The Lesser Dead

SCHISM

The Latins went after the Hessian three days later. Don’t go thinking this was all about holy morals and the despoiling of children, though that was how it got dressed up. Wars are never officially about taking shit away from somebody else, be it oil or land or money; officially they’re always about liberty or God or saving somebody. Avenging some wrong works pretty well. So the Latins said they were going to Greenwich Village to avenge a great wrong.

“And get your hands on his money,” Margaret said. It was a hell of a fight. Margaret was dead set against peeling him until we talked to him, but they said talking to him would just warn him and he would button up or run.

“He won’t run,” Margaret said, but she didn’t like the idea of attacking him, as disgusted as she was by what he stood accused of. Attacking a beast like that seemed like too much risk for too little gain. But then, she was already in the mayor’s apartment and likely to stay there. With the Hessian’s money, the Puerto Rican guys could set themselves up in some nice, basemented fortress like the Hessian had, get out of the tunnels, pay guys to watch over them by day, roam rich neighborhoods by night, unsuspected because of their fine clothes. Rich vampires definitely had it better.

“But he will fight. Have you perchance noticed how you’ve gotten just a little stronger every year? Do you know how old he is, and how well dug in? This’ll be no easy matter. We talk to him first.”

“We don’t fucking need to talk to him, Puta Madre, what’s he gonna say? ‘Yeah I did it, ¡cortame la cabeza! Now cut me my fucking head off please’?”

“He’s too dangerous.”

Old Boy got up from his leisurely squat and walked around to flank the Latins, standing now about ten yards behind them and to their right. He let them see where he was putting himself. He was a guy who spoke with gestures and motion.

Mapache flicked his eyes at Old Boy, but then settled them back on Margaret. He wasn’t giving up.

“So what? So, you’re dangerous, you get to turn six children, six, and fuck them, too?”

“Are you suggesting, sir, that we should police every vampire on this island? Or just the very rich ones?”

“You disappoint me. I thought you were in charge, man.”

His men were on edge. They hadn’t anticipated things going south with Margaret, they were always cool with Margaret.

“When it comes to these tunnels, I am in charge, Mr. Ramirez, and you would do well to remember it.”

“Or what?” he said, getting much closer to her than she liked. “You gonna talk to me?”

Old Boy gritted a boot on the concrete to let them know he was now five yards away. Margaret, never taking her eyes off Mapache, held a hand up to her pet ghost, as a master might to a dog. Not yet, boy. But maybe soon.

“If you don’t take one step back,” she told Mapache, growling a little in her throat and speaking slowly—it was always bad when she spoke slowly—“We’ll talk, just you and me. And much will be said between us in a very short time.”

Margaret didn’t bluff.

Ruth was already standing next to her, frowning her Statue of Liberty frown.

I moved closer to Margaret and Ruth, looking at Mapache, which didn’t impress him. Billy Bang stepped up, too, though. On Mapache’s side, Bug and Gua Gua got closer. Damn, Gua Gua was big. Dominic was about to step up next to Margaret, but Baldy hung back so he did, too. This could be bad.

Nobody said anything for about five seconds, but it felt like an hour.

Mapache stepped back, but he did it slowly, sarcastically, like Okay, but fuck you.

Margaret took it because everyone knew he still backed up. We were on uncharted waters now. I knew it. Baldy knew it so well it was all he could do not to smile, not to show the tip of a fang which is like the bird finger from a vampire. If this didn’t get fixed, Margaret’s biggest counterweight to the Italians was gone. And they weren’t the rookies they were before, they knew what they were doing now. They might move on her when Old Boy was on one of his walkabouts. They just might.

And she knew it.

“You want it done?” she said.

“We want it done.”

“Fine,” she said. “Then you’ll do it on your own.”

Let’s back up.

The night before this went down, Margaret came to the 18th Street station to check on things, and Cvetko told her what had been said. The kids wouldn’t utter a peep to Margaret, though; they didn’t like Margaret. She wasn’t exactly child-friendly. She wouldn’t have lasted long on Sesame Street.

But then the weirdest thing happened.

The little one, Duncan, said something in German. To Cvetko. Like he had heard Cvetko’s accent and decided it was close enough to German that he would try it out. He popped an eye over to Margaret to see if she understood.

She didn’t.

But Cvetko did. Cvetko’s dead fluent in German, just like Russian, French, English, Spanish, Latin, even Hungarian. Who the fuck speaks Hungarian? Cvetko, that’s who. But German.

When they had gone back and forth for a good while, Cvetko sent them off to play on the tracks, they liked the tracks, and took Margaret and me aside to tell us what they said.

“This boy, Duncan, speaks German because his mother is from East Berlin. These are all the children of British diplomats or translators. They went missing some time ago, perhaps last year, perhaps several years ago; Duncan doesn’t understand time very well and the others will not discuss these matters. They were all charmed away en masse from where they played in Stuyvesant Park, herded into our very old friend’s van, and turned in his basement. They lived with him in captivity until the winter, I assume this winter, when Peter decided he wasn’t going to take it anymore.”

“Take what anymore?” Margaret had said.

“Must I say it?”

“Don’t be squeamish. If something’s to be done, it won’t be done on hints and rumors.”

He said it.

I’ll spare you the details, but games were played. You know, those games that aren’t really games, but the grown-up puts child-friendly names on them. Margaret’s fangs were showing completely by the time Cvets finished that part, and it looked like it took some effort for her to drape her lip back over them and put them away.

“I’ll have to speak to him first. I’ll see it in his eyes if it’s true. I just can’t seem to make myself believe it,” she said, drooling and wiping it off with the sleeve of her bathrobe. People drool when they’re charmed. Vampires drool when they want to bite.

“We often live next to monsters unawares,” Cvetko said. “Look at us, carrying on our business below the feet of stockbrokers and secretaries; their shadows pass over our grates by day and we crawl into their windows by night.”

“You and your fucking philosophy,” Margaret said.

“The Son of Sam,” I chimed in. I had followed that with interest.

She waved my comment away.

“How did they bust out?”

“As Odysseus escaped the cave of the Cyclops,” Cvetko said.

“I must have missed my lesson that day. And how was that?”

“Sammy blinded him with a pencil.”

Peter liked the Rolling Stones. He must have seen Mick Jagger on TV because he actually did a little imitation of him, dancing and shaking his ass, hands on his hips, pouting out lips still bloody from the hunt. Watching him wiggle around like that was a little ooky after learning what had happened to him, but I put that out of my mind. He was just a kid. This was our third time playing “Gimme Shelter” on my hi-fi set and he was lip-syncing almost the whole thing. I boogied with him, tried to get Cvetko to join in but that was like trying to make a turtle play basketball. Manu danced with us, though. This was taking place in the common area outside our rooms, mine and Cvetko’s, I mean. We had abandoned their lockers and stolen new ones, easier than humping theirs all the way here, and Peter’s had been just a little small for him anyway. This time we got individual lockers, put them in their individual cells. These cells were honeycombed back here.

The transit police had come by the 18th Street station, like a dozen of them with lights and guns. We heard them a mile off, got clear fast, hiding our most important shit behind a false panel of loose tiles we hoped they still didn’t know about, came back for it later. This was nothing unusual, they did it from time to time, but it meant we should leave it alone for a while. That station was too close to the surface to be good long-term digs.

Probably some observant conductor caught sight of one of us, saw the lockers, who knows. Whatever the reason for the lame little raid, I asked Margaret if we could move back into our regular place and move the kids in with us. I could tell she wasn’t thinking about peeling them anymore. She was on their side now.

It had been a tense night. Hunting had gone okay, even though we had to feed Peter four times. The kids were happy, but the rest of us were on edge. We knew the Latins were going to peel the Hessian tonight; they had been casing his place and had a plan. I, for one, didn’t have a lot of faith in that plan. But I have to admit, I was curious to know what he was sitting on. Gold doubloons?

“What do you think the Hessian’s sitting on?” I asked Cvets. “Underground, I mean. What do you think he has?”

“Besides a room that locks from the outside for the imprisonment of children?”

“Don’t be a grump. You know what I mean. Treasure-wise.”

“Perhaps the lost gold of the Knights Templar.”

Always some obscure shit with him.

“No, really,” I said.

“Why didn’t you go on the expedition with our Hispanic friends? You might have seen for yourself.”

“I don’t think it’s going to go well for them,” I said.

“No,” he said.

“What should be done, then? About this kid business?”

He looked at me.

“Must something always be done?”

“Everybody knows you don’t turn kids. Let alone all that other stuff. Are you saying we ought to let that slide?”

“I am playing devil’s advocate. Indulge me.”

“It’s not right.”

“Neither was the suppression of Hungary by the Soviets. Or the invasion of Tibet by the Chinese.”

“Yeah, I remember people saying something about Tibet. The Dalai Lama, right?”

“Yet both acts went unpunished. Why?”

“What’s that got to do with anything? I’m talking about our neighborhood.”

“It is only a question of scale. Why did not the brave American army march into Budapest and save the Hungarian resistance who begged Mr. Eisenhower, in the name of democracy and freedom, to take their side? Why did we sit by while the Soviet tanks rolled in and hammered the beautiful old city?”

“That happened?”

“You have just written the epitaph of America. Yes, that happened. Twenty-two years ago. It was on the radio. It was in the newspapers. What were you doing, watching the Looney Tunes? Sitting in Battery Park with Emma Wilson?”

“Shut up.”

He knew better than to talk about Emma Wilson.

But I saw what he was getting at. He spelled it out anyway.

“The application of justice is a by-product of power. We look to leaders to protect us. We organize for collective defense. Or collective acquisition. Why do we submit to Margaret’s governance?”

“She’s tough and she knows her shit.”

“Precisely. But is she tough enough to impose her ethics, such as they are, on other groups not under her direct supervision? Should vampires in Brooklyn refrain from feeding under Borough Hall or Court Street because she has decided it is verboten for us?”

“The feeding thing is about protecting your turf. Let them do what they want.”

“Might not the discovery of murders underground in Brooklyn lead to sweeps of the tunnels in all of the boroughs? The transit police are not parochial.”

“Sure. But we can’t make Brooklyn guys do what we say.”

“Can we not? I doubt there is a larger enclave than ours in Brooklyn. We could give them an ultimatum.”

“Yeah, but that’s a big fight if they say no. What’s it win us?”

“Now you are thinking like President Eisenhower. And like Margaret.”

“The kid thing is different,” I said, not feeling so sure. Cvetko always made you feel like you were on thin ice.

“Not feeding in the subways is a matter of survival. Not matriculating children is a matter of taste.”

“And survival,” I said. “They don’t know what they’re doing.”

“They can be taught. My point is that your disgust at the actions of the Hessian, while understandable, is not necessarily sufficient motivation to attack a creature of his age and tactical knowledge.”

“He gets away with it because he’s strong.”

“This is the story of mankind.”

“I thought you were going to be a priest at one point.”

“Yes. But then I read the newspaper.”

EMMA WILSON

Emma Wilson was my girlfriend for the summer and fall of 1955 or ’56, I don’t remember. I think ’56 because of what Cvetko said, but I don’t know if I ever told him a year. I never bit her. I never told her I was actually dead. I think I loved her, if it’s possible to love somebody without liking her that much. I think it is. She was pretty like some Dutch porcelain thing; she had a closet full of angora sweaters and a neck like a swan’s. We used to sit on benches and make out; I liked the innocence of it so I never pushed her, I let myself forget what I was when I was with her. She thought I was a student at Columbia; I even charmed a professor into bumping into me at a late-night diner and acting like I was the smartest guy since Einstein. I ate hamburgers and French fries looking into her big baby blues even though I knew the food was going to twist around in my rotten old guts and come out practically the same way it went in, and that that was going to hurt. It was worth it for her to look at me like a real boy, I felt like fucking Pinocchio with her. Did I charm her a little? Yeah, not to the point of drooling, but you would have, too, I don’t care who you are. I really don’t. She was just that pretty, Grace Kelly pretty, blond Adele Mara pretty, and I think of her when I smell certain flowers, I don’t know their names. Her in her painted-on capri pants, tiny veins almost invisible on the tops of her feet in their white slippers. She gave me her virginity. She did that, even said it like that. “Joey, I want to give you my virginity.” I got us a room at the Astor hotel and everything, this after I sucked it up and took her to see My Fair Lady, which looked like only girls would ever like it but turned out not to be so bad. She had told her dad she was sleeping over with a girlfriend, so I had the whole night with her, and that was the only time she didn’t have to cut it short. It was me stealing away before morning, though, rushing out of the Astor and down into the subway to run back to the draped-off, bars-on-the-windows, triple-locked apartment I rented off Bleecker Street, sure I was going to burn. It was the longest and shortest night of my life. The seconds were pouring through my fingers like sand and I could watch them go but I couldn’t stop them. I remember every minute of it. We made love three times. In between, we ordered drinks and room service; we talked about Forbidden Planet, which was the first movie we saw together; we talked about London and put on Cockney accents. We ran the halls and ballrooms, trying to see every inch of this glorious hotel, and I mean this thing was magnificent. Coral Room, Rose Room. A section of the bar just for the gays. They had this garden on the roof; we walked around up there and the moon was out, not full but big. It’s all gone now, the Astor. I was hoping it would be cloudy when they knocked it down, I wanted to come outside and see. But it wasn’t. And I didn’t.

Emma Wilson.

You’ll never guess what broke us up, and, if you do, you’re such a cynic I feel a little bad for you.

