The Lesser Dead

CHEWED UP BY A GIANT MOUTH

“Hey, short stuff!” somebody stage-whispered above me.

I looked up and saw Billy Bang spidered against the roof, looking down at me. “Anybody following you?” he said.

“Maybe.”

He dropped down, took a good long look down the tunnel behind me. Then he got close enough for me to smell the fear under his aftershave, whispered into my ear. “Margaret’s looking for you. She wants all hands on deck, keeping lookout at choke points. She’s got Old Boy combing the tunnels in a loop; whoever finds them bangs on pipes: Bang in threes means we all go there, fast. Just keep banging means they’re coming and we should play defense. No fuckin’ around this time, she says. We got to peel ’em. You ready to do that?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, “well, that’s my official story, too. But all this war shit? Man, I just bite necks and play guitar. Billy Bang might not be around much after this.”

“She home?”

“Far as I know.”

“Better go see what she wants me to do.”

He gave me an ironic salute.

“And hey,” he said. I turned around. “Watch yourself. We found Ruth. I found her. She was fucked-up, man.”

“Fucked-up how?”

“Let’s just leave it at fucked-up.”

Being afraid isn’t all bad. It wakes you up. You notice things. I saw Sammy from a long way off, his red bob of hair standing out against the darker walls behind him. He was walking the tracks between stations, just above where you go down to get to Margaret’s loops. As far away as he was, though, he knew I was behind him. I think he had been waiting for me to catch up. I thought about trying to find a pipe to bang on, but it was just him. I could handle just him.

“Sammy,” I said, walking faster. “Come here.”

He stopped. He turned around to face me. His clothes were bloody as hell, and he had tacky, half-dried blood smeared around his mouth, like a kid in Central Park in the summer with a Kool-Aid face. Was eating all they did? It was… animalistic. At just that moment I was sure I wasn’t like them, that they were a different kind of vampire altogether. A worse kind.

“What are you going to do, Joey?” he said, smiling a little. “Are you going to kill me now for being bad?” He let me walk right up on him. I didn’t like this. “At least do it quickly,” he said. “I shall be very brave.”

He closed his eyes now, or pretended to, keeping one slitted open as though he were cheating saying grace. The wind kicked up in the tunnel; a train was coming, I could see its light. I put my hand on his chin and grabbed the back of his hair with the other. One good twist with all I had, and even if I couldn’t uncrown him, I might fuck him up enough to lay him down in front of the train. I might even be able to throw him on the third rail.

Maybe he can do those same things to you.

I gave his head a little jerk, like a dry run. He was trying not to giggle. He was drooling a little, too.

“Are you going to treat me like you did fat Mikey?” he said, giggling and drooling on my wrist. “Go ahead!” he said, and now his hands were on my wrists, gently spasming as though encouraging me to twist his head. “When I count three, you twist as hard as you can and pop goes my head, isn’t that how it works?”

The conductor saw us now, started blaring his horn, but he would never have time to stop.

“One!”

I tried to let go, meaning to jump clear and find a niche to flatten out in, but he had my wrists in his hands, his hands like little pliers.

He’s stronger than me!

“Two!” he said. I tried picking him up, but I couldn’t; he had his feet tangled up in the running rails.

Oh fuck it’s coming and if my head comes off I’m dead and if I hit the third rail I’m dead and even if not it’s going to hurt like a cunt let go let go LET GO.

“THREE!”

The light on the train was as big as a sun, the horn blew up my ears, the face of the conductor was a Halloween mask of disbelief and horror. It all became unreal to me, like it didn’t matter, the sun of the train’s light a sun over Tatooine. This letting go at the last second, this was how people died. And deer, I guess. Only I snapped to. Almost in time. I saw Sammy go flat, squeeze himself down between the tracks, taking the only place I knew to go. I remember one of his disjointed eyes looking up at me like a flounder’s eye. I took my chances and jumped up, jumped hard and tried to grab on to the roof of the tunnel, only I couldn’t get purchase. Worse, I had jumped so hard I bounced, spun in the air, and my legs swung down, breaking my heels on the windshield and knocking my shoes off. Did you ever break your heel? I don’t recommend it. I tried to get small, cling to the top of the train, but it was too late, I couldn’t get small enough not to take the worst beating of my life between the train and the tunnel’s ceiling. I screamed like a girl. I remember seeing a flash of a red letter, like a P, where some tagger had climbed the train in the yard. It was like being chewed up in a giant mouth, but fast; I broke my teeth, I broke my shoulders and ribs, my sock came off, I was half-scalped, the fucking can of hair spray dislocated my hip and tore the bejesus out of my coat pocket but somehow didn’t pop and got so twisted up in my shirt it didn’t come loose.

I hit the tracks blind in one eye, my nose about an inch from the third rail. I literally peeled myself up enough to roll away from it. The most solid thing on my person was the hair spray can, and I was so dazed I stuck that can down the front of my pants like I was shoplifting it. I tried to stand up but my broken legs wouldn’t hold me. Everything hurt and itched at once as my insulted bones already tried knitting themselves together. I heard a plap as the skin of my scalp stuck itself back to the top of my skull. Sammy had gathered himself now, and he ambled over, laughing.

Then he licked me. No shit, he licked my face and scalp, not like a pervert, but like a dog licking a bone. He was tasting my blood. I tried to push him away, only my arm wasn’t ready for pushes and I rebroke it.

“Oooo, that was nasty,” I heard another one saying. Manu. No trace of sarcasm like Sammy might have delivered; he said it like he really felt bad for me. No surprise there, I felt bad for me, I might have felt bad for Manson watching him take the up-against-the-tunnel-roof train-grind. Duncan lurked behind Manu holding an adult’s bloody sweater against his cheek as if for comfort. I thought of Linus in Peanuts. I tried to stand but still wasn’t up for it. Sammy straddled me and licked me again.

“Knock it off,” I tried to say, but the sound I made was all vowels. He understood anyway.

“Or what?” he said, and I didn’t have a good answer.

“Leave him be,” said Manu.

“I’m older, I don’t have to listen to you,” the smaller Sammy said.

That was when it hit me. Margaret was right. These kids weren’t kids at all. And I was completely at their mercy.

My mouth had formed up enough to speak.

“What now?” I said.

“Perhaps you’d like to hit your pipe so the others will come. We’d very much like the others to come,” Sammy said, showing fangs and drooling. Remember, vampires drool when they want to bite, which means when they want to attack. I imagined Billy Bang walking up on them, or Luna. I shook my head.

“Good,” said Manu. “The First Three want to see you.”

The First Three.

My legs were strong enough for me to stand. I could see out of my left eye again and my headache was getting better.

Just as I began to contemplate making a run for it, bastard Sammy picked up a brick and broke my legs again. He took a pencil out of his pocket and blinded me. I screamed, so he jammed gravel in my mouth.

The two of them picked me up and ran off with me.

Fast.

A THRONE ROOM IN HELL

Everything in me hurt when they set me down.

I didn’t know where I was, but it stank like hell. Maybe it was hell. Except it was cold.

I felt something crawl over my face.

“Joey-Joey-Joey!” I heard. Peter.

“Joey,” a little mouse-voice echoed. Camilla.

“He still can’t see,” Duncan said. “But look, the right one’s almost whole.”

“That’s the left,” Camilla said.

“Oh, right. The left, then. He’ll be able to see us in no time at all. When his peepers heal.”

“Had you to hurt him so badly?” Camilla mewed.

“He tried to twist my head off.”

“I want to twist your head off sometimes, Sammy,” Peter said.

Manu said, “You should have seen it! It was brilliant! That was the worst I’ve seen someone hurt who still lived after.”

“You’re forgetting the British officer and the elephant.”

“It was very much the same sort of thing, only topsy-turvy. Instead of an elephant mushing him groundwise, the train mushed him roofwise. Anyway, that officer never lived.”

“Did so! My pretend-father spoke to him after, they joked about the fat in the bullets.”

“Anyway, he never got out of bed.”

“That’s true.”

“And they shouldn’t have made them bite the bullets.”

“That’s also true.”

“Shh, he’s about to see us.”

I became aware of music in the background: Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street.”

My left eye fuzzed in, everything bleary. The room around me was unfamiliar. I heard someone blowing bubbles, like in the bath, but it was thick and sloppy-sounding. Duncan was closest, inches from me, looking down at me like I was a schoolyard bug dying in an interesting way. His big, blue eyes shone faintly in the dim light, somehow innocent. Sammy behind him, not innocent at all. Manu passive, observing. I heard the bubbling again. I looked over and saw a big, industrial trash barrel with two little heads poking out of it. Make it three. Alfie surfaced now, blowing out horsy-lips and spraying a fine mist. You know what the trash barrel was full of. Sure you do. If you don’t, allow me to point out the meat hook hanging still but wicked about six feet over the barrel, the rusty old chain leading up from it, the anchor hook someone nailed into the concrete roof and the little brown hand- and footprints up there, the stack of naked dead in the corner with their throats cut and their feet bound together with straps. The three kids in the trash barrel had their hair slicked back with it, they were slathered in it, they all looked like they had just been born.

Sammy came up to the trash barrel, cupped his hand, and slurped from it. Peter, a very healthy and robust Peter, splashed at him, laughing.

“Have a care!” Manu said, suddenly animated. “You’ll ruin the radio!”

“It’s a cassette player,” Alfie corrected, now splashing Manu.

“Anyway, stupid to ruin it.”

