The Lesser Dead

by Christopher Buehlman

  “No. By the B . . . by the Beatles. ‘Hey Jude.’”

  “You believe this guy?” he asked me, jabbing a thumb at him and looking at me over his shades. “Man, I ain’t got that many na-na-nas in me tonight, cut me some slack.”

  “Oh,” he said, starting to turn away.

  “Don’t give up so easy, big boy. Just ask for something shorter. Something civilized. And feed the crocodile.” So saying, he used the toe of his cowboy boot to flip the latch and reopen the guitar case, scooting it around to gape at poker visor, who floated a rumpled dollar into it.

  “‘Time in a Bottle’?”

  “Fuck that. You’ll get ‘Bad Bad Leroy Brown’ and like it. And then we’ll go take a walk in the snow.”

  “Walk in the snow,” he said, drooling a little.

  “You comin’, little man?” he said to me.

  “I like the snow,” I said, my stomach rumbling.

  And then poker visor and me listened to Jim Croce’s song about how the big guy doesn’t always win.

  TOWN MEETING

  I won’t bore you with the meeting in its entirety. Just the minutes, maybe, would you like that? Members present: thirteen, I won’t name them all. Ruth. Old Boy. Me and Cvetko, Billy Bang, Luna, Margaret, Baldy, not really bald, just starting to bald when his clock stopped, but that’s got nothing to do with it. His name was Balducci, ex-mob. You know how they say you’re never out of the mob? He was out of the mob. And always attached at the hip was Baldy’s dago friend Dominic. Dominic was younger, real handsome, a flashy dresser like me. But Brooklyn dumb.

  I should tell you about Baldy and Dominic now. Baldy got turned by some hooker (See? Lots of hooker vampires out there, watch yourself!) while he was on business in Philadelphia like eight years ago, came back to New York as soon as he figured out enough to get by. But whoever she was, she didn’t stick around to show him anything. Maybe she didn’t know anything. Dom had been his driver. Dom didn’t know why his friend was so sick and pale, had figured he had gotten whacked and was surprised to see him at all, took him home, put him up in the attic. Dom wanted to tell their associates Baldy was okay, things had heated up a little with the Philly people over the disappearance, but Baldy said no, let him lie low for a while. “And stay with me, Dom. Till I feel better.” But he wasn’t going to feel better till he fed. Which he did, on Dominic, bled him out and backwashed by accident. Bang. New vampire. They knew better than to go to anybody; these dagos aren’t big on turning the other cheek but they do call themselves Catholic and know what a vampire is. They knew they were done aboveground. Then they remembered how sometimes the family moved guns and other stuff under the tracks, so they got the bright idea to move in down here. Only they weren’t the first vampires to think that. Not by a long shot.

  Margaret was in charge then, calling herself the mayor. That she called herself the mayor was kind of a running joke because she had founded this colony, she had charmed the Hunchers into showing her where the best digs were, and she was damned if she was ever moving out of them just because she didn’t shake the right hands. She was our chieftess. She was our queen. Our capo. And if anybody understood how those things worked, it should have been a wise guy.

  Baldy had never seen the inside of her huge, cush apartment, but he had heard how good it was. The mayor’s apartment. He wanted it. It wasn’t long before Baldy asked when there was going to be an election. He did it with Dominic standing near him, at a time when Old Boy was away.

  Margaret jumped him, dragged him down to the tracks, put his head right by the third rail, and he couldn’t do a damned thing. She was stronger. Dominic didn’t know what to do; he saw in her eyes she was perfectly ready to fry them both, Dominic too if he touched either one of them, not that Ruth would have let him.

  “Let’s have an election,” Margaret had shouted in his ear. “Right here, right now. I’m running for mayor of the underground, with full and unquestioned authority over every dead person in the tunnels. Will you vote for me, sir?”

  He couldn’t get any traction. The only thing he could have braced against to try to push back was the rail itself. She was braced against the running rails, and she was just so much stronger.

  “I said. Do. I. Have. Your vote?”

  “Yes.”

  He never openly bucked her again, but you could see he was waiting. That was Baldy and Dominic.