I was so busy keeping the fact that I was a vampire hidden that I let slip the fact my mother was Jewish. And once I said it, I couldn’t charm the knowledge back out of her, her bigotry was that deep. “It changes the way you smell to me,” she had said, making a face like she knew what an asshole she was but that she couldn’t help it. “I’m going away to college anyway,” she said. “Winter session.” That’s when it dawned on me she wasn’t a nice person, and that I had never really liked her beyond the way she curled up on a sofa like a cat or the way the light looked in her eyes, or those almost-invisible veins at the tops of her Grace Kelly feet. I was in love with a doll. And when she spoke, when she spoke from her soul, she came out with that anti-Semitic horseshit. After all her pretending to be worried about children starving in Communist China.

“It changes the way you smell.” Can you believe that? I breathed the stale air out of me for half an hour before I saw her, I practically drank mouthwash, I charmed her, but now I smelled “Jewish.” Here I was crawling in windows, drinking blood, she never saw me in the daytime, but never mind that; she would never get past the idea that my mother ate matzoh.

Maybe it was in 1956.

Maybe she did say something about Hungary.

It was a long time ago.

THE VELVET ROPE

Back here in 1978, I needed some time to myself.

Away from Cvetko, away from Margaret and the kids, all of it. I was sick of politics and everybody getting all wound up. I wanted to dress up and look good, maybe get some action, feed on new people without the hungry little brood tugging at my shirt wanting their turn again and again.

I wanted loud music to make me feel sexy, young, and powerful.

The Ammonia was great for that, but I was feeling more disco than punk, and, besides that, I had an odd craving.

I wanted to bite somebody famous.

I knew just the place.

“What about me?” I said. I was on the wrong side of the velvet rope at Studio 54 and the little dago-looking tyrant who decided who got in was lording it over the crowd.

I was dressed to the nines, putting out a low-grade charm so I looked twenty-twoish, but never mind all that, he looked straight over my head.

“Okay, you with the poodle-fur vest or whatever, you can come in. And you, geisha lady, I like the way you dance.”

“Hey,” said a man with a fedora and a pin-striped coat.

“I told you not to wear a hat, nobody wears hats in here.” The loser threw the hat away like a Frisbee but it was too late, he had lost any hint of cool he might have had.

Limos, cars honking, somebody yelling farther up 8th Avenue.

Grace Jones poured herself out of a limo. We parted like water around Moses. Of course Mussolini let her in without her asking, she just said, “Hello,” and slid past the rope on her mile-long legs, so tall and black and elegant she was like another species, a better one.

“What about me?” I said again.

“What about you?” said the frowny-faced guy next to me with tangled-up gold chains nesting in his chest hair and a collar so wide I thought he might fly. He’d already been waved off but wasn’t giving up, was ready to stand there for hours if he had to, and he resented the fact that I just walked right up with attitude like I knew I was getting in. Fact is, I knew I was getting in. All I had to do was catch Little Italy’s eye, but that wasn’t easy. He purposely wasn’t looking at me because I was short. I hate that. He wasn’t so tall himself.

So I took out the greasy red firecracker I brought for exactly this purpose and lit it with the Zippo I took off the dead Hunchers. People stepped back from me, called me names while it sizzled, and I flicked it down right in front of my boots, BANG! A lady who had been too busy tripping balls to hear the hiss went “AAH!” and waved her hands like she was trying to dry her nails.

“You!” the dago said, pointing at me. “Don’t do that, it doesn’t help.”

He looked me in the eye.

Gotcha!

You don’t need eye contact to charm, but the subject needs to know it’s him you’re talking to. And eye contact definitely makes it take better.

“It helps plenty,” I said, “but I won’t be a bad boy once I’m in.”

I kept his eyes nailed to mine; he wouldn’t have looked away if a golden unicorn walked up waving a big boner. Which could have happened there.

“No?” he said, starting to drool a little.

“Of course not. So point at me and tell me to go in.”

He did exactly that.

General groans erupted from the others.

“No fuckin’ way,” somebody said, as outraged as if St. Peter had waved a known pervert into heaven. Somebody else said, “I’m bringin’ a cherry bomb tomorrow.” The balls-trippy lady, in a spasm of druggy clarity, even said, “He hypnotized him! I watched him do it!”

But fuck them, I was in.

I walked through a sea of half-dressed and freaky partiers; man, this was the place to be. Here was a woman all in blue body paint with seashells on her tits, and what tits, and there went a super-buff Asian guy wearing zebra-skin pants and cowboy boots, a cowboy hat, no shirt, a monkey on his shoulder. At first I thought it was weird that they let monkeys in, but I had heard about a horse getting in with Bianca Jagger riding it, so what’s a monkey? But then I realized the monkey was stuffed. It wore a little cowboy hat, too. Funny a monkey and a buff Oriental could wear hats, but not that schmuck outside. Asian guy smiled at me. I had heard this place was a circus, and boy that was no lie. A big crescent moon hung over the dance floor with a light-up coke spoon under his nose, the busboys ran around in short-shorts and bow ties like Christmas presents, everybody’s hand on their asses or thighs, people were actually screwing on the balcony, and there were gays everywhere. This was like the Indianapolis 500 of gays, all souped-up and rolling around in circles, happy as hell, and why shouldn’t they be? Nobody was going to curb-stomp them in here, nobody was going to judge them. And, let’s be clear, I wasn’t judging them. I just didn’t want them, you know, touching me. Not even the guy who looked like Freddie Mercury. I mean, I thought he looked like Freddie Mercury. Turns out it fucking was Freddie Mercury.

Who else did I make that night besides Grace and Freddie? Andy Warhol for sure, you can’t miss that wig. Captain Kirk from Star Trek. Billy Joel. One of the chicks from Charlie’s Angels, not Farrah (I wish!) but one of the brunettes, her brunette locks tumbling all down her bare back. I wanted to bite her, but she was going to be hard to get away from her table. I didn’t recognize anyone else at her table, but they were attractive and intense and at least two of them were coking it up. Cocaine people don’t charm easy; what you want is a drunk or a pothead.

Then I saw her.

The prettiest girl in the place, and that was no easy feat here.

I couldn’t remember her name, but it was that girl from the remake of King Kong, her character name had been Dwan. She was prettier than Fay Wray had been, sort of all-American wholesome but smart in the eyes. I mostly didn’t care for the remake, but I saw it twice just because of Dwan. She was out on the floor dancing, really graceful, simple black dress. I think they were playing Earth, Wind and Fire. I watched her for a minute, then I went out on the floor, too. I had to duck the flailing arms of a highly energetic pantsless fireman on roller skates; earlier he’d been letting people pull him around by his cock, and I stopped to boogie with a cute little lady like eighty years old, what the hell was she doing here? But then somebody picked her up and the whole crowd passed her overhead as carefully as they might pass a baby while she giggled and spread her arms and legs wide. I worked my way closer to Dwan. She smelled like the best perfume, just undercut with sweat; I was starting to get a little bit aroused. I looked at her face while I danced, waiting for her to notice me staring at her and then look down at me so I could get my hooks in her, tell her to follow me outside or to a booth; I was actually hot enough and hungry enough to risk biting her in a booth in here. Anything could happen in here. People who saw would probably ask me to do them next. Anyway, Dwan turned her face to me and I caught her eyes and held them. But before I could say anything, I got bumped into. Hard. I looked over and saw this very tall, incredibly sexy brunette in a black choker and a black sequined flapperlike dress with tassels. She was staring down at me.

“Sorry,” she said, like really she wasn’t.

Was this how she flirted?

The girl from King Kong danced away.

Now the Fifty-Foot Woman grabbed my hand, danced me off the floor, danced me almost into one of the short-shorts-wearing busboys holding a tub over his head, danced me up against the wall. Don’t get me wrong, I like a woman who knows what she wants, but I really had a crush on what’s-her-name, so I craned my neck around trying to keep a bead on where she went. She was at the bar, doing that incredibly sexy thing where she lifts up one foot and lets the shoe dangle off her toes. I wanted to bite her ankle, her heel, I was drooling.

The tall woman grabbed my cheeks in her hand and pointed my face toward hers. Her face looked young, vaguely Liza Minnelli, but she didn’t smell young. I caught a whiff of her breath. It smelled like a dead dog in a Dumpster.

“Jessica Lange wouldn’t give you the time of day unless you charmed her,” she said. Her voice was lower than I would have thought. “And I’m not having that. Not here.”

She lifted her lip in a brief snarl, gave me the fang-tip fuck you.

“Holy shit,” I said.

“That’s right.”

Now she took my hand and put it palm-down on the front of her dress. There was a rather large dick there.

“Holy shit,” I said.

“That’s right, too. Now run back home before you get stepped on, little cockroach. You’re dirty, you smell like trains, and you don’t belong here.”

She/he (I’ll stick with she for simplicity’s sake) stepped back and gestured at the door.

“But,” I said, just about to protest that all I wanted to do was dance, but I didn’t get past but before she grabbed my hand again, her grip as hard as pliers.

“Wrong answer,” she said. Out came the fangs and she bit me. Fucking hard.

All the way through the bones of my hand.

My eyes teared up from pain, not from wanting to actually cry or anything. The dead shouldn’t cry, not even the lesser dead, which I clearly was next to her.

She was stronger, older, and it was her place. His place, whatever.

I grabbed my hand to keep from bleeding all over myself, licked it so I would heal faster.

And I left.

DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE

A lot happened while I was gone.

Nobody had heard from the Latins, for one thing, but I’ll get to that.

The first thing I saw when I got back was Peter and Alfie sitting back against the rock wall looking sleepy, holding hands. Camilla had already gone to her locker; she was singing a song, but too softly for me to understand any of the words. It sounded like a lullaby.

“You guys all right?” I asked.

“Yes, Joey,” Peter said, but it looked like he was having trouble keeping his head up. It was still a good hour till sunrise.

“Hey, Cvets,” I called into Cvetko’s room, “did these kids eat?”

Cvets wasn’t there.

“Joey,” Peter said, sounding almost as quiet as his sister.

“Yeah, kid?”

I walked closer, noticed that they smelled bad, like sewage, and their pants were wet at the bottoms.

“What have you guys been doing, playing in the toilets?”

The ghost of a smile crossed Alfie’s lips.

“We’ve been talking about you,” Peter said.

Alfie nodded gravely.

“All of us.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes,” Peter said.

Alfie whispered, “We even asked the god of small places.”

“Who’s that?”

“It’s the god we talk to since Yayzu doesn’t want us.”

Yayzu?

“It’s really just pretend,” Peter said, “there are no gods.”

“You’ll make him mad!” Alfie said.

“Let him get mad,” Peter said, looking at me. “The point is, we were all talking about Joey.”

This god of small places shit creeped me out. I changed the subject.

“Well, what did you say? About me, I mean. Nice things, I hope.”

“We’ve decided that we quite like you.”

“That’s good,” I said.

“It is,” he agreed in that serious way kids have.

“You sure you’re okay? You look wiped out. Did you eat?”

He nodded, then stuck out his tongue to show me the back was still bloody.

“As much as I could,” he said.

What the hell did that mean?

“Would you hold my hand, please?” he said, holding his small, white hand up. There wasn’t a lot of light down here, just Cvetko’s lamp, which was always on, but that was far away so everything had that pretty cat’s-eye candlelit look. It would have looked solid black to you, assuming you’re alive.

“Please,” he said again. “I’m cold.” I realized I had just been looking at him. I wasn’t much of a hand-holder, but he seemed so sad. And so small. They were all so small. It seemed like a miracle they’d made it as long as they did.

“Yeah,” I said, and slipped my bigger hand around his. His was cold. Colder than mine, anyway. Vampires normally only get that cold when they’re starving.

“We’ve decided,” Peter said, with some effort.

“All of us,” Alfie interrupted.

“Yes. All of us have decided…”

“Except half of Sammy.”

“But mostly Sammy, too.”

Alfie considered this, then said, “Maybe mostly Sammy, he did say yes.”

“We’ve decided that we want you to be one of us.”

“That’s funny,” I said. “I thought you guys were becoming part of us.”

“Yes, of course we are,” said a very sleepy Camilla, holding a Raggedy Ann doll. This was her third or fourth one since they came to live with us; she stole them whenever she could. No one ever saw her take them. She was standing right behind me; I hadn’t even noticed her song had stopped. I hadn’t heard her walk up. “But while we’re all joining your group, you should be joining ours, too.”

“But only you,” Alfie said.

“Yes,” Peter said, his eyes closing like he was in his mother’s lap trying to make it through the late show, my hand still holding his up. Like a little dead fish out of a lake.

“Only you,” Camilla said.

“Why,” I said, “something wrong with Cvetko?”

“He’s old,” she said, wrinkling her nose.

She hugged me.

Then she helped her brothers to bed.

I went to ask Luna if she knew where Cvetko was, but he was already there; I heard them talking but they were talking so low I didn’t understand them till I climbed up. There was no ladder or stairs; you had to be a vampire or a rat to get up to Luna’s cell, and rats weren’t interested. Luna’s room was really like a half-cave with wires dangling out of the roof, I have no idea what it was for, and lots of movie posters. Luna liked movies almost as much as I did, especially movies with Paul Newman. You never met a pair like Butch and The Kid, one poster said, Paul Newman and Robert Redford running and shooting in that browny oldey-timey color. Other posters crowded that one, lapped over it where she’d glued them onto the rock: A Streetcar Named Desire, Super Fly, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean. That one I saw with Luna; we used to crack each other up saying, all serious and proud, “I am a Bean,” like his daughter does in the film. Maybe you had to be there. The walls were swimming with band posters, too, but nobody you’ve heard of. The Boats, Pissnuts, Jesus and the Iguanas; she saved any flyer any tight-pants kid handed her on the street, and she hadn’t gotten around to gluing them all up. Her place was full of papers like a loose carpet that stuck to her bare feet and came away with charcoal footprints because she never wore shoes in the tunnels. Not the best housekeeper, Luna, especially after she lost Clayton. The cleanest spot was where his box used to be.

