But I had to follow somebody. The hunger was on me. And the place was emptying fast; Central Park wasn’t a place where good citizens wanted to get caught after dark.
I left the meadow, looking back over my shoulder as I went. I remembered when that other big, open space, the Great Lawn, was a Hooverville, full of improvised shacks and tents put up by the poorest of the poor during the Depression. Not long after I got turned, I saw a guy cut another guy’s ears off with a razor up there, just cut ’em right the fuck off, said what did he need ears for if he wasn’t going to listen. Kids then played stickball, kids always play, but when they weren’t doing that, they were hunting pigeons and squirrels with slingshots. You know, for dinner. People now bitching about gas rationing and recession have no idea. No fucking idea whatever.
I steered toward the Delacorte, deserted now, but the theater crowd would come in a few months with their rich, winey blood corralling themselves within the limits of the lights, laughing their pretty laughs, the women in their pantsuits, the men in their longish hair and wide ties. But before I could get there, I entered the dripping green little forest of the Ramble, an especially bad place to hang out when the light was failing. On a lucky night, you’d trip over gays gaying it up. On a less lucky night, well, let’s just say the weather’s a little muggy. As if to illustrate this, a pair of nearly skeletal black dudes noticed me; one got up from where he had been squatting beneath the shelter of a branch-hung garbage bag, burning the edges of a plastic orange Frisbee with a lighter, I can’t say why, sometimes there is no why. Sometimes it’s just Frisbee-burning time. “Li’l man, li’l man,” he chanted in a kind of singsong, motioning me to him for what purpose I did not know, flipping the smoking Frisbee in his hand, grinning a big alligatory grin. But then the older fellow that he had been squatting near said, “Butterbean, let him be! He one a’ them.” Butterbean stopped cold and turned around, moved back into the darkness under the bag, saying quietly, I think to me, “I didn’t mean nothin’. I wa’n’t gonna do nothin’.”
One of them? One of them, who? Inquiring minds want to know. I walked toward them.
“Get on outta here!” the older one said. “Go on back to the castle, now, you don’t want us. We dirty.”
Even as he said that, I heard the crunch of a syringe under my shoe. Dirty indeed, and he was talking about his blood. He knew what I was!
“The rest of us are at the castle? Like, the Belvedere Castle?” I said.
“I dunno, just get on. Please.”
“But at the castle?”
“Some nights.”
I stopped. They both visibly relaxed. The older one took a hand out of a pocket.
“Th’ow me that Frisbee.”
WHAT I FOUND IN THE CASTLE
I walked up the steps to the Belvedere Castle, a nineteenth-century fairy-tale castle overlooking the turtle pond and the Delacorte theater. The fairy tale had turned dark, though; the windows were boarded up with plywood and the stonework and doors were blemished everywhere with shitty graffiti tags. The plywood, too. The only ones I could read were MASTER in rain-washed labia pink and Lucky I or 1 in Casper-the-Ghost white.
Stay focused, I thought.
Blood.
I smelled blood.
It wasn’t dark yet, but it would be within the hour, normally my time, but I found myself feeling nervous. I had only met new vampires a few times, and always vampires like me. Were there other kinds? I had heard rumors. Vampires that fly. Vampires that are really insects. But who knows? My rumor policy is keep an open mind but don’t believe until you hear it from somebody who saw firsthand. Someone you trust. Still, I found myself looking up in the sky.
It was raining harder now. I opened my mouth and let the water run in; I blinked my eyes against the drops that fell, watching them make their way down to me from on high. Normally I only saw rain up to streetlight height, but here it came, real and ordinary water falling from higher than I would ever reach.
Stay focused.
I knew what I was doing. I was putting it off. My heart beat once or twice like a rusty old engine trying to turn over, which of course it only really did when I jumper-cabled it to a living heart by feeding.
“Hey, kid.”
I turned and saw a husky negro cop. His overlong mustache wasn’t even. Probably a bachelor, a wife would have told him.
“Get outta there. It’s not safe.”
He was genuinely concerned.
“What’s in there?” I said in my best ten-year-old kiddie voice, pointing at the castle.
“Nothing for you. Now get on home. This is no place for kids.”
Not living kids, I thought.
“Okay,” I said. He watched to make sure I went down the steps, then kept walking.
“Thanks,” I said, making as if to take Transverse out of the park like a good lad. Once I was out of his sight, though, I pulled off my shoes and socks and plastic shin guards and skinnied up the wall of the castle: bad cat, bad rat, dead kid. Actually slipped once because of the rain but caught myself so fast you wouldn’t have noticed if you were watching. I went all the way to the top tower, approached the round window upside down. I peeked in. Just weather equipment, no visible way farther down. I went down a half story to a busted-out slot window, too small for a person but I wasn’t exactly a person. I got small, felt my skull squish flat, my vision went screwy until my head formed up on the other side; then I wrestled one shoulder at a time through, mashed my pelvic bones flat, tore up my shorts and soccer jersey real good. But it took less than five seconds and I was in.
Be so quiet.
