The Lesser Dead

by Christopher Buehlman

  I love long hair, if it’s clean. I don’t have long hair myself because it makes it too hard to pass as a kid, and little-lost-soccer-boy is my favorite disguise. Just after sunset I dress out down in the subway, slip my little plastic shin guards under my knee socks, carry cleats in my free hand, and then it’s I got separated from my mom and dad, help me find their hotel across the park. Works like a charm. I could pass as a little girl, but damned if I’m wearing a dress.

  I’m open-minded, but not gay.

  ROBERT PLANT AND THE MEXICAN CHICK

  Except I am a little gay for Robert Plant.

  I saw Led Zeppelin at Madison Square Garden a year or so ago, maybe four or five years, it goes so quick now. Anyway, I was really close to the stage, and there he was. Robert Plant. Long and lean, golden-curled like a woman but wolfy, his hairy belly snug in his jeans, the bacony smell of marijuana warm and close around me (when I remembered to breathe—I forgot for a good half an hour; I know I didn’t breathe at all during “No Quarter,” and that song went on so long three pearl divers in a row would have died. Plant was right at the peak, as good as he was ever going to get, nowhere to go but gray and fat, and that happens fast. I thought about turning him just to preserve that, the that that was Robert fucking Plant in 1970-whatever, but of course vampirism would kill his career, turn him into a talented bum like Billy Bang. More about him later. The undead don’t care about careers. Vampires are all retirees, happy enough to bend your ear about what they used to do, but their only passion is for a dark, warm liquid, and the only thing that satisfies them to the bones is getting more. It’s worse than heroin, believe me, and I’ve seen plenty of junkies.

  But just thinking about sticking my nose in that big, honey-colored shag of hair on Robert Plant made me pop a boner. A really hard, uncomfortable one, and in my tight jeans, too. I tried to pretend it was for the foxy, spaced-out Mexican girl hip-grinding near me in her midriff shirt and turquoise rings, slinky and stinking of patchouli, but no dice. My dead pecker was hard for Robert Plant. I thought about leaving because I don’t think of myself that way, nothing against the gays, but Joseph Hiram Peacock is all about the trim. No way could I leave that concert. It was too good. I love the shit out of Robert Plant.

  I wanted to try to get backstage, but even if I did, what was I going to do? Bite him? Wave my boner at him? Get him to sign it? When the music was finally done and everyone heaved for the exits, I saw the Mexican girl shouldering her way through the crowd with her friend, a helplessly ordinary brown-haired waitress type with glow-in-the-dark blue eye shadow. That was where my night was going. I followed them out.

  Down into the subway, which I think of as my front porch (yes, the whole thing) and all the way to the East Village via Union Square. Blue eye shadow lived there, above a rock-and-roll bar, and I was afraid my new girlfriend would go up with her, but she didn’t. She kept going, past Tompkins Park, all the way to grimey, crimey Alphabet City, and I followed her, thinking, Don’t take a cab don’t take a cab don’t take a cab, I’ll protect you.

  I saw her go into a moldy-looking brownstone with a big bloodshot eye spray-painted on the side along with a jungle of names and letters in all colors. Bottles in paper sacks in the alley, an egg carton, a warped shopping cart turned over and shot through with weeds. Third-floor light came on, backlighting a balconeta with a little garden of potted plants. I skinnied up the brick wall and tapped on the glass. She let me in. They always let me in. It helps that I was turned when I was fourteen, baby face, big blue eyes, thank God I was mostly through puberty. My voice can go either way, which is useful, I’ve trained it. Before all this started, I had only ever met one little-boy vampire with a permanently high voice, and he made me uncomfortable. I have always felt that whoever turns anyone less than thirteen needs to be taken sunbathing.

  So there I was on her third-floor iron balcony, the smell of the iron making me horny for blood, smiling at her where she peeped around the curtain and saying, “You need to water your coriander,” through a cracked pane. She understood the third time and smiled back and absolutely should not have opened the French door but did. I mean, there wasn’t a fire escape on that side, how did I get up there?

  People don’t think when they see something they like.

  And we’re all hypnotists anyway, vampires I mean. We get what we want.

  So she cracked the door of her own free will and that was all the invitation I needed. In came my little white hand, pushing the curtain aside, pushing her back, but playfully. Not really, but it seemed like it to her because I was smiling. Her cat was the smartest thing in the room. He didn’t like me. He didn’t scream and shit himself like they do sometimes, but he decided now was a great time to go in the closet, up on the towels. Fine by me, kitty. Stay out of my way.

  “Do you want tea?” she said. Did I want tea! “It’s chamomile. I just put the water on.” Trace of an accent, like she came to America when she was eleven or twelve. “Or I’ve got beer.” The thought of beer in my empty, black stomach made my empty, black stomach turn. I hadn’t fed in days and it was getting urgent. So I charmed her hard.

  “My earlobe tastes like cinnamon.”