My other eye fuzzed in.

Sammy said, “Manu’s just mad because in India a radio costs a prick. I read it in the Mirror. There were too many golliwogs, so Gandhi-girl was giving golliwogs little radios just to snip their pricks off.”

“Shut your hole,” Manu said.

“What do you fancy they do with all them pricks? The wogs, I mean? Woglet-woglings wear them for earrings? Kali got a girdle of them, Kali-wolly-oxenfree!”

“Goolies for your golliwogs,” Manu said, grabbing Sammy’s hair and kicking him between the legs so hard he lifted him off the ground; it looked like he dislocated his foot doing it. Sammy retched and went down, but sprang up grimacing, hitting Manu in the jaw, clearly breaking it. Manu, now sporting an unhealthy underbite, scrambled to the stack of dead, picked up a head that had been sitting loose, and flung it, missing Sammy but clipping Duncan, who blinked and held up a soft little hand, Please don’t. Then he went on all fours to a fresh puddle of blood and lapped at it like a tame little lapdog at a table spill.

Sammy balled up his fists.

Manu’s jaw reset itself and he crouched, preparing for a spring.

Both of them were smiling.

“Stop it,” Camilla whispered.

“Stop it!” Peter said, more loudly.

Then Camilla spoke again.

“You’ll wear yourselves out for the hunt.”

She slipped under again. My hip settled back into place, more like wrenched itself back into place.

The hunt.

I didn’t have to think too hard to figure out what that was going to mean. Cvetko, Margaret, Luna. I wanted out, but I had no idea where I was, or how to get past these little fuckers. Sammy was strong, so very strong, though he just looked like an eight-year-old kid with skinny arms. Camilla could probably kick my ass. Maybe even Duncan. Old Boy could maybe handle these little things, but Cvets?

I looked at the dead-pile. The lower ones weren’t so new, had bloated bellies, were starting to juice and get sticky. Slow, fat flies circled like jets in a holding pattern over La Guardia. There were baby flies, too. There’s another word for them, but you might be overdosing on the filth and carnage of this room, so let’s stick with baby flies.

“Look, he’s whole again!” Duncan said, pointing at me. I sat up; the spray can I had stashed in my pants was uncomfortable, so I took it out, rolled it against the wall. I cut my eyes at Sammy, ready to scrap if the little fucker reached for a brick. He didn’t. They were all looking at me now. Camilla whispered in Peter’s ear.

“Joey,” Peter said, “I just want you to know… we want you to know, that you are one of us. If you want to be.”

“You’re young!” Duncan said. “Say your name like a little boy. He said you could.”

That struck me funny.

“He who?” I said.

They all laughed. I didn’t like that laugh.

“Now say your name like you’re little,” Peter said, meaning it.

“Joey Peacock,” I said in my falsetto. Peter’s brow unknit itself and he smiled again like the moon coming from behind a cloud.

“Good enough for me. There’s still boy in you, so you’re in.”

Camilla said something that sounded a lot like that German-ish thing Gonzalo had said. Now I said it, too, just like Gonzalo had.

Lext Un-Fayger, the x like L’chaim.

“Yea!” Camilla said, more loudly, excited, “Leoht Unfaeger!”

She said more words like that. Peter and Alfie both answered her; Peter looked at me, shook his head.

“He doesn’t speak it,” Peter said to his brother and sister, “only we do.” Then, to me, he said, “Horrid light. You’ve got a horrid light in your eyes like us.”

“What is that, German?” I said.

Camilla laughed.

“No, silly,” she said. “It’s English.”

“Bullshit,” I said, “I speak English.”

“Before it changed,” said Alfie.

Manu chimed in. “I hate it when they speak all that.”

“That’s because it’s not for wogs!” said Sammy. Manu pushed his face openhanded, something less than a slap but a little less than friendly, and Sammy did it back.

“You don’t speak it either,” Manu said.

“I know! And who says I want to?”

“Be quiet, both of you!” Peter said, and they obeyed. “Of course, you’d be bottom of the chain. It goes by how old you are.”

“And how old are you?”

“Old.”

“Yeah, but how old?”

“Second oldest.”

“After me,” Camilla said, getting out of her gruesome bath now, walking over to a second barrel, and pouring a bucket of water over herself. Duncan retreated from the little wave on the concrete like a kid at the beach. A bunch of roaches retreated, too. Camilla emptied the bucket over her head again, now using a sponge, then dried herself off as best she could with a pair of filthy blue jeans.

“But you’re… smaller,” I said. “Aren’t you brothers and sisters?”

“She got the Leoht Unfaeger first,” Alfie said. “We were babies then.”

“You were a baby,” said Peter. “I was a little boy already. She was older-sister-gone-three-winters.”

Camilla held up three fingers.

“But she came back for us.”

He didn’t actually say she, he said her real name, and it wasn’t Camilla. Elf-something. I’ll just keep calling her Camilla.

Whatever her name was, she sat down cross-legged and Manu, without being told to, found a comb and started combing out her wet hair. He got snagged up in a tangle, pulled at the comb; she grimaced and hit him hard in the leg.

“Ow,” he said mildly, not worried about it, combing away.

Where the hell were we, anyway? This brick-and-concrete space was new to me. Something about it made me think of movies I had seen with kings and queens, how they would receive hoity-toities while they sat up on their thrones. That’s what this place was like, a throne room, with the royal family bobbing around in a plastic trash bin.

I didn’t know when I’d get the chance to ask again, so I asked.

“What’s with the blood? In the barrel, I mean. I understand drinking it, I do that, we all do that, but why… swim in it?”

A snatch of DJ blather played from the cassette deck; somebody must have been taping off the radio. Did someone make this tape for them or was it just lifted off one of the dead? I felt paralyzed, like I was standing in front of this canyon of how little I knew about them.

“Feeding’s not enough now,” Alfie said.

“Our stomachs are smaller than they were,” said Peter.

“It happens when you’re old.”

“And they leak,” Peter said, making a face.

Camilla said, “Don’t tell him everything.”

“I’ll tell him if I want, he fed us,” Peter said. “Baths help us move again. When we don’t have enough blood, we get slow with arms and legs like sticks. Baths help us save up. The more we soak, the longer we can go.”

“It’s like batteries,” Alfie said. “You know what batteries are?”

“Course he does,” Camilla peeped. “He’s new and lives in a city. Now shut up.”

“Easy when you’re new,” Manu said. “You can last for nights without eating. You can sleep in the woods, sleep near little villages or in a temple, come in from time to time like a tiger, at your ease. But these geezers? They need a city. Lots of poppets. Every four hours or so they got to swig or they stiff up. Sometimes they stiff up anyway, but after a bath year, they got a few years. Like they soaked their bones new again.”

A bath year!

How many people were they planning to peel, Brooklyn?

“It’s why we need the Tube,” Alfie said.

“Subway,” Peter corrected.

“Right, subway.”

America’s “Ventura Highway” came on, with its high, pretty strings and beautiful images describing a sunlit California that was as far away from this place as heaven.

In case I had any doubts I was actually in hell, bored, shitty Sammy went to the dead-pile and kicked a young woman the color of a cod belly, causing a pile of beetles to tumble out of the gash in her throat and a hole under one of her deflated breasts.

“Stop messing about with the poppets,” Peter said.

“Now make him drink,” Camilla said.

“I’ll make him!” said Sammy, bounding over.

“No,” Camilla said. “Peter will.”

“Peter will,” Duncan said, looking up at me hopefully. “And Joey will take Millie’s place.”

“Millie died the death in Wessex,” Alfie said.

“Hampshire,” Camilla corrected. “Joey won’t know Wessex.”

“I liked Millie,” Duncan said, suddenly very sad.

My eyes were sharp again now; I got a better look past Duncan at the head Sammy had thrown. It hadn’t decayed like some of the others, though it didn’t look fresh either. That’s because it was a vampire’s head, and we don’t rot, we burn or dry up. I saw the mustache riding over the huge fangs, the face frozen in a sneer of pain or defiance, the empty sockets where its eyes should be.

SHALL WE MAKE A RABBIT OF HIM?

Yes a blind rabbit.

It was Mapache. My heart turned over and beat twice, three times, then stopped again. With or without Wilhelm Messer, the kids had killed the Latins, right under our noses, too. How truly fucked I was hit me then, and you know what? It was almost a relief.

“Come on,” Manu said, pulling me over to the barrel where Peter waited patiently, his hands cupped and full of blood.

“What about Varney?” I said. “The Hessian? You said he turned the bunch of you. You said he did other things to you, not nice things.”

Alfie and Sammy giggled now.

“You mean that he diddled us,” Camilla said. “Fucked us in our mouths and holes.”

The others giggled at her swearing. She laughed a little, too, then turned serious.

“It makes me sad,” she said.

“What does?”

“How easy it is to lie to you.”

The little monsters. All that filth they said was just one big lie. I knew Messer wasn’t into that shit. I was really starting to hate them.

“First say after me,” Peter said. Then he pronounced some words in their language, English-before-it-changed. I said the words after him. They broke it up real small; I clearly wasn’t the first to say them. I saw Manu and Duncan mouth the words with me. I almost recognized the words, they were kind of like English. I think I promised to be with them forever and to share what was mine with them, including my blood. I drank the blood from Peter’s hands, then Alfie’s, then Camilla’s. Then, in what could only have been a fuck-you to baptism, Sammy ducked my head in the blood barrel three times.

