The Lesser Dead

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From the New York Daily News, dated February 4, 1978:

It figures this was one of the few news articles Margaret missed that winter. She was the first generation of her family that could read, so she gobbled up newspapers like she was trying to prove something. She moved her lips, but you wouldn’t want to be the one to tell her.

Anyway, she missed that one. We all did.

I don’t know that it would have changed anything.

But it might have.

OUR TRIBE

¹⁹⁷⁸

^{LATE FEBRUARY}

Margaret was squatting, looking at me. Cvetko was looking at her, rubbing his hands a little like he was washing them in slow motion. Ruth was standing near her, Old Boy working a toothpick around in his mouth where he would have had a cigarette a few years ago. Smoking’s no good for us; all that breathing gives us a headache and the nicotine does nothing because our blood doesn’t run much, it mostly just sits there. Most turned smokers try for a month or two, then get tired of it.

Margaret said, “We’ll need to call a town meeting. Tomorrow night, an hour past sunset. Tell everyone you can find.” And with that, Margaret McMannis strolled off into the tunnel with her escort, the three of them briefly silhouetted by the light of an approaching car. The other two scooted forward into niches for workers, but not Margaret. She kicked her thong sandals off and moved left, fast. By the time the train reached her, she would be up on the roof of the tunnel, hanging over it so the passengers didn’t see her; when it was past, she’d drop like a spider and fetch her sandals, Old Boy and Ruth falling into place on her flanks like Thing One and Thing Two.

Cvetko and I retreated back into the darkness that led to our abandoned service rooms, then made our way upstairs. “I’ll tell Billy. You tell Luna,” I said. Cvetko nodded, said, “Thank you.” Luna would be working close to where his latest rash of letters had gone, and, after he found her, he would have time to go socialize with his bridge-club biddies and drink their moldy old geriatric blood.

There were fourteen vampires in our group, all sleeping in little clusters or alone but nobody more than a ten-minute walk. Cvetko and I were in workrooms next to each other; most were in proper rooms a little bigger than mine, quarters for the construction crew when they were building all this.

Margaret, of course, got the sweet spot. The mayor’s apartment. Like the governor’s mansion or the White House or Buckingham Palace, only under New York City and fitted out for a vampire. Really beautiful place, the cream of nineteenth-century engineering and architecture. Back in the day, they tried out all different kinds of subway cars and tracks before they figured out the system they got now. But instead of getting together and talking it out, all these fat cats just started digging their own tunnels. This one failed experiment was supposed to be high-end, and Margaret’s vault was where they were planning to entertain the press and eat caviar with the mayor and all that, only they ran out of money. Of course they ran out of money, tiles from Spain and that green velvet couch and all, a mahogany bar and little statues of angels, I mean Margaret’s digs were sweet. Her box was behind the bar, nice and snug, she had it lined with fur. Just on the other side was a fancy door leading to a station platform that never got used except for one demo run by a car that now sat abandoned off its rails (that was where Old Boy lived), and then there was this half mile of tracks before a hole in the wall that opened on a big, deep pit that collected groundwater and stank. We called that Purgatory. That was where we put what was left of people we peeled. There was a rolling cart on the tracks that worked just fine for body dumping.

All of this was on the far side of our little colony, about ten minutes away at a stroll, though I could get there much quicker if I had to. Much quicker.

RUTH AND OLD BOY

Ruth had been friends with Margaret since about 1945, but Ruth was old. Not Clayton or Hessian old, but suffragette old. Born about when Cvetko was (1890?), fifty-five-ish when her clock stopped, square, grim head like a monument, like the Statue of Liberty or Blind Frowning Fucking Justice. Everything on her is square, mannish, solid. Even her fangs are less sharp than most; she has to tear more when she bites, like a dog with a sock. If you think Cvetko’s a drag, this woman could have killed the mood on V-J Day. Which was right about the time she got turned—some bughouse-crazy black woman vampire bit her up in Harlem, had the idea she was Margaret Sanger (different Margaret), the woman who opened a colored women’s clinic up there fifteen years before. Point of fact, the woman had seen Ruth running messages to the clinic, Ruth did work for Sanger. Just not real recently. She had been in Harlem that day to visit a woman who used to work there but now had leukemia. The vampire who jumped Ruth told her it was for coming up where she didn’t belong trying to get rid of all the black babies. Only Ruth’s disappearance made the paper, complete with “her colored assailant seeming to embrace her intimately,” and, like I said, our Margaret reads the paper. Scours it for vampire stuff, and this was a bull’s-eye. She went up there looking, asking questions, found Ruth. Taught her. Tore the head off the one who turned her. That was the first time she used her shovel, and adopting Ruth was one of the smartest things she ever did. Nobody loves Margaret like Ruth. Ruth doesn’t talk much, but she’s determined and strong and if Dr. Van Helsing himself were coming for Margaret McMannis, he’d have to get through Ruth first.

Another thing about Ruth. She looks dead, even when she just fed. Clayton said older vampires use a constant, automatic low-grade charm that even works on other vampires, even works on themselves, to look the way they did when they were turned. It’s the same kind of charm that hides our fangs, only even more automatic; the only thing it doesn’t hide so well is the way our eyes shine like cat’s eyes when light hits them in the dark. He said it only drops when a vampire is frightened or dying, or when he wants it dropped. He said that he had seen himself and didn’t want to again—Clayton was really old. But Ruth, she had learned to relax that. Her skin was greenish-gray and her irises were too light all the time. Except when she hunted. She would charm herself warm-looking like the rest of us to hunt. The thing about Ruth was she hated a liar, which I could understand.

I hate a liar, too.

Old Boy, now here was another beast entirely. Like Baldy, we’ll get to Baldy later, Old Boy’s name is deceptive. He actually had a boyish face, only got turned in 1972 or so. Wouldn’t say who did it, but we all know it was Margaret, she told me. Only Margaret was allowed to turn people whenever she wanted. If one of us wanted to, we could ask, but she almost always said no. She didn’t want anybody else having divided loyalties, and a lot of loyalty comes with being turned, even if it’s a hostile act. Very conflicting stuff, take my word for it. I hated Margaret when she stopped my clock, but I loved her a little bit, too. I couldn’t imagine hurting her, and not just because she could kick my ass for twenty years before I got a lick in. There’s something instinctual about it. Anyway, Old Boy was a good choice; he was young, but dangerous. He’d been in Vietnam. “Old Boy” was what they called him in his Marine recon unit, and he was really out in the shit, where people took ears and dicks and fingers as trophies. He was good with a knife and stealthy as a mother even before he got turned. Now? Now he was like a breeze you couldn’t even feel. He was like a nothing that would kill you before you knew you were in trouble. Big fangs on him, but he used his knife, cut and suck. He watched out for Margaret, sometimes close, sometimes at a distance, and if Ruth would take a bullet for her, figuratively speaking, everybody knew it would be Old Boy who’d get revenge if somebody had two bullets.

He had been working as a security guard at the port. He hated it. He was close to killing himself because he didn’t understand life back in the States, preferred moving in the darkness out where you had to machete your way through the mosquitoes and the only friendlies were Hmong and beardy Green Berets who’d half gone native. No, America didn’t fit him anymore. Where most guys had nightmares about Nam, he had nightmares about the United States. One of the rare times he talked to me for more than five minutes, he told me he dreamed about having to walk across open places with a tight suit on and everybody looking at him from every window and he couldn’t hide anywhere. He’d wake up in a cold sweat dreaming about being drunk in a house full of children, reeling from room to room with tiny children in his way, knowing it was only a matter of time before he hurt one of them and then he’d go to the electric chair. He had Nam dreams, too, but they didn’t bother him like that. He woke up from dreams about burning hootches and covering himself in mud to wait in ambush and then he’d wake up and get sad when he realized he was just in his shitty apartment and he had to go out and talk to people he wasn’t allowed to punch. He actually spotted Margaret while she was hunting, followed her, kept up with her. That she was able to climb on the sides of buildings didn’t surprise him much after the shit he had seen. She didn’t even know she had grown a tail. For a while. When she realized a warm body had actually gotten the drop on her, she was intrigued. They sat by the water and talked. She gave him a choice. He took the one that sounded the most like being back in-country.

LUNA AND BILLY BANG

Luna was our closest neighbor. Luna was a prostitute, which, as you can imagine, is a profession that lends itself to vampirism. I’ll go out on a limb here and say that as many vampires become prostitutes as prostitutes become vampires, but of course I have only my own bullshit to back this up. Think about it, though. Darkness, privacy, secrecy. It’s perfect. They probably start off pretending to be hookers to hunt, but soon they’re going through with it because sex and feeding go so well together.

But I don’t mean to confuse the issue; Luna was a prostitute first, had a real fucked-up family. Not that all prosties do, that’s a cliché. Plenty of them do it just because that’s how they’re built. But with Luna, the cliché was true. The dad broke the older brother’s arm when he found out he was visiting Luna in the basement, but not because it was wrong; because he was jealous. Dad was visiting Luna in the bath. The only people who know where she goes are me and Cvetko; she always lets us know where she’s going in case she gets arrested and can’t get away. I can’t much imagine the scenario in which she wouldn’t be able to get away, but the idea of waking up in a cell scares her senseless, so she drops off a piece of wide-ruled notebook paper with the neighborhood she intends to prowl Flair-markered in so we’ll know what precinct to bail her out of should she not turn up by four A.M. or so. Of course, this has never happened. The one time she almost got arrested, a john flashed a badge at her and she was so startled she punched him in the mouth rather than charm her way out of it; she hit him so hard she heard one of his teeth hit the window. Backup cop was a lady, pulled a gun. Luna was still freaked-out, showing her fangs, so the cop panicked and shot Luna, shot her right in the forehead. That stunned her, it takes a second to get the brain going again, but lady cop was stunned, too. First time she’d used a gun on something three-dimensional that bled. By the time she stopped making a goldfish mouth and went for the radio, Luna was back in business. She sprained the lady cop’s wrist taking the gun from her, threw it in a trash can, and, blinking her own blood out of her eyes, told the cop, “This didn’t happen. Go home!” She went home. The male cop was still conscious, so Luna charmed him, too, told him to ram his El Camino into a fire hydrant and forget her face. He did. Case closed.

The notebook paper tonight said,

TIMES

I kinda had a crush on Luna when she moved in down the tunnel. Okay, I never completely lost it. Okay, I never lost it at all. She was pretty in that Goldie Hawn way; the other Times Square girls hated her because few of them looked as good as she did when she put on makeup, but they knew better than to fuck with her and so did the pimps. Clayton brought her here from Milwaukee, I don’t think she’d been a vampire long, she never said much about that. He was old, though, like I said. He’d been doing this since Mark Twain was barefoot Sammy chasing Missouri grasshoppers; he got night fever and went sunbathing. More about night fever and Luna later. Luna was Cvetko’s business. Billy was mine.

I went up into the tunnel not far from Union Square, waited for a train. I was wearing a black leather jacket, lambskin, really suave, but when the train went by I turned my back, tucked my head, and squared my shoulders. People don’t think rectangular shapes are people, it’s a ninja trick. Okay, so I had a paisley purple-and-blue scarf on, I loved that scarf, but nobody would know what they were looking at should they see that flamboyant little jab of color, not in the split second they might see me from the train window. I timed it so I turned with the train as it went by me, switching from ninja to torero, letting it glance off me a little and leaping up onto the platform just behind it, turning my landing into a kind of a groovy little dance step. Anybody who caught sight of me would think I had been there all along and they just hadn’t noticed; nobody jumps up on a subway platform in midgroove and keeps walking all funky and casual. Nobody but Joey Peacock. That’s not ninja stuff, or maybe it is, but I like to think I’m the originator. Did I mention I had numchuks? I was pretty good with them, too. Though that’s Korean, I think, not Japanese. Ninjas use sais and shurikens. That means throwing stars. I had been practicing with those, too.

I made my way through the station, momentarily confused by the blizzard of smells and colors and all the bright light. I kicked a mashed-up half hot dog out of my way, then immediately regretted it because I was wearing my nice zip-up ankle boots. I grabbed a piece of the New York Post and wiped off the little bit of mustard and relish, close enough to the 14th Street entrance now to hear Billy. He was playing “Ain’t No Sunshine When She’s Gone” by Bill Withers. Billy has a taste for the ironic. I like Billy. Even though he got Luna. They were splitsville now, but he definitely got her. You know what I mean when I say got her, right? Yeah, I thought so. Billy got everybody.