  “Mentiroso,” she said, glass-eyed, her lips staying open after the final o. I always remembered that word. I asked Cvetko about it years later and he said, “That means ‘liar,’” which is about what I guessed. Cvetko was Slovenian, spoke like eight languages and read even more, but I’ll get to him in a minute.

  “You don’t have to take my word for it,” I said, so she leaned in, openmouthed, and I saw her teeth. Dark fillings in the back ones. And she never had braces; her bottom teeth formed a kind of slack W and she had tiny crooked canines sharper than normal. Not sharp like mine, and certainly not as long, but she couldn’t see mine because I was charming her not to. You can’t see a vampire’s fangs unless he wants you to, or unless something startles him good, but it’s got to be something big. Terrifying. Then all those unconscious charms go right out the window and you see him just as he is, which isn’t so pretty, especially as we get older. But you know what we don’t do unconsciously? Blink. When we’re around you guys, we have to remember to blink, another reason we like sunglasses.

  The Mexican fox leaned close, first sucking then sharply nibbling my earlobe. She giggled and said, “Canela,” licking her lips, and now it was my turn. I tasted her earlobes and she shivered. Then she wrinkled her nose. Goddamn it, I had forgotten to breathe on the way here so now my breath smelled like a dead dog in a Dumpster. I poured on the charm.

  “My breath smells like cinnamon, too.”

  She unwrinkled her nose and smiled, nodding in agreement, a little bit of drool falling from the corner of her mouth. I was drooling, too, but not because I’d been charmed slack-jawed. I was getting ravenous. I licked her neck. Just once. It was rank with psilocybin, bitter with patchouli, but the salt shone through it all like a nickel in a mud puddle. I got hard again, glad Robert Plant had nothing to do with it. Her jugular vein pulsed delicately, but I was feeling naughtier than that.

  “Take your jeans down,” I said.

  She raised one eyebrow. I like people who can do that; I taught myself how when I was a kid, before all this.

  “Take your jeans and panties down,” I commanded. She drooled and complied.

  She was hairy, but had shaved her thighs at least. Not that I minded hair. Cvetko hated hair. I’ll get to Cvetko.

  Now I put my nose in the corner where her leg met her hip, Christ-awfully aware of the mother lode of dark, soupy blood coursing in her femoral artery. I licked there, just at the juncture. She moaned a little, then tried to maneuver my head so I could lick her slit. Normally I might have, but I was too hungry. I scratched her thigh with the pricks of my fangs, noticed her cat looking at me from its perch on the towels. Keeping eye contact with the cat, I jammed my fangs into the femoral. The blood jetted around my teeth, flooded m
y mouth, hot and ambrosial, and now I moaned. My hand was spidered flat on her belly, the tip of my ring finger in her navel. She squealed and squirmed while I drank. She came, I think. I made myself stop at what felt like a pint, took care not to backwash in her. Not that I thought she was going to die—death plus backwash equals new vampire. A pint isn’t going to kill anybody, just ask the Red Cross.

  I pulled out. Her body jerked. Her teakettle sang. I pulled off my shoe and sock, stuck the sock on her bite wound, put her hand on top of the bite, then closed her legs around that. She was sleeping already, which was normal. Tomorrow there wouldn’t even be any holes, they close up fast if you’re healthy, but there would be bruising.

  I went into the kitchen, turned the stove off, and moved the kettle. Damn it, I was still hungry. In a spasm of poor timing, the cat hissed at me. Fine. I grabbed the little beast, flipped it over (ignoring its flurry of claws—the scratches were shallow, healed almost as fast as kitty made them), and sank my teeth into its belly, stabbing for the big vein there. Cat blood isn’t great, but it does the job. I only meant to take a swallow, but I took more and the cat shuddered and became an ex-cat. “Oh, hell,” I said. The girl didn’t deserve to wake up to a sore crotch, a hangover, and a dead cat. I kissed her temple, holding the cat behind my back, and was just about to make my way out the French doors. I remembered my shoe, put that on sockless, and jumped down all three floors to the dirty street. Left the doors open to support the runaway cat theory.

  I walked all the way to Murray Hill with the cat under my jacket before I broke the window of a Buick Centurion and flung it in the passenger seat. Funny that I remember the car but not her name. Was it Yasmina? Did I fuck her around the hand holding the sock to her bite wound, leaving her full of my lukewarm, dead seed?

  You would have sex with me if I weren’t charming you, right? You saw me and thought I was sexy, I might have said.

  I thought you were sexy, she might have slurred back. Or maybe I’m remembering other girls, other nights. I’m not sure. Probably did get with Yasmina, Violeta, Rosa, whatever her name was. Feeding makes you a little drunk and you forget things.

  God, she was pretty. I think of her when I hear Led Zeppelin, her face, yes, but mostly the blood in her thigh. And the high-in-the-nose tang of her sweat.

  And the teakettle.

  CVETKO

  Whatever year the Zeppelin concert was, forget that.

  This is about what happened in 1978.

  It started on Valentine’s Day, a couple of weeks after the blizzard.

