering all over himself, and he climbed the wall under me and made his way to the nook I shared with Chloë. He lifted the flowers off me, he undid my hand of cold flesh from hers of cool bone, bit through the twine. He might as well have been lifting a wooden sculpture when he lifted me from the ledge, but he moved my stiff limbs so my arms hooked around him, my face buried in his neck, I was like Pinocchio. He leapt with me, caught us on his strong legs. He was standing with my arms around him, like I was his drunk friend; he bit George and filled his mouth, shotgunning the blood into mine. He did this again and again until George began to wilt, then set us both down and continued. My tongue began to wiggle a little in its bath of warm liquid, my eyes lubricated, I made myself blink a dry, painful blink, and then a smoother one. A tear rolled down my cheek, whether from sheer joy or my eye healing itself I couldn’t say.

When Cvetko thought George couldn’t take any more, he bit his own wrist and drew hard, filling his cheeks again so he looked like a giant chipmunk. He squirted this into my mouth and now I closed my lips, actually swallowed, moved my head a little. You get the idea. He brought me back. Cvetko came back for me and he gave me back my life on a silver platter. He didn’t even kill Blond Jesus doing it, though I think he maybe came close.

I ran my tongue over the sockets where my fangs used to be. Felt little points coming in. I didn’t mean to smile, but I did. Life as a vampire is pretty awful, but it still seems to beat the alternative. For now, at least. I think we all get night fever eventually. Except the kids. Those kids stay kids, keep a sense of wonder and reinvent themselves every day, even if their wonder feeds on cruelty and they reinvent themselves into different kinds of viciousness. That’s what Cvetko thinks, anyway, and Cvetko’s pretty smart.

We talked it all out later, of course. Here’s a snatch of that:

“How did you do it? Save me, I mean.”

“I knew they would take you. I guessed that they would make a little god of you, that they would bleed you and leave you there. It is possible they do that everywhere they go, make sacrifices in thanks for the hunt, make shrines enclosing defeated rivals. I saw photographs among Manu’s things, vampires bedecked with flowers and wearing expressions of bewilderment; vampires who did not appear to have been beheaded or burned or staked with wood; vampires who appeared to have been exsanguinated, which is not a swift death and one which best preserves our remains. I deduced from the ages of the vampires in the photographs that the children preferred their godlings to be pubescent, something between children and adults. Perhaps they imagine you as gateways or conduits to the godhead, as they perceive it. I had seen the remains of the girl you call Chloë and connected her with them, realized they had killed her, taken her fangs, deified her. It seemed likely that they would do the same to you, and, when they turned their attention back to the business of meeting their massive need for blood, I might have a chance to reclaim you.”