Her box was an old hutch lying on its back with a dirty green sleeping bag tucked sloppily into it, and she had a yellowish pillow crammed into a too-small flowered pillowcase that had been bled on and washed a dozen times, but you could see where the blood had been. There was a metal folding chair, we all had those, we had pinched a bunch of them from a Universalist Unitarian church on East 35th Street, but nobody was using it. Cvetko stood while she squatted. She was crying.

“Don’t you get it?” she said. “They’re still doing it.”

She shut up when she saw that I had crawled up her wall.

They both trusted me enough to keep talking, which made me feel good.

“How many?” Cvetko said.

“I don’t know. Maybe six,” she said, wiping runny mascara with the backs of her hands. She sniffled a wet one and said, “She’s gonna kill them, isn’t she?”

Cvetko didn’t say anything.

“Isn’t she?”

“Tell me exactly where it is.”

The Balworth Theater was a little black box in Chelsea that couldn’t make its rent and ended up closed. Nothing unusual about that. What was unusual was that its basement had a tiny half door that opened on a crawl space down with iron rungs drilled into it, and this crawl space led to a section of sewer that led to a boiler room that led to a length of active subway line that, in turn, led to the inactive subway lines, experimental subway lines, and defunct underground workspaces where we lived. The shinbone’s connected to the collarbone, you know? The whole underground’s like that; you can get anywhere in New York without seeing daylight if you’re willing to get dirty. This particular crawl space looked like Prohibition stuff to me, like maybe the building with the theater had been a speakeasy and the customers needed a back door out when the cops came knocking.

We had to wade through some ankle-deep unmentionable stuff in the sewer part, and I remembered Peter and Alfie’s pants cuffs. I opened up the door, Cvets was right behind me, and I crawled in like a cat through a cat door. I remember having this fear like a guillotine blade was going to pop down and cut my head off. But of course it didn’t.

The first thing I saw was the puppet, like a big papier-mâché Humpty Dumpty figure. A couple of painted wooden spears and swords, too, a rack of wigs and shoes. Prop room. Then I realized it wasn’t Humpty Dumpty at all, it was Tweedledum, and there was Tweedledee behind and next to it. A huge Queen of Hearts crown and gown hung up on the wall, too, the wig under the crown all done up like Marie Antoinette. A pair of red ladies’ pumps sat in the middle of the floor, one turned on its side. I could almost hear the actress, one of these waitresses who can’t get commercials and only does plays with five-dollar tickets, plays only other actors go to, yelling Off with her head! to an audience of ten, eight of them friends of the cast. So the last thing they did was Alice in Wonderland. But they left half their shit here. A folding table, a heater, a makeup box. Maybe somebody died? Maybe the place got foreclosed on? Could be that nobody wanted these costumes; they were kind of high-school looking.

Then I saw the writing.

Not very big. Waist high, on a wall that might have once been light brown but had faded to the color of a tobacco stain.

The writing was so small I almost missed it.

Small fingers had painted those letters on the wall. You know what they used for paint. Sure you do. On the wall nearby, dozens of round blotches like polka dots, browny-red but fading, some of them barely there. Like the wall had the measles.

Now Cvetko was in, too. We hadn’t brought Luna or anybody else, just us. A fly, a fat one, drowsy with the cold, came through the open door at the top of the stairs and buzzed around the room making lazy circles. He landed on the letter Y in WAY, his little mouth dabbing down on it like the sucker end of a kid’s toy arrow. Neither one of us said anything. We went up the stairs.

The body sat in in the front row, as if watching a play. Fit young guy, or had been fit, but now he was bled out white, almost as white as the rabbit’s ears that sat on top of his head, though the tip of one of those was bloody. The man’s eyes were gone, just two holes, and it looked weird, looked wrong that he had eyebrows over the holes. His mouth had been stuffed with socks. Vicious little bites cratered his neck, wrists, and inner thighs. Two seats away from him, a bucket. A trail of blood led from the floor in front of him up the raw concrete stairs toward the sound and light room. A bloody handprint on the glass. Grown-up-sized; a crack webbing out from it made me think of Spider-Man.

“Spider-Man,” I said before I could stop myself. It sounded stupid in that room. Cvetko didn’t say anything, just walked up the stairs and looked into the booth. I went behind him. Five more bodies lay in there, half-undressed, but only to get at their arteries. These had their eyes, though. They were stacked. The one on top, an Asian woman, had her eyes open and cut to the door like she’d been waiting for us, like maybe we’d set her loose and tell her she could tidy up and go back out shopping for lychee nuts or whatever she was doing when they got her. And how did they do it? When it was just them? Charm them off a train like the guy on the 6, Come and help us find our mommies? Leave your briefcase, you won’t need it.

Cvetko bent over and picked something up. It was my superball, sticky from the puddle of blood it had been sitting in. Now I understood the blotches on the wall of the prop basement; I closed my eyes and heard the ball thump-thump-thumping, saw Peter and Sammy taking turns catching it, Camilla clomping around in the Queen of Hearts’ shoes, Off with their heads, out with their eyes, make him a rabbit!

“This is bad, Cvetko.”

“Do you think so?” he said, with that tired sarcasm he uses when I say something obvious.

“What do you think?”

“I think we must tell our esteemed mayor that the children are incorrigible, and that they are going to get us found out. And I think we must burn this place.”

I pictured Margaret like the real Queen of Hearts, rather the Queen of Spades, coming down the tunnel with the shovel over her shoulder. Would she do it one at a time, in separate places? Or all lined up, with us holding them down? Old Boy and Ruth would be on board, maybe Cvetko now that he’d seen this. But Luna? Forget it. Billy, too. Baldy and Dominic would say no just to make trouble, take advantage of the rift. And me. Could I do it? I pictured sleepy little Peter, holding up his white hand. Camilla clutching Raggedy Ann and crying. But sleepy Peter. It was like he was sick.

“Cvets, I think something’s wrong with those kids. The way they eat. How hungry they are.”

He looked at me like go on.

“I mean, what if it wasn’t their fault?”

“Intent doesn’t matter when the results carry consequence.”

“Yeah, but what if we could fix it?”

“I am skeptical.”

“But you can’t rule it out. Night fever is a vampire disease. What if there are more of them? A disease might be fixable.”

He considered this. A fly lit briefly on his head, then decided it didn’t like him and flew away. He absentmindedly touched the spot where the fly had been.

“It is possible that some of them are starving despite their feeding, which would explain their carelessness and excess. It is possible such a condition could be reversed. Your argument is sound,” he said. In Cvetko’s world, there was no higher praise. “But, as you noted, we need more information.”

“That book,” I said, “the one Clayton made.”

“The Codex,” he said, “may or may not contain answers to this problem.”

“We’ll ask Margaret for it.”

He scoffed.

“This is important, Cvets. She might.”

“She trusts no one with that book.”

“Then we should borrow it.”

“Are you talking about theft?” he said.

“Theft’s when you don’t give it back.”

He nodded slowly.

“Even so, we must burn this place.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess so.”

I didn’t like fire so much. None of us did. We made our way out of the theater, back down to the basement.

Shall we make a rabbit of him?

“And we must remove the door to the sewer, brick up the wall.”

“I don’t know shit about laying bricks.”

“I was, for a short time, a gardener.”

“Figures,” I said.

“I think this place will keep one more day. Tomorrow night. Tonight we get the bricks and mortar.”

“Tonight hell, it’s almost morning.”

“I will place the masonry, you will only be in my way. I can set the fire without assistance, too.”

Fine by me.

“Yeah, but how will you get the bricks? In the daytime?”

“You’re wasting time. Go home. Make sure they’re all there. Make sure they don’t leave.”

“And if they get hungry?”

“Feed them. Or else they will feed themselves.”

THE DEVIL’S DICE

I was dreaming about a game I was playing with the devil. This was your typical red devil with goat feet, horns, big backward-curving horns like on one of those African antelope things, but not an antelope. I don’t know what the point of the game was; it was like dominoes, which I never played, because we each had stacks of little stones or pieces of ivory, or tiles, definitely square. He had a big pile and I had a little one. He kept rolling dice and every time he rolled, he did something different with his other hand, made some sort of Freemason sign or something. It was fascinating. Only while I looked, with his dice hand he’d steal away another couple of tiles from my pile, then roll again. I realized I wasn’t ever going to get a turn at this rate. Hey! I said, but when I said it, it wasn’t the devil, it was the Hessian. Bigger than death and all dressed up in his Prussian blues. He rolled the dice again, a twelve, then did the thing with his hand and I looked, like a dog at a treat, and there went more of my tiles. I don’t want to play this anymore, I said, and it was the devil again. This pissed him off, so he turned over the table and the tiles poured on me like an avalanche. Only now I was lying next to Margaret in a bed, which was creepy by itself. She looked dead, like Ruth, gray and clammy. I said, “Today’s your death-day,” and I don’t think I told you about that. That’s the day you figure you would have died. I picked January 9, 1999; I would have been eighty, and that’s how long my grandpa Peacock lived. But she said, “You’re coming with me.” And she took a soda straw and shot something up my nose; I thought it was a BB. It hurt. It went up into my sinus, like above my eye.

“Ow,” I said, only now I was really saying it. I was awake. Only it wasn’t night yet, or I don’t think so. I felt something moving in my head. Above my eye.

“Ow,” I said again, reaching up for the door of the refrigerator by habit, only it wasn’t closed. I sat up. Whatever it was, was wriggling and I knew; I had bugs in there. “Goddamn it,” I said, pressing one nostril shut and blowing. Three or four roaches skittered out; I slapped them off me, but there was another one in there, and he went into a panic.

“Ow, fuck!”

Took me two or three snotty honks before I shot this one into my lap and then I picked him up, clapped and smashed him. Sometimes bugs crawl into us because, if we’ve fed, we’re a little warmer than the rocks, and a nostril or an ear is a very tempting hidey-hole. We mostly don’t sleep naked, you can figure that one out for yourself.

But who opened my door? That’s what let the little bastard in. Now I saw him. Sammy. He was squatting down on his haunches against the wall.

“Did you open my door?”

“No,” he said, but defiantly, meaning yes.

“Well, don’t.”

Nothing.

His eyes shone in the darkness.

We want you to be one of us.

Except half of Sammy.

“What do you want?”

He didn’t talk for a second or two, like he was weighing me.

“Peter hurts. He needs you.”

A flame flared up as Sammy lit a lighter. Closed the lid on it. Opened it and lit it again.

“That’s my Zippo!” I said.

The sneaky little fucker.

He considered it, placed it carefully, maybe sarcastically, on the floor like a little tombstone, then walked out, looking after me to see if I was coming.

I got up, thought about waking Cvetko, didn’t. I followed Sammy into the little honeycomb of rooms where we’d put them and saw that Peter was sitting up in his locker, watching for me.

“He’s hungry,” Alfie said. Alfie stood nearby, just next to Camilla. “Me, too,” she peeped.

“It’s going to be night soon,” I said.

“I can’t wait,” Peter whimpered. He really did sound pitiful. Tears streaked his cheeks. Hunger for a vampire is an awful thing, worse than it ever gets for a boy—at least an American boy, I can hear Cvetko saying. Blood hunger sits in your guts like a rock. Then after a day or two that rock heats up and your limbs get cold and they hurt. If people talk to you, they just sound like insects buzzing or dogs barking because all you can focus on is that coal burning in the middle of you; you have to put it out. And every living neck is a fire extinguisher. If you let it get to that point, you just drink and drink and you don’t care about peeling people, you’d peel them all to close that smoldering hole in you. I could see in Peter’s eyes that was where he was. And he’d fed, they’d all fed. They confessed to the killings in the theater, told me they would sneak down there in the middle of the day to fill up again, like raiding the fridge when everyone else was asleep. I didn’t bother lecturing them or warning them; it was clear they couldn’t help it.

“Where are the others? Manu and Duncan?” I said.

“Sleeping,” Alfie said. “They don’t eat so much.”

“And you,” I said to Sammy, “are you hungry, too?”

“Not like them. But yes.”

Not like them. Them meaning Alfie and Peter and Camilla. The siblings. I could almost hear Cvetko telling me to think; I was tempted to wake him up, but he would want me to work this out on my own. Was it hereditary? Your argument is sound, I could hear the old egghead saying. But hereditary would mean unfixable, which would mean Off with their heads!

“Have you always been like this?” I asked.

Peter shook his head.

“How long?”

“I don’t want to talk. I want to go to the theater,” he said.

“But they’re all gone,” Alfie said. “Dry-dry-dried up.”

“Even the rabbit,” said Camilla.

“Because you took his eyes,” said Peter.

“It was only a game,” she said.

Alfie said, “Anyway the rabbit was already dead.”

“Poor rabbit,” Camilla agreed. “But I don’t want to talk anymore, either.”

Now her belly hitched and she held it and sat down, a tear spilling down her cheek.