I know what you’re thinking, that I sold my soul, only I didn’t have one to sell anymore. You’re thinking I sold out my friends. But I didn’t. I said the words, whatever they meant, but who cares? They were just words. And as far as I saw, these little monsters didn’t have any monopoly on lying. If I could keep Margaret and Cvetko and Luna out of the dead-pile, I would do anything I had to.

Or so I thought.

Have you ever been argued about while you were sitting right there? That happened next.

“We should take him on the hunt,” Sammy said.

“He won’t want to hunt for his friends, he can go on the next hunt.”

“He’s our friend now, not theirs, he said the words.”

(quietly) “Did he mean them?”

“If not, worse for him.”

“Stay with him, Sammy.”

“I will not miss the hunt.”

“You never miss one, I’ve missed three.”

“Wogs miss hunts sometimes.”

“Stop calling me that.”

“Stop being one.”

“I did stop, I’m one of you, and for a long time now.”

“Not as long as me.”

“And you not as long as them, but they’re not garlic-in-ass-boys to me like you.”

(quietly) “Stop it.”

“Stop it, both of you.”

(quietly) “Stay with him, Sammy.”

“Yes, Sammy, you watch him.”

The two blond boys and the dark-haired girl were all out of the bath now and as clean as they were going to get. Still, cold-drowsy flies that didn’t want to fight for space on the ripe ones in the pile lit on them to taste their ears and hair, simply after the blood, not even aware of the unnatural things that blood was on; we were just furniture to bugs. And they didn’t seem to notice the bugs, either.

“But Sammy wants to uncrown him,” Duncan said.

“Not unless he shows false.”

“He won’t,” Duncan whined. “But you’ll say he did because you want to uncrown him. Because you’re nasty.”

“I am nasty, booger, and you’re a load of cold bogie. I’m not missing this hunt.”

(quietly) “You’ll miss what we say you’ll miss.”

Sammy went to talk back but didn’t. I looked at Camilla again. Sammy was scared of her. Just how strong were they?

“Go and get the pomegranates while we think about it,” Camilla all but whispered.

Sammy left.

“We might need Sammy,” Manu said, as though he hated saying it. “He’s quite strong. There are a lot of them.”

“Lots of bugs, too!” Duncan said, rolling Mapache’s head over a parade of roaches.

“We could crucify Joey,” Manu said, “so no one has to watch him.”

Oh shit!

Duncan said, “Someone else must fetch the spikes this time. It hurts my hands to pull the spikes from the tracks.”

“That’s only good for poppets. He’ll pull himself free.”

“Wait!” I said. “Why all this ‘hunt’ business? The underground is huge, goes all the way up to Harlem, all the way out to Queens. Why not share? Pick a spot for yourselves and stay there? I could show you places.”

Camilla looked at me as though I’d just suggested she should eat lightbulbs and drink gasoline.

“We don’t share.”

“Then let them run away. Tell them to go, they’ll go.”

“Not the queen.”

“Who?”

“Your queen. The Celt.”

Margaret.

She had that right. Margaret doesn’t run. I felt exasperated, afraid, yes, but just overwhelmed by the unfairness of it, how they had tricked us, everything. What I said next was really childish, I know; you won’t sympathize much. And neither did Camilla.

“But the subway… it’s ours. We were here first.”

She walked very close to me and put her little finger in my face; this was the first time I had seen her mad. But still she was quiet, which was worse. Honestly, I wish she had yelled it.

“No,” she said. “You were not.”

Right.

DON’T TRUST THE CHILDREN.

These children.

The mood in the throne room changed quickly when Sammy came back from the shaft they were using as storage.

“The pomegranates are gone! Someone took them! You know, don’t you?” he said, pushing me down like I was nothing and looming over me, his white face an angry moon, his coppery hair a fire. I guessed he was talking about grenades.

“I’ve been here the whole time, I don’t know a thing,” I said. Scary eyes on that kid.

“It was the quiet one,” Camilla said, drooling while she said it.

“Old Boy,” said Peter, also drooling. They wanted to bite and bite and bite.

“Where is he?” Sammy asked me, barely able to talk for the spit welling up in his mouth, shaking with the desire to twist my head. “You’d better tell.”

“How would I know?” I said. I wanted to say How would I know, stupid? but I left the stupid off. I might as well have said it for the way he reacted.

He bit my nose off. Just bit it right the fuck off, one of his fangs punching a hole in my upper lip while he did it. I screamed, my eyes tearing up, and I punched him in the throat. It would have killed a regular kid, but he just backed up and crouched to spring, spat my nose onto the dead-pile with the beetles. I stood up. Next thing I knew, Peter had one of my arms in a hard grip. Manu was only too happy to grab Sammy.

That was when the can rolled in, a little gray can with a yellow band around it. Peter knew what it was; he let go of me. Duncan didn’t know what it was; he reached for it. Camilla knew what it was; she grabbed Duncan away. Manu knew. He jumped behind the blood barrel. Alfie’s the one who saved them. He threw a fattish, bald dead guy on it. Fast. The “pomegranate” went off just as it was being covered, flared so bright and hot it hurt our eyes; a hissing dragon was loose in the room, a piece of a star landed on my foot, burned through my sock to the bone, I would have that scar for keeps. I yelled. Alfie yelled; he caught some on the foot, too. This all happened in two heartbeats.

And I’ll never forget what I saw when the grenade went off. It scared them, you see. Just for that second. They dropped their charm and I saw them as they were.

Duncan looked paler, not completely different, but clearly dead. Manu was long dead, gray-brown and dry, but still recognizably human. Sammy, too. But what really burned itself into my eyes was the brothers and their sister. Did you ever see a mummy? Not like King Tut all gold in his death mask out in Los Angeles, and not like a guy wrapped in bandages in the movies, but the little blackened, shriveled children they pulled up out of tombs in South America, in the desert, their heads packed with dried mud, little wigs of hair nailed or stitched to their dried-gourd skulls. Peter, Alfie, and Camilla were like that: their lips dried back from their mouths so their awful, outsized fangs showed, their arms no thicker than broomsticks, ending in curled little fists with fingers missing here and there. Their sunken eyes looked dry and blind. Their ribs bore stains from where their stomachs no longer held blood without spilling it. They were decrepit. I would have time to think about what that meant later, what that meant for any vampire, what happened to us when we got older. I would have time to dwell at great length on the cost of the magic or curse or whatever unnatural law kept these little things going centuries after they should have crumbled away. This was why they needed a waterfall of blood gushing through them. They were like jet engines, brutally strong but unimaginably hungry.

I saw these things in a flash. I made a noise, like “Ahh!” And then it was over. They were pale, handsome children again, scared children, reacting to an oversized flare of white flame just yards away from them. Flame was, of course, one of the few things that could actually harm them for good and ever.

They leapt back.

The dead man was on fire; smoke poured out from under him and filled the room, but I had the impression smoke was pouring out of his mouth, the gash in his throat, his ass. It probably stank. My nose was gone.

The Devil. It’s the Devil, here with his angels to collect us all because we’re his.

I ran.

Just outside the door, a hand grabbed a fistful of my hair, the edge of a knife tickled my throat, we spun. Just for a second. Then we both ran, ran hard, ran for our lives.

Old Boy barefoot.

Me in one smoking sock and chewed-up clothes.

A star of pain in my foot.

I snatched up a rusty iron bar with a dab of concrete attached to it.

He used the butt of his knife.

We banged every pipe we could find.

THE WATERS OF BABYLON

“Do you know where we are?”

Old Boy shook his head no.

Pipes banged somewhere, distant, impossible to figure out where.

We had just concluded a furious sprint, ducking under trains and splashing through sewers, we hoped in the direction of our loops, but even hard-ass Old Boy was panicked. My heart was beating, actually beating. This was the most afraid I’d been since I was first turned. We stood knee-deep in shitty water. A ladder led up to a manhole, trash collected on that ladder streaming like jellyfish in the current of filth.

He pointed up with his knife.

“Go find out,” he said.

“Have I got a whole nose?” I said. It felt like it had grown back, but I didn’t want to pop up in public looking like a leper.

He nodded, let himself smile, barely, at the ridiculousness of the question, and I skinnied up the ladder. I felt better turning away from the darkness of the tunnel knowing he had my back. I popped my head up on 4th Street near one of the newer peep shows; since about, what, 1970, sex shops had been metastasizing east from Times Square with no sign of going into remission. This one was called the Owl and Pussycat, get it? The word Pussy’s in there.

Anyway, we weren’t too far from the bricked-up window I used as a front door. We ran. He hid the knife, clutched the remaining grenades under his arm. People turned after us or held their noses, enchanted, no doubt, by our bouquet of smoke and human waste. The manhole covers and sidewalk grates steamed, neon signs flashed, a lady in a white coat hid her purse from us, another lady in a hideous plaid pantsuit said to her friend, “Did you see that kid? The teeth he had?” I had let my charm drop; I was too scared to bring it back up, I just kept my mouth closed.

A cop’s German shepherd barked at me like I was a bag of cats. “Hey,” the cop said to us, “slow down!” You could see he half wanted to chase us but knew he’d never catch us; we weren’t slowing down for anybody.

We ducked back underground, started making our way to the loops. As fast as we went, I knew in my bones we were too late. They knew the tunnels better than we did. The hunt was on.

Smoke.

