The Lesser Dead

by Christopher Buehlman

  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?

  DISNEYLAND

  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:

  CVETKO!!!!!!

  “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.”

  “How old are they, Cvets? Really?”

  “From what you’ve told me, perhaps a thousand years, perhaps twelve hundred. The siblings, that is to say. They are the oldest. They may be among the oldest living beings outside the plant kingdom. I believe them to be Saxons. I once caught them talking privately, thought I heard Old English, the language of Beowulf, but I simply couldn’t believe that. I convinced myself I had heard a German dialect and they were careful never to speak their true language in my presence again. Had I only let myself believe it sooner, I might have known how lethal they were.”

  I asked him how he stayed hidden from them, yet close enough to come find me when the time was right. He showed me his hand. I didn’t get it. He sighed and pointed at the ring on his pinky, the ring his wife gave him. I got it then, and I was proud of myself for getting it. He fetched it out of the East River. He hid down there. Just like Clayton had said vampires could, even though we don’t like the water. He hid in a sunken car, not breathing, safe from sunlight, getting fucked with by eels. You can’t sleep like that, but you can sure as hell hide until sunset and get a fresh start.

  “And that’s where I figured out how they crossed,” he said.

  “Crossed?”

  “The Atlantic.”

  “They flew.”

  “Do you really imagine creatures so old and canny would suffer the risks of discovery and exposure inherent in a transatlantic flight? Even on the Concorde, they could not be guaranteed to avoid delay, emergency landing, the possibility of being expected to cross a sunlit tarmac.”

  “They had a ticket! I saw it.”

  “You saw the corner of a ticket. Did you read it?”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Exactly. Neither did I.”

  “But what boat?”

  * * *

  Now you have to read a little bit of a Post article.

  I apologize.

  It’s from February 1978, just about the time all of this started.

  HELL YACHT BURNS NEAR MANHATTAN

  The hulk of a luxury yacht suspected of shuttling sex slaves from Europe or North Africa to the United States was pulled from the Lower Bay on Monday.

  The Étoile Mordante, a 120-foot luxury yacht registered in Antibes, France, had recently arrived in New Jersey following a journey across the Atlantic from Plymouth, UK, via the Azores and Bermuda.

  The yacht, a multimillion-dollar dream ship outfitted with a Jacuzzi and capable of sleeping 15 passengers, had been transformed into a hellish seagoing dungeon, complete with restraints, padlocked doors, and buckets full of human waste. After mooring at the Sandy Hook Yacht Club for several weeks, the Étoile Mordante made its final voyage in the wee hours of the morning, where it was burned
and scuttled, apparently by members of its own crew, sinking in minutes. The remains of nine individuals have been recovered, including five of the original seven crew members, two missing residents of Bermuda, and a Canadian commercial actress who disappeared while vacationing in the city of Hamilton on Bermuda’s main island.

  One of the Étoile’s two dinghies was recovered at Battery Park, and a search is under way. The two missing crew members, James Kant, 28, and William McWhirter, 40, are wanted in the investigation, although neither individual has a criminal history and no motive seems apparent.

  The superyacht’s owner, children’s clothing magnate Henri Marceau, 49, was last seen in Plymouth and remains unaccounted for. Authorities will not comment on the possibility that other perpetrators may have been involved, but an unnamed source with experience in modern piracy speculates that the Étoile Mordante may have run afoul of baddies based in the troubled nation of Mauritania, where slavery remains legal. Increasingly daring groups have been operating near the Canary Islands and striking as far north as the Azores.

  Why seagoing criminals might come to our shores cannot be known, but some theorize that increasing lawlessness and the growth of the Manhattan sex trade could be providing opportunities for foreign traffickers who may not have been so bold in better times.

  Mayor Koch, in a public statement issued yesterday, said, “No effort will be spared to locate the individuals responsible for the brutalities committed on this unfortunate vessel.” But with the hiring freeze stripping officers from all five boroughs, many believe that the arrival of this gruesome ship is only a sign of things to come.

  Continued on page 3

  So they started in England. And now they were here.

  “We have to tell somebody.”

  Cvetko just looked at me.

  “What are we going to do about them?” I said.

  He didn’t speak.

  He said nothing because nothing was the answer.

  Nothing was all we were holding, and that was exactly what we did.

  * * *

  There’s no point in rolling out the rest of the story in detail because it got easier, and easy is boring. I went with Cvetko to Boston, where we met a new group of vampires; they owned apartments in Brookline, actually rented to vampires specifically. Regular people, too, but there were secret tunnels between rooms and in the walls so those regular people had regular visitors of the nocturnal variety. Visitors who owned the place and didn’t have to be invited in. Everyone in that building looked a little peaked, if you know what I’m saying, but rent was cheap. We stayed there for six months or so, long enough, as it turned out, for God to kill a couple of popes, and you should have seen once-was-Catholic Cvetko hunched over the radio, grinning like a baby over the new pope’s speeches from the Vatican, except when he grimaced because he wasn’t satisfied with the translations.

  We went our separate ways in the spring; it’s okay, I know where he lives, he even has a phone now. But I had to leave.

  Because I met somebody.

  And by somebody I mean a vampire. Her name doesn’t matter. Her specific looks are unimportant but she should be beautiful in your mind’s-eye pinup. She should look as good in a summer dress as in a man’s button-down shirt, she should know how to take off a tie, and she should look fucking adorable trying to put one on. She might not look so good in a bikini, not in strong light, but you never see her in strong light. As to her actual age, let’s make her old enough to know how to get by but not some ancient thing that looks at even other vampires as house pets. Roughly my age, in other words. Let’s turn her someplace interesting, maybe in Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl, let’s put her on a bus with her mean-ass mama praying next to her while red sand blows against the window. Let’s have that bus stop and pick somebody up at night, a guy who wears his hat brim down.