“May I…” Peter started.

“What?”

But I knew what he was going to say.

“May I bite you, Joey? Only a little?”

“No!” I said while he was still saying little.

That was absolutely against the rules. Margaret laid down the law on that at our very first town meeting and said it again every time somebody new came in. Her rap went something like this:

“This colony is hunt or die. Nobody asks to feed off another, nobody lets anyone feed off ’em. I hear about anybody doing that, they’re out. I’ll have no dependents and no weaklings here. And don’t go cryin’ charity; all charity died with the hope of heaven.”

That bit about dependents and weaklings rang false with me; what happened between two of us wasn’t any of her beeswax as far as I could see.

I figured out the real reason later. When I broke down. Of course I broke down. The hope of heaven may have died (like when I was nine), but I still couldn’t listen to a kid whimper in pain like that when I might do something to help him. Or her. But I wasn’t stupid about it, at least not completely. I wasn’t going to make myself that vulnerable with half-of-Sammy watching. I went to Luna. She was a softie like me. I told her what was happening, what I was going to do, asked her to watch and make sure I didn’t get in trouble.

“How long do we carry them?” she said.

We.

Just that fast, she was on board, too.

“I don’t know,” I said. She nodded. We went. So now I was protecting peelers, hiding their crimes from Margaret and letting them feed from me.

She had plenty of reason to kill me if she found out.

And that was before I stole her book.

THE THING IN THE TUNNEL

Getting that Codex from Margaret wasn’t going to be easy; she never left anybody alone in her place and she kept irregular hours. She was funny about her stuff, too, like with that couch of hers. I had the feeling she would know where everything was, would smell where your fingers had touched her things. The only thing I had going for me was that she had just torn the joint up killing the Hunchers; she might not have everything in its place in her mind, you know? She might not think twice about my scent because I had been down there, too. Now what I needed was an opportunity.

Be careful what you ask for, right?

Gua Gua came back. He was the only one of the Latins who came back.

It was daytime when he found us; he woke us up. He was yelling.

“I smell you, you whore! You’re going to look at me before you kill me. Do you hear me, puta madre, te voy a mostrar mi cara.”

“Joey?” one of the kids said from a locker, I’m not sure which one.

I heard Cvetko getting up; I always forgot how fast he could move when he had to.

I went out to the tunnel, followed it around to where the noise was coming from. Gua Gua was in the tunnel not far from us, down in the trough of an unused section of track not far from Luna’s cave.

It had taken him days to get back to us because he did it blind, feeling his way along the tunnels and following scent. He was blind because he’d been burned. Missing an ear, half his scalp, both eyes. Old Boy said everything above the nose got fucked-up because somebody shorter was standing in front of him. Old Boy said it was Willy Pete, white phosphorus, a kind of grenade they used to kill VC in tunnels. Supremely nasty stuff, it would stick to you and just keep burning.

The Hessian.

This is what happens when you fuck with the Hessian.

Old Boy was stalking the Puerto Rican, just walking behind him barefoot with his knife out. How long had he been following him? I almost said it. Gua Gua was an it now. This was one of the worst things I’d ever seen; this guy should have been dead, he should have been dead twice, but here he was moving around, all pink and black and puckered. Coming for Margaret. Coming for us.

“You told him,” he shouted. “You told him we were coming. He was ready! You’re up there laughing at us, but you’ll get yours, too. I don’t know how, you bitch, but you will. And the last thing you’ll think of is my face.”

I was hypnotized, everyone was. The whole neighborhood crowded on the rise above the tracks, looking down at the shouting thing with three-quarters of a head. But that’s when it hit me. Everybody was here: Ruth, Old Boy, Margaret. This was my chance, but who knew for how long?

Gua Gua was getting close now, feeling his way along and yelling himself hoarse.

Margaret nodded at Old Boy, and Old Boy moved fast. I didn’t watch. I hightailed it back to Margaret’s place; it only took me a few minutes. I flew like the shadow of an airplane; my feet barely touched the ground.

The chain was the first problem; Margaret was strong enough to pull her trapdoor up with a little effort. Me? It took a lot of effort. I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to do it, but I got the image of her finding me here and my heart beat once or twice and I pulled that chain with all I had. Up it came with a groan and a shudder; I hooked the chain so it would stay open. Down I went.

I had never been in here alone before. It struck me again how well put together this vault was. If the Big One fell, it might just be Margaret crawling out of the rubble like a big angry cockroach in a bathrobe. I knew she had other clothes, but she rarely wore them. Where did she even keep her clothes? Probably in the big armoire. It had never occurred to me to wonder what she had stuffed in the cabinets behind the bar or in the honeycombed wine shelves or in the big steamer trunk. The trunk had a lock on it. Was The Codex in there? Or was it near her fur-lined sleeping box behind the bar? I didn’t know how big the book was, I had never seen it. The chest made more sense. But I would need the key.

Just leave, forget it.

Let her kill the kids, they’re sick anyway.

I hated that last thought. I closed my eyes for a second and saw Peter crying, heard him whimpering. The reason Margaret didn’t want us feeding off each other was that it made you care about the one you gave your blood to. It was that simple. Margaret didn’t think it was going to make us weak, she thought it would make us love each other more than her. She was right. I had held Peter’s little white hand while he fed from my wrist and I had done the same for Camilla. Luna did it for Alfie, let him take from her neck while she cradled his head like a mother. Now both of us were in their corner. I wanted to help those kids, and any chance I had of doing that was in that book.

Hurry.

It occurred to me to break the lock, but that was stupid, I couldn’t cover that up. Was it even in the chest? Cvetko would have said to look everywhere else first, or would he? No time. Best guess and go for it. Back to the chest I had no key for.

Margaret had the key.

But Margaret left in a hurry.

The key’s in here!

It sure was. On a ring of three keys hanging on a nail on the wall, next to the narrow door she actually used to get in and out, though nobody but her knew where it led. The trapdoor was just for moving stuff through.

Three keys. I knelt down in front of the cedar chest.

I tried one, too big, it didn’t work.

Hurry.

I tried the second one. Little key.

It worked.

I lifted up the lid.

THE VAMPIRE’S TRUNK

Yarn? Are you kidding me? I’ve never seen her knit, not once, what does she wear, socks? I guess I have seen her with a scarf once or twice.

Margaret McMannis, the queen of the underworld, at least our mile or two of it, knitted socks. And scarves. Yarn in brown, gray, and blue lay rolled in balls on one end of the upper tray of the trunk, along with a collection of knitting needles, two of them crossed midknit and capped off with pencil erasers. The other end of that tray was filled with money, mostly American fives and ones, but a few pounds, Deutschmarks, and Canadian dollars lay stacked in small but tidy bundles. Coins in a jam jar. A little Japanese figure, like a frog or a dog, I can never tell with that Asian stuff. Rings and earrings stood in tiny rows like Cvetko’s chess pieces, grouped by size and type. I had a moment of confusion where it seemed like I was back in my house in 1933, standing near Margaret’s purse, looking at the gorgon cameo I was about to plant her with to get her canned, starting all of this business for me in the first place. Here I was again, violating her personal property for the second time ever, and if she caught me the consequences would be just as dire. Here’s to Joey Peacock, the boy so nice I killed him twice.

I pulled out that tray (carefully, so carefully) and what do you know, more money. Twenties this time, she must have had fifteen, twenty thousand dollars bricked up with dry, yellowing rubber bands about the same color as her fangs. Her murderous, sharp panther-fangs. I picked up a couple of thin little books, like sketchbooks, and looked under them; a nickel-plated revolver and a box of bullets, another couple of boxes, one locked, but too small for the Bible-sized leather book I was imagining. A crucifix sawn in half, that was weird. Seashells. Seriously, seashells? Did she go down to Coney Island at night and wade out in the water?

Wait a minute, I thought.

I took another look at the sketchbooks, opened the top one up. A watercolor painting, not bad, showed some kind of mountain with a couple of shacks just at sunset, a rusty pickup truck. Really spiky cursive script in pencil next to it, Clayton’s writing; I recognized it because he had left me notes.

The page after that was missing.

Hurry!

I shut that book and opened another; more paintings, more writing, all Clayton’s. A swamp with a man holding a pot to collect blood from a mule’s neck; six figures standing around, looking down into a hole; an old man in a chair, his pants almost up to his tits and a fedora on his head—I couldn’t see his fangs, but knew he was one of us by the light in his eyes. The writing on that one said:

I cracked the third book, carefully, this one was older, and saw a moonlit field of dead and dying men, belly-shot horses all unstrung, a woman bending down to bite the neck of a fellow in a dark blue uniform against a tree. This painting bothered me. There was one word next to it, an Indian-sounding word that started with Chick, like Chicken-sausage, but that wasn’t it. The woman was biting the man but looking at you, as if out through time, through the paper at you. His hand was tangled in her black hair; her free hand cupped his chin like he was her lover. Like she was showing Clayton what she could do. His lover? A woman who picked over battlefields.

A ghoul, that’s the word for it.

We’re ghouls.

What the fuck was I doing, I had no time to read! I snapped that book shut, put it and the other two under my arm, caught sight of Margaret’s shovel leaning against the wall.

Exactly, now get the fuck out.

The problem of how to get back in here and return the books was one I would have to solve later; now I had another nut to crack. Go out the way I came or take my chances with the narrow door? I might run into her, face-to-face; I might get lost. But I would know how to get back in without pulling up the trap. I would learn something about how Margaret moves around so fast down here. That was something. That was worth the risk. But how to close the trap and still get out? Drop it and jump? Was I fast enough? If I wasn’t, I might get my legs pinched by that monster of a door. I might get pinched in the middle, stuck dying but unable to die until Margaret came home and found me there.

“I am that fast,” I told Margaret’s room. “I am.”

So I put The Codex(es) on the bar and got a good running jump that let me skinny up out of the hole. I looked at the chain on its wall hook, going up to its pulley. How like the mouth of a giant, biting clam the door looked. Fuck it. Two steps and a belly-dive. I could do this.

I grunted and strained as I unhooked the chain and the weight of the door immediately yanked it out of my hands. I moved faster than I ever had before. I moved like the shadow of a plane on the ground. I felt the door nip at the heel of my boot as it closed and I just missed flattening Margaret’s couch as I hit the floor, coming face-to-face with the faded bloodstain from the black Huncher Margaret had brained.

Go, now!

I grabbed the sketchbooks and slipped into the slot of darkness in Margaret’s wall, having no idea where I would come out. There was a story, another Greek story, about a guy in a cave maze with a ball of yarn, looking for a monster with a bull’s head. These guys in stories, running in looking for monsters. I was a monster, but I knew when I was outgunned. If I still did anything like praying, I would have prayed to the god of small places not to meet Margaret McMannis in that tunnel.

“Did you?” Cvetko asked.

“What?” I said, looking at a picture of a dog. It was a German shepherd, watercolored in, sitting on the trunk of a big 1950s car with fins on the back. His tongue hung down like a piece of ham at the deli. This picture was unusual because it was full of daylight. “How did he do this?” I said. “The dog’s not growling or anything, and the sun’s out.”

Cvetko pointed at a faint crease on the opposite page.

“What?”

“Paper clip,” he said. “Photograph.” That kind of deflated me. First, because I had liked the idea of Clayton breaking the rules, walking in the afternoon, making eye contact with a dog without it going apeshit. I always liked dogs, hated having to cross the street to avoid them, hated their barking and trying to bite me as much because I felt rejected by an old friend as by the unwanted attention it always brought. Daisy’s such a nice girl, but she wanted to kill that kid. Must be some kind of creep for sweet little Daisy to act like that. But I also felt deflated because I should have known better. Suns and friendly dogs only existed in photographs, of course that’s how he did this. I wondered if the pooch was on the trunk or if Clayton stuck it there, if there were separate photographs of dog and car. Only one crease. Clayton could work from life, too. It suddenly struck me as unfair that I’d never know if that dog actually sat on that trunk or if it was just something Clayton made up.

Now the kids stole up, all of them like a little pack. All of them but Peter. They gathered around Cvetko like he was Grandpa showing vacation pictures. Which I guess these were. They sure as hell weren’t the medical encyclopedia about being a vampire I’d hoped to find. What was more, and Cvetko didn’t say it, there were pages missing. Lots of them, I think. Did Clayton tear out paintings he wasn’t happy with? Did somebody get to these first and yank out the good stuff?

“I like the look of that dog,” Alfie said. “That’s a good-dog, guard-dog, keep-you-safe.”

“Not me,” said Duncan, shrinking away from The Codex as though even a picture of such a dog might bite, hiding his little hands in the blanket he had taken to carrying even on the hunt. It wasn’t the cleanest blanket in the world.

“You ignored my question,” Cvetko said.

“Which one?”

“The one about our esteemed leader bumping into you in the tunnel. Did she?”

“Oh,” I said, “no.”

“No, I don’t imagine that would have gone well.”

“Turns out her tunnel splits into three. The way I took dumped me out in an air shaft near Penn Station.”

Cvetko looked at the children.

“If I promise to show you some of the pictures in these books later, will you all leave us alone for a little while?”

“If you show us properly,” Sammy said, bending and unbending his small toes against the concrete beneath him. “And not just for a moment to send us away again.”

“I will show you properly, and answer whatever questions I can about them. But first I must speak to Joseph Hiram Peacock.”

Sammy kept looking at him.

“Alone,” Cvetko said.