We ran from the unused tracks and leapt through the passageway that led to the common room. DON’T TRUST THE CHILDREN. Right. Got it. Luna’s mattress was on fire; that was where the smoke was coming from. Someone had thrown it from Luna’s high cave, perhaps Luna trying to defend herself. Her movie posters littered the floor everywhere. I saw a pair of shoes sticking out from behind the burned-up table where we used to fold clothes. Edgar. His head lay thirty yards away, near a broken television, holes where his eyes should have been. Sandy, farther off, had been burned, was in fact still on fire, though less furiously so than Luna’s mattress. I only knew her by the platinum blond wig she wore to pretend she was Lana Turner when she worked up the courage to bite people. Farther off, the sounds of fighting.

“CVETKO?” I yelled. “BILLY?”

Old Boy hit me, slashed a finger over his lips.

We moved fast and quiet after that, following those shouts, screams, and bangs. We passed ruined vampires as we went down the tunnel; lanky piano-playing Malachi frozen in a grotesque backbend, the fingers that pounded out his last “Tiger Rag” clutching at his shirt and tie as if he had been trying to get some air, a small, sooty handprint on his sleeve, a shaft of wood sticking out of his chest, his eyes rolled back in his head. Staked. I had never seen a vampire staked. Edgar’s lover, Anthony, lay headless a hundred yards down, the head nowhere to be seen. Then we saw her.

Luna.

We were moving through active tunnels, heading for Union Square station; it wasn’t far off now.

We found Luna stumbling along the wall, her hair singed, her hands cupped over her eyes. She wasn’t sobbing or anything, she was past that.

“Luna,” I said.

She said my name.

“What happened?”

“They killed everyone. Or did you mean to me? Oh. Yes, of course to me.”

Old Boy grabbed her elbow so she knew he was there.

“Um. Fire. Sammy had a spray can and a lighter. He held me down. Would have killed me, but they needed him. To fight Margaret. She was clobbering them, she and Billy. But she must be tired by now. Yes. I don’t think my eyes are coming back, are they? No, of course not.”

Old Boy whispered, “Get her off the live track.” And he sprinted after the awful sounds farther down. I tried to pick her up, but that was when she lost her shit.

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING DON’T TOUCH ME! FOLLOW HIM KILL THEM GET THEM, JOEY, GET THEM!”

I tried to drag her but she flung herself down, groped till she had purchase on the track, held on.

“Let me get you out of here!” I said, yanking around her hips, crying.

“No,” she said, clutching the rails tighter, shaking now, keeping what was left of her face from me.

I let go of her hips.

“Go, Joey. Get them.”

I turned away from her, my wrist over my mouth.

“Protect your eyes,” she said, almost calmly. “They go after the eyes.”

I ran.

“They work together.”

That was the last thing I heard her say.

One backward glance showed me she was doing what I like to think I would have done. She was putting her neck on the running rails.

They were killing Chinchilla just as we got there. Manu and Alfie, I mean. Manu was on the ground, on his back, had Chinchilla’s arms cinched under his own armpits, kept a foot in Chinchilla’s chest, propping him up and anchoring him while Alfie twisted his head in violent spasms.

Old Boy ran at them. Past this, another fight, the four remaining kids were wearing down Margaret and Billy Bang, driving them back toward the light of the Union Square station.

All six of them? Had we lost so many without killing even one?

Chinchilla’s head came off in a spray of black blood. Alfie threw it at Old Boy’s feet and broke right fast as Old Boy dove for him; Old Boy stumbled, his knife gouged only air.

Yes. We lost so many without killing even one.

Hopelessness tried to wash over me but there was no time. Old Boy had caught Alfie but Alfie curled into a ball, protecting his neck with his arms. None of the truly awful things Old Boy did to him with that knife were enough to get through his arms or make him let go of the back of his own neck where his little fingers interlaced. Then here came Manu, straight for Old Boy’s eyes, gouging with his fingers. Old Boy had to cover up; he cut Manu now, flung him against the wall. I whaled on the side of Alfie’s head; he kicked me backward, broke a rib doing it, then Old Boy was on him again with that knife. I grabbed Alfie’s hands, tried to pry his arms down from around his neck so Old Boy could get at his head, but I wasn’t strong enough; it was like trying to pry a statue apart. Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed the fight at the tunnel’s mouth. Margaret and Billy were in trouble. They had put their backs against the wall so they couldn’t be surrounded. Margaret was working that shovel, had half decapitated Camilla, but only half; she was already healing, bent over in a caricature of someone with a migraine, using her little hands to fix her head in place. Meanwhile, Sammy flailed at Margaret’s eyes with his pencil, trying to clutch on the sleeve of her robe for purchase. No sooner had she swatted him away than here came Duncan, pitching a fistful of gravel at her eyes. Peter had broken Billy’s legs and now hacked at him with a machete; it was all Billy could do to protect his neck. One of Old Boy’s grenades fell near me; I leapt away from it, but then snatched it up and pocketed it when I saw it had the pin in it. I ran toward Margaret and Billy, keeping low and quiet.

I pulled the pin.

The children didn’t see me coming, had no wall at their backs.

Margaret’s shovel dug a groove in Sammy’s face, pushed him back toward me. There was no time for the words to form in my mind, but I was glad it was Sammy. I was so fucking glad it was nasty, blood-guzzling, eye-burning Sammy. I grabbed his waistband, jammed the grenade down the back of his pants, then pitched him toward the third rail like a bouncer evicting a drunk. He missed the rail, the bad part of it anyway, bounced off the wood covering on top. Landed on his feet like a cat. Drew his lips back and showed his fangs, blood from his shoveled-in but healing nose and cheek running into his mouth. Then he realized what was in his pants. He yelled, “NOT ME NOT ME!!!!” like he’d been chosen as “it” and might change the chooser’s mind. He reached down his trousers, but it was too late. It popped and the pain hit him, made him shriek; he ran at me but desperately, like he wanted help as he grew a tail of fire that quickly ate him. He screamed. Came at me like a torch, showering painful sparks and giving off vicious heat. Everyone jumped away from him.

He folded in half and burned like the dry, old thing he was. In a heap. By the wall.

He died.

Still burning, smoke gouting from him.

The fighting had stopped for a second, everybody getting an eyeful of Sammy’s big finish and a snootful of smoke, then Margaret punted Duncan’s head, I mean she was going for the goalposts, and the fight was on again. She drove her shovel into Peter, breaking an arm. I turned back to see if I could help Old Boy, but Manu jumped out of the smoke and clotheslined me, knocked me ass over tits.

Alfie stomped my spine on his way past; they were both fleeing Old Boy. Camilla was up now. She gasped at the ruin of Sammy and ran toward the light of Union Station. The rest of the children followed. Margaret stopped to help the wreck that was Billy to its feet.

We chased them.

I admit it was good to see them running.

From us.

Behind us, a light. A train was coming.

Luna.

I heard the squeal of its brakes, knew the driver saw her, would try to stop even though he knew he couldn’t, not in time.

Luna!

The train ground behind us slower, slower, raining sparks. People on board were yelling, they had seen the fire, might even have recognized that its fuel was boy-shaped. With the train and the fire blocking things up, we couldn’t go back in the tunnel if we wanted to. Whatever happened next was going to happen by the platform in Union Station, out in the open, under the lights. With an audience.

They turned. The children. They might have kept running, they ran like greyhounds, they could have left us farther and farther behind them until they dropped out of sight. They might have slipped like ghosts into one of the side paths or crawlways about which they seemed to have encyclopedic knowledge, but flight was not their goal. They were just regrouping, choosing their ground. They wanted us gone, all of us, the strong ones dead, the weak ones so badly frightened we’d never dream about returning, except perhaps years later, after they were gone again, to write a warning on the wall.

NO, REALLY, DON’T TRUST THE CHILDREN.

So they turned.

Imagine you were on the platform that March night in 1978. Cold outside, so you were wearing a scarf, a jacket. If you’re a girl you probably had on tall boots, they were really in, maybe hair feathered back like Kristy McNichol or a Bee Gee. An older, heavyset guy with an unfeatherable comb-over blew sax, really good sax, but the crowd was cheap that night. Nobody wanted to take off their gloves or take their hands out of their pockets. He had a few crumpled dollars in his beret from the people who got on the last several trains, he had a few quarters and nickels, a strange abundance of dimes, but this particular crowd just wasn’t playing ball. Not the student-looking kid with the pile of Art-Garfunkel-kinky red hair, the big Adam’s apple, and the glasses that covered half his face. Not the blond guy in the powder-blue suit with his pants too short, showing just a little too much of the argyle socks that didn’t quite match the rest of him. Not the old lady clutching the purse with the strap like the St. Louis Arch against her stomach as if to stop someone from punching her there, and what was she doing out this late anyway? Not the black woman with the Dutch Chocolate lipstick and the opaque leopard-print scarf that looked too fragile to have ever been near a leopard. The guy on the horn wasn’t playing anything in particular, just letting it caterwaul like the soundtrack to some detective show. Over the horn, you heard something else, was it yelling? Next came the unmistakable squeal of a train’s brakes, and yes, definitely yelling. The sax stopped. Some looky-loos were actually crowding closer to the platform, stepping all over the beret full of dimes.

“Look there,” someone said from the platform. Another one shrieked; there were several shouts of “Get a cop,” “Call an ambulance,” and the like. A quintet of bloody children spilled out of the tunnel, their clothes in tatters.

“There’s been an accident!”

“Oh my God!”