Anybody else walking up on Billy Bang would have thought he was just a particularly good busker, one of those world-shakers you just know is only stopping underground for a little spare change and a laugh on his way to a recording contract in L.A. or Nashville. Billy was a black guy, mostly, maybe some Puerto Rican. He played his steel guitar like something he stole from angels and he was going to wring one more song out of it before they came to confiscate it. He was a handsome vampire; it was hard not to envy him, twenty-eight forever, wearing only a suede vest on his trunk even in this cold, mirrored sunglasses over his eyes, an ironic cowboy hat on, a foxtail hanging off his fret. Tight jeans and snakeskin cowboy boots. You get the idea. Only Billy wasn’t a world-shaker, he was a bloodsucker, and he would never get to Nashville or L.A. because his gig in the tunnels was just too sweet and the blood was too easy to leave behind. Billy was still passionate about music, you could hear it, but it was his second love and always would be.

I walked up to Billy behind a fat lady so he wouldn’t see me at first. She bent down to put a quarter in his guitar case and I popped around her side like a tugboat around a freighter, shaking my hand slowly and O’ing my mouth as if to say Big Spender! Billy smiled just a little, finishing “Ain’t No Sunshine” and tipping his hat for the loose semicircle of listeners, who clapped and came up with another couple of bucks between them before slouching off to their unguessable destinations.

“Joey Peacock! My man!” he said, flashing fangs only I could see, closing his guitar case and giving me some kind of soul handshake I never properly learned my half of. “What’s shakin’?”

“Town meeting,” I said. I told him when and where.

“What’s up her skirt now?”

“Kid vampires.”

“Up her skirt?”

“For all I know. But definitely on the cars. Hunting.”

I told him what I saw and a big smile crept onto his face. He peeked over the sunglasses, showing his big brown eyes.

“You wouldn’t be fuckin’ with Billy Bang now, would you?”

“Scout’s honor,” I said.

He shrugged.

“So, we kick their little asses and make it clear they ain’t welcome. Can’t be huntin’ on the cars where everybody can see. Don’t need no new tenants downstairs, neither.”

“Makes sense.”

“We really havin’ a town powwow over this? This sounds like light work.”

“Yep. But you didn’t see them.”

“Well, that’s a good thing for them.”

Now a slightly chubby part-Asian-looking fellow stood staring at us, holding a Slurpee cup. Denim jacket. Poker visor, don’t ask me why.

“What. May I do. For you?” Billy said, putting on his fake-ass cordial DJ voice without actually looking at him.

“Are you done? Your set?”

“Did you see me close my guitar case?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Then, my good sir, I am done. My set.”

The guy was shy. This was hard for him and Billy wasn’t making it any easier.

“Oh… Well… I was hoping…”

“There’s your problem right there. HA-HA!”

“Hoping you might play…”

“Get it out, Oddjob.” I don’t know how he made that sound friendly, but he did.

“Something by the…”

It became clear to me that poker visor wasn’t just shy—he had something like a stutter. Billy didn’t notice or didn’t care.

“…by the Dock of the Bay?”

“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 going; 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.’”

He waited.

“And then you say…”

“What?” I said.

“Anything you like. So long as it is entertaining.”

“Oh, you want me to lie.”

“A mundane lie hiding an exotic truth is deception; an exotic lie hiding a mundane truth is storytelling. Deception may be necessary to preserve life, but storytelling makes life worth living. So make my life worth living.”

“I shot a tiger. Like that?”

“Yes,” he said, looking at me now, pleased with me. “Exactly like that.”

“I shot a tiger in the ass.”

“You don’t have to be vulgar.”

“What?”

“You could shoot the tiger anywhere you wanted to.”

“I shot a tiger in the poontang.”

“What is poontang?”

I smiled a fangy smile at him so he guessed what poontang must be. He sighed deep, stale lung air and went back to his National Geographic, where, I guess, tigers only get shot in legitimate body parts. He was pissed. I scooted around in front of him, pulled his magazine down with my finger so he was looking me in the eye.

“I shot a tiger straight through the heart. It yawned a big whiskery yawn and stretched and died. It was as long as a small horse, and the raja was happy. He gave me opium to smoke and then the coolies picked up the tiger, only it wasn’t really dead, and it clawed a man who died later. Infection. Now everybody shot the tiger. And the raja made the man’s family rich beyond their dreams, with rubies and emeralds and pearls and coral. Especially coral.”

Cvetko smiled. His eyes twinkled.

“I think there is hope for you. Not much. Just a little. But enough so we may not yet declare you an American savage.”

I made like an Indian patting my open mouth and going woo-woo-woo.

“It’s almost sunrise,” he said, a little sadly.

I wasn’t sad. I was full of blood, ready to curl up in my fridge like Oscar the Grouch in his can and get some sleep, maybe dead-dream about getting me some little vampire kid scalps on the subway raid.

Cvetko closed his book, crawled into his coffin. For the record, he was the only one of us who slept in an actual wooden coffin, but that’s just how he was.

After he tucked in, I picked up his magazine. Wrinkly old Irish fuckers from the Dingle peninsula, a San Antonio colored girl who looked a lot like Elise (only nobody let their nipples show through their dresses back then), and an article about Brazilian killer bees. How they were coming north, all pissed off, how amateur beekeepers were going to have to find a new hobby. Nearly identical in appearance to gentler honeybees of European origin, the African bees quickly dominate the hives of the less aggressive strains. But that’s nature, isn’t it? Nice guys really do, really always finish last.

We didn’t see anything on the subway the next night. Well, no creepy little kids. Just the usual weirdness; punks, dudes with big Afros, women in pantsuits, guys in sideburns, cops. New York cops always impressed me by looking bored and dangerous at the same time, like big, sleepy crocodiles who probably wouldn’t notice you, but could really fuck up your evening if they did. Big asshole crocodiles in their chalky blue shirts and stop-sign black hats, silver badges shining like a lie only kids believed. I always smiled at them, broad enough to show my fangs, confident the constant low-grade charm was humming along, hiding them. One cop, kinda meaty in that used-to-play-football way, woke up a sleeping pot-smelling kid with long hair and a yellow but stained Pittsburgh Steelers T-shirt. He woke him up by poking him with his nightstick. “Hey,” he said. “My partner wants to know if you got a joint on you.”

“No, man, I’m clean,” he said reflexively, rubbing his eyes.

“He’s clean,” he said to his partner, who barely looked. You could tell he wished he had a different partner. “Too bad. We wanted to party. Anyway, sit up. No sleeping on the cars.”

“Okay,” he said, and sat up.

But the cop kept looking at him. He wasn’t done. “You got your terrible towel on you?”

“Excuse me, sir?” the sleepy kid said. The cop gestured at the T-shirt, so I guessed it was a football thing. Have you noticed that most bullies are boring?

“Oh,” he said, getting it. “No.”

The cop saw me looking now, looked back. I grinned at him. “How about you, kid, you a Steelers fan?” The train turned, everybody shifted. I let my charm drop for a second, just a split second, giving him a flash of the fangs. He blinked twice. Looked at his partner to see if he saw, but he wasn’t paying attention. I kept smiling at him, no fangs. He looked at me, mouth-breathing. The Steeler kid nodded off, started slumping. The train pulled into Penn Station. The cops got off.

Cvetko had watched the whole thing, knew what I had done; I felt him disapprove, but he kept his mouth shut for the moment, went back to reading his book, not a National Geographic but some pervert book about naked apes.

I looked at the sleepy kid with his thin, shitty blond mustache, so long it fluttered in his breath. He must have been a mess eating soup. This was a newish style, just the mustache, long hair. I’d seen a lot come and go, hats, no hats, short ties, thin ties, wide ties. I wondered about really old vampires, if they even noticed anymore.

“I want to get really old,” I said to Cvetko.

“Why?” he said, without looking up.

“I don’t know. I just do.”

“You can’t bear to think of the world going on without your contributions to it?”

“Ha-ha. I just mean, I’m glad I got bitten, you know? If I hadn’t, I might, I mean I would…”

“Look like me?” Cvetko finished. That caught me up short. He was about the age I should have been, after all. Poor Cvets, stuck in that old body. Stronger, more vital, sure, his arthritis went away and all, but he looked old; worse, he thought old.

“You know what I mean,” I said.

“There are compensations for aging. Children. Grandchildren.”

“You didn’t have those.”

I winced when I said it, I shouldn’t have said it like that, but he didn’t make a big deal out of it. He was good like that.

“Status in society. Pride in accomplishment. I had those things.”

Now three thug-looking teenagers got on the train. They started laughing about Steeler guy, sat around him. One of them reached into his pocket, pulled out his wallet, looking at me and Cvetko with an I-dare-you-to-say-a-word look on his face. Stuck it in his own pocket while his impressed friend stage-whispered, “Oh shit, man, you didn’t!” Cvetko smiled pleasantly at them, checked his watch. The thief smiled back, mocking, making bug eyes. Cvetko’s nostrils flared a little, so I sniffed, too. No beer. He was checking to see if they were drunk or high. He hated biting anyone who was drunk or high.

“Our two hours are nearly up,” he said. “Will you finish without me?”

“You bet,” I said.

They got off at the next stop, still giggling. Times Square. Cvetko followed them off, keeping a discreet distance. I watched Steeler kid snore his mustache into his mouth, thinking it was quite likely he was going to get his wallet back in the mail.

NIGHT FEVER

Now’s a good a time as any to tell you about night fever. You might guess it’s kinda like cabin fever, and, yeah, that’s close. Night fever is what happens when a vampire can’t take being in the dark anymore, but it’s more than that. It looks neuro-whatsical, but Cvetko says it’s a disease of the soul.

The guy who brought Luna here from Milwaukee, Clayton? Clay, really. He was smooth. He was from Boston, though he’d lost the accent. Born around 1820, turned before the Civil War, traveled around on trains, developed all kinds of tactics for sheltering during the day while on the road; he would do anything, submerge himself in mud bogs, sink himself with a big rock and sleep in a lake, dress as a cop to get himself invited in someplace, then hide in the attic or basement and sleep there. He knew a lot about vampires, kept a book just full of notes describing some of the vampires he met, where he met them. Margaret was keeping it now, had been since Clayton died last summer, we called it The Codex, and what sad bookworm bastard do you think came up with that? Cvetko is right, sixty-four dollars to you.

The first symptom of night fever: increased desire for blood. You can’t stop drinking. This is dangerous because you end up killing people. Killing people means you risk making more vampires. Clayton made two new vampires, both in ’76 when he was starting to slip his chain. Billy Bang is one. The other didn’t make it.

Second symptom of night fever: desire for abasement. As opposed to what you get in Kansas when you see a tornado coming, which is the desire for a basement. Don’t worry, Cvetko didn’t laugh either when I told him that one. But you start feeling dirty, like you’re no good, like you don’t deserve to drink human blood anymore. Clayton started bringing food down here on purpose, stuff he got out of the trash, but any kind of food is a big no-no in the tunnels because it brings on rats. Lots of them. Carpets of them. But that’s what Clayton wanted. We’d find him sleeping outside his box, just surrounded by dead rats like pistachio shells or something, smiling and shaking. If you’re in a neighborhood where pets start to go missing, you got either a psychopath working his way up to people or a vampire working his way down from them.

The third symptom is the worst. Tremors. I’ve seen a vampire pull out of night fever before, but not once they started rocking and rolling. It’s like they just can’t hold still anymore, not their head, not their limbs, you hear them scraping around in whatever they’re sleeping in.

Symptom four? Not really a symptom, more of an event. You go sunbathing. For real. Not just tooling around Washington Square Park when it’s raining and the sun won’t come out; not getting yourself sick by going out without sunglasses when it’s overcast and the bright gray clouds press a headache behind your eyes; I mean stepping right into full-on sunshine naked as a jaybird and dying forever. The newspapers never cover it or, when they do, they make up some normal explanation or call it spontaneous human combustion, which is right except for the “human” part.

Anyway, Clayton. One day I was walking near his and Luna’s cavelike place and I heard him moving around, dragging his limbs and whimpering. Luna was outside his box crooning down mother-tones to him even though she was so sleepy she could barely stand from the last two days. He finally convinced her he was all right and she collapsed into her junkyard armoire. I went to my room, but I heard him. He went.

Next night there was a bit in the Times about a guy who doused himself in gasoline and jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge. “Fell like a comet,” the Times said; “Blazing like a star,” said the Post. Coincidence? I don’t think so. They said it was some other guy, a Steven Bergman or something, who also went missing, but newspapers are like cops, they just don’t like loose ends.

It had been summer, bright, warm. That matters; what kind of sun you get hit with, I mean. Cool winter sun makes you smoke; you can actually get a dose of that and live, if it’s hazy or misty at all. Bright summer sun, you catch fire. Takes a couple of seconds. I hear in the desert it’s almost instant, you go up like a torch. Not a lot of vampires in the desert. We like it up north.