The little girl walked away, and the rest did, too, Sammy last, looking again over his shoulder, but more at me than Cvetko. I’d have paid ten bucks to know what that little shit was thinking. If he hadn’t gotten his clock stopped, he would have grown up mean and clever. He would have made a good criminal.

“These paintings are quite expressive,” Cvetko said. “I think our Clayton would have been remembered as a notable, if minor, early American painter had he not had the sun stolen from him.”

“Yeah,” I said, “they’re great. But what’s wrong with these kids?”

“I share your disappointment. I was hoping for more insight into our condition. But, really, these are quite pleasant. There was a painter, a countryman of mine, Anton Ažbe, who had the ability to put the soul of the subject into the eyes. His painting of a Negress still haunts me, her gravitas, her eyes. Ažbe knew eyes. I wish I had met him but he died in Munich. This painting, of Clayton’s, Arthur 1922”—he traded books and flipped until he found what he wanted—“has much of the same power. Don’t you agree? You don’t know Ažbe, of course; Clayton had none of his training or photographic mastery of detail, but the sense of weariness is perfectly communicated. I suspect our Arthur did not survive long after this was painted.”

“Are you really going on about creaky old commie painters? What are we going to do?”

Now Duncan was at the door.

“Peter needs a bath,” he said. “He needs one.”

“No,” Camilla said, coming up behind him and snatching his hand, hard, making him show his fangs at her.

“But he does,” Duncan said.

“You’re the stinky one,” she said, and pulled him away, his blanket dragging behind him. I watched them go.

“You’re feeding them, aren’t you?” Cvetko said.

I trust Cvetko, I do. But I was so scared of Margaret finding out I just lied.

“No.”

He looked me in the eyes, tilted down his glasses to do it, smiled at me like my uncle Walt used to. Like he knew I was naughty but it was okay.

“Interesting.”

WAYCHEE ROO

The next night I woke up starving.

Feeding the munchkins really wore me out. I had to bleed somebody, and I remembered it was Tuesday night. Soap! Gonzalo! I schlepped through the tunnels till I got to the 23rd Street platform and took it north all the way to the Bakers’ stop. It was beginning to feel like work, keeping up with them, keeping blood in my stomach. All those paintings of Clayton’s had really gotten my wheels turning. Manhattan wasn’t the only place to be a vampire. What was it like out in the Ozarks, wherever those were? Down in Florida? Nah, too sunny. But Vermont, up in the mountains? Virginia? This had possibilities. Not too many people around, just you in a cave or a snowy cabin, creeping down at night to terrorize the villagers like Dracula. That sounded like the life. Except, where would I go to see a movie? What if the girls nearby were ugly, like with moles and country accents? Country accents drive me nuts; so does the music, I can’t even listen to it. Want to chase me out of a room, don’t bother with garlic or a cross, just put some George Jones or Conway Twitty on the jukebox. Not that “Have You Never Been Mellow” is musical genius, but Olivia Newton John (a) is foxy and (b) doesn’t twang. No, I keep an eye out for Kenny Rogers down in the tunnels, I’d love to decorate his life.

I checked my watch. 9:12. Plenty of time. Two kids on their way home from karate class sat in sweat-stained white uniforms, a green belt and a yellow belt. They babysat a rumpled gym bag between them, one foam shin and foot pad trying to peek out of the zipper like a tongue out of a mouth.

“What style do you kids take?” I said.

They looked at me, not sure if they should trust me, and then the bigger one said, “Waychee Roo.” I knew about Tae Kwon Do and the great Bruce Lee’s Wing Chun Kung Fu. I’d heard of Dim Mak, the Death Touch; all the comics had ads for that. I had been about to send away for the Black Dragon Society book, but Cvets had pointed out that secrets for sale aren’t secrets and that any vampire, even puny little me, could wipe up the floor with Count Danté, however much of a badass he looked like with his ’fro and his snarling and making his hands into claws like he was a big funky wizard about to cast a spell of whoop-ass.

But I didn’t know Waychee Roo from a poke in the eye with a stick.

“What’s that?” I said.

“It’s Okinawan.”

“You guys use numchuks?”

He shook his head sadly, like if he’d been a slightly luckier child he could have joined a dojo where they used numchuks.

“I have a pair,” I said.

“You mean nunchaku?”

“Yeah, numchuks.”

“Are you a black belt?”

“Yeah,” I said. Maybe not, but I could kick a black belt’s ass, that had to count for something. I noticed how tan these lads looked, which was not really tan at all, but after hanging out with pale, cold Peter and the rest, these warm-body blond kids looked almost like Arabs.

“Cool,” the small one said.

“Show us something!” said the brother.

I looked around at the dozen or so other people on the car. Nobody was paying much attention, so I grabbed a pole and extended my body straight out, held it just for a second, pointing my toes.

“Cool!” said the small one.

“My uncle can do that,” said the older one. “He’s a gymnast. He almost went to Munich, but Dad says it’s good he didn’t.”

“Bad guys,” the little one said.

“Yeah? Well, I’ll show you something even cooler when the train stops again.”

They leaned forward, all eyes.

When we pulled into the Lexington station, I waited till just the last second, waited until the leavers had left and the getters-on had gotten on, then I jumped up and karate-chopped the pole with my forearm, not snapping the pole cleanly like I thought, but denting it good and knocking it loose at the top. It was loud. Everybody looked. I had broken my arm. I made a little squealy sound without meaning to.

The big one said, “Kee-YA!”

“Cool!” said the little one, but a big black guy in a striped tie looked angry, said, “Why’d you do that, man? People ride this thing.”

I laughed and ran, just beating the shutting doors, cradling the busted arm, which was even now resetting and knitting itself whole.

The Bakers’ place was all wrong.

First of all, nobody came to the door when I rang so I had to go back outside the building and climb around to the balcony window, which was locked. I tried to peek in but the drapes were drawn. Had they gone on vacation? I went back around through the front lobby, took the stairs two at a time, rang the doorbell again. Nothing. I put my ear to the door and thought I heard talking. I knocked. Nothing. I was about to pull out Gary Combs’s American Express card and jimmy the lock when I heard the elevator ding, so I waited. A lady with curlers under a head scarf came out with a bag of corner-store groceries, the neck of a wine bottle sticking up like a periscope. I know I looked bad leaning against the wall looking at the ugly hallway carpeting, and she slowed up, her hand fishing in her purse for her keys. Her elbow vised down on her purse a little. She came a step closer, pulled her keys out. Jesus, she lived in the apartment next door.

“Can I help you?” she said, scared, but more that I’d try to take her purse or, God forbid, her wine than that I’d hurt her. I wasn’t exactly intimidating.

“Everything’s cool,” I said, using my little-boy voice. Then I got a good look at her. Pretty in a washed-out, Katharine-Ross-with-crow’s-feet kind of way. I switched to my sexy James Dean voice and poured on the charm, made myself look older. “Is anybody home now at your place?”

“No,” she said, saliva running out of her mouth and into her grocery bag.

“Expecting anybody?”

She shook her head no.

“Do you have a television?”

She nodded. Then she dropped her keys and unbuttoned her coat, rubbing herself in the zipper area, still holding her groceries, which I took from her.

“Jesus, not here. Pick up your keys and ask me in.”

She did.

For an older broad, like thirty-five, she had a good body. It was sitting naked on the couch next to me, a brown couch, thank God, because she was kind of a bleeder. I had tasted the bitter, high-in-the-nose notes of aspirin as I sucked from her thigh and went back for seconds on her wrist. My timing was perfect, too. The naughty stuff was over and now Soap was on. Dinner and a show is my favorite. I confess I wasn’t paying much attention, though; Jody, the gay one, was ranting about something, but I was in my head, still worrying about how I was going to replace Margaret’s books and find out what was wrong with Peter and the others. The sound from the neighbor lady’s Magnavox was weird, like it had an echo. That was when I realized the same show was on next door. Somebody was watching Soap at the Bakers’. They must have had the volume up to three-quarters. What the fuck? They didn’t like that show, not without me there.

Something banged against the wall. Once. Twice. Three times.

“Coming,” my companion said, like it was the door, and stood up, a fresh runner of blood going down her leg.

“No,” I said. “Go get dressed.”

She stopped and swayed, then walked down the hallway bare-assed, one curler loose and bobbing as she went. Bloody footprints on the carpet; the carpet wasn’t that dark, I was making a mess here. I hate aspirin.

I was thinking it was time to get going when the phone rang.

“I’ll get it,” she sang out from the bedroom. I couldn’t hear what she said to the caller over the TV, but then she said, “Joey? Is that your name? It’s for you.”

My heart beat once.

“Tell them I’m not here and hang up.”

Mumbles from the bedroom. She came out. I stood up to go. The phone rang again. I picked it up.

“Curler residence,” I said, trying to make a joke, but I said it flat because I was scared.

“Joey.”

A kid’s voice.

American.

“Joey.”

“Who’s this?”

“It’s Mikey.”

“Mikey who?” I said, though I knew good and goddamned well who.

“From next door.”

My heart beat again.

The televisions blared their nonsense.

“You know,” he said. “The fat kid you bite and take blood from and laugh at. Why aren’t you watching TV with me? Do you like Ms. Kemp better?”

I didn’t say anything, I didn’t know what to say. I was trying to think but couldn’t. He kept talking.

“Are you putting your penis in her vagina? My daddy wants to do that to Ms. Kemp. He told his friend at the bar. He doesn’t put it in Mommy’s anymore, she says it hurts her now since she’s got lady problems.”

I made a fish mouth. Nothing came out.

“I’d like to put my penis in Ms. Kemp, too. Maybe I will. I’ll be right there.”

Oh shit oh shit oh shit.

I had never charmed anyone over the phone before; I didn’t know if it would work, but I thought so.

“Stay there,” I said. “Unlock your door, sit down, and don’t move again till I come over.”

He didn’t say anything. I started to repeat myself, but he interrupted me.

“Stay there, unlock—”

“I know what you’re trying to do,” he said. “But it doesn’t work on me anymore because I’m like you now.”

My heart beat twice.

I wanted to run but knew I couldn’t just leave a mess like this. Not unless I ran and kept running, ran to the Ozarks, ran to wherever that long-ago dog was sitting on the trunk of the car.

“I’m hungry,” he said. And hung up.

That broke the spell. I looked at Ms. Kemp. “Stay here, lock it behind me, don’t let anyone in!”

I heard the Bakers’ door unlatch, swing open. I leapt for Ms. Kemp’s door, opened that. We met in the hallway.

He looked bad. He stank. Blood bibbed the front of his yellow Izod polo shirt. He looked dead. He showed me his fangs like he was proud of them, little nubby new fangs in his very red mouth. He was about to say something. I heard the door across the hall start to unlatch. I grabbed his chin, shut his mouth, and shoved him back in his doorway, shutting his door just as the one across the hall was starting to open.

Oh shit oh shit oh shit.

“Don’t push me,” he said, pushing me back, hard. I rolled with it, rolled back to the television, which I turned up all the way, though momentum made me break the volume knob off when I did it.

“Hey, you want to keep it down over there?” a deep voice said from the hall. I clobbered the Baker kid so hard I broke his jaw; he squealed and sat down. I opened the door, looked at the big dago-looking guy standing there, told him and his huge mustache, “Mind your own business! Turn your TV on,” saw his eyes go blank, and then I shut the door. Heard him shut his. I turned around just in time to see the coffee table coming at my head, ducked in time so it was a glancing blow, but it still sent me tumbling. Only now did I notice what a wreck the rest of the place was: broken glass everywhere, the refrigerator standing open, one shelf collapsed so the food was on the kitchen floor, the Miracle Whip jar broken with Miracle Whip blobbed out everywhere.

I turned around; here came the coffee table again. I got under the table, slid like I was sliding into third, kicked his legs out from under him. He fell hard. On top of me. The table hit a shelf full of tchotchkes, made an awful noise.

Now he grabbed my neck, choking me. Lot of good that would do, I don’t breathe much, but it did hurt. He saw that wasn’t working, fishhooked a thumb into my mouth, tore my mouth open all the way to the cheek, and that hurt like blazing hell. It wasn’t fair he got to be so strong so young! I remembered a move I saw in a karate magazine, snaked my left arm over his right arm, under the elbow of his left, and slapped up under his elbow, hard. It rolled him, but then he just rolled me over again, straight on top of the Miracle Whip jar and all the other broken glass, I was cut to shit.

“OW, fuck!” I said, but his knee slid in the mess on the linoleum and he was off-balance enough for me to roll him the rest of the way over. He flopped on his stomach and said, “Mom!”

The telephone rang.

I pulled the open refrigerator over on top of him; the milk broke, tomatoes rolled everywhere, then I slipped in gravy or maybe it was blood. There was an awful lot of blood in this place.

“Mom!” he said again.

The telephone kept ringing.

I had never peeled a vampire before, I didn’t want to. But what else? Take him with me? No time to think.

He started wriggling out from under the fridge, so I stomped on his neck and broke it.

Somebody knocked on the door.

Somebody across the room said, “MO-om!” and I realized it was Gonzalo exactly imitating the way the kid sounded when he was watching TV. Poor bird had no idea, he was running back and forth on his little wooden bar.

“Mr. Baker?” a woman said, her voice muffled through the wood, but I could tell it wasn’t my new friend next door.

The kid’s neck righted itself with a sound like tearing off a cold turkey wing; it was even worse than the sound it had made breaking. He started doing a push-up, trying to get the fridge off.