A brutalized teenager and three equally bloody adults, one of them a savage woman with a shovel, followed after the children. Now smoke poured out of the tunnel, smoke that stank of chemicals. People started going for the stairs, tentatively at first, then like they meant it. Behind the smoke, the nose of a train slowing to full stop, like a snake that poked its snoot into a rabbit hole and decided to park there.

What was this?

Nobody bombed New York, but this looked like IRA shit, PLO, Red Brigade. Could it have come here, that foreign germ of violence as food for newspapers? No. This was something new. Or perhaps something so old and awful it had been forgotten on purpose. Because now four of the bleeding children (and they weren’t really children, were they? Had their eyes not shone in the tunnel?) turned around to face the bleeding adults running at them. They curled into balls like kids in a duck-and-cover drill from the fifties, their hands clasped behind their necks, their heads tucked between their knees. The madwoman with the shovel stood over the dark-haired little girl and rose up like King Arthur about to drive Excalibur into its stone; she was on her tiptoes, almost on point. “Stop!” a hysterical cop next to you yelled, his revolver almost next to your ear. He was going to shoot. Thank God you got your hand over your ear in time. Not because your partial deafness would have been such a big deal in the grand scheme of things, what with so many people about to die so strangely, but had you been deafened, you might not have heard the sweet boy who would speak in a moment—but not yet, he was just making his way to the platform.

Now the cop shot at just the instant the lunatic drove down with her shovel. The shot caught her in the hip, turned her just a little, but she caught the kid in the knee, clipped the leg off, and even sparked the running rail beneath, but the kid didn’t scream. The woman screamed. You couldn’t know, of course, that she screamed not because she was shot but because she missed the child’s neck. That her aim was decapitation. That the child had gambled that even this brutal, crazed woman wouldn’t be strong enough to cut her head off with her limbs protecting it, not with one blow, but that the little girl who was so rarely wrong had made a millennial mistake. The woman was that strong. Would have taken the girl’s head and arm clean off, drawing a very long, sad story to its end.

Only she missed.

And she wouldn’t get another chance, even though she raised her bloody shovel once again. The cop must have put his time in at the range; even jacked up at what he was seeing, his second shot was better, took part of shovel-woman’s head off, but she didn’t fall. She just looked momentarily confused, like she was struggling to say a word she had forgotten. She looked at the blade of her shovel as though it might be written there. The other adults were doing violence to the other children. People were yelling at them to stop.

Now the sweet boy climbed onto the platform and held his hands up. Everyone looked, you looked, too. He left small, bloody footprints behind him. You wouldn’t remember his face, it would blur in your memory, but you remember that his face was sweet, as was his voice.

“Everyone! Listen! Help us! The grown-ups are hurting us! You must pull their heads off! You must hold them down and shock them on the bad rail!”

Yes, we will!

Such a sweet boy, who could want to hurt an angel of his rank?

“Do not let them speak!” he said, and you resolved to keep them silent. Your eyes spilled over, tears streamed down your cheeks with the pathos of it, your mouth opened and you drooled on your shirt or sweater or tie, your saliva ran like you were starving and someone had tucked grains of salt under your tongue. No time for salt, though. You had to save these angels from the murderers on the tracks.

Was that how it happened? Was that why you did it? I’m only guessing here. I only know what I saw.

What you saw, I think, was a triumph of mankind, of Manhattan, manna from above, the end of bystanderism forever, I am my brother’s keeper, we are, all of us, going down onto those tracks. And you did. One big wave of you in your sport coats and London Fogs and turtlenecks; in your saris and jumpsuits and Grateful Dead T-shirts under peacoats and down vests and leather, in your wool caps, deerstalkers, and babushkas, smelling of Old Spice and Marlboros and sub-polyester sweat, you poured over the lip of that platform, elbowing each other out of the way for the privilege of tearing the killers apart, especially the one with the shovel. The mad are supposed to have inhuman strength, and these were no exception. The wild black man in the funky vest tore a man’s arm off trying to save the woman. The very pale one in the olive jacket used his knife, tried to cut his way through the crowd and save the woman. But there was no saving her, you were all over her, a swarm of you. She brained the first ones, busted teeth and jaws, she swore and bit in a fury with teeth that belonged on a tiger, she was a tiger, but you bore her down, those of you up front, took her shovel from her, stuffed your hands and arms in her mouth though she bit and bit deep. You turned for a moment to see those in the back handing up the children, and a miracle happened, didn’t it? These bloody things who seemed too hurt to live were healing before your eyes. The little girl got passed backward over heads; nobody could find the leg that had been cut from her, but that’s because it was on again! Now you turned front and the vile tiger-woman-thing was closer to the rail. It was as slow as tug-of-war, moving her there. A POP! and sizzle as a woman in a fox-trimmed coat touched the rail, jerked, and smoked, her fox smoking, too. A man in a security-guard outfit made contact next, jostled into it by the crowd, his life ending in a violent spasm that curled him so the back of his head almost touched his heels. And then it was her turn. You saw her face before she went, her skin the color of ash, her gorgon’s eyes, her mouth open in a snarl. Her teeth like a tiger’s. A vampire? Why not? Who else would want to hurt that honeyed boy?

“Die, you fucking monster!” you yelled, though you don’t normally swear.

And die she did.

The saxophonist, grunting and drooling, wrestled her foot into the lethal rail. Her hand had been gripping the running rail, so the current went fully through her, exploded her hands, popped off her head, set her hair stinkingly ablaze.

A common noise went up of gagged cries and shouts; all those train-moving amps and volts were hungry, they didn’t stop with her. The saxophonist jerked and burned as well, his ridiculous comb-over standing on end. The guy in the powder-blue suit caught fire; he kicked his loafers off and wiggled his argyle-besocked feet almost comically. Several others who had been wrestling her died, though none so spectacularly. A good dozen, maybe a score were injured.

You were not among these; you had not been strong or early enough to get to the front. But here came the teenaged boy, the dirty one, spared because the sweet boy had said the grown-ups are hurting us, and, whatever he was, this one was no grown-up. He looked you in the eye.

I looked at you, I don’t know which one you were, I looked at so many. I saw Margaret burning. I saw Old Boy down, his hands on a grenade, half a dozen hands on his, holding them together, holding the pin in, and here came the college boy with the mane of frizzy red hair and the shovel. I tensed to spring down but saw that I was too late. The shovel fell. Old Boy died the death, the college boy holding up his trophy while the tongue in it moved in and out, as though the last taste in its mouth were unpleasant. The boy yelled a nasal, unlikely war whoop, then stood slack.

Billy Bang had disappeared.

Good for him. I mean that. Good for him.

The crowd seethed, unsure what to do now. Some began to snap out of it. A woman screamed, the old woman with the huge purse, but she seemed less like an old woman than like a child who had gotten separated from its parents in a room full of monsters.

“Forget what you saw here,” Peter shouted, his voice carrying throughout the station. All heads turned to him.

“Tell them you just don’t remember what you saw.”

Alfie took Old Boy’s head away from his killer, tore the fangs out with pliers and kept them.

Of course. However the authorities explained this clusterfuck, the explanation was not going to involve vampires.

Camilla told the policeman to shoot himself. He put his gun in his mouth, but hesitated, crying. She stomped his foot and told him to again. He did. His hat flew off. Peter picked it up and put it on.

Duncan saw me now, and said, “Grab him! Bring him here!”

He was drooling, showing me fangs no one else could see.

I ran, up the stairs, over people, out of hell.

He didn’t chase me.

A COIN WITH THREE SIDES

Joseph Hiram Peacock had never been to a foreign city, but that’s what New York looked like to me as I sprinted through her streets. I ran in no particular direction, through the East Village, past the tattoo parlors and record shops in St. Mark’s Place, past seedy bars and into Tompkins Park, then down through Little Italy and into Chinatown where I thought about slipping underground into the tightly packed labyrinth of tunnels used by the Tongs, but Margaret kept us out of those because the Chinese mob still used them, and I kept out of them now because underground didn’t sound so good. So I ran west through Tribeca, then into the warehouses and art lofts of SoHo; I knocked people down, ran over the hoods of taxis, jumped into Dumpsters and hid; I had to keep moving or hide till I found new clothes, I was a mess. But I had an even more pressing need. When I realized I was in SoHo, all the exertion caught up with me and my limbs went cold, the hot hole framed with burning coals opened in my gut; I needed blood. When people get tired, they pant and sweat, they need water and sleep. We need only one thing; all our strength comes from that one thing. Cvetko said it was the life force in blood, the magic in it that kept us alive, since we didn’t have moving parts inside anymore, no circulation, no metabolism, no need to breathe. And where was Cvetko? I immediately felt guilt for leaving him down there, with them. I had the impulse to turn around and look for him; I pictured him hiding underground, touching his face somewhere in total darkness, hoping he wouldn’t see the lights of their awful little eyes coming for him. Probably just like in the war, hiding from Germans, or Italians. Maybe he knew how to survive from the war. But there was nothing practical or savvy about Cvets; I was just making excuses because I was scared. He needed someone to tell him the party was over, help him out of there. You should have seen the state of him when he first came to us from Bushwick because the neighborhood had gone to hell; he was helpless. Like one of those special kids who gets a routine and you’d better not deviate from it. Now the neighborhood had gone to hell for real and everything, but everything had to change.