I had bright winter sun on me once, thank God it was through a window, glass helps just a little. A normal kid I used to hang out with and pretend to smoke cigarettes, his name was Freddie, played a nasty trick on me once. I actually told him what I was, this was like five years ago. He was kind of a nerd, went to Stuyvesant not too far from us. He kept me out after sunrise in his room, had the blinds down. There was a manhole cover just outside his house I figured I could get to when a cloud passed, it was stupid. But the bastard actually lifted the blind on me because he thought I was bullshitting him. “Vampire my ass,” he said. I still have the scar from it, a permanent pinkish-gray triangle on my left elbow that’s really intense and knotted at the point, then fades out as it goes. It smoked like a bitch, hurt like a bitch. I punched him in the nose and took the blanket off his bed, busted out the window, and went down the manhole. Who was he going to tell? Who would believe him? Fuck Freddie, I never saw him again.

But Clayton, he got the full treatment.

Those Hudson River frogmen weren’t going to find a damned thing; when sunlight torches one of the family, it even torches the bones.

Clayton was the second-oldest vampire I knew about in New York.

The oldest was a Hessian. Like, played for the other team in the Revolutionary War. Big bastard, pale as death, never fully lost his German accent. Had a house in Greenwich Village, beautiful place with bars on the windows and a servant; the Hessian is stinking rich and nobody fucks with him. Or at least they didn’t for a long time. More about him later, much later.

But enough about night fever and Hessians.

You probably want to hear about the next time I saw those kids.

Okay.

But the story jumps ahead now.

THE RAIN SONG

You know how when you’re a kid a rainy day seems like the end of the world? You press your forehead to the window and sigh, fogging the glass, drawing squiggles in the fog with your pudgy little finger or maybe writing the word BORED but not backward so a woman walking by on her way to the bank or somewhere errandy glances at it but doesn’t take the time to work it out, just clip-clops along hunched under her umbrella, those perfect, temporary circles pinging in the puddles at her feet. And the sun, fickle in this gray city, always a flight risk, seems gone for good. No note, just went out for cigarettes and never came back. Your dad and mom are seething with some just-under-the-skin fight and they wish you could go play even more than you do, if that’s possible, cause they’ve got awful things to say to each other, things you can plaster over maybe but they’re part of the architecture now. And you? You’re tired of your toys and nobody will play a game, and you’ve read everything twice and the dog barely wags at you, barely cocks his eye at you, knows you’re dangerous somehow.

That’s a rainy day for a kid, a rainy Saturday anyway.

When you’re a vampire, a rainy day is a hall pass.

This particular day, a freaky warm Saturday in March, I was sitting just inside the entrance to the subway with my soccer gear on and a transistor radio on my lap, not caring that I was in the way, making the wet, grumpy lava flow of mass transit users even grumpier for having to step around me. One lady actually shook her umbrella out practically on me, said, “Oh, pardon me, I didn’t see you.” I thought about following her down but didn’t want to taste her, thought her blood might be rank with all that sourpuss she was pumping out of her sourpuss gland.

The radio was fuzzy; I twiddled with the antenna.

“Warmer than normal (pffft) time of year in the greater New York metropolitan area. Expect light rain (pffft) cloud cover for the rest of the day and over… (pffft) clearing tomorrow morning. The temperature at Central Park is (pffft).”

Music to my ears, static and all.

I slipped out of the Columbus Circle entrance and crossed the street to the park’s southwestern corner. I stayed away from the carriage horses—one tried to bite me once, made quite a scene—and instead steered toward the guy at the kosher hot dog cart, asked him what time he closed. Six? Perfect. Would he mind holding on to my radio till I got back? Drool and nod, surprisingly feminine way of patting his mouth with the corner of the napkin, I think this guy wore lipstick in his free time. It was already after four; I’d probably forget the radio, but I had six or seven more of them in my room—if shoplifting were an Olympic event, I’d be Mark Spitz.

I tooled around for a while, past the big, useless Maine memorial, I mean, the Alamo’s a good story, I get that, but the Maine? Smelled like an inside job to me. Fuck the Maine! I went to Umpire Rock to look at the skyscrapers jutting up past the trees, Essex House blazoning its name in hooker red, much less elegant than the Hampshire House next to it; then past the Carousel, the dilapidated Dairy, up and patted Balto’s head. When I was still a real kid, me and a bunch of other small fry hitched our sled behind the big bronze doggie and Dad’s friend Walther took a picture. Must have been 1929, 1930, after the crash because I remember looking at the skyscrapers on Park Avenue, watching for guys jumping. Uncle Walt told me about the jumpers; he was always telling me creepy shit in that matter-of-fact way that made you love him, made you sure everything was all right because all the bad stuff he told you about had to get through him to get to you. I don’t know what happened to that Balto picture. I don’t know what happened to anything.

I doubled back to the Sheep Meadow; I knew that on this first almost warm day of 1978 I’d see kids playing soccer there, rain or no, and I did, a bunch of them all muddy and swearing and laughing, a few spectators sharing cigarettes on the sidelines. I asked if I could play, and they didn’t let me at first, and then a few of the older ones left when some girls came by and I was in.

At first nobody wanted to pass to me, younger as I was and dressed in my really square parochial soccer jersey and all, but a ginger kid got in trouble and booted it sideways to me, so I yo-yoed that ball around like Pelé and scored bigger than hell. I dialed it back after that, let kids take the ball off me half the time, but scored twice more. One of the fullbacks on the other team called me “shrimp,” a tall, skinny, bucktoothed kid you just knew would end up in jail. One of my teammates stood up for me, said, “That’s Supershrimp to you! He fucked you up twice now!” and bucktooth didn’t like that. Made a point of tripping me the next time I got near him. I gave him a cleat in the nuts during a big tangle-up later and I could tell he wanted to fight but didn’t want to look like the bully he actually was. The rain got heavier then, and most of the kids left. But bucktooth wasn’t done with me, nor I with him, so we stayed on to keep playing three on three. A Puerto Rican kid split for dinner, so we were left with five. Soccer was out. Bucktooth suggested Smear the Queer, looking right at me, and I said, “Hell yeah!” in my ten-year-old’s falsetto, making the others laugh. One threw me the ball, and off I went, weaving around the dirty, mostly pale legs and twisting out of feeble claw-hands until it began to strain credibility and I let myself get smeared. But something had shifted in the group dynamic; they liked me. I had outmaneuvered seemingly older kids well enough to make them go “Whoa!” and “Damn, Supershrimp!” and then taken my lumps while laughing. They piled on me, sure, but the late knee or elbow from bucktooth never came. Instead, he awkwardly patted my back as I got up. At that moment I decided I wouldn’t follow him home after all.

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 multiple 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.

“Good-bye,” he’d said sweetly, like he missed me already.

“Yeah,” I’d said, hating myself and what I was, which was something I didn’t feel very often. “Keep walking, go away.”

He went away.

I went to the sink now, splashed some water on my tongue. Evidence, shmevidence, the police wouldn’t find anything, even our fingerprints disappear. Still, I shouldn’t hang out too long.

I looked at the books and records formerly owned by Mr. Combs: science stuff, physics. Some of it in German. Yawnsville. This guy would have gotten along great with Cvetko. Novels, mostly arty-smarty: Günter Grass, Herman Hesse, The Little Prince. I liked The Little Prince. The music was better. Jazz, mostly—Miles Davis, Charlie Parker. I took the Miles Davis, Sketches of Spain, slipped it under my arm. It was a pretty cover.

Of course I went through his drawers and got some cash, a tie pin with a diamond, a silver ring with three pieces of onyx; he wasn’t going to need any of that.

I noticed his bed was made. He was a bed-maker. Made sense, the place was cluttered but clean. His mommy taught him right.

I was about to leave. I had fed the bird, filled my pockets, gotten a snootful of a dead man’s scent and now I had a bad case of the what’s-it-all-fors. My hand was on the knob.

“Want to groove on Miles?” the bird said. Then, more excitedly, “Miles Davis!” And it clicked and whistled its ass off.

One thing about carrying a birdcage on the subway, everybody looks at you. Saturday night, the 6 train. Everybody was on their way out to a movie or a late dinner or just to get good and schnockered at some Midtown watering hole. Too many people to charm more than mildly; hiding my fangs was as good as it was going to get.

“What kinda bird is that?” said a cowboy-looking guy, good and loud and twangy, doing that thing hicks from the sticks do when they want to show they’re more sociable than New Yorkers.

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know?”

I shrugged, looking at him.

“Well, what’s his name?”

“Why, you want his phone number?”

“Nice kid,” he said to everybody and nobody, laughing like, See, I knew you were all a-holes here.

Maybe we are.

“Hello?” Mrs. Baker said from inside her apartment.

“It’s me,” I said, grinning a shit-eating grin at the little round peephole, holding the cage while Gonzalo said, “Are you cold? Do you want the heater? Are you cold?”

I laughed.

The bird laughed, too, but like somebody else, probably his master.

I heard her draw the chain out of the latch and open the door. I stepped in quick. Little Baker was at his post in the recliner, eating a bowl of ice cream with M&M’s on top, pouring Coke in. Well, he wasn’t keeping that ass on him with baby carrots.

“Who is it, Mom?” he said, sounding annoyed. “The commercial’s almost over.”

“Just me,” I said, and he looked up and started drooling.

“It’s an African gray parrot,” his mom said absently, also drooling a bit.

“Is it?”

“Yes.”

“Well, his name’s Gonzalo, and you’re all going to be very happy together. He eats this stuff.”

I handed over the bag of sunflower seeds plus a box of macaw feed. At the sound of the bag, the bird went back and forth on his bar.

“They like fresh fruit, too. And nuts,” she said.

Gonzalo clicked and bobbed his head.

“How do you know this stuff?”

“My sister’s ex-husband owned a pet store. He threw himself under a bus. Right in front of her. I didn’t care for him.”

“That’s nice. Where’s Pops?”

“Out.”

This was a problem. I’d have to charm him, too, or he might dump the bird.

“Out where?”

“Felix’s. On the corner. It’s the only bar on the block.”

Problem solved.

Back in television land, the commercial ended.

“MO-om!” little Baker said.

“MO-om!” the bird said, exactly imitating the kid’s bratty, entitled whine.

I laughed and Gonzalo said, “Live from New York, it’s Saaaaturday night!”

Damned if it wasn’t, too.

I loved that bird.

I walked into the corner bar, Felix the Cat’s, one of those old-guy places that smelled like weak beer and Kool cigarettes, a shitty television over the bar next to a little team of Clydesdales pulling their beer wagon around in circles under a glass dome. The only guy in the place with long hair was swearing at that stupid game where you slide the disc down the plank.

Mr. Baker was bellied up to the bar, watching himself get old in the long, dirty mirror. He said “Hi” mildly when I slid up next to him.

“Who’s the kid?” the bartender said.

“My son.”

“I thought I met your son.”

“My other son.”

Howard Cosell was talking away on the television. Someone threw a peanut at him, earning him a finger wag from the barman, but it was a good throw, would have hit Howard right in the eye, might have made him jerk his head and knock his lousy toupee crooked.

I told Mr. Baker that he and his family were the proud owners of a new bird. “What kind?” he drooled. I mopped his lip with a napkin before the barman saw.

“African. It’s gray.”

“A bird? A real, honest-to-goodness bird?”

“Well, yeah.”

“I always wanted a bird. I have to go meet him! Is it a him?”

“I didn’t look. But I think so.”

“Him,” he said. “I have to! I…”

“What?”

His eyes started to moisten. Then he grabbed my shoulder hard.

“Good-bye.”

He got up in a spasm.

He was so enthusiastic about his new bird that he stuffed his pockets with peanuts and left immediately, forgetting to pay. The bartender called after him; he held up the I’ll-be-back-in-a-minute index finger and kept going, but he wasn’t going to be back in a minute. I paid for his three Budweisers. I had already said my good-byes to Gonzalo, but they were really so-longs. I had to find Cvetko and tell him what I saw, but first I had to make sure I got to see that bird again. It was a really cool goddamn bird.

LUCKY LUCKY

“And they just let you go?” Cvetko said. The old woman walked up to me with a tea tray for the third time in ten minutes.

“He does not care for tea,” Cvetko said again, but he wasn’t particularly good at charming. I was.

“No tea,” I said. “Now knit or something.” But I shouldn’t have said “now” because she dropped the whole tea set with a crash-bang and went hobbling off for her needles and yarn. The whole rest of the talk with Cvetko she just sat there, bleeding and knitting; she must have been on some anticoagulant. Cvetko wiped at her neck with a cloth so she didn’t mess up her nightgown. Kind of a saucy nightgown for an old bird, like satin or something; she must have really been looking forward to her visit.

“Of course they let me go, they’re just little kids.”

“I should loan you a book about ‘just little kids’ on a desert island.”

“Is it like Gilligan’s Island?” I said, fucking with him.

He sighed.

A little white paw flicked out under the bathroom door. The light was on in there.

I asked Cvetko, “Why do all old ladies have cats?”