I had to peel him.

I saw a block of knives, pulled out the big one, the one for turkeys.

I jumped on top of the fridge and stomped, flattening him out again under it.

The phone rang, the door knocked.

“No, don’t! No, don’t!” the bird said. I thought it was talking to me, then realized it was repeating somebody else’s words. Probably their last words.

Now the little chunk was pushing me and the fridge up; a jar of pickles slipped out and went rolling.

“Whatever is going on in there, I want you to know I’ve called the police,” the woman at the door said.

The phone stopped ringing.

I struck, jamming the knife down as far as I could into the kid’s skull, which was pretty much all the way to my fist, then pulled out halfway and stirred the point. He went flat, but it wouldn’t last. There was only one way.

I pulled the knife out.

“No, don’t! MO-om!” Gonzalo said.

I put the knife, edge up, under the kid’s neck.

“Sorry, Mikey. I’m so sorry.”

Hey, Mikey! He likes it!

Then I did it.

It’s not an easy thing. I don’t know what you’ve seen in the movies, but it’s not like that. It’s awful.

His brain started working again before I got through the bone and he tried to fight, jerking himself back and forth like a giant windshield wiper in all the mess beneath him, wheezing air through his cut pipes, bucking the refrigerator and spilling out more little bottles and fruit.

But I held on and did it.

I got it off.

Just as the police arrived.

This is how it looked on the cover of the New York Post:

I won’t force their whole shitty article on you, but the short version is this: Police responded to calls about a disturbance at a fifth-floor apartment in the Upper East Side neighborhood of Yorkville. Several commands to open up were ignored, forcing officers to bust in. Officers on the scene claimed to have seen someone holding, and I quote, “a kitchen knife and a head”; they recalled firing on this individual. None of them could supply a description except to say that he or she “wasn’t very tall” and “moved with surprising speed.” The suspect is believed to have escaped out the living room window despite the lack of a fire escape from that balcony. The headless body of twelve-year-old Michael Baker was found in the kitchen. The brutally stabbed bodies of his parents were found in the bathtub, along with child-sized hand and foot marks, though no readable fingerprints were discovered. Disturbing satanic messages and images had been painted on the wall in blood, including references to the punk band the Ramones and the notorious club CBGB. While the NYPD officially expressed confidence about catching the perpetrators, one unnamed source reported that evidence had been tampered with and that the crime scene had been “heinously mistreated.” The family pet, believed to be a parrot, also appeared to have been stolen.

Here’s how it looked from my end:

“OPEN UP!” he said. “POLICE!”

I was standing on the back of a refrigerator, holding poor Mikey’s head. I knew they couldn’t catch me, but they were going to find bodies. I just had to make sure they wouldn’t find anything vampirey. Luckily, the bar was low because people generally didn’t believe in us, but some of this evidence would be tough to ignore.

Four hard knocks rattled the door. These were pretty good doors, but nothing a determined person couldn’t get through.

Think!

First, the head. Mikey’s little fangs had to go—I set the head on the counter, knocked the canines out with the butt of the knife, and stuck these in my pocket. My face was itching terribly where my torn cheek healed itself.

“OPEN UP OR WE’LL BREAK IT DOWN!”

Where were the Baker mom and dad? Bedroom? No. Bathroom. Stacked up the way the kids liked to do it. Completely drained, fish-belly white, brutalized necks and wrists, blood all down the front of Dad’s boxers where somebody got his femoral. From the stains on Mikey’s shirt, one had to guess that he had taken part as well, too scared to leave, not knowing how to hunt. By the time I came around he was so hungry he got brave. But who turned him, and why? An accident? Maybe. No time to think.

Three more hard knocks.

The Bakers’ holes would play funny at the coroner’s, and there was no time to burn them.

Shit shit shit.

There was nothing for it. I stabbed and cut the fuck out of both of them, doing my best to slash up the bite marks, stabbing them in random places, too, just to confuse things. She belched and he farted a big one while I did it; you know how stiffs are. This wasn’t the best way I could think of to spend an evening.

I stepped out into the living room and picked up the kid’s head, meaning to hide it, I don’t know where, just as the door went bang! and the biggest cop I ever saw, a huge Polish-looking guy with no neck, walked in behind his service .38.

“DROP THE KNIFE!” he said, and I did.

“Drop the fucking head! Do it now!”

I did.

Two more cops came in, also drawn and ready to shoot, one with the shotgun that had blown the door.

“Now drop your guns,” I said.

Two of them did, but the little Hispanic guy in the back was tougher; he only lowered his .38 a bit, then raised it. I was about to tell him to do it again when I felt my back push out a piece of the jar I fell on and I jerked. Hispanic guy shot. He was a good shot. It tore through my chest, clipped my heart, and put a hole right through my lung. He probably would have shot me again, but he saw I was unarmed.

“Lay down on the floor!” he said, moving closer and reaching for his cuffs, perplexed at the inaction of his friends. “You guys want to help me, or what?”

I fixed his eyes and went to give him a counterorder, but my lung wasn’t quite healed and I only managed to bend over and cough blood.

He slipped the cuff on one hand and turned me, kicked the back of my knee to make me kneel.

“Seriously, a little help?” he said, grabbing my wrist and darting his eye back at his drooling friends. I yanked my hand free, grabbed his gun hand, and jerked that up in the air as he shot again.

“Stop,” I wheezed, looking him in the eye again, really pouring it on. He relaxed, went slack-jawed.

“Holster your gun.”

He did.

I peeked out the window. Two cop cars, one cop down at the cars watching the front, talking into the radio. I had a minute.

“You three, listen. I want you to make it look like punks or satanists did this, got it? Get sponges, whatever, paint weird shit on the walls. Stop before your buddies get here. Block the door so they can’t get in for a minute.”

“What about you?” said the little Hispanic guy, sounding genuinely concerned about me.

I went and grabbed Gonzalo out of his cage. He crawled onto my shoulder.

“Me?” I said, rubbing the already closed gunshot wound on my chest. I made my hand small and shook off the cuff. “I’ll be just fine,” and I went out the window.

I climbed up to the roof, then climbed down once I got to the other side, the side away from the street. Two more cop cars and an ambulance were just pulling up.

I grabbed the bird’s feet so he wouldn’t fall off while I ran, and run I did.

Like the shadow of an airplane on the ground.

HOLLOW BE THY NAME

Before I went anywhere, I went to see Chloë. She always calmed me down, lifted my spirits. Poor, beat-up, runaway Chloë, was I the only person who understood her?

I knew I’d probably be waking Blond Jesus up, so I brought him a meatball sandwich, the smell of which turned my stomach a little, what with all that greasy tinfoil with cheese stuck to it. Everything reminded me of carnage now: the Hunchers’ brains down in Margaret’s apartment, the stuff that came out of the Baker kid. But Blond Jesus loved that goddamned meatball sandwich, ate it with big, grateful bites and chewed with his mouth open. He wanted to talk, but I wanted the company of the dead. After the pandemonium of telephones, gunshots, screams, squawks, and a kitchen being trashed, I needed somebody who knew how to shut up.

“Watch my bird,” I said, leaving Gonzalo there. “Make a stand for it or something, would ya? Nothing fancy. I’ll give you five bucks.”

“Sure thing,” he said, showing me a big, steamy mouthful of food, steaming up his own glasses.

I put my hand over my mouth and lit out of there. When I got to the pipe, I threw away my ruined shirt and pants and squeezed through in my skivvies. It felt kind of improper, but never mind. It wasn’t like that with Chloë, she was just a kid. I slipped through the hole and into Chloë’s cave. I was safe there. I let myself just say whatever I wanted. Or maybe I just thought it, I don’t even remember. It was something like praying, something like beatnik poetry I’d heard down in the Village. I just poured out words.

Our Chloë, who art in cavern, hollow be thy name. Thy cavern come, here I come, I played my drum for him, pa-rum-pum-pum-pum. Chloë, I’m feeling bad about the things I’ve done, the things I have to keep doing just to keep, what is it, living? I’m not saying I’ve got it rougher than you, your days were few, and very blue. I’m going to stop rhyming now because it sounds stupid. I just think about you, whoever beat your face in. How could they do that? Everything seems set up so you’ve got to hurt someone all the time, no matter what. I cut a guy’s head off today, a kid, I mean I really cut it off. He was a vampire, I probably did him a favor. Maybe somebody should do that to me, I don’t like myself very much right now. Probably you don’t like me either, bothering you all the time like I do, you probably wish I’d just go away, but I’m selfish and I think I need to talk to you more than you need me to leave you alone. But you don’t need that, do you? You don’t need anything anymore and never will again. People bring you things, like I bring you flowers sometimes, and would have tonight but I had to get a guy a sandwich for watching my bird so my hands were full, but you don’t care. You’re like, It’s nice that you brought me things, but I’m dead, I don’t need anything, I don’t want anything, I’m complete. Maybe that’s what you’re here for, as an example. Maybe you’re my god of small places. You teach me things. Through you I see maybe only the dead are perfect. Maybe only the dead are gentle.

Something moved on the other side of the wall.

“Hello?” I said.

No answer.

Fuck it, what was I afraid of after the night I’d had?

I went back to communing with Chloë.

Anyway, kid, I thought I should tell you that I’m thinking about leaving. The tunnels, but maybe even New York. Sorry if calling you kid offends you, I don’t mean any disrespect, you’re probably the same age as me. What I mean is, we both died at the same time, only you did it right. Not that I really want to die, at least I don’t think so. But I’ve got to get out of here. At least for a while. Not that I know what I’d do out in the boondocks, out in the wilds of Philadelphia or Hoboken, or Milwaukee. Can you imagine? Me out in Milwaukee with Lenny and Squiggy and the Big Ragu? Not that you watch TV, that’s Laverne and Shirley, it’s all right. But what do you think about all this? Stay or go? Let’s play a game. If I should go, just be really quiet.

She didn’t say anything.

All right. But that’s not fair, is it, because I think I really want to go and I rigged things, and what are you going to do, talk? Let’s be fair. If I should stay, just be really quiet again.

She didn’t say anything.

But someone else did.

“Town meeting.”

I looked up at the missing bricks and saw Old Boy’s dully glowing eyes peering in at me.

“How’d you find me?” I said.

“Your bird smells.”

“I left the bird.”

“I know. But you still smell like him.”

“Hey, I heard you,” I said. “How come? I heard your foot on gravel. You’re normally so quiet.”

“Shut up,” he said, but not unfriendly. “Town meeting is at dawn. At the water pipe. Margaret’s pissed.”

“When is she not?”

He smiled and went away.

“What the fuck is that?” Margaret said.

“It’s an African gray parrot.”

“I can see what color it is.”

“That’s part of its name.”

“Just keep it quiet.”

“Quiet!” Gonzalo said.

She narrowed her eyes.

“Get it out of here before I kill it.”

“Quiet!”

“Have I got time? Before you start the meeting?”

“No, you trivial little man, you haven’t, but run.”

She didn’t look at me. I didn’t like that.

I ran the bird back to my room, put a shoestring around his leg, and tied him to the stand. He said something to me in German. Something like Lext Un-Fayger only the x was more like the ch in L’chaim. I thought that was weird, I didn’t see the Bakers popping out any foreign languages, and then I remembered Gary Combs was kind of an egghead, had some foreign-language books.

“Want to groove on Miles?” I asked him, but he didn’t, just bobbed his head at me, and off I ran to the meeting, afraid I was going to be found out for any number of things that would cost me my life.

TRUST

“Some of you’s been feedin’ ’em, and there’s more than one. Don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talkin’ about, neither.”

More than a few of us got really uncomfortable just then. All of us were there except the kids. Ruth had them at the 18th Street station, no doubt boring them stupid, frowning them into lassitude. She was old and strong enough to keep them in line and loyal enough to Margaret not to need a pep rally.

“I don’t want to go callin’ out individuals by name because, to be plain, there’s too many of ya. You know who you are. But it stops now. Either they hunt on their own without makin’ a mess or they die. It’s brutal, but that’s how it has to be.”

I pictured the Bakers in the bathtub. I pictured the Asian lady on top of the stack at the theater. I pictured the blind rabbit. Cvetko and I exchanged a look. Cvets smelled like smoke and mortar.

“We got it too good down here to have the law comin’ down with thirty fuckers and a dozen dogs, cleanin’ us out, wallin’ off tunnels, makin’ patrols in force. Which is exactly what’ll happen if people up there start dyin’ and they figure out where it’s comin’ from. It was hard enough last year with that crazy kike shootin’ people cause his dog told him so, and the cops all jumpy and nobody goin’ about alone no more.”

“Last year wasn’t all bad,” Billy Bang said. “The blackout was fun.” That got a laugh. He and Luna and I went out on a spree that first night the power went out, just biting the fuck out of everybody like it was Halloween. All the cops were cracking skulls in Brooklyn, so there we were climbing through open windows in the Upper East Side, knocking dead electric fans out of the way and bleeding the wealthy, tasting their fear and their salt, the veal in their blood, enjoying how inconvenienced they were by it all, how embarrassed to be caught with messy hair, sweating through tank tops just like their employees in Astoria and the Bronx.

“That’s as may be,” Margaret said. “But I want to hear from each of you that you understand me.”

“I understand,” that Edgar fellow said.

“I got it,” Billy said.

Then she stopped.

I swear she tilted her head like a dog hearing a silent whistle, like she couldn’t believe what she was seeing.

“And who the fuck is this?”