Whether I was going to find the balls to help Cvets was a problem I would have to work out after I fed. I scanned the windows for one with a light on, found it. It even had a fire escape, not normally a factor, but in my weakened state, sticking to walls wasn’t going to be a picnic. Up I went, using the stairs like a citizen, still cat-quiet. The balcony faced the street, too, so I was going to have to be quick about getting in. I kept my eyes peeled open because when I shut them I saw bad things on the insides of my eyelids. Margaret, Luna, Old Boy. Fuck this whole circus.

It was a war.

We didn’t know it was one until it was too late.

And we lost.

I shook that off, I was starving. I peeped in the window. A woman in an orange raincoat painted a huge, abstract cat in purple oil, a window behind it open on the moon, in the painting I mean, and the yellow on that moon was beautiful. I had seen the real moon through a telescope once, rising, after I was turned so it was very bright to me even though it was still low and yellow, and it was one of the prettiest things I ever saw. This woman, she had the cat, and a table and a teacup, and in the cup, in the tea, the moon shone there, too. It was definitely abstract, definitely what you would call modern art, but it was actually good. Who was this broad, was she in the Guggenheim? Why the raincoat? Was she cold? I touched the glass, felt no warmth in it. I noticed she had rumpled jeans on under the raincoat; I thought maybe she had two pairs on, tucked into the tops of those yellow work boots with the rawhide laces people who like John Denver wear. She breathed out; she had been holding it in, using a tiny brush to put moonlight on a whisker, and I saw her breath puff out. No heat. She was poor. No Guggenheim for her.

She turned around and looked at me then; I think she saw my reflection in the windows opposite. She was maybe fifty, mouse-brown hair, pretty once was my first thought, then I realized she was still pretty. I had just seen such ugly things that this cold loft with its naked brick and bare lightbulbs and a mattress on the floor with a pile of books for a nightstand was beautiful, and she was beautiful for making it that way and keeping it as nice as she could and for not having the heart to throw away the Gerber daisy wilting, already dropping petals from its place in the Coke bottle on the counter by the stove. And she was beautiful for wearing a raincoat with a sweater under it because that was all she had. I didn’t even know I was touching the glass. I didn’t know I was sobbing, either, until she looked at me and I was embarrassed. I was ready to jump because I knew how I looked, that my skin was waxy and dead from hunger and that my hair was dry and dull, that my clothes were bloody, burned, and filthy, hanging off me like I was an accident victim, a bum, and a war refugee rolled into one, which, at this point, I was. I was sure she was going to call the cops, if she even had a phone in this joint. She saw me and froze. Scared, but not for herself, I think. She patted the air twice with her hand like stay there and wiped her brush off, put it in a little jar of cloudy liquid full of brushes. She came over, the light from the bulbs flashing once on glasses that made her look like an owl.

She opened the window.

“Come in,” she said. I hadn’t charmed her, nothing. She just saw me and asked me in. I was still sobbing, so hard I thought I might retch.

“What happened, do you need an ambulance? I don’t have a phone, but my neighbor does, I just heard his door, he’ll be awake.”

I shook my head no. She looked at me more closely. Held the side of her glasses like that was going to help her see some microscopic something she was searching for on my face. Her eyes traveled all over my face. I just sat there, the sobs slowing down. But I couldn’t move. It was like she had charmed me. She put the back of her hand against my cheek, felt how cold I was, then put that same hand under my armpit to make sure. Then she said, “Oh.” She put a finger near my mouth. “May I?” she said, and I didn’t say anything, just sat there. She put her finger under my lip and felt my fangs, like the Wild Kingdom guy feeling around in the mouth of a drugged cat.

“You’re not just cold. You’re starving,” she said.

I nodded my head. I didn’t care that she knew what I was, I wasn’t concerned about how she knew. It was so good to feel safe. But she told me anyway.

“I grew up in Brooklyn,” she said. “I knew one of you when I was a teenager. He would visit me. He was… kind. At a time when no one else was.”

“He have a big ugly head?” I said, so quietly she must have barely heard me.

Off with her head!

She nodded, barely, not wanting to call him ugly. John Valentine. The one who turned Margaret, the one who burned up when his building fell down. The one who could ride a horse. The fact that he turned Margaret made him my grandfather, in a way. Now here was someone who knew family. This was Margaret’s wake, in a way, the only one she would get.

“I lost someone tonight,” I said.

“I’m sorry. Who?”

Never call me your mother again.

“My mother.”

She took my hand in hers and the warmth coming from her almost burned me.

“Your real mother?”

“Real as I got.”

She nodded.

“You have to eat. Don’t you?”

I looked at my feet. My ugly, veiny, pale feet. My sprint through Manhattan had abused them. New York is not made for bare feet; I had felt the dig of broken glass and the sting of pop tops, I had scraped their tops on curbs, even paused to unsheathe a hypodermic needle from my heel near Tompkins Park. This had all gone away almost as quickly as it had happened. But the worst thing was that I had tracked dog shit into her loft. Of all the things, just dog shit. She noticed, but didn’t care.

This woman, and I never found out her name, pulled her scarf away from her neck, pulled down her sweater.

“You have to promise,” she said.

“What?”

“You know what. Not too much.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Don’t make me… like you are. I don’t want that.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Go on,” she said.

I sat there, a drugged cat.

“Go on.”

She got the shakes after I fed, but they went away when she smoked a tight little joint; she really knew her way around rolling paper. Neither one of us talked much. I think she was wrestling with whether to ask me to stay, but I didn’t want to. Her huge windows faced east anyway, and the filmy March sun was going to come looking in every corner of that place. There was a bathroom, but it had a window, too, and no tub. The shower was just a hose and a hole. The toilet ran all the time. She gave me a pair of jeans that sagged in the butt and a shirt, I won’t call it a blouse, with tiny flowers on it like cute, curly weeds, fake pearl snaps for buttons. It was nothing Charles Bronson would wear, but it was better than the shredded, blood-stiff rags I had worn through her window. Clothes were the least of my worries. She went to get me a scarf, too, but I took off out the window while she fished in the closet. I suck at good-byes.

As I walked fast away from there, I stuck my hands in the pockets of my new droopy-ass jeans, felt paper. Three dollars. She must have got them off the dirty pile.

It was three A.M. or so; I didn’t have long to find a hidey-hole. The thought that I could die that way, just crisped by the sun, seemed tiresome to me after all I’d just been through, like somebody should have given me a pass just this once. I needed sleep, but I knew what I would dream about so the thought of closing my eyes made me shudder.

My feet took me home. Not to the subways, not down a manhole, but home. Before I even knew what I was doing, I was standing in front of the place I grew up, looking up at my old window as Margaret once had, throwing coins up at me. The streetlight was still there. I hadn’t been by in a good decade, and not at all before that. When you’re dead, you don’t want to see your folks. Somebody in my family might have still been there ten years ago when I had walked by as if on a dare, with a fedora on and my head down, but not now. They had changed the place into a café. Stubbed-out cigarette butts, all of them smoked to the filter, a few of them lipsticky, lay on the street and sidewalk; I could almost hear some long-haired schmuck playing guitar surrounded by NYU chicks in thrift-store leather coats. All of them eyeless, all of them blind rabbits, while above them a gorgon in the upstairs window was waiting for me to look at her, ready to turn me to stone. Or maybe I was waiting up there, fourteen years old again, no, more innocent, make it six years old, and if I just looked up and met my own gaze I would magically go back into my body. 1925. The stock market humming along on phantom cash, Vilma making paprikash or marzipan. It’s magic for me to walk around without a heartbeat, right? It’s magic for little kids to live hundreds of years and kill stacks of people, right? Why not something good for a change? Why not let me go?

“I’m sorry for what I did to Margaret,” I said, closing my eyes hard. “I’m sorry I was such a rotten kid. I’ll do better. I swear. Just take it all back, okay?” I turned my head up and looked. No little Joey. Just black windows on the face of that house, one with a crack in it. The blindest of blind rabbits. I didn’t know who I was praying to, anyway. I was the property of the god of small places, and that god was deaf to everything said aboveground.

“What am I going to do?” I said.

Go back for Cvetko.

Run away.

Sit on a bench at Battery Park and wait for the sun.

Damned shame coins didn’t have three sides.

I didn’t feel like I had a whole lot to lose when I knocked at the Hessian’s door. I didn’t even know I was going there until I found myself looking up at the huge oak door with the carved acorns and oak leaves, little squirrels in the corners. Big mean old bastard like that and he had squirrels on his door. The knocker was more his speed, a big brass bear’s head, the coolest knocker I ever saw. I didn’t know what I was going to say until just before I knocked. I just grabbed the ring in the bear’s mouth like I was holding a subway strap and I hung there until I heard the words in my head: Hello, Mr. Messer. I know I haven’t seen you in a long time, it’s Joey Peacock, this isn’t my shirt, but I was wondering if you would be willing to help me. I want to get rid of these vampires that look like children, but they’re not children. They’re evil, but the big kind of evil, not like us. They told dirty lies about you and killed my friends. You’re reasonable, right? Margaret said you were a mercenary, which means you fight for money, no offense, or at least you did. I could pay you. Not a lot right now, but I could owe you. I’m a really good thief and I don’t mind trying something big. It would have to be big, like diamonds or a bank, because this won’t be easy. They’re dangerous. Really, really dangerous. And I don’t know what else to do.

Hopeless, right? But what the fuck.

Really, what the fuck.

I knocked.