  The rest I’ll get to later, too many names at once is a drag, like, how are you supposed to enjoy the party when everyone’s rushing up to you with a hand out and saying their name? And you’re so busy thinking about how you’re going to say your name you miss half of them, even the foxy chick you’ve already pictured belly-down in a back room getting her bra unsnapped by your fang. Or maybe that’s just me. Oh yeah, minutes.

  Members’ apologies: Sandy. Sandy was only six months into night school, not that there’s really a school, that’s just a term for it. Being it. Sandy wasn’t coping well, prime candidate for sunbathing. We’re not even sure who got her, or why—turning somebody is pretty deliberate unless you’re new at it and fuck up; spit closes wounds, but if you spit in the vein and they die, shazam, which is probably how this went. I mean, who’d want to turn a nice mom-looking woman who worked in programming for WNET down in Newark? That’s the PBS station. I fucked with her once acting like the Count from Sesame Street. “How vell do you see in the dark? How many fingers am I holding up? Vun? Two? Yes! TWO Fingers! HAHAHAHAHA!” I was just trying to cheer her up, but she cried so hard she had a convulsion or something, or thought she was having one, which is what most vampire medical issues are—ghosts of problems we can’t actually have anymore. Anyway, Sandy got freaked-out seeing too many of us in one place, so Billy Bang would swing by later and tell her what happened, down where she slept in her cardboard box because she wasn’t ready enough to accept her situation to commit to a proper freezer, Dumpster, refrigerator, or coffin. She lived in the most remote part of our loops, under a staircase that led to a walled-up doorway, near Malachi. Malachi had a piano down here, used to teach it before; he kept to himself, but you heard him playing jazz sometimes. You won’t hear too much about Malachi, I really didn’t know him. Anyway, Sandy. The only reason she was still making it at all was because Billy would take her out and make her hunt, but she had to adopt a whole different persona to do that. Put on a shitload of lipstick and act like some 1940s movie star. Slowly closed her eyelids and opened them again like a lizard before she’d answer you. No, Sandy was a short-timer and we all knew it, even Billy. So no town meeting for her.

  Right, minutes.

  I forget the date and time, just that it was an hour after sunset and it was cold.

  Item #1: There are weird little pale kids who may or may not be vampires charming people on the cars, probably hunting.

  Discussion: Baldy pointed out that only I had seen them, but then Luna said she thought she had, too. Another vampire, a light-in-the-loafers, always-overdressed strawberry blond named Edgar, spoke up and said that he had definitely seen two such kids approach, charm, and accompany a woman to the platform and away. Edgar lived with a quiet little vampire named Anthony. Three sightings, all on subway cars of different lines, and that was enough for Margaret.

  Action: We would take turns riding the cars in pairs, fanning out to different lines, looking for groups of unescorted children. Upon sighting any, we were to follow them as discreetly as possible so we could see where they were holing up. In the event of trouble, the pair would beat feet back here as soon as they could be sure they weren’t followed.

  “Everybody pick a partner,” Margaret said. I picked Luna, but she picked punked-out Chinchilla, who was turned at eighteen or so. Cvetko picked me, so I picked Cvetko back.

  “When do we start, Mama?” Billy said.

  “Tomorrow night, Mr. Bang. Two hours of riding, then the rest of the night is yours. And you’ll be going with
me.”

  He performed a brief soft-shoe and bow.

  “And please knock off that jigaboo shit,” she said, smiling inscrutably. He smiled back, just as inscrutably. To this day I don’t know much about their relationship, except that I think he got her. Billy Bang got everybody.

  THE SWEETEST GIRL IN NEW YORK

  Well, not everybody. He never got Chloë. Chloë was my secret. I went to see her after the meeting. It wasn’t so easy to get to Chloë’s place; you had to take an abandoned subway tunnel all the way to the Manhattan anchorage of the Brooklyn Bridge. They had all these vaults there, beautiful brick vaults from the 1880s, I swear we forgot how to build nice things. They were nicer than a lot of apartments, only underground, so they were dark and some of them were wet. Hunchers slept in a couple of them; one guy who lived there used his as a carpentry workshop. Made cabinets and tables and stuff; he was the one who made Cvetko’s coffin. I liked that guy. I called him Blond Jesus even though his name was George, because he kind of looked like Jesus, except blond and half-blind, had big, thick glasses. A very accepting guy, like you’d expect Jesus to be. Here’s an example: This guy really was almost blind; he had to get close enough to his work it looked like he was doing it by smell. No power down there; he lit like twenty oil lamps so his place looked like a cathedral. Used oldey-timey tools. His eyes got a little worse every year. He was thirty now, figured he’d be completely blind by forty, but did he cop an attitude about it? No.