  Wherever it happened, she was turned young like me, like Chloë; adolescent, mature enough to express sexuality, but not so mature that you should dwell on that if you’re not adolescent yourself. With just a thimbleful of charm she could pass for ten or twenty-two. And she had a car, let’s make it a 1974 Buick Centurion, big enough for two people who aren’t afraid of small places to sleep in the trunk. Small is all right. I had been the god of small places, after all, if only for a night and a day. It was easy to get across the country in a car like that, with a girl like that. Nobody suspects couples. And she taught me things. I learned to drive without running over people, for example. I learned to look down and to the right when headlights came, blinding as they were to us. I learned how to feed on the road. It was easy to follow a guy up to the restroom of a gas station, getting as close to him as his shadow, laying your hand over his while he turns the key on the end of its log or soup ladle or whatever, enthralling him Venus-flytrap fast when he turns surprised eyes on you. It was easy to hunt in motels on Route 66 with bugs circling the outside lights and clerks drowsing before black-and-white countertop televisions, bored teenagers kicking their feet in the shallow end of the pool in the last hour before they switch the pool light off. Turns out I like pool lights.

  Turns out I like California.

  Are you ready?

  Here comes your happy ending.

  Mostly happy, anyway. Not so happy for New York City, which we left in the custody of monsters, but I’m not even sure they were the worst monsters in that city. Either way, the suffering of others is easy enough to endure when it happens in the rearview mirror. If you’re like most Americans, the kind of person who likes to believe in the world as it should be, in redemption and the triumph of the familiar over that which is strange or foreign, then put this story down after you read the rest of this page. Watch a game show, watch screaming women with wide eyes and huge smiles bear-hug Bob Barker in thanks for appliances and money. If you don’t understand why women in old German pictures look at Hitler with game-show eyes, if you think Disneyland is possible without Auschwitz sitting at the other end of the seesaw, or if the assassination of President Kennedy slides around in your guts like a dead crab because you hate it when bad things happen and the answers don’t add up, stop reading as soon as you see The End.

  Things can end happily, as much as anything ends at all. We went to the moon after Dallas, right? Just like Kennedy said. So get the echo of those three shots out of your ears and look at that. The moon, I mean. Imagine me with my girl, pick whatever hair color you like for her, pick any town in California, so long as it’s on the coast. Wait, I know exactly the town!

  Here’s your last image:

  Night swimming, Oceano, California, 1979. Two very pale teenagers rise out of the water dripping, giggling, licking salt off each other’s temples, teasingly dragging kitten-sharp fangs nobody else can see across each other’s necks. These kids like each other, and they like swimming, they can hold their breath a long time.

  The boy from New York takes the beautiful Okie girl by the hand and leads her into a draped and triple-locked seaside cottage while first light threatens and the powder-orange full moon sets over the Pacific. Let’s have the young lovers cross in front of a balding man with bifocals and a hump in his neck walking the beach beside a formless grandmother with a waterfall of varicose veins; if you’re a philosophical person, you might guess both couples are roughly the same age.

  As the live ones walk inexorably north, the dead ones cross lengthwise, unlock their door, and head for the shower, where they will wash the sand and salt from their lukewarm bodies before settling into the plush and bugless shared box in which they will make love and sleep the day away. Outside, a German shepherd gets away from his master, jumps between the bougainvillea bush and the mailboxes, sniffs at the wet footprints on the walk, goes to bark at the strange and unpleasant scent he finds there, but instead climbs up on the trunk of the car and bays at the moon until it sinks. He sits there, wagging, until the leash goes on and he’s led away.

  A convert
ible drives by, a coked-up young woman on her way home from a party smiles at the man and the dog, Led Zeppelin’s “Fool in the Rain” pouring from her speakers.

  I’m going to type The End now, and that’s it.

  The End

  Please put the goddamned book down.

  So.

  You’re here.

  How unfortunate.

  I assume you are the sort of person who would go backstage after the opera in hopes of hearing the prima donna crying on the telephone, or walking in on the baritone fellating the basso buffo. I respect that—I was always the same way myself—though I suspect you are not very happy. Happiness is the province of those who ask few questions. I remember, even before this was visited upon me, how I envied those who eagerly did what they were told: those who married without complaint at father’s behest; those who looked up rather than sideways in church; those, in short, who honestly believed in God, good kings, and righteous wars.

  Envy and respect are not the same things, however.

  Before I endow you with respect, I should find out whether your curiosity is intellectual or merely morbid. Not that those who gawk at train derailments are so very different from those who conduct autopsies; both want, at some level, to know what has happened, and, by extension, what will happen. Did the liver fail because of the decedent’s alcoholism or was some toxin administered? If toxin, who delivered it? If the deliverer is found, he or she may be imprisoned or, in more honest times, hanged, and thus pose no further threat. Or, for the gawker at the accident, espying loose parts not unlike his or her own parts strewn amid wreckage may lead to a sense of awe at death’s power, or horror at life’s fragility, either of which may be instructive in any number of ways. I am a great believer in the tonic effect of a timely memento mori.

  Forgive me if the image of the train derailment seems repetitive after the carnage at Union Square; I spend a good deal of time around trains. I have always enjoyed them.