The Luftwaffe-looking doorman must have known I was standing there rehearsing what I was going to say; I got the idea that they didn’t miss a lot in that house. Maybe they had cameras, but I didn’t see one. The door swung open quietly; you expect a creak out of a door like that.

“May I help you?” he said, looking at me in no particular way. Hard to tell if he remembered me. Servants always act like they don’t remember you.

“Do you remember me?” I said.

He blinked once, slowly, like a lizard, if they blink.

“Would it please you if I remembered you?”

“Sure. I guess.”

“Then of course I remember you.”

He was still standing half behind the door, making no move to open it wider or invite me in.

Damn, he was handsome. He wasn’t young anymore, but he had one of those faces. Weird watching people get old; you have to be old yourself to get it. I don’t like suddenly seeing regular people again after fifteen, twenty years, it’s depressing. He still looked good, but for how long? He was the night shift guy; you’d think Messer would have turned him.

“Is your… boss home?”

“I don’t think so.”

Still had that German accent, sounded like he was on Hogan’s Heroes.

We just stood there for a second. I looked at the bear on the door, then back at him.

“May I come in?”

Slow blink.

“I don’t think so.”

“Who is it?” a voice said behind him. Not Messer.

“A boy.”

“What boy?”

The voice sounded familiar, but I couldn’t tell if it was a guy or a girl.

“A boy I remember,” he said.

“Show me!” the voice said.

He opened the door a little more, stepped back, not to let me in but just so I would be visible to the owner of the voice. We saw each other. Christ, this was not my night. A tall woman with a cock. The one from Studio 54 that said I smelled like trains.

She laughed.

She kept laughing, covered her mouth with her hand.

The doorman didn’t even permit himself a smirk. Damn, he was good. He closed the door with the squirrels and the bear and the acorns at just the right speed. Not insultingly fast. Not awkwardly slow. Just right.

So here’s the part where it’s four A.M. and I charm some schmuck to let me into his nice, dark apartment and I feed on him and tie him up or peel him and sleep in his bathtub, get a fresh start tomorrow night, right? I did peek in several apartments, but every place I looked in, I came up with a reason why I shouldn’t bother the people there. Truth is, I did feed one more time; I had to. I couldn’t take all I needed from she-who-paints-cats without killing her. So I started scoping, thinking I should choose well in case it was my last meal. I hadn’t entirely ruled out greeting the sunrise at Battery Park. The only guy on Christopher Street flagged down the only cab on Christopher Street, and I walked up just as the cabbie asked him where he was going. He hadn’t stopped yet, just slowed down and asked through the window so the guy couldn’t open the door in case he failed the audition.

I walked up, poured on some charm, said through the cracked window,

You must pull their heads off!

“We’re going to Idlewild.”

“You mean the airport? JFK?”

I think he was a Sikh, he had the turban. When he said airport he pushed his eyebrows together over his nose like affectionate caterpillars.

“I’m not with him! I’m going to…”

“Shut up, Dad,” I said, and he shut up.

I said,

You must hold them down and shock them on the bad rail!

“Yeah, JFK, I forgot, the airport.”

The Sikh rolled off to “seek” another passenger. I knew from the way he asked the guy he was only looking for Manhattan fares.

The Dad guy glared at me angrily but wouldn’t speak because I had commanded him to shut up. I told him to come in the alley with me and I would give him a dollar. Turned out I lied. I didn’t give him a dollar. But I did have a secret to tell him, if he’d lean down close. And I did take the money out of his wallet just in case I decided against sunbathing.

Cvetko

First I ran away from my problem, headed west. By four thirty A.M. I had made it up by the old dockyards, the crumbling piers where the gays sunbathed in the summer, whole packs of them. Nobody was around now. Too dark, too cold, unless maybe people came here to hook up in hidden places. There were lots of hidden places in this rusted-out set of piers. As long as I looked out for Coney Island Whitefish, I could maybe stay here, cover up in a trash bag, tuck myself into a rusted cargo container. But no. I might surprise some gays, I didn’t want to see any of that. Or maybe I did, just a little bit, which was why I kept drifting near places like this. Maybe I didn’t want to suck a guy off or anything but I wanted to watch somebody else do that, maybe I secretly liked it when queers hit on me so I could feel attractive but also act superior, like, “Thanks anyway, gay guy, but I’m normal.” Normal, right. I like pussy. I’m a Capricorn. Oh, and I drink blood and don’t get older. Why was I thinking about this now? Maybe it was easier to think uncomfortable thoughts than horrifying, bewildering ones.

Maybe you want to know who you are before you die.

I stood near the water, looking west, where night was running away from me. It was windy, blowing my hair around. A seagull did that thing where he flew against a draft and hovered in one place, he was looking at me like maybe he hadn’t smelled me and was surprised to find one of us bread-and-sometimes-Alka-Seltzer-throwers so close to him suddenly. I swear this bird was looking me right in the face. He called out twice.

“Cvetko! Cvetko!” I said back to him, imitating him. He flew off.

“Yeah, I know.”

I went east.

I went back underground.

THE GOD OF SMALL PLACES

I meant to look for Cvets immediately, but I was so exhausted I sleepwalked into the growing crowd of predawn commuters making their way through Grand Central Station; I went through a door I know that led down. Then I went through a couple of doors and a passageway I didn’t know until I ended up in an unfamiliar service tunnel, where I wedged myself up high between a pipe and the roof. A lot of bugs crawled around; there must have been food nearby. I plugged my nostrils with dollar bills and went to sleep. Once I heard transit cops walk under me, saw their flashlights bobbing. I guessed it was going to get hot for a while because of Union Station, however they put it together. But these guys weren’t serious. They weren’t talking about accidents or bombings. They were talking about Leon Spinks.

I went back to sleep.

I woke up to find that one of my nose dollars had fallen out and sure enough I now had a snootful of bugs, small ones; goddamn, I hated sleeping without a box. I blew them out without much trouble. I knew in my bones that it was sunset. I remembered where I was, in a service tunnel under Grand Central.

I took the 6 down; they had just gotten it running again, it was packed. We didn’t stop at Union Square. The station was closed for repairs. I didn’t look out the window when we passed, but everyone around me put down their papers, papers with headlines like 4 TRAIN DERAILS! and, you gotta love the Post, GOOD SAMARITANS FRIED! I plugged my ears because I didn’t want to hear people talking about it like it was theirs, like they had a right to it. Instead I got a dumbshow of craning necks, ladies putting hands over mouths, one guy taking a picture like he came this way on purpose. It seemed like everybody around me had to stick an elbow in my cheek or an ass in my face while I sat with my hands over my ears, not looking through the permanent marker squiggles on the glass to see how the cleanup was going. I didn’t look because I didn’t want to see where my friends died. But I also didn’t look because I was still scared.

I had to find Cvets.

We had to get out of here.

I had a hunch about where he might be.

I didn’t find Cvetko in the beautiful old abandoned City Hall station. But I did find a note from him. He had stuck it in one of his hooker-red envelopes from Valentine’s Day and put it through the bars of an old ticket window. The outside said Joseph H. Peacock. How do you like that? Even with the apocalypse upon us this guy took time to write out my whole name, except for the Hiram.

The envelope was heavy.

When I opened it, I saw why.

I pulled on a tiny gold chain to reveal the piece of jewelry attached to it. I found myself staring straight at the coral pendant I slipped into Margaret’s purse all those years ago. Medusa stared back at me.

Then I read the note.

All right, I wasn’t the shiniest knife in the drawer, I knew that. I would never be some super-genius egghead like Cvetko; I sucked at crossword puzzles and would have sucked worse at chess, which is why I never bothered. But hanging out with him had rubbed off on me a little bit—I could almost hear him whispering in my ear, Think, Joey, think—what does this mean?

His wife was dead. She died in the war, killed by mixed-up guerrillas who thought he was ratting them out to Italians who were like pint-sized Germans you could actually beat sometimes. Anyway, she was dead. Meet me here and I shall take you to my wife meant I would die. He was telling me to get the hell out of here!

I looked at the white cameo standing out against her coral backdrop. Medusa. I’d put it in Margaret’s purse to get her canned from her job at my house forty-five years before. And she’d kept it, maybe to remind herself of something; not to be in the wrong place, not to trust Jews, who knew? I had no idea how Cvetko got it, maybe he poked around her apartment after she was dead. Anyway, he knew what it meant.

“You’re a poison pill, aren’t you?” I asked it. It didn’t say anything back, just turned and turned, this way, that way.

The walk back to Chloë’s place was one sad-bastard march of doom. I took back alleys and little streets, wending my way toward the anchorage under the Brooklyn Bridge, my head full of grief and shame. They got Cvetko. They got him and tried to use him to get me, but he outsmarted them and warned me, which meant, in a way, that I outsmarted them, too. But they got him. He was probably already finished, and, if not, he would be soon. Do not seek me in Manhattan meant don’t look for him. I looked at how he signed it, noticed he didn’t capitalize the sincerely after Yours. He was serving me as he would his own child. He couldn’t get out, but he bought my ticket out for me. Right under their noses. I could picture Manu reading it out loud for the others, laughing with them while Cvets hung from a pulley waiting for the little asshole queen to whisper Off with his head!

I was still crying when I got to Blond Jesus’s place.

He was pretty nocturnal. I expected to see his lamps blazing, but they were out. Could he have been off getting himself a beer? He liked beer okay, but he did that in the afternoons if at all. It hurts me to confess this, but I did bite him a couple of times, and he wasn’t what you’d call boozy; he didn’t see well enough at night to go too far, either, so his being out would have been weird.