  He said his eyesight got him out of the war, and he was really eager to go when the draft board sent for him. Said he was a different person back then, grew up on stories about Mount Curry-botchy or whatever where John Wayne put up the flag on Okinawa. He had been counting the days until he could be a Marine. It broke his heart when the sawbones at the induction station declared him 4-F. He thought he could make it with glasses. His little heart had thrilled every time he saw the evening news and spotted a soldier with glasses, thinking, That’s gonna be me one day! But his eyes were truly bad—even with glasses, he wouldn’t have known Ho Chi Minh from Santa Claus, and Uncle Sam knew it. After he got 4-effed, he was wrecked. But then he had a “holy vision.” He understood that he would have “done bad things, really bad things,” and I had to wonder what he thought those bad things were. I just couldn’t imagine this guy doing stuff Old Boy talked about. I don’t think he would have made it out of basic training, he was so high-strung. And gentle. Weirdly, nervously gentle, like couldn’t stand the idea of hurting a rat, though everybody underground has to hurt some rats sometimes. In any case, in this “holy vision” he understood that he was supposed to do the work of Jesus on the earth and read about the Buddha, that the only way he could get to heaven or enlightenment, either one was fine by him, was by climbing a tower of cabinets and bookshelves that he built with his own sweat and charged fair prices for. Also, he shouldn’t buy the flesh of pigs, though it was all right to eat it if someone gave it to him because it was worse to be rude. Not that people were lining up to hand Blond Jesus pork chops. I know, bugshit crazy, right? But what do you want from a half-blind carpenter who lives in a hobbit hole under the Brooklyn Bridge? You’d have been crazy, too.

  Anyway, I tell you about Jesus-George because he was Chloë’s closest neighbor. Once you got to George’s flickering, lamplit vault and heard him planing away at a long slice of pine, you were almost to Chloë.

  Beautiful Chloë.

  She had a vault in this same anchorage, only it was set off by itself and hidden. You had to get on your hands and knees and slither through a rusty-ass pipe; seriously, you didn’t want to wear nice clothes to see Chloë, but she didn’t care about clothes. Once you were through the pipe, you dropped down a crescent-shaped hole into a kind of brick anteroom facing a wall of newer bricks, like somebody had partitioned a bigger room, which they had. There was a place in the wall, about six feet up, where a couple of bricks didn’t lie flush, and these were loose, you could see them. If you pulled these out, there was just enough space so a skinny guy could crawl in without getting small.

  And that was Chloë’s room.

  Chloë sat up on a sort of bedrock ledge chest height to me, tucked back in kind of a brick recess. She had a dress on, an old dress from the ’30s or ’40s, and a bobby pin stuck through her hair; there was still some hair on her, brown and dusty. Though she was mostly a skeleton. Yeah, it’s fair to say Chloë was a skeleton. She was small, but not a child, not completely. Maybe a teenager. She huddled against the back of the brick alcove and held her bone knees with bone hands that had the nubs of the fingers worn off. There was dried, old blood on the dress. She was missing teeth, too; she only had a few teeth left in her head.

  It seemed to me that Chloë was some kid who got trapped in here and starved. Maybe somebody worked her over at home, maybe her mom found a gentleman friend who knocked her teeth out for her, and she went exploring, found a place to be alone, but couldn’t squeeze back out of the hole she had crawled into. Maybe she was too weak. Maybe she was already starving, who knows? Anyway, there were scratch marks on the walls, lots of them. That’s what made her fingers shorter. Nasty stuff.