“I enjoy cats,” the old lady said. “They sit on your lap and purr when it’s cold. It’s a great relief to loneliness. Do you have any idea what it’s like to know that you are unlikely to live more than a decade? To have survived all those who were familiar to you so that everyone is a stranger? To feel that you’re tedious to these strangers? But really, it’s the nearness of death, especially for a secular person. Cats help with that.” She went on smiling, knitting, drooling, bleeding. Cvetko dabbed at her. She mouthed a silent Thank you.

“Are you done here?” I said. “Can we go talk somewhere? Maybe Old City Hall?”

In the same way that I had Chloë to go to when I wanted some peace, Cvetko had the Old City Hall station. I’m the one who showed it to him. The first time he saw it I thought he was going to cry at its vaulted ceilings and chandeliers, the beautiful brickwork. He even loved the blacked-out windows on the roof that used to be stained glass, used to let filtered sunlight in. It was magnificent. This was the place they had built to knock the socks off anybody who visited America back in the day, like “we’re so rich this is the stuff we stick underground.” Only problem was it was too small for how long the new trains were, just like 18th Street, only worse because this was a loop, not a straight line, so it would be impossible to fix. There was no way to let passengers on and off all the cars; some would still be in the tunnel. So this big, beautiful station got closed in ’45 and empty trains go through without stopping. Mostly empty. Citizens who want to peek at Old City Hall can still ride the 6 to the end of the line and just not get off before it starts up again. They’re not supposed to. But most people do what they’re not supposed to, as long as it’s fun, and sometimes even if it isn’t.

“This is a good place for conversation,” Cvetko said. “The temperature is agreeable and there are no unwanted listeners. Mrs. Dunwitty is an expert at keeping secrets. Do you know, she used to work in a speakeasy frequented by underworld figures. She was in charge of the coat room, and also the firearms of guests.”

“I fellated Lucky Luciano!” she said.

“Yeah, she’s buttoned up as tight as Fort Knox.”

“She won’t remember our visit.”

“Of course I won’t. Are you a vampire like Mr. Štukelj?”

“Yes.”

“That’s fine. Are you a Jew?”

“Shut up and knit.”

“That’s fine, too.”

She went back to her needles. The cat yowled. Another joined it. She had at least two of them in there.

“So you believe them to be feral?”

“What?”

“Your little associates in the park.”

“Oh. Yeah. Wild, untrained.”

“Did you ascertain how many there are?”

He said the word ascertain like he was smearing butter on fresh bread. He gave it like a gift.

“I saw six. I asked if there were more. They said no.”

Cvetko nodded.

“What do you think Margaret’s going to do if we tell her?” I said.

“You have known her for longer than I. I turn the question around on you. And please stop agitating your knees in that fashion; it is obvious that you are stimulating yourself.”

I hadn’t realized I was doing it. I got up, paced around, looking at the pictures on the walls. Guy smiling in a U.S. Army Air Corps cap, black and white and dead, nice chin on him, though. Really old people in sixties shots, young people in really old photos, one of them water-stained, showing a pretty couple, big mustache on him, hats like the Gay Nineties. Three babies, all in dresses, even the boy. Bet one of the girls was her.

Hey, Dad! She’s going to blow a gangster! Marry a pilot! End up as a midnight snack for a dead guy from, what, hungry-Austria!

“Joey.”

“Huh?”

“Stay with me, please. This is important.”

“Oh, Margaret. I don’t know.”

“Most important is the question of who turned them and then let them go with no knowledge of what they are or how to survive in the world as it is now. This individual is dangerous.”

I considered a fern hanging in macramé from a hook on the ceiling. I pushed it, set it swinging. I set another one swinging, too.

“I really don’t know what she’s liable to do, Cvets.”

KILLING MARGARET

Let’s go back to 1933.

All those years ago.

Margaret wheeling me through the streets of Manhattan in the Beth Israel wheelchair, my belly full of nurse’s blood, the darkness of the morgue drawer still sitting at the center of my mind like a base a runner can’t quite steal away from, always back to it and back, I’m dead I’m dead I’m dead.

I remember the slow parade of streetlamps over me, the tide of car headlights in the street, brighter now than they had seemed before, the only suns I would ever know.

“I would have left you there,” she said. “I wanted to, believe me.”

“Why didn’t you?” I said.

“I’m responsible for you now. At least until you learn.”

“Learn want?”

“Learn how. The how of it. He’ll show you.”

I started to ask another question and she cuffed my ear, hard.

“Shut up now. I don’t like your questions, and neither will he.”

“Hey,” a woman with a grocery bag said to Margaret. “What kind of nurse are you, smacking that kid like that?”

Margaret ignored her, but the woman trotted up next to her.

“I mean it, what’s wrong with you? You don’t smack a sick kid.”

Never slowing down, Margaret turned her head, looked her in the eye, and the woman stopped and tilted her grocery bag so an apple fell out and rolled, just stood in the sidewalk with her mouth open, making a sound I’ll never forget. Almost a cow sound, full of despair, the sound of a woman who hadn’t realized that behind every face was a skull and behind every skull, worse than the skull, was nothing. Just nothing. Margaret could show you that in a second.

One thing I need to say about Margaret’s family situation is that when she worked for us, I pictured the Irish stereotype, house full of kids, drunk husband, you know. Turns out I didn’t know a thing. When she left my house that day, the day of the gorgon, she had gone to her wretched Brooklyn tenement building with few windows and coal soot on the burlap walls, and she had passed the night staring at her son, a pale, freckled boy of six named Liam who had fallen from a snowy rooftop and lost the use of an arm. Worse, Liam was simple now. No school, no work, no wife for him. Ever. She had driven her violent husband off the year before and had leveraged herself as far into debt as she could go before finding the job at my family’s house. Things had started to get better. Just the week before the incident, she had paid one dollar fifty cents on the sixteen dollars she owed the grocer, given her sister a dollar against the ten she owed her and gotten her ice skates out of hock. Turns out Margaret in her daylight life wasn’t a half-bad skater.

And then?

“I tried being a whore,” she told me once. “I went with a fella, but ended up changing my mind about it halfway into the thing. He punched me good a few times and tried to take what he wanted, but I waited until he had his pants down and cut his mickey with a razor in my shoe. Not off. Just nicked it, but you know how they bleed, or maybe you don’t, but I do, and he wasn’t for fighting anymore after, and wasn’t worried about getting his money back neither. Just ran out into the street howling, holding a towel bunched up on it. Still, my eyes swelled up near shut and I knew I wasn’t no good for whoring. I didn’t know what I was good for.”

The food had run out and eviction was looming. They were living on soup kitchen and breadline charity. Margaret’s sister, who had five kids of her own, wouldn’t take the boy permanently, and neither would the home for boys. Not while Margaret was alive.

“So I did it.”

Picture this. You’re a vampire. You’ve bought a tenement building in Brooklyn, some leaning-over piece of shit waiting to collapse or burn to the ground. You’ve got some schmuck who collects rents and manages things so nobody has to meet you. You live on the top floor with the windows boarded up and a pipe leading down to the ground and into the sewers, and that’s how you get out unseen. You make a point not to hunt in your own building, but there’s a wrinkle. There’s this woman. Irish, like half your tenants, but she doesn’t walk around beat-up looking and sad with a scarf around her hair waiting for her teeth to fall out. She’s got spirit. Like some old Irish clan chieftess or queen or something, she could walk down the sidewalk naked and never drop her chin. She had a piece-of-shit man who tried working her over with his belt one time too many, meaning once, and he ended up pushed down the stairs with a meat fork in his belly, went septic, almost killed him but he got better. Somebody said he went to Ohio because Pennsylvania was still too close to her. Only she’s got a sick kid and a perpetual case of bad luck.

You look in her window sometimes, watch her comb out her reddish-brown hair, you notice that her big blue eyes never look far-off or dreamy but like there’s work to be done and she’s going to do it. When she goes to bed she doesn’t read or pray—just washes up, combs her hair, lies back straight as a board in the middle of the bed (now that she can) and off goes the lightbulb behind its ratty shade. Only you can still see because you’re a vampire, and you just watch her in the dark, watch her close her eyes like a dead soldier, watch her chest rise and fall and think about how clean her neck is, how hot her blood is, how good it would be. She’s a beautiful woman, but not in the way the girls in the magazines or paintings are. She’s beautiful like a horse is beautiful, in her veins and the shape of her head, and her eyes. Especially her eyes. You want her in all the ways you can want a living woman. Only you never do it, any of it. Not here. Not where you live.

Then one day she sends the kid off, borrows a thimbleful of cheap perfume from the young mother two doors down, gets tarted up in torn stockings and shoes you’d never seen her wear. She goes out late. Comes home bruised and bloody. Not her blood. You’re intrigued.

A week or so later she sends the kid off again. It’s a cool, cloudy night. And the Irish queen who seemed to be made out of stone has a breakdown. She doesn’t break with sobbing or hysterics or booze; she starts busting things. Dead-faced, dead-eyed, she breaks her plates and cups and saucers, she takes a soup can to the glass parts of the cabinets and the clock and then chucks the can at the bathroom mirror. The neighbors knock and she tells them not to be concerned, she’s cleaning house, and what can they do? You can’t call the cops on a woman for breaking her own shit, and they’ve got their own lousy lives to worry about.

When she’s busted enough bustables, out comes the razor and she starts in shredding the shreddables: bed linens, towels, dishcloths, a picture of FDR, her underthings, her dresses, isn’t this fascinating? Then she draws her bath, and you have a good idea what’s coming, especially since she’s still holding the razor. A woman who cuts up her towels before she gets in the tub probably isn’t planning to dry herself off after, right?

She seems to think about it for a long time, though. And that’s when she cries. Like how unfair things have been to drive her to this place finally hits her and at last she shows a moment of weakness. It’s not like you really know how to love anyone or anything being what you are and all, but whatever affection you felt for her because of her strength doubles now that you see that strength’s limit.

How fast she does it surprises you. Just one wrist, hard, more of a gouge than a slash, across the wrist like an amateur. And what does she do? Gets out of the tub and starts trying to bind the cut with the strips of towel.

But you can’t help yourself anymore.

Not with all that blood.

“As soon as I clipped myself I saw myself in hell. That’s where suicides go, as I’d long been told, and I supposed I believed it, but not really. It had started to seem to me that the Lord actually wanted it of some of us; that he would just keep shoveling out the misery until we got the idea that we wasn’t wanted here no more. And if he was going to stick us in a second hell because we were sick of the first one, then he wasn’t no better than the worst of us, so what was the point of it? Only, the instant the cold pain of the razor hit me and the blood started fanning out in the water, I saw myself. Jerking like, with my eyes rolled back in my head, in a dark, hot place, my skin as white as ash and burning now, everything burning, and a crowd burning with me. So up I jumped, splashing water everywhere, fetching what was left of a towel and trying to stop it. I started saying Jesus then, but Jesus wasn’t what come through the window.”

So in you go. Nobody’s going to pay attention to the sound of something else breaking here, so you go through the glass. She doesn’t go to scream, just looks at you like you’re something in this life she hadn’t imagined and she doesn’t know where to put you. Still, you jam your hand over her mouth and start lapping blood from her arm, and oh the salty, frothy, watered-down goodness of it, like the faintest memory of hot broth on a cold day, and now you’ve thrown down her poor excuse of a bandage and you’re nursing straight from her gushing wrist, opening the wound bigger with your big yellow teeth, it’s spraying so fast you can’t get it all in your mouth, it jets on your chin, up your nostril, and this is bad because you’re going to kill her. Or are you?

“Live or die, he said, and I said live, not because I wanted to but because I wasn’t ready to go to hell. But he kept taking the blood from me, and I’d been thinking it was the devil, but now I remembered Dracula, and what a silly business that was, or had seemed, but here was one like him. And killing me, too, despite his question. So I made the decision to fight him, but it was too late. I’d no strength left. I clawed at his eye once and he didn’t like that, twisted my arm near off and I wanted to yell but couldn’t through his hand, which I bit, and hard, but he paid it no mind. Just kept draining the life out of me until the darkness rose up like a buzzing mass of flies and took my sight away, but I heard knocking at the door again, and then I felt him spit something back in my arm. Just for a second I got my vision back, got a good look at him. Jesus, I wished I hadn’t. I was hoping that wouldn’t be the last thing I saw before I died. But it was. I died just after I felt the air get colder. I died just about the moment I knew he was taking me out the window. Christ, he was hideous.”

Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you that part of this little make-believe. You’re hideous. Christ, you’re hideous.