The landing up top was littered with clothes: a girl’s green sweater, torn and bloody; a suede hippie coat with a fringe, likewise bloody; two pairs of prescription glasses, one broken; some poor fucker’s fake leg, a purse, two wallets, a Timex, a bloody knit hat, a pack of gum.
Oh fuck, this is for real.
I went down the stairs against the wall, one delicate step at a time.
Easy does it, grasshopper. When you can walk on rice paper and leave no mark, it is time for you to go.
I remembered that Margaret had said we should only report where they were staying so we could come back in force, but I was too damned curious. Plus, I knew I could get back up those stairs and out the window so fast nothing could grab me. None of the other vampires I knew were as fast as me. I would be okay.
Breathing.
I froze. Whoever was breathing was barely breathing, and doing it through his nose. I slid up against the wall and took the rest of the spiral staircase sideways, belly against stone. I took it slow.
When I got to the second floor I saw him. A man, stripped to the waist, bloody to the waist, tied to a metal folding chair, gagged with a knotted bandana. He was barely conscious, heavily charmed and dying. His possessions lay scattered about the room like debris, as if he had exploded: keys, a wallet, a corduroy jacket, broken sunglasses, the other Hush Puppy.
Trace light from the failing day leaked in around the edges of the boards over the windows.
His head lolled.
I debated going over to him, looked at the floor. Stained with blood but not pooled; whatever blood had fallen there had been lapped up. I looked more closely. Bloody footprints, bloody handprints. Small ones. Child-sized.
Rather than add mine to them, I crept across the wall, over the boards on the windows.
* * *
This poor fucker. I crawled closer. It’s hard to stay stuck sideways on a wall with only three limbs, but I reached for his wallet, the contents of which lay pooled half in it as if the wallet had vomited. I saw his driver’s license and plucked it up.
Gary Combs.
A much younger, healthier Gary Combs smiled at me from the photo on the plastic. The guy in the chair looked like his dad, pale as a jellyfish, his neck and wrists brutalized with mult
iple bites that weren’t healing; they had made him too weak to heal. He was shivering. His foot twitched and sent a Fanta grape soda can rolling.
Vampires don’t drink soda. I noticed other cans, a hamburger wrapper, a plastic bucket that smelled like piss and hamburger puke.
They were trying to keep him alive. How long had he been here?
I looked behind me and listened—nobody coming. I stole closer to him, stepping on the wallet and Hush Puppy so not to add my size-eight footprints to the smaller ones on the floor. What should I do? Let him go? He wasn’t going to make it unless he got to a hospital right now, and maybe not even then.
Cvetko would let him go, maybe even take him for help. Cvetko didn’t believe vampires should kill. And certainly not like this. This was nasty. It was like they didn’t care what they were doing, or didn’t know any better.
I started loosening the knot of the bandana so he could maybe breathe a little. It was soaked with drool. And blood. Out of nowhere I realized I was hungry, ravenous even, but feeding off this guy would put him under.
“Gary,” I said.
His eyelids fluttered.
“Mr. Combs.”
He looked at me. White guy, a little funky, had a graying goatee. A professor? Bookstore owner? Something smart. I scanned the floor for glasses, didn’t see any.
He looked at me now, afraid but charmed enough not to panic.
I poured a little charm into a harmless lie.
“You’re going to be okay.”
He didn’t nod. He just accepted the sentence, too tired to agree or disagree.
“Who did this to you?”
Mild surprise filtered through exhaustion. I should know very well who did this to him, his eyes said.
“You.”
“Me?” I said, touching my chest exactly like my mom would have, very Jewish.
“You. Kids. Ghost kids.”
“How many of us are there?”
He smiled and shook his head.
“You’re. Not so bad. Don’t mean it. Can’t help it.”
“How many?”
He looked sad now. Balled up his face to cry.
“Nobody’s . . . feeding.”
“It sure looks like somebody’s feeding.”
He shook his head.
“My bird. Gonzalo.”
“What kind of bird is it?”
That sounded stupid as soon as I said it, making small talk with a dying man in a vampire lair.
“Pretty,” he said.
He shivered really hard.
“Want. Coke,” I heard. I looked around, found a Pepsi can with a little sloshing around in it. I held it to his lips. He shook me off.
“Cold,” he said. “Coat.”
Duh. That’s what he said the first time. Poor bastard’s in shock. I went to get his coat, but couldn’t pick it up because there was something on it. A foot. Attached to a boy. A very cold, very white little boy, dressed up as if for church but wet, and barefoot. And a little bloody.
He stepped off the coat. I picked it up, my rusty old heart fear-beating now. I draped the coat around Gary Combs, who shivered again, but I kept an eye on the boy.
“Have you come to play?” he asked.
I noticed he was holding a folded-up umbrella.
British? A British kid?
He looked to be about eight years old.
Be friendly. Be sweet. They’re dangerous. He won’t be alone.
“Is this how you play?” I asked, nodding back at the expiring Mr. Combs.
“No, silly. It’s how we eat. We’re like you. See?”