  It was cold enough to make a polar bear put on wool underwear and Cvetko had red envelopes for his letters. I’ll get to the letters in a minute, but now it’s time for me to try to describe the charmless but endearing calamity that was Cvetko.

  Imagine a friend of your parents, someone you knew as a kid, that person from before you were born who came over sometimes and sat around with your dad and mom drinking a little, not too much, talking about the most boring shit in the world and there’s no such thing as a radio or TV yet but you have to sit there and not fidget while he goes on and on laughing at his own lame jokes, pushing his glasses up with the wrong finger, not exactly “old” yet but already has that old-man smell like socks and wood and some shaving cream they don’t make anymore. And everybody listens to him because he’s actually very nice, would loan you money or help you move before you asked him to, one of those guys, but he just doesn’t understand that nobody cares about a picnic he took on a mountain in Yugoslavia in 1925 or whether Father Jumping-Jesus sounded nasal after Mass and we all hope he doesn’t catch a cold.

  Cvetko was Yugoslavian, but he would point a finger up at the ceiling and tilt his head and insist that he was Slovenian. Not much of an accent; to give the guy credit, he had a gift for languages. Once, when God still rode a tricycle, he taught linguistics in that Yugoslavian city that sounds like “lube job.”

  He came to the loops only two years before, and Margaret didn’t want him at first; Margaret didn’t want anybody at first, she was not the trusting type. But this poor schmuck. He’d seen some nasty stuff in World War II, lost his family, two boys and a girl. Fucking Nazis. He wasn’t a Jew or anything, he was as Catholic as they came, but he didn’t sign on with their program. And he says it wasn’t actually the Germans that killed his family, it was the Italians, who were allied with Germany then. Except it wasn’t actually the Italians who destroyed his house, though it was their fault. Because it was the guys who fought the Germans but got their ass kicked and came south to fight the Italians instead because Italians were pussies, at least next to the Germans, but these partisan guys had bad information and blew up Cvetko’s house because they confused him with another professor who had ratted them out, and they didn’t like him anyway because he wasn’t a commie like half of them were, though he says he is kind of a socialist.

  Who can follow all that shit, right?

  Anyway, he ended up coming to America after the war, right here to New York City, but couldn’t get a job in a university because, and this is the ironic part, they thought he was a commie. Not commie enough for the freedom fighters of Lube Job, too commie for Columbia University. So he ended up teaching in a Catholic high school in Park Slope, living in Bedford-Stuyvesant, riding his bicycle back and forth like a schmuck. The vampire who got him knocked him off his bike, got him under an el. Never taught him anything, he had to figure it out. He’s smart like that, though.

  Figured out he should move away somewhere his nocturnal hours wouldn’t raise eyebrows, hole up in a place that had a basement. He picked Bushwick because it was quiet and he could afford it, told people he was working at the navy yard. Then the navy yard closed and it wasn’t quiet anymore. Twenty years go by fast when you’re dead. Now it was 1975. The neighborhood fell apart around his ears; all the blacks and Puerto Ricans were setting fires, burning down buildings. The white people who owned the buildings were playing with matches, too. No shit. Arson to collect insurance, arson to evict deadbeat tenants and collect insurance. Arson as pure mischief when you’re a ghetto kid. Low water pressure in the summer because the kids are out opening hydrants to cool off, plus Ford told us to drop dead so we fired half the cops and firemen. In short, lots and lots of arson. One thing vampires don’t like is fire. So here came Cvetko, into Manhattan, got himself a shithole in the Bowery, but he was already thinking about moving underground when he saw one of us. Ruth, to be specific. Followed her. Asked about her situation, was told he should talk to Margaret. He did. It went okay. He moved in temporarily at the 18th Street station, which is abandoned. That’s where vampires on probation go.

  He didn’t stay on probation long. Margaret had a soft spot for another former Catholic, plus she rapidly figured out that he was smart, if bland. Really bland. Human oatmeal. I took him on as my neighbor half out of pity. You’d pity him, too.

  Here’s Cvetko in a Polaroid:

  Picture a guy about sixty, wearing a suit. He’s one of those squares that’s always wearing a suit. A sad little potbelly on him, not a big one, but you feel bad for him carrying that around forever—you’re pretty much stuck with what you’ve got when your clock stops. Mostly gray hair going white at the temples, horn-rimmed glasses on crooked, smiling nervously at you even though you just said something mean to him. Familiar but forgettable face, like you’d seen him before, but then, not five minutes after talking to him, all you remember is that he had boring glasses and he was boring.

  “You know what it is, writing letters to people you’re going to bite, asking them if it’s okay? Retarded, that’s what. It’s retarded, Cvetko.”

  In this imaginary Polaroid, he’s hunched over a letter he’s writing with one of those pens you push down different buttons to make different colors. He’s writing in blue. On a tablet with that guide paper behind it so you don’t curl up with your sentences at the end, which is what I do. But I write on lined paper when I
write, which is never, because typewriters are much more my style.

  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.”