The vampire who turned Margaret was named John Valentine. Kind of a bad joke, pinning a hearts-and-flowers name like Valentine on a kid after you reached your great Godly scepter down into the womb and gave him a stir. He looked like he’d been squeezed out wrong, one big goldfishy eye, the other one sunk in his head, and what a head. Broad nose and lips on him like he had a little chocolate in the blender somewhere, but his hair was pure dago, black and greasy and not enough of it. He might have had a widow’s peak once, but that peninsula had mostly sunk, leaving one sad little island of hair, one stubborn patch of it he grew out long and put a ribbon on sometimes. He was half-mad, which you might have been if you had literally been sold to a circus. But he was brilliant, too. Brilliant enough to talk a vampire into turning him so he could escape the freak show. Brilliant enough to run schemes, steal and extort his way into property ownership and never blow his cover.

He was big and strong, almost as strong as the Hessian.

He was the only vampire I knew that horses and dogs were okay with; I saw him ride a horse once.

And if it weren’t for John Valentine, Margaret might have left me in that morgue drawer to figure it all out on my own. But she owed him. He had shipped her kid off to live in a home for people like that and bribed them to favor him. He taught her, and made her teach me, and we stayed together, the three of us, until the bright, sunny day when his building collapsed and his box popped open and mine and Margaret’s didn’t. Dumb luck. That was in 1942. But nobody cared about collapsing tenements then. There was this war on.

MARGARET KILLING

^NOW

¹⁹⁷⁸

I stood with Margaret in her vault, the mayor’s apartment, surveying the wreckage. Four Hunchers had found their way into the place and it hadn’t gone well for them. She was spitting out the last of the blood from her shot mouth and rubbing her hands, which were sore from what she’d just done to the intruders.

“Never call me your mother again,” she said.

I held up my hands like I wouldn’t dream of it.

“Oh, would you look at this, now,” she said, pointing at a hole in her sage-green velvet couch. Never mind the brain and hair on it, she could clean those off with a stiff brush. And never mind the point-blank gunshot to the face she’d absorbed. It was the bullet hole in her couch that pissed her off.

One of the Hunchers was still alive; she had broken his back and stuffed a sock in his mouth. Now she pinched his nose until he came to, but then she charmed him. “You won’t yell, but you’ll listen and you’ll answer when I ask you something.”

He nodded, his eyes tearing up. He couldn’t see us in the dark and his little gang’s flashlight was smashed.

“Did nobody upstairs warn you not to come down here?”

He shook his head no and started crying.

“Stop yer blubbin’,” she said. He did. I glanced over at one of his friends who had died so fast he fell back on his own legs like a contortionist, his face baggy-looking from the busted skull, one eye bugged, brain in his hair.

“Are you going to kill me?” he asked.

“Course I am. Where did you fine fellas come from?”

“The Bowery,” he said in a sleepy voice.

“Anybody else know you’re here?”

“No.”

“Anybody gonna come lookin’ for you?”

“No.”

“All right,” she said, nodding. And she rolled him over and fed while he moaned. And then I fed, and he died while I did it, his body seeming to deflate. Ridiculously, I thought of a basketball that would never bounce again, but it wasn’t funny. He had been full of pot but not smack, so my head just got a little achy. Smack makes me throw up.

I thought about Butterbean and his burned Frisbee in the park, the older one saying, You don’t want us, we dirty.

I thought about Gary Combs’s head dropping like a setting moon as he died.

It’s what they’re for.

No, it’s not.

Margaret sat on the couch, her legs crossed, looking at me.

“What was it you wanted to see me about, Joey?”

I told her.

THE STEEPLE OF HIS HANDS

Me and Cvetko in my room.

This was after the three of us pulled the four Hunchers out of Margaret’s apartment and then dragged them down the tracks to Purgatory, a sick rat following us in a woozy S-pattern.

Rats didn’t last long in our tunnels because we kept them covered in rat poison. It didn’t bother us.

Cvetko had his fingers steepled under his chin, waiting for me to say whatever I had come to tell him.

“Margaret says she’s taking the Latins and going to the castle,” I said.

He looked bothered, broke the steeple of his hands and touched his face like he does. He hated killing anyone, but the thought of setting that grim bunch of Puerto Rican killers loose on teeny little kid vampires clearly ate him up. Those guys were killers before they got turned, which wasn’t long ago.

No, Cvetko hated this and I wasn’t in love with it myself.

“We should talk to them,” he said.

“What, the kids? I already talked to them. They just don’t get it.”

“The Latins.”

“Are you kidding? Margaret will flip her shit if we go around her like that.”

He looked at me over his glasses, clearly scared but determined.

“They were still people ten years ago, all of them. Their communities live with three generations under one roof; as brutal as they are, they won’t like the idea of destroying children any more than you or I do.”

“I don’t know, Cvets.”

“Why do you think, Joseph Peacock, that Margaret decided not to call a town meeting?”

I put my hands behind my head. I was lying on top of my fridge like Snoopy on his doghouse.

“I dunno. Just to get it done.”

“Have you been watching television?”

“No,” I lied. “Why?”

“Because you are exhibiting signs of mental atrophy.”

“The fuck does that mean?”

He took his glasses off and polished them, still looking at me.

“It means you are giving me a lazy answer instead of thinking. Now, why does Margaret choose not to bring this up for discussion?”

“Because nobody’ll like it.”

“Precisely. If we talk to her Puerto Rican friends and harden their hearts against her plan, she will, of necessity, call a meeting in order to gather enough strength to deal with the little ones decisively. But the meeting will not go her way because she is not a diplomat. She will have to bend to the will of the group. Let me ask you another question.”

I nodded.

“Rather, why don’t you tell me what my next question is and then answer it yourself?”

I rolled off the fridge and paced. I think better when I’m moving. Not that I could pace far in that cell with Cvetko in it.

It hit me and I stopped cold.

“Why did she tell me? What she was going to do, I mean.”

He smiled at me in that happy-professor, Joey-isn’t-a-retard-after-all way.

“And?”

“And it’s because she doesn’t really want to do it, either. She wants me to stop it.”

He pretended to applaud.

“I would not go so far as to say she actively wants you to stop it. But she does, I believe, want you to share in her guilt by assenting, and she will not retaliate against you even if she reasons out that you betrayed her confidence.”

“Why not? She doesn’t like me.”

“Never forget that you alone remember her when she was a living woman. She has known you longer than any of us. You are no incidental traveler, no Jonah she can cast into the sea for the whale to swallow. Except perhaps for Ruth, you are the closest thing she has to family.”

I guess I never thought of it that way.

THE RACCOON AND THE VAN

“She know you’re here?”

He met us in an unused subbasement below a tienda on Avenue B that sold brooms and mops and cheap cookware, but also candles for different saints. The shopkeepers didn’t know it was there, let alone that it was connected by crawl spaces to active subway lines, and abandoned loops to the west, and to wherever these guys lived. I had never been past this sort of cobwebby parlor. It was about the size of the inside of a McDonald’s. You called these guys by tapping a pipe with a wrench three times, then counting to five and tapping three more. If it was early evening, before they went out, or early morning before they tucked in, one of them would show up within five or ten minutes.

“No, she does not,” Cvetko said.

The other squatted down on his heels, thinking about this. To look at him, he was just a very pale Puerto Rican kid with torn-up jeans and Bruce Lee–looking kung fu shoes, a hooded sweatshirt, navy blue. But his eyes were too dark and small, and he never liked to look at you. If you looked closely at his jeans, you saw that they had been bled on. Plenty. He wasn’t much older than me. A mustache had just been coming in when his clock stopped. He wasn’t the leader, but he was the little brother. What he thought mattered. I didn’t know his name.

He nodded, glanced up at us for a second, then looked at our feet. We should talk now. We did. We wanted to meet with Mapache. His dark eyes went back and forth a couple of times while he thought about it, and I thought maybe Cvetko had been wrong, maybe whatever embers of humanity were left in this kid had just gone cold, we might have missed it by a month. I could only too easily picture him hacking the head off the little British boy or his maybe-sister; he looked closed-off and bitter. I wonder how much choice he had in whether to join his brother underground.

He moved over to the pipe and banged it twice, real gentle. Then once harder. And then he sat really still with his head down like he wasn’t even there; I’m sure this kid could disappear like that, just squat in an alley, cold to the touch and motionless so you never knew he was there till you felt his hand over your mouth.

When the kid heard his brother approach, he lit a candle in the corner, a saint candle from the tienda but with the saint’s face and name spray-painted over. Nobody needed a candle to see, but newer vampires still need a little boost to see well.

Mapache was less creepy than the kid, liked to smile, would actually look at you. The one creepy thing he did was to stand kind of close to you while talking, but I think that was a Hispanic thing in general. He would touch you, too, and vampires don’t touch each other much. Mapache had a big fucking mustache and I know he was Puerto Rickie, not Mexican, but I thought Pancho Villa must have been like this. Big mustache, easy to like, but still a killer. And this guy killed vampires, which isn’t easy.

After we told him what we had to tell, he said, “I see why you came to me. This needs thinking about. I’ll talk to the others, and either way I won’t say nothing.”

“We are grateful,” Cvetko said.

I thought he would go back into the hole now, but he didn’t. He stood even a little closer to us.

“Meantime, you wanna hunt?” he said, grinning like a bastard. His eyes caught what little light there was in the room and shone like raccoon eyes. I later learned from Cvetko that’s what mapache means. Raccoon. At the offer to hunt, Cvetko shifted his weight, which meant he was nervous, but I answered for him before he could cough up some chickenshit excuse.

“Hell yes.”

I have to give it up to the Latin Hearts; these guys had fun hunting. You’re not going to remember all these names, but there was a husky one who looked older, Gua Gua. I think that means van. He wasn’t quite van-sized, but he was a little more than person-sized. He was the uncle of the two brothers. Anyway, we went to a little alley not too far off 1st Avenue, between a pizza joint and a pawnshop with a shitty saxophone behind the bars, like even the musical instruments here were felons. Gua Gua was all camped out in a wheelchair, blanket around his legs, Greek fisherman’s cap on his head, his greasy hair uncombed. He had a PLEASE HELP BLESS YOU cardboard sign on his lap and a half a milk carton next to it to collect change. Here’s the brilliant part: He parked his rig out in the sidewalk, near the street. If you were actually moved enough by the human tragedy of this big coughing slob on wheels to put money in the carton, you were walking closer to him than the alley and you got by safely. If you weren’t feeling generous but weren’t repelled by him, you walked in the middle of the sidewalk and you got by safely. But. If the phlegmy coughing and the sight of the poor fat fucker drove you far enough away, you walked close to the alley. If Gua Gua sneezed, that meant the coast was clear. And that was bad news for you.

Mapache snatched the first one, an artist-type lady older than she was dressed, wearing a man’s hat and a big pair of round earrings like a second pair of eyes. He moved so fast she didn’t have time to make much noise, just went EEP!, kinda cute actually, but still the younger brother stuffed a pillow over her face, pushed her up against the wall, and went to work on her neck. A little guy they call Bug actually darted up her skirt, sucked her femoral. This whole thing took like forty seconds, during which Gua Gua rolled his chair back against the alley to block the view with his girth. When it was done, he turned around, he was the best at charming, and told her, “Nothing happened to you, lady, just count to five real quiet, then give me your money and go home. Go to bed.” She did exactly as she was told, emptied the green, foldy stuff in her purse into the milk carton and stumbled away in a daze, her scarf knotted around her neck, dripping blood from up under her skirts, but that stopped soon.

A couple came down the sidewalk, then a black guy who gave Gua Gua a quarter. It only cost a quarter to get down that street safely.

The next one who came too close to the alley was for Gua Gua. Kind of a badly shaven PLO sympathizer guy with a— What’s that word for the Yasser Arafat scarfy thing? I don’t know. He looked all hard and flinty, hawk-faced like he practiced it, though I only saw that look for a second before Bug and I caught him and flung him in. Mapache pillowed him, but he was strong, wiry-like, punched me a good one, which started me laughing. Like he finally gets to hit a Jew and this is how it goes for him. Anyway, nobody bit this one. Mapache pulled out a little knife and did his wrist, bled him down into a plastic McDonald’s glass with a picture of the Hamburglar on it. Then Gua Gua coughed twice and Bug draped a big garbage bag around us and we lay still. A laughing, carousing bunch went by the alley, somebody saying something Spanish, somebody else belched real loud like on purpose and kicked a bottle. Then three more coughs and we finished with Arafat. Bug licked his bleeding wrist with the flat of his tongue, it’s the spit that makes the wound close up, and sure enough the well sputtered and went dry. We stood him up, straightened up his kerchief, and Gua Gua charmed him off home. Then Mapache pulled out a little bottle of rum and poured some in the glass, stirring with a straw. He gave us each a sip—rum and blood is good, they called it ronrico—then wiped the rim with his shirt and passed it on to Gua Gua. Cvetko and I fed next, then we moved on to another ambush site, splitting up on the way there, moving in ones and twos. Always Mapache and his brother.