He showed me a vicious set of fangs, showed them to me like another kid might show where a grown-up tooth had replaced a baby tooth. Now a little black-haired girl came down the steps behind him, white and quiet as a ghost, her hair wet from the rain.
It was the girl from the subway. Without her makeup.
Get out.
I looked at the boarded-up windows leading to the balcony on this level, assessing whether I could actually bust through the plywood on the first try. I thought maybe I could. The image of Wile E. Coyote leaving a coyote-shaped hole in the plywood came to me and I almost laughed, but I didn’t.
Now she stood a little behind him, taking his hand. Like siblings.
“I can hear your heart,” the boy said. “You’re affrighted.”
“Frightened,” I said.
“Yes,” he said, smiling a little. “I forgot.”
“I think I just want to go.”
“Please don’t,” the girl said, so quietly I barely heard her. “What’s your name?”
“Joey,” I said, without thinking about it.
“Joey,” the boy said in a childish singsong. “I knew a Joey, push-come-shove he ran very slowey.”
“If you didn’t come to play, what did you come for?”
Gary Combs groaned, pissed himself. The boy said, almost absentmindedly, “You were supposed to ask for the bucket.” Then, to me again, “My name’s Peter.” His little white hand came out. We shook. Two cold boys. He was colder.
“He needs a hospital,” I said, indicating the man in the chair.
“What for?” the girl said.
“He’ll die without it.”
“He’s supposed to die,” she said, all innocence.
“No,” I said. “He’s not.”
“He’s just a poppet. It’s what they’re for.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because. The police. They’ll find out and start looking. Eventually they’ll find something.”
“Oh,” she said.
Peter said, “How do you not kill them?”
“Nobody showed you?”
He shook his head. So did she.
She said something so low I couldn’t hear. I leaned closer, still standing awkwardly on shoe and wallet.
“Won’t they come looking if we take him to hospital?”
Smart thing, I thought. What was she, seven?
“Maybe,” I said. “You’ve made a huge mess of this.”
“Sorry,” she said, nudging the boy. “Sorry,” he echoed.
Not as sorry as him.
As I went to look at poor Mr. Combs again, I noticed he had a third child in his lap, another boy. This one in dirty jeans and a Keep on Truckin’ T-shirt. Vaguely Indian looking. The man started muttering to the little creature, and at first I thought he was pleading, but he wasn’t. “I just want you to know it’s okay you’re just kids someone did this to you and you’re just kids just kids pretty kids like Gonzalo pretty bird talks and whistles you’d like my bird.”
The boy petted his hair while he spoke, all the while squirming up his lap, positioning himself closer and closer to the insulted neck. Still petting, he bobbed his head once, gouged his outsized teeth into the man’s neck and drank. A weak jet of blood escaped around the boy’s teeth, made him squint and grunt, and the girl darted forward, licked the drops from the ground.
The first boy, hopping from foot to foot, opened and closed the umbrella, his mouth open in a dumb, hungry smile that showed off his fangs and let fall a runner of drool.
Jesus, they’re animals.
But not as bad as whoever turned them.
That fucker needs to die.
Gary stopped talking. I watched his head drop as slowly as a setting moon, so slowly you almost couldn’t see it happening.
Hungry as I was, I didn’t feed on him.
Not with them.
Not yet.
GONZALO
“So what’s your name, ugly parrot?”
It didn’t say anything, just cocked its head and blinked its huge, smart yellow eye at me.
“Say Gonzalo,” I said. “Gonzalo? Is that you?”
/>
It bobbed its head. Was it nodding? I didn’t think so, they just bob their heads sometimes, right? What the hell do I know about parrots? Why was I here? I looked around Gary Combs’s Chelsea apartment, which was full of all kinds of Japanese and Chinese stuff and heaping shelves full of books and stacks of records. The dominant feature of the room was the cage. It was a big cage.
“Pretty bird,” I said. It scratched its face and stood on one foot.
“I don’t know what I’m doing here,” I said. “I just, I don’t know. Are you hungry? Where’s your food?”
It went back and forth on its wooden bar, clicking and whistling now. It knew what was up. I found a bag of sunflower seeds under the sink and poured some into the feeder. I didn’t know how much to pour. Whatever, it ate, and, while it did, I peeled a magnet of a cockatoo off the fridge and stuck that in my pocket.
I caught my reflection in a mirror, sort of a big tin square thing from Mexico or somewhere. I grinned at myself, stuck my tongue out. My tongue was still bloody, and I had some around the gums. I hadn’t done a great job cleaning myself after biting the man in the park, a big guy I charmed into bending down to hug me. I patted his back in that huggy way while I fed, made sure we were mostly hidden, but just in case I told him, “Sob a little,” and he had. Just a kid hugging his dad, maybe getting over some tragedy. People turn away from a man crying. They’ll watch a woman, but not a man. He was big enough I knew I could take a pint and a half off him, and he’d been okay. Staggered a little, still sobbing, holding his neck. “Put your hand down, stop sobbing,” I had told him, and he had.
The Lesser Dead Page 11