Baldy was standing near an actual bald guy. A very Italian-looking bald guy, clearly a fresh vampire, lots of scars. Shoulder muscles like he juggled engine blocks. Clearly good at getting places without being noticed; even Old Boy had missed him. Dominic stood on the other side. All of them had visible guns, one in a belt, two under the arm in shoulder holsters.

Balducci said, “I figured the meeting was a good time to introduce my friend Paulie.”

The Paulie guy nodded, barely. It’s the way you nod at somebody you’re probably going to try to kill later. Margaret just stood there for another second looking so outraged she was almost amused.

Before I tell you what happened, I’m going to tell you what I think Baldy was thinking. The hardass on his left was none other than Paulo “The Screw” Milanese, a hit man with thirty jobs under his belt. His calling card was to twist a corkscrew into your head, what was left of it, you get the idea. This guy was in the papers. An FBI sting had busted six other guys in his immediate circle, but the Screw shot his way out and went to a safe house, Balducci figured out where. Gave him a proposition. This sounded like a good way to avoid prison and put off hell. Baldy kept him in hiding above-ground, taught him a thing or two, then figured he’d introduce him when Margaret was in trouble. Figured he was a good counterbalance to Old Boy, who wasn’t on top of his game just lately because he was letting the kids feed off him too much. He figured Margaret wouldn’t go to the mat with the odds evened up and the group divided.

He figured wrong.

Margaret pulled the gun out of the Screw’s holster and shot Baldy in the head. Fast. While he was stunned and the Screw was gunless, she grabbed her shovel. Dominic ran. Old Boy’s knife was out and he went to work on Milanese; they rolled into the water-pipe area, slammed against the moldy wall right next to where it said RUST. Before Baldy could recover, Margaret shot twice more and scrambled his brains again. She dropped the gun and launched herself. Her approach with the shovel was almost like ballet. Leap, leap, half leap, crouch, uppercut.

Baldy was dead so fast his body took two steps and fell.

Old Boy finished with his man, flung the hacked-off head against the wall. It was still trying to talk.

I had never actually seen anybody get their head taken off before, now it was three in two days. I had to get out of the tunnels. Everything was going to hell.

If you’re not a vampire yourself, or have never seen one move for real, you’re thinking, What was everybody doing standing around? If your experience is a little broader, however, you know how fast these things go down. As fast as two BOMP-BOMP-Shhs in Queen’s “We Will Rock You.” As fast as a car wreck.

But I’m getting to that.

Something else had happened.

When Old Boy and Milanese went thumping up against the wall, they scraped a bunch of mold off it. It turns out some long-ago wall-scrawler had not written RUST near the busted pipe that served as our fountain. There was another letter there. Luna scraped more mold away to reveal a T.

TRUST

“Look there,” Billy Bang said, pointing where the Screw’s head had bounced off the wall at another point just to the right of TRUST. A tennis ball’s width of white paint shone through the caked-on greenish-black carpet of schmutz.

Baldy’s dead hand was waving in the air, like Help me I’m headless, but everybody was more interested in the wall. Like we knew it was significant. Billy stepped forward, took the bloody shovel from Margaret, started scraping mold away.

THE

He went to the right of that.

C

“Cops!” the normally almost catatonic Sandy yelled, like she was playing Wheel of Fortune. Billy kept scraping. I stole a glance at Cvetko, saw his wheels turning.

CHILD

Billy stopped.

“Keep going,” Luna said.

He did.

CHILDREN

“Trust the Children,” Billy said. “I think they wrote that they own selves.”

Most of them laughed. Not Cvetko. And not Margaret.

Billy rested on his shovel.

“Are ye an idiot?” Margaret said.

Sounded like eedjeet.

She took the shovel from Billy and walked to the left of the word

TRUST

DON’T TRUST THE CHILDREN

Everyone gasped in chorus. Cvetko, too.

Then he said something I didn’t understand.

It sounded like Many, many tickle a parson.

But it wasn’t in English.

“I’m sick of shit I don’t understand,” I said, and walked away.

I spent a long time packing my suitcase; it was one of those 1940s ones with the delicate little latches, but real solid otherwise. Nothing a gorilla could jump up and down on, but classy, kind of an orangey color between a brick and a pumpkin, not that that’s important, I just like that color. I stuffed it as full as I could, even sat on it to press it down. I had no idea where I was going to end up, but doubted anybody sold nice vests and coats out in dog-on-a-trunk land with corn and Hee Haw and guys that stuck a piece of grass in their mouth while they talked to you. Margaret, Cvetko, and Billy had been talking about who wrote DON’T TRUST THE CHILDREN, but the crux of it was that Margaret was going to kill them tomorrow night, even though none of them could quite convince themselves the wall was talking about these children. That was like twenty years’ worth of mold we scraped off. Still, it seemed to superstitious Margaret like a sign, and she was all Off with their heads! Old Boy and Chinchilla would come with her, and she even had Billy halfway convinced. Cvetko wasn’t saying much about it, taking it all in and pondering. I just wanted to leave. The first time I walked out, though, Margaret stopped me, told me she wanted me to go tell Ruth what was up and that she should keep them there.

I knew better than to buck a direct order, but I must have looked like I just got told to shovel out a Dumpster full of horse apples, because Cvetko spoke up and volunteered to go instead of me. I could have kissed him. Actually I did kiss him, right on the forehead, because I realized it might be my last chance. I gave him a look that I hoped let him know this was it. This was good-bye. I think he already knew. He patted my shoulder and gave my arm a hard squeeze. Margaret waved me off and I went to pack. There was no rule against anybody leaving, but I didn’t want to risk pissing her off so I didn’t announce my plans. I figured I’d send Cvets a postcard at his dummy address once I got to Peoria or wherever.

I had it all planned out, as far as a guy like me plans anything. I would charm somebody with a car, get them to drive me out of the city, ditch them, get a hotel. Maybe Pennsylvania. I heard it was pretty. I could come back to the city or find another city, maybe Philly, when I ran out of dough. Anyway, I just couldn’t take any more peeling. Biting people was one thing, but I was going to feel the knife going through that kid’s neck bone for the rest of my nights. I knew I had to get a few hours’ sleep, it was already like ten A.M., but I had no idea how I was going to be able to stop thinking about it. Turns out it wasn’t so hard after all. I was exhausted. Only I didn’t get to sleep too long.

Cvetko came back with the news about three P.M.: Ruth was gone. The kids were gone. The platform at the 18th Street station was awash in vampire blood. Margaret woke the rest of us up. She’s not a gentle waker-upper, either; she banged on my fridge door with her sandal and said, “Rise and shine.” When I sat up, she cut her eyes to my suitcase and said, “Where d’ya think you’re goin’?” Before I could answer, and I didn’t really have an answer, she said, “I’ll tell you where. You’re comin’ with us to find those little monsters and shorten ’em all a head.”

Gonzalo flapped his wings real big; I don’t think he liked Margaret. I don’t think he liked living underground. I caught him pulling feathers out of his own chest; he was working on a little bald spot there.

“I can’t, Margaret. I just can’t.”

That was a mistake, but what do you want, I was sleepy. Next thing I knew she had me by both ears like she really wouldn’t mind ripping them off. “You can and you will. You’re the one brought those false, murderin’ little devils among us, and you’ll help us sort ’em out. Then you can go wherever you care to go, if you think anyone else’ll have you.”

She kicked my suitcase over, making Gonzalo squawk, and left. And then she came back, still pissed. “I’ve known you forty years now, Joseph Peacock, and I’ll tell you somethin’ about yourself, whether you want to hear it or not. You start real strong but you finish like a runt. You’re forever getting yourself into messes you haven’t got the britches to get yourself out of, or else letting people walk on you. That little girlie that left you cold for bein’ a Jew-boy? I’d have peeled her.”

“But you said…”

“The devil with what I said. Do you think anything in this world would have tasted as good as her princess blood pourin’ hot down your throat? No matter who her fuckin’ daddy was? But you didn’t have the stones for it. And that boy, Freddie.”

“I know,” I said.

“You were stupid enough to tell him what you were, so what did he do?”

“He didn’t believe me.”

“Tried to let the blind up on you, put sunshine to you. Damn near did it, too, and that would have been the end of you.”

I looked at the scar on my elbow.

“He just didn’t believe. He wanted to see what would happen.”

“He saw, all right. Did you ever wonder what happened to him?”

“No. I never went around him anymore.”

“Well, I went around him. I did him. I drank him dead on a tugboat while he begged me not to and I threw what was left of him in the East River.”

I just blinked at her.

She smiled an ugly smile.

“Laws are for the stupid. That’s what I learned all them years ago, swimmin’ as hard as I could and still sinkin’. I never told you this, but there was just a little part of me that admired what you did to me, putting that necklace on me. Not at first, of course, I was for killin’ you, and I did. But later, on thinkin’ about it, I understood it better. Oh, it was a wretched bit of business, a spoiled child’s petty revenge. But here’s the thing. You wanted me out of the house and you got me out because you were willing to get dirty to do it. And that’s how the world is.”

“I’m sorry for what I did, though. I was wrong.”

She slapped me.

She actually slapped me.

“No, you weren’t. You were God’s instrument. I failed at everything but this. You made me this.” She squatted down close to me now, said the next bit practically into my ear.

“Now, I don’t know if you’ve worked this out in your fond brain or not, but them children are no children, so don’t you be squeamish about hurtin’ ’em. They want what we have. This place. And they mean to take it. They fooled us all because they were willin’ to get dirty, and if we don’t get dirtier, they’ll kill us. All of us.”

We spent hours and hours combing the tunnels, all of us together, moving fast and quiet. Margaret with her shovel, Old Boy just out front, running point. We scared the shit out of the Hunchers we ran across, asked them about the kids, charmed them to forget they saw us. Long story short, we didn’t find them. Not that day. Not that night.

We went as a group to the 18th Street station and the first thing we found was a bunch of new trespassing notices and rat poison warnings the MTA had stuck on the posts. Then we found the blood. A big pond of it near the edge of the platform, not fresh but not old, like half a day old. Still sticky in places. Margaret squatted down and tasted it. Then she did something I had never seen her do.

She screamed.

She found a small, bloody footprint.

She spat on it like a crazy person and screamed something in Irish. She loved Ruth, or came as close to loving as any of us could.

I couldn’t feel bad for the kids anymore, but I certainly didn’t envy them. I’d had Margaret come looking for me before, and I can tell you it wasn’t a situation you wanted to be in.

Ever.

We got back from our fool’s errand at four A.M. or so, all of us tired. It had been a grim night, except for one moment. We found some Hunchers sleeping in a boiler room under Grand Central, four of them, just runaway kids, and we fed on them all together, taking turns keeping watch. They’d been drinking, so we all knew we’d have a little misery when the alcohol came out of us later, but we needed our strength. Anyway, after we all slaked our thirst, Billy said, “Shit, man, the first time the whole family eats together and nobody says grace.”

When we got back to the common area near the pipes, we saw it.

A Raggedy Ann doll.

One of Camilla’s, clearly.

It lay in front of a worktable we used for folding laundry and counting out stolen money.

“They’ve been here,” said Chinchilla.

“Someone give Mr. Chinchilla a gold star,” Margaret said wearily.

Luna went to pick the doll up, but Old Boy stole up behind her fast, pulled her away by the belt. Motioned all of us back. Way back. Picked up a couple of poisoned rats from a stack of them Ruth had broomed together. Threw the first one at the doll and missed. The second one bumped it. It popped, yeah, but then it flared up so bright it hurt our eyes, hissed awfully, like a dragon. Filled the whole place with smoke, so much smoke. He saved Luna, maybe more of us, all because he knew about booby traps. Could smell one. The table was fucked, bright holes burning in it. White phosphorus doesn’t stop till it stops, water doesn’t help. Just burns right through everything. Sure, vampires are bad, but let’s not forget it was ordinary people who came up with the pure evil that was an incendiary grenade. I didn’t think it was possible to feel worse for Gua Gua, but now that I’d seen what got him, felt the heat on my face at even a good distance, I did. Him and the rest of the Latins. What a miserable way to go. Even the smoke smelled like poison and death.

Had the Hessian really killed Mapache and the others? Or was it the kids? Maybe someone we hadn’t even seen yet? Margaret was probably right, their story was bullshit. The Hessian might never have touched them, might have had nothing to do with this.

But a guy like that would have had the money and connections to get illegal grenades. Then, so would Baldy and his mob friends. Where was Dominic?

Old Boy probably knew where to get this stuff, too. I looked at him, how pale and tired he was from feeding them, and it still surprised me that he had done something so… soft. He was always off alone. Had he killed the Latins? No, I could almost hear Cvetko saying think—if he was in with the kids, why would he save us from the grenade?

Was something truly fucked-up going on here?

I had the deep-in-my-bones feeling that I just didn’t have a clue about what was really happening.

“Good ole Willy Pete,” Old Boy said, smiling a little. “I don’t think we’ve seen the last of him.”

Jesus, he liked this stuff. Booby traps, grenades, having an enemy.

I decided I was leaving the tunnels after all.

After I got Gonzalo out of this mess.

And got some sleep.

Did you know parrots don’t fly that well? It’s because people clip their wings. Makes sense, especially up in an apartment; you don’t want to open up a window to get a breath of fresh air and there goes your parrot saying, “So long, sucker!” all the way back to Africa or Central Park or wherever. Central Park was the first thing I thought, lots of trees and nuts, and maybe somebody would say, “Look, that’s a valuable parrot,” and come and get him out of the tree. I don’t know what with. Maybe just coax him down with egghead German and a bag of pistachios. Stupid idea, but remember I hadn’t slept and that messes with our heads as much as with yours.