Oh, I forgot to tell you, Mapache walked with a cane. Made him look a little like a dirty, smiley pimp. I really liked these guys and their system; getting into somebody’s house was safer, but this was downright fun, like trick-or-treating. Give the fat man a quarter or else! Even Cvetko seemed amused by it.

Until they peeled a guy.

I didn’t like that either.

They jumped a very brown, white-haired man on his way home from working at a taquería or some beaner place, he smelled like beef fat and beans and olive oil, he must have been fifty. Too old for a job like that. But he was alone and more interested in his beer in a paper bag than in his surroundings, so they flipped him up into a Dumpster next to an old broken couch and started drilling him to make more ronrico. But he was a little drunk and stubborn, wasn’t taking well to the charm, even when Gua Gua tried it—sleepy drunk is good for charming, angry drunk is not. He yelled a lot, he wouldn’t shut up, and now people were coming. Mapache full-on cut his throat. Just cut it. We put him in the old couch, which had about a thousand mice in it, we had to shake the mice out, and dumped him in the river. When it was done, Cvetko made that uncomfortable face he makes where really he’s just not sure what to do, but it looks like maybe he smelled a fart, and it’s easy to take it the wrong way. Mapache was a guy who took things the wrong way.

“What?” he said.

“We aren’t supposed to kill them.”

“No, viejo, we aren’t supposed to kill them and get caught.”

Cvetko should have shut up then, but he was so smart he was dumb, one of these guys who couldn’t let something go if he knew he was right. And mostly he was right.

“Not to differ, but we need not get caught for the body to be discovered. If a great many bodies are discovered, the police will increase their scrutiny of this area.”

Cvetko really should have shut up.

“Hey! I don’t know where the fuck you’re from, but I’m from here. People die here. Every day. As long as they’re poor or brown, and that guy was both, the cops could give a shit. That poor motherfucker couldn’t get in the newspaper if he flew to the moon.”

Shut up Cvetko shut up.

But he was going to say something else. I knew he was.

“Still,” he said. Just that one word, but one too many.

Mapache walked over, stood real close like he does, making Cvets pull up his lip in that uncomfortable, fang-showing sneer like a dog waiting to get hit with a rolled-up magazine.

“What the fuck are you makin’ that face for, man? And talkin’ that talk? Police will increase their SCREW-TIN-KNEE. Fuck you, man. This is how it is, and you know it even if you wanna act like a priest, fuckin’ maricon vampire priest. What, you never peel nobody? It was a accident!”

Cvetko just sneered, actually closed his eyes like maybe his aggressor would just go away if he ostriched.

“Mapache, please, he doesn’t mean it,” I said.

Gua Gua walked over, said something in Spanish, put his huge, white hand on Mapache’s shoulder. Mapache relaxed a little, started to turn around, then fucking face-touching, fucking autistic Cvetko had to burp out some more wisdom, eyes still closed, one hand held halfway up as if to stop a smack.

“We have to work together, we have to try to agree on common governance…”

Mapache, quick as hell, and I mean this guy moved more like a panther than a raccoon, grabbed the machete off his brother’s belt and came at Cvets. I stood in his way but he pushed me aside, grabbing Cvetko’s hand with his free one and then swinging the machete down. He lopped Cvetko’s hand off, lopped it right the fuck off. Tossed it in the water.

Cvetko and me just stood there.

“It’ll grow back, man,” Mapache said, a scrawny olive branch if ever I heard one, and the four of them walked away. I wanted to kill that fucker but knew I couldn’t, not him. Not now.

Cvets just stood there bleeding, his hand already re-forming off the bone, the severed one down in the river doubtless dissolving, unmaking itself. A regular hand, crabs would already be fighting over that, but not one of ours. Animals don’t eat us. I used to cut my fingers off and throw them at track-rabbits to see if they’d eat them; they never did, the fingers just bubbled away like butter in a hot pan at the same rate the new ones grew in.

Cvetko was already wriggling the new hand, touching his thumb to the new fingers.

What kind of bully do you have to be to hurt a guy like Cvetko? But some vampires were like that, hated weakness. Hell, a lot of people were like that, too.

“You okay?” I said, a stupid question but I couldn’t think of anything else.

“As they say, nothing hurt but my pride,” he said, trying to smile, but it was so pathetic I was almost glad when he gave up and let himself look real sad.

“My ring,” he said.

I never noticed one on him. I mean, I knew he had one, on his pinky, gold, but I never really looked at it.

I guess I wasn’t much of a friend.

“My wife gave it to me.”

THE GARGOYLE

When we got back to our tunnels, Margaret was waiting for us. She perched up in a brick niche like a gargoyle, holding her shovel. Her head-taking-off shovel.

“Did… Did you want to speak to us?” Cvetko asked. She just squatted up there in her shitty bathrobe with her fangs showing, her shovel idly scraping the wall, staring at us. I opened my mouth to speak but then shut it again. That was the thing with Margaret, you always felt she was looking right through you.

“Just get into your boxes and shut them real tight,” she said. “There’s a meeting tomorrow night, Eighteenth Street station, early, and then we’re going on a little walk in the park. All of us.”

She watched us go to our cells. She waited. It was a while before I slept, knowing she was out there, but I dead-dreamed her sitting there in her niche until she turned into an actual gargoyle, opening her mouth so blood came out of it, and out of her eyes, like rainwater, filling the tracks until they flooded and I knew she was going to flood the city that way.

There’s a boulder in Central Park, I’m not telling you where, but it’s a boulder that a pack of vampires can lift. Barely. So they did lift it. This pack of vampires rolled a shopping cart up and the weakest of them, that would be me, dumped the cart while the rest of them grunted, holding up the boulder, and then they let it down so heavy the earth moved under their feet. There’s three stiffs under that boulder, but nobody’s ever going to find them. They’re as flat as stingrays now. They’re part of the park and that’s all they are.

I’ll back up a bit.

Turns out not all of us went to Belvedere Castle, but most of us. Ten. We approached the building from all sides, probably nine o’clock or so, didn’t bother going up to the top windows, just peeled the boards off one big window and walked into the first floor like we owned the place.

“Fuckin’ animals,” Baldy said.

The elementary class of night school had been busy.

A bigger woman, bag lady type, lay spread-eagled like the X on a landing pad for a helicopter, all chewed up, dead about a day, her raw-sausage-looking ankles stuffed into too-small sneakers with the backs cut off. She was staring at the ceiling with her lips pursed together, like her last out-breath had been a horsy noise. Less fresh than her was Mr. Combs, crumpled in a corner starting to look black, his eyes dusty and sunken. He had worms.

Want to groove on Miles?

How had nobody smelled this place? Were people so used to how rotten the park was that they didn’t even care anymore? Had no cops come by? The flies were thick in here.

I led the way up the stairs, knowing as I went the kids wouldn’t be there. They had cleared out. But I smelled something familiar, something that filled me with dread. I knew what it was even as I poked my head around and looked.

The Negro cop. Handcuffed to the chair, his head twisted all the way around, his sad-bastard, uneven mustache an upside-down horseshoe that caught no luck. He was missing teeth. This was bad. This was going to bring SCREW-TIN-KNEE. I felt his cheek. Warm as hell.

They saw us coming, popped his neck, got out without us seeing. The cop’s mouth was still drooling bloody drool.

“Well,” Margaret said, addressing mostly Billy Bang and myself. We were the two loudest ones arguing not to hurt the small fry. She said it again.

“Just, well.”

After we cleaned up the mess, we all fanned out across the park in twos. Cvetko and me headed southeast; I picked the direction.

“You seem to have a hunch, Joseph,” Cvets said.

“Yeah,” I said.

We were supposed to get one of them, any one of them, and bring it back to our loops so Margaret could talk to it and find out where it came from, besides England. Did I mention Margaret didn’t like England much? Cvetko had objected, pointing out that they might all be together, that it might be dangerous. “If two of youse can’t handle a pack of little children who don’t know nothing yet besides peelin’ bums, then you deserve what you get.” Me and Cvets felt dubious about this, but we saluted and marched like good soldiers.

Really, we all but sprinted because of my hunch, and then I caught their scent. I was right.

“Brilliant,” he whispered when he saw where I was taking us. He patted my shoulder.

The children’s zoo.

Whatever else they were, they were children, and children love a zoo.

IN THE BELLY OF THE WHALE

“You have come to play, you have!” Peter squealed, smiling so I got another good look in his mouth; something I haven’t mentioned yet is that Peter had been about eight when his clock stopped, so now he was stuck with this cluster of gaps and mismatched teeth around the very sharp, yellowy fangs in his mouth. Now he was smiling this mess at me in pure, innocent joy, sitting huddled with the others. Five others, just as he said. Six dead children in the belly of Whaley the whale, who served as the entrance to the children’s zoo they put in like ten or fifteen years before. There used to be aquariums and all in the whale’s mouth, but these were empty now and the place was graffitied and trashed like most of the rest of the city.

“Gimme that,” I said, scared of them, but not too scared to snatch the cop’s hat off Peter’s head.

He made a pouty face and grabbed my nose, hard. Like he was going to rip it off for me. I twisted out of it and he laughed, grabbed the little girl’s nose instead.

I put the cop’s hat under my jacket.

“We were playing at jacks,” he said, and a little ginger boy held up a red rubber ball. I smiled. Then I saw what they were using as jacks and I stopped smiling.

“Look,” I said, “I need one of you to come back home with me. Would you like to see where I live?”

“Where do you live?” Peter said, the look on his face suggesting this had best not be boring. I had the idea they were still trying to work out if I was a kid like them, thus worth associating with, or a square like Cvetko, who they pretty much ignored. Cvetko was hunkered down next to me, looking like a teacher in his suit, looking like someone to be disobeyed, mocked, run in circles around.

“Someplace cool,” I said. “But first I got a better idea.”

“What, what?” said the ginger boy.

“What?” said the little dark-haired girl, almost too softly to hear.

“Yes, what?” Cvetko said, cocking an eyebrow at me.

The smaller little blond boy, who had ignored everything else as he tried to bend a penny with a pair of pliers, now looked up.

“Let’s go see a movie!”

Clearly Cvetko didn’t want to go see a movie. Neither did I, if the truth be told, but I needed time to think.

Want to know what they were using as jacks? A couple of jacks, sure. But also bullets, six of them.

And teeth.

I knew as soon as the epic symphony music banged up and the little ones all jumped that Star Wars was the right movie to keep them still for at least half an hour while Cvetko and I thought about what to do with them. The Astor Plaza Theater in Times Square was the last one in Manhattan still showing Star Wars, and only for late-night screenings. Peter had wanted to go see another movie, A Hard Knight’s Night, because there was a knight on the poster and he liked knights, but that was at another kind of theater altogether, the kind where middle-aged guys sat by themselves in raincoats.

Thank God for Star Wars. What else were we going to watch, The Bad News Bears Go to Japan? Sure it had kids in it, but it sucked, and sucked big. Corvette Summer? They weren’t going to sit still for that. Not a bad film for what it was, though. I had jerked off at least twice about Annie Potts. I’d love to meet Annie Potts. Still, you almost felt bad for Mark Hamill trying to be somebody besides Luke Skywalker. Fucking Star Wars.

Funny the power of that film—everybody clapped when it started, they often clapped. The little ones were staring at it openmouthed, whispering among themselves, pointing. At one point during the fight on the Death Star, the littlest one crawled into Cvetko’s lap and hugged his neck like he was Grandpa, which seemed to really embarrass him, so the girl pulled the kid off. Point is, they loved it. Hell, I loved it. I had seen it nine times already and I never got tired of it.

I was so into it that I almost felt bothered by Cvetko asking me, “What do you think our next step is?” I was holding a bag of popcorn just for appearances, no butter, it’s not really butter anyway and it smells like shit. Darth Vader was holding up the rebel guy by the neck, smoke everywhere, and Princess Leia was about to get caught.

“I dunno,” I said.

He went quiet then, thinking, didn’t say anything else until the stormtroopers stopped the speeder with Obi-Wan and Luke.

He said, “Let’s take them back home. All of them.”

A guy behind us shushed him, and I did something just to show off—I turned around and said, “Move along,” charming the guy. Not a second later, Obi-Wan charmed the stormtrooper, saying “Move along,” and the stormtrooper said it back twice, Move along, move along. The kids loved this! The guy I charmed stumbled all over everybody’s feet moving along like I told him to, I don’t know where to. His woman friend said his name after him.

“Yeah,” I said. “Home. But after the movie.”

Turns out we didn’t go home right away.

When the movie was done they were hungry, really hungry, despite having fed so recently.

I guessed I was, too.

And I knew just the place.

I hailed a cab.

Poor Mrs. Baker.

Can you imagine? There you are, suffering insomnia or whatever, three pillows behind you, reading The Thorn Birds with a penlight while your man snores beery snores and then you look up and I’m walking up on your bed as quiet as death by carbon monoxide, all shiny-eyed with six shiny-eyed little children behind me.

