Christopher Buehlman - The Lesser Dead

Perhaps these suggestions of Peter Pan and Dracula are too much even for you. You want answers that make sense, but they must be plausible ; if you can’t have justice (and you can’t) you crave at least a pleasing, believable symmetry.

I suggest you accustom yourself to seeing things through a warped glass. I have remained vague about everything, from the entrances to the tunnels leading underground and the layout of those tunnels (try to draw a map from this narrative, I dare you) to my original identity and the patterns of my travel with the children. Even if you worked up the courage to brave Manhattan’s underground, you would, if you were lucky, come during one of our generational absences. If you were unlucky enough to visit while we were there, you would only end up on the end of a pulley awaiting the knife. And you would have to come alone, or nearly so; the mad run in small packs. Nobody sane will believe a word of this narrative to be anything other than fiction, no matter how many disappear.

After all this, you still know nothing of me.

You do not know who I am, when I started, where I come from.

Under every face lies a skull, under the skull, nothing.

All you need to know is that you cannot trust me.

I am only too happy to smile at you, talk philosophy with you, show you my National Geographic s, all the while knowing I’ll be the one to place the last brick in your tomb.

I am pulling off one mask and putting on another.

Ready?

Here goes!

(Farewell, central European dialect.)

In the next city, I’ll be a stylish young man from New York, mad for pussy and always game to watch television.

My accent and word choice’ll be perfect, I just wrote a whole fucking book to get this shit down, and, let me tell you, it’s going to be a lot more fun than playing that old-fart, lapsed-Catholic disgrace-to-vampirism Slovenian I peeled in London. I hated pushing my belly out. I hated having to act reluctant to kill. Truth is, I kinda like peeling fuckers. But, hey, you do what you gotta do when you play a long game, and the new Joseph Hiram Peacock plays a very long game.

I can hear the kids playing in their bath, tossing something, I don’t know what, back and forth between them. I’m going to bury this now, it’ll be fun to read again one day. If you do dig it out, or if some schmuck publishes it, God knows where I’ll be by then, or who.

You might even know me.

Thanks, as always, to my ever-charming agent, Michelle Brower, and to my stalwart editor, Tom Colgan, for their unwavering support in this and previous endeavors. A writer is nothing without readers, and the first to read this manuscript helped it tremendously: Jennifer Schlitt, Naomi Kashinsky, Kelly Cochrane Davis, Chris Holcom, Noelle Burk, Ciara Carinci, Cyrus Rua, and Allison Williams, I am grateful. My old friend Jeff Schiemann deserves a nod for his support, as does Sejal Mehta for an entertaining travel story that made me think more creatively about the troubled relationship between vampires and insects. Thanks also to the MTA’s helpful and personable Carey Stumm, who rewarded my trip to Brooklyn with boxes of archived subway photos and some very practical observations about navigating the tunnels on foot (which, for most of us, is neither legal nor recommended). If you will indulge me a moment more, I would like to name a few of the booksellers who have been especially kind over the last two and a half years: Joe at Austin’s BookPeople, Dan and Stacie at Milwaukee’s Boswell Book Company, John and McKenna at Houston’s Murder by the Book, Ted at Garden District Book Shop in New Orleans, and Bill at the River’s End Bookstore in Oswego, New York, have all made me feel welcome in their stores and have kept my novels running across their shelves. Finally, I want to thank Judy Lagerman at Penguin Group (USA) for the magnificently ghoulish cover design that graces The Lesser Dead ’s first edition. Brava!

THOSE ACROSS THE RIVER

BETWEEN TWO FIRES

THE NECROMANCER’S HOUSE

THE LESSER DEAD

This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

Copyright © 2014 by Christopher Buehlman.

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

BERKLEY® is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.

The “B” design is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.

eBook ISBN: 978-0-698-14632-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Buehlman, Christopher.

The lesser dead / Christopher Buehlman. — Berkley hardcover edition.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-425-27261-9 (hardcover)

1. Vampires—Fiction. 2. Nineteen seventies—Fiction. 3. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3602.U3395L47 2014

813’.6—dc22

2014016672

FIRST EDITION: October 2014

Cover photographs: woman © Joanna Jankowski / Arcangel Images;

abstract texture © Ensuper/Shutterstock.

Cover design by Judith Lagerman.

Endpaper image © sorsillo/iStock.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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