So I took him to Central Park in a taxi. The cabbie didn’t like much about it, any of it, but he needed the fare. These weren’t great times in the city for most people, if you hadn’t noticed.

“Shouldn’t he be in a cage?”

The cabbie was an Indian fellow with horn-rimmed glasses and a fixed harelip.

“Yeah, but I lost it,” I said.

“Will he be making a mess in my taxi?”

Gonzalo just bobbed his head, his new bald spot standing out on his chest like a sheriff’s badge.

“No promises,” I said, and handed the cabbie a five-spot.

We didn’t talk anymore until he dropped me off.

I found some nice trees just off Fifth Avenue, across from the Plaza Hotel, and remembered it was supposed to be some kind of bird sanctuary anyway. I told the cabbie to keep the meter running, this shouldn’t take long, but I did want to say good-bye.

I walked Gonzalo up to the pond there and set him on my hand, tried to get him to look at me.

He did for a second, cocking his head, then said that German phrase again and nubbed out his tongue a couple of times.

“Listen, Gonz, this is serious. This is good-bye. I thought I’d be able to take care of you, but the tunnels are no place for a guy like you, and even if they were, I have to split. I’m sorry about your old master, he was better for you. Maybe you’ll get lucky and get somebody like that again. Funny how everything affects everything. If there were no vampires, you’d still be good and cozy and I’d be old somewhere. Maybe I’d have a parrot, turns out I like you guys. Maybe I would have beat Gary Combs to the bird store that day and you would have been my bird. Anyway, good luck to you and good luck to me.”

I tossed him up in the air, toward the trees, but he just flapped like hell and landed slowly, like a guy coming down in a parachute. I had never seen him do more than that, I just sort of assumed he could fly when he wanted to, but he was mostly in a cage. Then I remembered the expression “clipping your wings” and figured that was what happened to Gonzalo.

He walked around on the ground.

I picked him back up.

The cabdriver must have been watching me talk to the bird; he drove away. At least that’s what I thought just then, but I looked down at my shirt and saw how dirty it was, noticed a few drops of blood on my shirt from where we bled the runaways in the boiler room. It had been such a long night that it seemed like the night before. I spit-cleaned the bloody part of the shirt, got another cab, and had him take me to a pet store. I bet nobody ever broke into a pet store to leave a pet there. Or maybe they did. Either way, I left a note.

I got underground just before sunup.

I got some sleep.

I dreamed I had wings.

MICHELANGELO

I made sure not to pass anybody on my way out; I felt like a quitter. Making a stealthy escape was even tougher because I was carrying a suitcase; I could make myself small, but the size of the luggage was not negotiable. A plastic bag would have been smarter than the case, I guess, but it was a hell of a nice suitcase, and if I was going to pare my possessions down to so very few, they should at least be things worth having.

Turns out in order to get out with the suitcase I had to bust an extra brick or two out of the bricked-over basement window in Chelsea, which I did by holding on to a pipe in the ceiling and donkey-kicking with my heels. It was just after sunset; there was still a little red in the sky. The first order of business was to feed, so I charmed a guy with a suit and tie and good, high hair down to the basement I had just crawled out of. He also had a suitcase. Two guys with suitcases, like we were going to have a little business meeting down there with the spiders and that moldy basement smell. After I bit him, and his blood was bitter with nicotine—he must have smoked two and a half packs a day—I told him to open his suitcase and he did. Hair care products, like hair spray and gel and shampoo and shit. A whole box of business cards, one of which I plucked out. It just read John M. Murray, gave his 212 phone number.

“What do you, go door to door?” I asked.

“I’m a rep,” he said, drooling all over his very wide, white shirt collar. “I call on people who own beauty shops and salons.”

His neck was still trying to bleed, so I licked it again to close it up. He did smell good, and he could have been a TV anchorman with that head of feathered hair on him. It kind of crunched a little when you touched it, but it looked good.

“What do you use?” I asked him, touching his hair.

“Apollonis,” he said, pointing at a bottle of hair spray with a picture of a Greek god on it. I took it out, looked at my own suitcase, but decided I didn’t want to risk opening it for fear I might not get it closed again. I stuck the hair spray in my coat pocket.

“There good money in selling this shit?”

“Not bad,” he said.

“Show me your money.”

He took out his wallet and peeled it open for inspection. I removed the two twenties, the ten, and the five he had in there.

“You got your car around here?”

He shook his head no. I gave him back the ten, told him to close his suitcase, climb out the window, and take a cab west to the Empire Diner. I said he should get himself a chili sundae, I heard they were good, and forget about what happened here. Out he went; I had to give him a boost to reach the window. He was heavier than he looked, kind of a muscular guy, must have played football in college or maybe he was one of these gym guys. Anyway, off he went to the diner, or so I thought. I’d been to the Empire and seen that chili sundae, it was clever. Sour cream at the top like ice cream, little tomato for a cherry. Stuff like that made me almost wish I could eat without, shall we say, consequences.

I sprayed a SHHT of that Apollonis on myself just for the smell and went out.

I could still see my guy; he tried to hail a cab but it was too close to rush hour still and every cab had a head or two heads in the back, already on their way somewhere. The charm mostly wore off him, I saw it happen, and he looked puzzled for a minute, then kept walking, still going west toward the Hudson. Looked right at me, didn’t register who I was; I smiled a little, that always amuses me.

Now I was looking for somebody with a car, somebody alone.

I stood at an intersection with long red lights, checking out traffic, looking for a nice car with nobody in the passenger seat and the lock tab up. Somebody who looked not too bright, easy to manipulate. I saw my guy again, he passed me, and goddamn if he didn’t turn the corner and come up to a big brick-red sedan parked three cars down and fish out his keys. He got in, threw his suitcase in the passenger seat, and started it. I almost yelled HEY but instead I went over and tapped on the glass. When he caught my eyes, I poured it on again.

“May I sit down?” I yelled over the honking and traffic.

I saw him mouth sure but I had to point at the passenger door lock, which was still down. He leaned over far—it was a big-ass car, like an LTD—and opened up. I tossed his case full of hair shit in the back and got in with my bag.

“Hey, I thought you said you didn’t have a car near here?”

“Girlfriend’s,” he said. “Her name’s—”

“I don’t care, I’m sure she’s a whore. Start the car.”

He did.

“Drive us to Pennsylvania,” I said.

“Penn Station?”

“No, fucking Pennsylvania with cows and the Amish, let’s go,” but I charmed him too much. His mouth just hung open, saliva pouring out of him like he was Niagara Falls; he couldn’t even figure out the gears. You got to charm a guy just enough if you want him to be able to do complicated stuff.

I had last tried to drive while Eisenhower was president, but time goes fast for us and it didn’t seem so long at the moment. Anyway, I didn’t need Slobbery McGoodhair gumming up the works all the way out to Injun Hole, Pennsylvania, or wherever.

“Get out,” I said.

He got out, reflexively reached for his suitcase, shut the door.

I forgot to say, “Watch out for traffic.”

It’s the little things.

Just as I was sliding over, the poor guy was hit, luckily just by a bicycle, but it hit him pretty hard, throwing him, the bicyclist, and the bike down in the street. The guy driving in that lane had great reflexes, screeched to a stop before he hit either one of them, but the Apollonis guy’s suitcase flew up and got whomped by a fast-moving van two lanes over, shampoo bottles and conditioner and other glop flying all over the place. I panicked, jammed down on the gas, I guess it was a V8 cause it really had some horses under the hood. I slammed into the VW Bug parked in front of me, knocked it forward; there were sparks, I’m not sure what from. I cut out left now and mashed the gas again, managed not to hit the guys in the street, taking advantage of the lane they were now blocking, saying shit shit shit all the while. I tried to keep the nose of the thing in just the one lane, but it was too long—who makes cars with mile-long hoods anyway? The fucking thing was like an aircraft carrier—and I got clipped by a taxi, which knocked me back into the Bug, and I bounced off that and into the taxi again, saw some chubby lady’s face yelling in the back, she looked like Bella Abzug, could have been for all I know. A bottle of shampoo, which must have sailed up two stories, came down and exploded in pinkish-red glory all over my windshield; this was going to be the best-smelling accident ever. Smash, crunch, smash, everybody honking, everybody yelling. I grabbed my suitcase and tried to get out the passenger door, but it was junked shut for good. A very angry taxi driver with a cut over his eye and half a pair of glasses was shouting in Greek or something into the driver’s-side window. I heard a cop blowing his whistle. Here he came on a horse, too. All the cars were crunched up together now, there was a huge pile-up, the final spasm of which was a delivery truck clipping a tree, the goddamned tree falling down in a grand, slow-motion shower of leaves and almost taking a traffic light with it.

“What the fucks is wrong with you?” Greek half-glasses taxi guy was yelling, having switched to English now. The bicyclist was behind me, his arm probably broken, trying to stop the Apollonis guy where he was limping around in shock picking up unopened bottles of conditioner and business cards and the cigarettes that got knocked out of his shirt pocket. The traffic light up ahead wagged crazily, like a signalman on cocaine trying to stop a train. The cop on the horse loomed up over the cars, motioning with his free hand for everyone to stay calm, his horse skidding for a second in oil or hair gel or God knows what. A woman screamed, “Michelangelo!” and a Chihuahua with a green and red sweater on went running down the sidewalk. I swear this all happened in five seconds.

I opened the driver’s-side door, motioning angry hurt Greek guy back, but he saw I had the suitcase, correctly guessed I meant to make a run for it, tried to stop me from opening the door, but I gave it a good shove and knocked him on his ass. Bella Abzug tried to get out of the taxi, too, but I kicked her door shut. Here came the Goodhair guy, coming to his senses, slurring, “That’s my car!” through broken teeth. Here came the bicyclist with him, chicken-winging his hurt arm, trying to get a good look at my face. Here came the cop on the horse, the horse making crazy eyes at me; I knew it wanted to bite me or step on me, both at the same time if it could manage it.

“Fuck this.”

I hugged my suitcase and jumped up high, my butt on the roof of the car, and I rolled backward. This was ninja shit. I hit the sidewalk on my feet just as somebody yelled, “That’s the kid, grab him!” and somebody else yelled, “He tried to steal that car!” Michelangelo was way ahead, running in his out-of-season Christmas sweater, dragging his leash, and I ran that way, too. Up ahead, a crowd had gathered to see why the tree had fallen; I couldn’t run as fast as I wanted to, two Good Samaritans had almost caught me. This is New York, where a guy can stab a girl to death in front of thirty people, but let a harmless-looking kid try to steal something, ten guys form a posse. People want their name in the paper, but not if they’re going to get hurt.

I passed a telephone booth, heard the driver of the delivery truck saying, “… hit a tree, I’m okay, cops are on their—” and then he yelled, “HEY!” because I was turning him and his phone booth over to block the guys running after me. One stopped, knew a kid shouldn’t have been able to do that, but the other guy meant business, skip-stepped around Michelangelo, who had stopped to eat a French fry, hopped the booth, planting his size-twelve work boot right on the glass over the hysterical face of the horizontal truck driver. The guy was coming right at me in his brownish ’fro and sunglasses. He looked like a white Reggie Jackson, but that’s what happens when you watch too much TV, everybody looks like someone famous. I turned the corner; this sidewalk wasn’t crowded, I would turn on the jets now and burn this guy, but damn if my suitcase didn’t clip a trash can and pop open, all my best shirts and pants popping out and raining down. I stopped and grabbed some; I wanted my numchuks, but they had rolled out into the middle of the street and here came the lunkhead do-gooder. I smelled something shit-like but had no time to find out why. I tore down the sidewalk, vaulted over a bum, slapped a slice of folded pizza and its greasy paper plate out of a pimply teenaged guy’s hand just for the sheer fuck you of it—I mean my numchuks were gone—then I skittered up a ten-foot-high fence using just my feet and one hand. I left the Good Samaritan guy in the dust. I started to laugh, and then I realized that my clothes had fallen in shit with pieces of straw in it, probably that cop’s horse’s shit, and now I had it on the shirt I was wearing, too, because I had grabbed it all against my chest.

“Motherfucker,” I said, in my fouled shirt and my good-smelling hair.

So much for Pennsylvania.

I went down into the subway at 23rd and Avenue of the Americas, walked the tracks until I came to the service shaft leading down to a tunnel that led to our loops. I wanted to wash what remained of my laundry, talk to Cvetko, and think about what to do next. I didn’t really trust anybody but him, and Margaret. I guess I trusted Margaret. And Luna. Okay, and Billy Bang. Maybe I could get Cvetko and the rest to come away with me somewhere; Cvetko was better at planning things and Luna kept her cool better than I did. Billy just made me laugh. The four of us would get along okay, I thought. Hell, maybe even Margaret was ready to give the loops a rest and try something else. That grenade had really put the fear of Jesus in me, not really Jesus, but you know what I’m saying. That thing would melt your face off, just two bright seconds between undead and dead-dead. I could still hear Gua Gua yelling.

But I knew better. Margaret never had anything of her own in life and damned if she was letting anyone take this place from her. Her kingdom. Her loops.

A train rumbled overhead, shaking the walls. That was when I heard it. A kid laughed.

I never found out which kid.

I probably should have looked for him, or her, but I ran.