She jumped and went to shout, her arm knocking over the lamp, but I stuck my hand in her mouth and killed the shout and the red-haired boy caught the lamp. Fast little thing, they all were. Mr. Baker made that can’t-breathe, snoring-gag sound drunk sleepers make and lifted his head, but no sooner had he done that than the Indian boy, Peter, and two others were on him, Peter lying across his nose and mouth and hugging his head, all but smothering him while the others latched on to his neck and wrists. The quiet little girl had gone into the other bedroom to tap the boy. I heard a brief struggle and then soothing words from Cvetko. I charmed Mrs. Baker and then Mr. Baker and they settled back, let us feed. I could hear Gonzalo in the other room, moving back and forth on his wooden bar.

Peter stopped drinking first, looked for a second like he was going to retch, but shook it off. The others kept going, hunched like nursing piglets.

“Okay,” I said. The Indian boy stopped, looked up smiling, bloody.

“Stop now,” I said, and all but the redhead stopped.

The red-haired boy wasn’t about to stop; he was gorging himself on Mrs. Baker so fast I was getting worried about her.

“C’mon,” I said. “Enough’s enough. Save some for the fishes.”

Mrs. Baker started breathing hard, trying feebly to push him away, aware even in her charmed state that she was in danger.

“Knock it off,” I said, pinching ginger’s nose and pulling him off her neck. I put the dish towel I had in my back pocket on the neck and put her hand on it, said, “Press that.” She did. But ginger was fuming at me. He slapped me. Not hard. Before I could slap him back, Peter lunged and poked the kid in the eye with his finger. Hard.

“OW!”

“Don’t hit our friend,” Peter said.

The ginger looked even angrier for a second, his eye tearing up, then Peter said, “Caught a fart in your eye, didn’t you? Didn’t you just?” The kind of thing that’s only funny to kids, but boy was it funny to Peter and carrot-top. Whose name was really Sammy. I learned all their names that night. Sammy was British, too. The boys giggled.

In the other room I heard Cvetko saying, “Good girl. You took just enough. Now let him sleep.”

I heard the Baker kid groan.

I realized I hadn’t even fed yet, but I dared not; they really chewed on the Bakers good.

Whatever was up with these kids, they were ravenous.

I had my first moment of doubt, wondering if maybe Margaret had the right idea.

Then I heard the girl in the living room.

“Pretty bird,” she said softly.

“Pretty bird,” Gonzalo agreed. “Happy Days, time for Happy Days.”

Then he made the sound of a doorbell.

All the kids went to him now. It was hard getting them away from the gray bastard. Gary Combs had been right; they did like his bird.

PENNY DREADFULS

“So what are your names?” Margaret said. She had them lined up on the platform at the deserted 18th Street station. A jungle of graffiti stood behind her on the tiles; vines of it climbed up the posts. All of us were there, except Sandy. Even the Latins. Even Old Boy.

“You first, blondie. Who are you?”

“Peter,” said Peter, puffing out his bony chest out as if for military inspection. His bloody shirt was off soaking in a bucket.

She pointed at the rest in turn.

The girl mumbled something.

“Speak up,” Margaret said. “Was that Carmilla?”

“Camilla. No r. I don’t like the r.”

“Sammy,” said the redhead.

“Manu,” said the Indian boy.

“Alfie,” said the smaller blond lad.

“Duncan,” said the smallest of all, a brown-haired boy, all smiles. It was hard not to smile back at Duncan, but Margaret managed. She was still thinking about taking their little heads off, I could see it in the narrowing of her eyes and the set of her lips. The shovel wasn’t far off.

The little girl was fidgeting.

“Camilla,” Margaret said. “Who turned you into what you are? You know what you are, right?”

She nodded.

“So who turned you?”

She looked down at the floor.

Margaret pulled off a sandal and slapped her with it.

“Easy, baby,” Billy Bang said.

The girl looked at Billy Bang.

Margaret did, too, with hard, don’t-fuck-with-me eyes, but she spoke to the child.

“Answer me.”

“Varney,” Peter said. “His name is Varney.”

Before Margaret could say anything else, Cvetko caught her eye and said, “Varney was the name of a fictional vampire in the mid-nineteenth century. It was a penny dreadful.”

“What?”

“The book was called a penny dreadful.”

“That’s what he called us, too. His penny dreadfuls,” said Duncan. Duncan looked like the youngest, maybe six. Really infectious smile on that kid, he could have done commercials.

“He turned us all into little boys who would stay little boys,” Peter said. “He only likes little boys.”

“And one girl,” Camilla said low, “as long as she stays quiet.”

Were they saying what I thought they were saying? Oh, this was nasty.

“Where is this fine gentleman now?” Margaret said, cutting her eyes to her shovel.

Nobody spoke, they all looked down. Margaret was out of the child-slapping mood, though, so she just said, almost gently, “Tell me where he is.”

Peter met her eyes.

“Looking for us.”

There was more, lots more. Margaret kept them up past sunrise, with the light filtering through the dirty ground-level windows of the abandoned station, not enough to hurt us beyond making us a little headachey and queasy if we looked directly at it. They were saying they wanted to go to sleep, but she kept on them, trying to wring the names of their parents out of them, how they got over here from England, if they were English. They were. They flew over on a plane, Eastern Airlines; the Indian boy even had a piece of his ticket. She tried to get them to talk about their parents, but they just cried. She looked like she was going to start working them over with her Sandal of Slappery, but Billy Bang was giving her the stink-eye; he wasn’t into how mean she was to them.

Cvetko said quietly, to me and Margaret, “I wonder if these tears are genuine,” then, more loudly, “Why will none of you tell us anything about your mothers and fathers? I find this very odd. I’ll tell you about my parents.”

“They really will go to sleep,” I said, and Baldy laughed; Margaret almost smiled.

“You,” Cvetko said to the quiet girl, “tell me your papa’s name.”

She scrunched up her face and made with the waterworks.

Margaret aimed those big blue gorgon lamps of hers at the girl and said, “Stop yer cryin’, you’re not a baby, are you? Tell the man about your father.”

She cried harder.

Cvetko squatted down in front of her; she turned her face away.

“Leave her alone,” Peter said.

“Yes,” Alfie said, “Let her be. She’s our sister.”

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” Cvetko said, looking at Alfie. He pushed his old-man glasses up his nose, then asked Alfie, “When your father went to work, did he wear a tie?”

Alfie put his balled-up fists over his eyes, shook his head miserably.

Luna said, “Hey, why don’t we lay off them for a while? Let them rest.”

Margaret said, “Nobody comes to live with us until we know who they are and where they come from, not even children. Those are the rules and we all agreed. Didn’t we?”

Luna looked away, nodded.

“Does your father wear a tie to work?” Cvetko said again.

“He’s dead!” Peter blurted out, angry now. He pulled Cvetko’s glasses off his nose and threw them on the tracks. Margaret smacked his hand hard with the sandal. He showed his fangs but wisely didn’t bite. Cvetko leapt down on the tracks, fetched up his glasses.

The little girl said something quietly.

“What?” Margaret said. “Say it again.”

“He was a king.”

“A king, my arse. King of what, Piccadilly Circus?”

“And Mother was a queen.”

Everyone was quiet for a minute.

Then Cvetko, standing on the tracks and peeking up over the platform, said, “Well, we don’t know how old these children are.”

“What?” Margaret said. “This is horseshit.”

“What’s your mother the queen of?” Cvetko said.

“Of a castle. With a dragon under it. She’s dead,” she said quietly.

“We can’t rule anything out,” Cvets offered.

“I can rule out a fuckin’ dragon,” Baldy said, getting a laugh from the Latins.

Baldy and Dominic hadn’t said anything through all of this, just watched quietly, but you could see Baldy’s wheels turning. Whatever happened with these munchkins was going to be a big change, and change is good when you’re in second place. He wanted that apartment of Margaret’s and, while he never did anything that would give her reason to move against him, you know he never forgot his humiliation by her.

“Mr. Štukelj, you’re not really askin’ me to entertain the notion that this ragamuffin’s some kind of ancient vampire princess.”

“Don’t forget the dragon,” said Dominic.

I felt bad for Cvetko, so I said, “He’s just saying we don’t know. That’s all he’s saying.”

Luna spoke up now.

“If this Varney motherfucker did my parents and turned me into a rape puppet I might tell you stories about being a princess, too.”

Cvetko looked down, touching his face. He had his glasses now, but just held them. He looked like a dog in the doghouse standing down there.

“Besides which,” Margaret said, “they flew across the Atlantic on an airplane. Have you forgotten that little detail? What’s that, eight hours now? I’m thinkin’ they’d have got some daylight on them if they were already family.”

Now the air changed. A light shone down the tracks, a train was rumbling down from 23rd on its way to 14th. Cvetko leapt up to the platform.

Normally it would be too dark for anyone to see us, but there was just enough light, so we all slipped behind posts, got small. All but the children. They didn’t know how. Margaret yelled over the growing rumble, “Lie down and hide your eyes! Hide your eyes from the train!”

That was one thing that stuck out in the dark, our reflective eyes. They did as they were told.

When the train was gone, Peter walked up to Margaret with his little fists balled.

“Our father wore a tie,” he said, still crying. “All right?”

Then he stomped back to his sister and hugged her. The others joined them, all of them sobbing and hugging her, forming like a protective circle around her. It was sad and sweet. I was starting to like these little shits, and I wasn’t the only one.

Billy Bang started playing “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.”

Margaret pretended not to hear him, talked over him like he wasn’t even playing.

“All right. Until we get some answers out of them, they don’t come live with us. They stay right here. And someone stays with them to teach them.”

“I’ll do it,” Luna said.

“Someone older, and more than one, in case this Mr. Varney shows up.”

“We’ll do it,” Baldy said. Dominic gave him a look like Oh, will we?

“Thank you for your team spirit, Mr. Balducci, but I think not. Mr. Peacock and Mr. Štukelj, are you up for it?”

“Oh shit,” I said.

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

A few words might be in order concerning the 18th Street station, which was going to be my temporary home while we sorted out the kids. Just like Old City Hall, they decommissioned it in 1948 because the trains got longer; it was either shut it down or make it bigger, and after the war there weren’t exactly bathtubs full of money floating around for public works. We were too busy paying to rebuild German towns we just paid to knock down; I never get politics. I don’t vote. Anyway, I’m glad they shut so many stations down. This is prime real estate for vampires, what with no sun, easy transportation, an endless sea of humanity to hide among. Notice I didn’t say feed on; we aren’t supposed to feed down here just so we don’t get anybody wise to us. Commuters, I mean. Hunchers are fair game, if you can stand the drugs and booze in their blood. They don’t exist.

Oh, but the station. It’s small, typical. We had to chase a few Hunchers out when we annexed it—that’s a Cvetko word, by the way, annexed. I like it. Makes it sound official, more like a real estate deal and less like we just took it. Here’s how we do it. Say you’re a bum—or “homeless person” if you’re all sweet about it—and you’re hunching down here with eleven others, an even dozen. One morning, this voice comes out of the blackness of the tunnel saying, “Get out of this station. This is your only warning. If twelve of you sleep here tonight, eleven will wake up tomorrow.” And that’s it. What do you do? If you’re new to the loops, you might tough up and decide to post watches, dig your heels in. But that’s not you, You actually have been around, living underground, going to soup kitchens, scoring smack or drinking yourself slobbery, but you’ve heard about the “tunnel talker.” He always keeps his promises. You heard about a group of seven that got the same rap at the Worth Street station, some voice in the tunnel told the seven of them to pack up or they’d wake up with six, but they sat tough. Or tried to. The guy they posted to watch fell asleep, and in the morning, they woke up to squealing brakes and sparks and feathers all over the place because a train popped the guy and dragged him, goose down vest and all, halfway to the next station. Then the transit police came and moved them all out anyway, and they didn’t come back. And you, do you really want to stay now that the tunnel talker has paid you a visit? Hell. No. Not even in the winter, And this was spring. Better to take your chances in a cardboard condo.

So it’s just that easy.

Cvetko and I stole a set of lockers out of a shitty gym on 14th Street, moved them through the tunnels wearing our stolen transit authority uniforms, set the kids up in those. Vampires don’t actually need coffins, we just like them. It’s instinct. Plus, it’s good hygiene, what with bugs and all crawling all over the place. I mean, you could get perfectly used to sleeping on the floor, but why would you? Beds are nicer. Same thing.

Before we left to get the lockers, we had a chat with the kids.

I did the talking; I related better to them.

“It’s like this,” I said. “You need to learn some things about being what you are now.”

“Dead!” Duncan offered, smiling.

“Yeah, dead. Undead. But you need to learn how to keep from peeling people. Otherwise you’re going to blow it for all of us, get it?”