  Anyway, I wasn’t the first one to find her. Or to take pity on her. She was crowned with dried flowers, had flowers stuffed in the niche behind her, all around her; it was creepy and sad and beautiful. Sometimes I would get flowers for her, too, walk them all the way from Chinatown or Little Italy with old ladies smiling at me like they knew I was on my way to see a dame, and bring them to her. The only bits of real color in Chloë’s room were the sunflower I had left behind her and the red roses I had gotten her last Valentine’s Day and woven into her head garlands with the drier, brown ones. Mine had dried extra vibrant.

  There were other offerings near her, too, cups and saucers with what looked like dried-up wine, coins, a toy horse from way back in the day. Like maybe whoever else found her loved her as much as I did.

  This was my favorite room in all of the underground; I came here whenever I was sad or lonely or had to think. There was something so beautiful about the way she sat, sort of defeated and yet like she had kept just enough of her dignity. Something like a kid and a young woman at the same time. When I first found her, her mouth had been frozen open like she had been wailing or sobbing when she died. I remember how carefully I closed it. How tenderly. Like this was the closest I was ever going to come to handling a baby. I wished I had known her. I might have saved her. Might have turned her. She might have been my girlfriend.

  Though I never told anyone else about her, I talked to her all the time. About Margaret and about Cvetko, about everything. Even really bad things.

  I got the feeling that the real Chloë was a sweet person through and through. I imagined her walking in Central Park back in the day, when we would have both been little kids, back before the crash, before the Hoovervilles, her daddy holding her hand and me walking with my uncle Walt, our two little groups passing on the sidewalk while a guy blew big soap bubbles and somebody in the distance played the clarinet. Both of us young and healthy and full of possibilities, before she was a corpse and I was a monster. I was sure the two of us in that room together was some of kind of mistake. Like she didn’t deserve what happened to her, like she was something to blame God with, the patron saint of injustice. Maybe I would have married her. She might have made me a better person. The Chloë I liked to imagine probably wouldn’t have wanted me teasing Cvetko. But really I just couldn’t help myself.

  I SHOT A TIGER IN THE ASS

  “I meant to ask you, Cvets, how did the hunting go near Broadway? Did you ease the melancholy of the postmenopausal? Did you play any exciting games of Hearts or Spades? Did you see Frank Langella?”

  This was at the very end of the night, when, above us, all the regular schmucks were fisting the sleep out of their eyes, getting ready to zombie-walk onto their trains and earn their bread.

  Cvetko had his big-ass table lamp go
ing; Baldy had run a line down here stealing power off the grid. Cvets didn’t need a lamp to see any more than I did, but he said it was easier to read. I read just fine without one, but maybe it’s because I got turned younger? Anyway, he was sitting on the floor next to his stack of National Geographics. The one he was reading had a freckly redheaded kid on the front, a Mazola corn oil ad on the back. Besides his groaning-ass shelves of actual books, he probably had forty, fifty issues of National Geographic, plus Life, travel magazines, anything with good photos. I don’t think any sad bastard thing Cvetko did broke my heart like watching him thumb through magazines and stare at pictures of sunny places. He waved away my saucy query and pointed at a picture of Arab guys building something, a boat? No, a house like an upside-down boat, made of reeds. Marsh Arabs, three of them smoking, palm trees splayed in the distance against a white-blue sky that stirred fleeting sense-memories of heat and pain.

  “Tell me, Joseph Hiram Peacock, about the time you went to Al Kabayish.”

  “Al Kabeesh my ass, I’ve barely been out of the boroughs, you know that.”

  He kept talking, still staring at the picture. “No, Joey, that is not how the game works. I say tell me about the time you went to Al Kabayish, or, if that is too obscure, Egypt. And you entertain me with tales of your adventures there. Perhaps you went to a camel market at the foot of the Great Pyramids and haggled a magnificent bargain.”

  “Because I’m a Jew?”

  “You are, if I remember correctly, half Jewish, raised Presbyterian.”

  “My mom’s a Jew, that’s all it takes to get in the club.”

  “I concede the point, even though it is immaterial. Everyone haggles in Egypt, the Arab as well as the Jew.”

  “I still think it was a Jew crack. Did you hear Margaret whip out jigaboo to Billy?”

  He waved that off, never looked up from his magazine, just turned the page. “Or I might say, ‘Tell me, Joseph Peacock, about the time you traveled in India.’”