They said they got it. I wasn’t sure they got it.

“Let me put this another way. You have to stay here while we’re gone, okay? If you leave, Margaret…”

“The scary lady,” Camilla whispered.

“Yes. The very scary lady will come get you. But if you stay here, she’ll be your friend. Like me and Cvetko.”

“Friends,” Peter said. “I like having lots of friends.”

“Right. You’re going to learn a lot of neato things from me and Cvets, and we’re all going to be fwiends.” I said that last bit like Elmer Fudd.

The kids giggled at that. And they did stay put. Or at least I thought they did.

When we got the lockers in, I went back to our loops under Chelsea and got some clothes for me and Cvets, as well as my numchuks and a bunch of his travel magazines. That was a fun trip, carrying all that shit alone. But the alternative was for both of us to go again, or for me to trust Cvets to get the clothes I told him I wanted, and that wasn’t going to happen.

The sun hadn’t been down too long, so I went up to a corner market I knew that had a rack of six coin-operated toy dispensers. I traded a shiny new bicentennial quarter for a little plastic bubble containing a brand-new superball and stuck that in my pocket before hefting my box of stuff again. I thought about getting a Spaldeen, but those weren’t fast enough. Not for vampires.

Before we started playing games, I had to establish rule number one, what Captain Kirk would call the Prime Directive. I caught a rat and threw it against the third rail. Pop-ka-BANG!

They got the message. Now the fun could start, and what fun! A superball in the subway is a riot. The kids loved it, and I loved watching them chase it. Fast little bastards, so fast, and I’m no slouch. I chased it, they chased it, they threw it at me so I could swat it with my numchuks like a baseball. We practiced getting small between the running rails and letting the trains go by over us, getting small behind posts, climbing sideways and upside down. They were naturals.

Cvetko sat on his ass with a Time magazine and read about Kampuchea or somewhere.

Then they dropped the bomb. It never ceases to amaze me how kids can just forget to tell you something important, even something you asked them about before.

I said, “Varney’ll never catch you guys now. Or are all English vampires this fast?”

“Oh, Varney’s not English,” Peter said.

“No? Is he a Yankee-Doodle Dandy like me?”

“No.”

“What is he?”

“A henchman!” Duncan said.

“Whose henchman?” I asked.

Cvetko was paying attention now, to hell with Kampuchea.

“No,” Camilla said. “Not a henchman.”

My heart turned over and scraped out a beat. I knew what she was going to say before she said it.

“A Hessian.”

THE HESSIAN

Wilhelm Ulrich Messer, I wasn’t allowed to call him Willy, was, as far as I know, the oldest New Yorker, maybe the oldest American, which was kind of ironic because he spent a few months trying to kick Americans out of New York. He came over from Germany when it wasn’t Germany yet and fought for the British in the war of 1776, in a couple of places your war buff types would know, but the only one I remember is Saratoga because he claims he shot Benedict Arnold’s horse there, and I don’t care for horses. Or Benedict Arnold. Traitors chafe my ass. So Wilhelm Messer was all right in my book, even if he was mental, but maybe that’s not his fault. He was old-ass-old. Got turned in his forties, after he had settled down and married, like 1800 or so.

First thing I want to say about old vampires is that they all get weird. I don’t know how he was back when he was wearing a pigtail under that pointy brass hat he showed me and shooting traitors in the horse, but now? Like an old dragon sitting on money. They say Jews are stingy, but this guy wouldn’t accept a collect call from Jesus on Easter morning. He was friends with John Valentine, which might have been the last time he was friends with anybody. His relationship with my old mentor was the only reason I ever saw inside his tall, narrow brick house in Greenwich Village, and that was in 1940 or so. He’s still in the same house, which is only maybe four blocks from my old house, how’s that for creepy? Moldy old vampire in the neighborhood where I grew up, I probably sang Christmas carols outside his door. Big shade trees in front of that house, servants upstairs, nobody on the ground floor, and he had the coolest basement you ever saw. Had a basement under the basement nobody got to see and that’s where he coffined up and kept his treasure. I think he had tunnels going out under the village.

After Valentine cooked, Messer didn’t have any use for me and that was okay by me. When Margaret decided to go underground like fifteen years ago, she found me in the Warehouse District basement apartment I was renting and we told him, asked him to join us. He said no. We were sitting in the basement library on a couch almost as nice as Margaret’s, surrounded by swords and pole-arms and oldey-timey maps on the walls, this guy loved a map. His tall brass hat and Prussian-blue uniform hung in a glass case, all lit from below like in a museum. The uniform really brought home how big the guy was. It was jarring that he had been so massive even at twenty years old, even back when everybody had little tiny shoes and chairs like for dolls, when a shrimp like me was average-sized. No wonder he didn’t want to go into the tunnels. I wondered if he even could get small. Probably not very.

He said, “It is undignified to live in the sewers and unsafe to live under the trains.”

Did I mention this guy had a mustache? Huge fucking mustache on him, like Burt Reynolds, only sandy-red. Probably used to twirl it on the ends back in the day.

“What do you mean, unsafe?” Margaret asked.

“Mrs. McMannis, I mean that it is not safe,” he said, a little crazy in the eyes. “Vampires have disappeared down there, many vampires, as anyone of a certain age can tell you. Your youth and enthusiasm are attractive”—it sounded like attractiff—“but tunnels are for vermin.”

An awkward moment passed. “Is there any other way in which I might assist you?” he said, leaning forward and putting his hands on his seat like it was time for us all to stand up now.

“No,” she said, a little pissed. Truth was, he didn’t need us. He had been doing just fine for a very long time, and if Margaret thought organizing underground was smart, she could hardly say his way was dumb.

Oldest, richest monster in a city of monsters, and as big as Mean Joe Green to boot.

“Then it is my pleasure to wish you both a good evening,” he said, just like Dracula, if Dracula were a kraut. The new servant opened a white-gloved hand and gestured at the stairs. His old servant, back in 1940, had been a light-skinned colored that could have been mute for all I knew; this 1960s servant was a young German-sounding guy, though he didn’t talk much either. If listening to a clock tick was your idea of a good time, this was the house for you. Anyway, quiet young German guy showed us up and out, opening a door for us with another “Good evening.” Handsome guy, kind of Luftwaffe-looking. Both of the servants had been real handsome. I think maybe Wilhelm the subway-hating Hessian swung AC/DC, just a feeling I got.

But kids?

I never saw him being into kids.

HUNGRY

“Those kids know how to eat,” Billy said. Luna, Billy, and me were sitting in the Empire Diner in Chelsea drinking coffee just before tucking in. There was already light in the sky, just that little bit so you can’t call it blue yet, just like dark with a glow to it. No sweat, though, there was a manhole cover just outside and the traffic wasn’t bad. I had money and tip lying on the ticket. We could be underground within sixty seconds; by the time somebody notices one of us slipping under, all three of us are under, and what are you going to do? Call the cops?

The waitress came by; she hadn’t come by for a while and Luna said it was because I hadn’t been remembering to blink, only now I think I was doing it too much, but still she came and poured a little more thick black coffee in my cup. We were all filling our bellies with warm java so we could sleep better. We were all hungry. I was so tired I just watched the steam rise from my cup and said, “Yeah. That they do.”

Watching the six of them nearly peel the Bakers the other night had convinced me we needed to split them up, so Luna had taken Camilla, Cvetko had taken Duncan and Alfie, and Billy had taken Manu and Peter. I got stuck with Sammy.

Cvetko was with the kids already, getting them squared away in their little metal bunks.

Billy said, “Manu ain’t too bad, but my man Pete? He starts bitching and moaning after an hour or two. He don’t take much, but he takes often.”

Luna nodded. “The girl’s the same. We almost got caught because she bit a guy on the subway, said she couldn’t wait. I charmed three people who got on while she was doing it. But, no, she doesn’t take much.”

I was thinking about Sammy. Little redheaded Sammy with a belly like a camel. He didn’t need to feed all the time like Peter and Camilla, but getting him off somebody before he drained them was hard; he’d fight you, try to take a quart.

“We hit three cabdrivers, two around here, one down by the Brooklyn Bridge. The third time I said, ‘Lay off, it’s my turn,’ but Sammy jabbed him anyway, latched onto his wrist while I was on his neck and sucked so hard the guy arched his back and rolled his eyes back in his head, so I stopped. The meter was running the whole time. I didn’t pay.”

The waitress passed by again and I waited till she was out of earshot.

“What do you think it is? Because they’re kids?”

“Maybe,” Billy said. “Maybe not.”

“Well, what else?”

Billy grimaced and washed down the last of his coffee. He made sure nobody was listening.

“What if they’re another kind of vampire?”

“What, like a different species or something?”

“Yeah,” Billy said, standing up and hefting his guitar case, “just like that.”

They were snoozing in their lockers. Cvetko had taken to sleeping in a big blanket by the turnstiles; he wasn’t about to drag his coffin out here any more than I was about to move my fridge. He just wrapped himself up good and tight so no light got in, making kind of a turban around his head. But he wasn’t out yet, just sitting up Indian-style, looking for all the world like a guy who smoked. I wondered if he used to smoke.

“Did you use to smoke, Cvetko?”

“Yes,” he said. “But only socially, never as a habit.”

“You wanna walk with me?”

He nodded, got up.

Someone kicked inside one of the lockers.

Someone kicked back twice.

“Settle yourselves and go to sleep,” he said. A halfhearted kick followed like a mild act of rebellion, but then they fell silent.

We hopped down onto the tracks and into the darkness of the tunnel.

“Billy said they might be another species of vampire,” I said.

“What are your thoughts on the subject?”

“I don’t have any. It’s why I’m asking you.”

He walked, his hands in his pockets.

“Mr. Bang is an intelligent man. It is possible that there are different strains of vampirism, though it must not be thought of as a disease.”

“You’ve said before you think it’s a curse. Magic.”

“Yes.”

“What is magic, anyway?”

“In my opinion, it is simply a series of phenomena or forces that science cannot now explain and might never be able to explain. Phenomena that are not subject to rules as we understand them, that may, in fact, change the rules we pretend to understand. Pretend in the French sense, as in to claim.”

“Why not just say claim?”

“Pretend is a more elegant word, as there is a sort of elegance in the best science. A child watches his parents dance a complicated waltz. The mechanics are beyond his power and will be for many years. But he may sketch a few steps of it, his head erect, his arms almost in the right position. He says, ‘I am dancing!’ One may say that he claims to dance, but really he pretends.”

“You think too much.”

“As you pretend not to understand the concepts I challenge you with. You do not believe the myth of your own ignorance. But you perpetuate it out of habit, out of a desire to align with the ideals of American pop culture. Charisma, action, dumb luck. You will not learn chess because you are too vain to imagine yourself bent over a board with dull old men or with the hucksters in Washington Square Park. You enjoy poker because it is an American game, the game of saloons and broad smiles. A game where luck or sudden violence may yet save the unprepared.”

“Train,” I said.

We took a niche, got small and flat, him higher, me lower, our backs to the tunnel. None of the sleepy fuckers goldfished behind the windows of the morning 5 train would know what they saw.

“So, magic,” I said.

“Do you remember the man you called the Pied Piper?”

Of course I remembered; it was one of the weirdest things I ever saw, which is saying something. There had been this guy, shabby-looking guy, I thought he was a Huncher. He walked through the sewers on his way uptown, a mob of rats around him. He was pointing at the biggest rats like a stickball captain picking teams, and damn if they weren’t following him. He must have had forty, fifty trailing behind him like a bride’s dress, all as big as cats or beagles.

“You said don’t fuck with him because you thought he was a wizard.”

“I said, Do not disturb him.”

“You said he was on his way to kill somebody.”

“I believe so, yes.”

“With rats. And he saw us.”

“He was aware of us.”

“What’s this got to do with the kids?”

“If magic is a current or river, perhaps some manipulate it, as that man with his rats. And perhaps others are caught in it. Those who are accursed.”

“Us,” I said.

“And them. Perhaps there are different streams in this river. Perhaps slight alterations in the nature of this curse result in something like speciation. Vampires like us, but not like us. This may account for their increased appetite. Or…”

“Or what?”

“Or anything. This is only one possibility among countless possibilities.”

“Like what else?”

He stopped on the tracks, picked up a coin. Looked like a buffalo nickel, I wasn’t sure.

“I am officially on strike. I refuse to do any further thinking for you until you offer me your own theories.”

“Maybe,” I started.

“Not now. You are tired and hungry. Watch them. Think. Avoid television. Tell me your theories this time tomorrow.”

“Okay.”

We walked on for a moment.

I could feel him looking at me.

“Do you think the Hessian is like us? The same species?”

He didn’t ask why I said that. He didn’t have to, a guy like Cvetko.

He just drew in a little breath and said, “Ah.”

That ah was the start of the third part of all this.

Or the end of the second.