I listened hard, trying to hear sawing or planing or hammering or any other carpenter stuff, but his little brick workshop was all quiet, all still. Too still. All I heard was the endless dragon-hiss of cars on the bridge above.

Why aren’t you working, George?

I stopped.

I looked at the entrance to the pipe that led down to Chloë’s place. If Cvetko and Old Boy had figured out I went there, maybe they had, too. Maybe they were waiting for me. My head told me I was being paranoid. But when I tried to move my feet toward the pipe, they wouldn’t go. What was down there, anyway? A bag of clothes? One last look at my girlfriend? This didn’t feel right, not by half. I walked away, backward, slow and quiet, still keeping an eye on the pipe. Now I turned and started off. Then I heard it. A little huff of disappointment and impatience. The sound a whiny kid makes when he’s told he has to do his homework before he gets to listen to the radio.

“Nff.”

My head snapped back and I looked at the pipe.

Peter’s little blond crown rose out of it.

His eyes shining like cat’s eyes.

I ran.

I’m a good runner, that’s my biggest strength. Unfortunately, they were damned good runners, too. They kept up with me, sometimes gained on me; I made myself go faster, regained what I had lost, but still I couldn’t pull away. It was anybody’s race—if I stumbled, I was theirs; if they lost sight of me for even thirty seconds, I was gone forever. My instinct for the last fifteen years had been to slip underground when threatened, but underground was where they wanted me, so I ran past the manhole covers and ignored the grates, drains, and dark stone mouths that used to mean sanctuary. I ran up 1st Street, made my way to St. Mark’s Place hoping to lose myself there, hoping there would be a crowd. There wasn’t, not much of one anyway, just a couple of punkish guys smoking outside a dive whose name I couldn’t see. They both watched me sprint by; I’m pretty sure my fangs were showing but I was too freaked-out even to close my mouth. I was halfway to 2nd Street when I let myself look behind me, and it must have been some instinct that made me turn my head just then, because here they came. Three of them, anyway. Oh shit, they’re trying to circle me, the other two are going to head me off at the intersection. Now I risked a glance forward. Sure enough, Manu and Duncan turned right onto St. Mark’s, boxing me in. I looked behind me again and saw that the three had slowed down, spreading out now so Camilla was in the middle of the street and one boy was on each sidewalk. Alfie was skipping. Fucking skipping.

I realized the only way out was up or down. Down sounded bad. Down sounded like getting penned in where nobody could see what they did to me, not that that mattered. Witnesses certainly hadn’t helped anything at Union Station.

Anyway, I jumped. I jumped straight up, grabbed the bottom of an iron balcony, and swung myself up like I was doing a sawhorse routine in the urban Olympics. I skittered up the side of the wall, broke through an apartment window, blundered through dark rooms while a woman screamed, knocked a hatstand full of hats out of my way, and went out the back window. Behind me, barely audible, I heard a child coo something comforting and the screaming stopped. I had no time to use the fire escape so I leapt again, back-down to save my legs, hit the hood of a cab, felt the skin over my spine split and a rib or two break, but I got lucky and the spine stayed whole; the cabbie jammed the brakes, so I spun off, found my footing, and sprinted toward 2nd again, blinking away the memory of the cabbie’s startled jellyfish face bluish behind the windshield. No Manu in front of me, he must have gone for the building, but Duncan came running, his mouth open like a kid running giddy down a hill in high summer or sledding through trees in the snow with a belly full of hot cocoa. He loved this. The hunt. I ran at him, took a swimmer’s eyeful behind me, saw Camilla pointing, the crazy-fast scramble of Alfie turning on the gas, but Peter was bent over, holding his stomach. He’s starving. So soon. I slammed into Duncan, grabbed him around the shoulders, went to chuck him out of my way, but he dug his little hands into my forearms. Someone said, “Stop that. You!” and I couldn’t look but knew by his voice it was a cop. I spun with the kid, tried to chuck him, but he held on, almost pulled me down to the ground. “I said stop!” I got an arm away from Duncan just as Alfie and the cop arrived. Duncan now wrapped both arms around my one arm, became deadweight. The cop grabbed my free wrist. I knew what I had to do. I jerked the cop closer; he was a sturdy guy with bushy eyebrows and salt-and-pepper hair cut short. I remember his surprised eyes when he found he couldn’t stop me from bending him down to me. He smelled like English Leather aftershave and licorice, or booze that smelled like licorice. I saw Alfie’s drooling, hungry face loom up, saw his hand flick as he motioned Manu to go farther up the sidewalk and close off 2nd. Duncan now had his legs wrapped around my thigh as if he were climbing a jungle gym; he sank his teeth into my forearm, hooking them behind the bone. Just like they taught him. Christ it hurt. He wasn’t much good as a fighter, not on his own, but he made a hell of an anchor.

The cop’s head was in front of me; I had him by the nape now, I butted off his cap. “Sorry,” I said, and used my left tooth like a letter opener, cutting him from forehead to temple. He put his hands on my face, tried to push me away, but now Alfie was on him, unable to control himself as the curtain of blood washed down the man’s face. He licked him with the flat of his tongue, licked his face like a dog lapping up gravy. Duncan, unsure of what to do, let go of me and joined Alfie. I pulled the nightstick out of the cop’s belt and launched myself backward, nearly falling on my ass. Manu went to grab me, but I wasn’t about to let him. He was clearly used to getting help from his older, stronger playmates, but all three of them were too busy dragging the cop into the alley so they could poke fresh holes in him, peel him, get their strength back while less-hungry Duncan played monkey-see, monkey-do.

It was just me and Manu; he was stronger, but I was bigger and I was fighting for my life. Plus, I had a nightstick. I gave it to him, too; I beat him for all I was worth.

“Ah,” Manu said, and “Ow,” and, incredibly, “Please,” and I would have said, Did you go easy when Chinchilla said please, or Edgar, or Malachi? but I was too busy swinging like John Henry, breaking his arms, busting the teeth out of his face. “Hey!” somebody yelled at me from a window, “Hey,” and a beer bottle broke on the street near me. I broke the wooden nightstick on the ground now, made a jagged point, braced myself to drive it into Manu’s chest, but he took a step back from me, tried to protect his chest with his wrecked arms, like a praying mantis I had seen in a picture. A van was coming up the street, one headlight out. I moved toward Manu, knocked one of his arms out of my way, but before I could strike he leapt back into the path of the van, on purpose. It hit him with a sick noise, turned him end over end. The driver got out immediately, left his door swinging open. A bottle hit my head. Somebody said, “Get that kid,” and for a split second I thought they meant Manu, that they knew what a vicious little killer he was, but then I felt a hand on my shoulder. I punched somebody’s beery gut and he went Whooof! and I ran into the blackest alley I could find. I easily outran the citizens, windmilling my limbs, getting tired now, the Johnny Horton song about the British fleeing the battle of New Orleans looping in my head with an idiot’s voice, over and over again. I could outrun people all night long. But I knew that if the kids spotted me it was all over; they were freshly fed, mighty little engines banging away with all pistons. I, on the other hand, was running out of gas almost as fast as I was running out of luck.

That’s why I went down the cellar doors.

There they were, right on 2nd Street, under some kind of Russian or Ukrainian diner advertising FRESH-SQUEEZE O. JUICE. I popped the rusty, brown chain and opened the rusty, brown doors, shutting them behind me. I found myself crawling between cardboard boxes, cans of tomatoes, mesh sacks of potatoes, and more mesh sacks of small brown oranges. I hadn’t used my lungs in a while, so I sniffed. I picked up the floor’s bouquet of bleach undercut with recently swabbed-up rat shit. Just a hint of live rat, too. I followed that smell on my hands and knees, hoping to find a way out, even if it led back underground. I moved a dead mini-refrigerator aside and found a panel that didn’t match the rest of the wall. Hiding place or crawl space? Only one way to find out. At just that moment, I heard the cellar door swing open.

Oh shit oh shit oh shit.

I fumbled around at the edges of the panel.

“Hullo?” a British voice asked playfully.

I found purchase, pulled the panel out, smelled a wash of fresher rat shit, saw a hiding space, crawled in, replaced the panel, all as quietly as I could manage. I crawled toward the back of the space, saw the round, black mouth of a pipe.

“Jo-eeey?” Manu said. “Our game was not finished. You played rough and didn’t give me my turn.”

I reached into the pipe, felt stacks of paper. Figures, the one day in my life I found a jackpot and it was just in the way. I pulled out the rubber-banded bricks of hundreds and fifties as fast as I could.

A little hand knocked at the other side of the panel. Someone giggled.

I took off the shirt, the droopy-ass jeans. The panel came off. I jumped into the pipe, getting small. They’re smaller, I thought, I’m done, but still I slithered and grunted and made my way through. I was maybe ten feet in when the pipe opened up into a larger space. I poked my head through, got one arm in. That was when I felt the hand on my ankle.

“Whither runst thou?” Camilla whispered. “Becalm thee.”

I pulled with the arm that was through, but I couldn’t break her grip. She pulled, too, but couldn’t yank me free. This went on for I don’t know how long. It felt like an hour. I grunted, I yelled, I snorted. “Shhhh,” she said. She said something in French, I think. Behind her, Peter laughed.

We fell into a kind of truce where I didn’t pull forward and she didn’t pull back. Time wasn’t on her side, though, not with that appetite. She let go. I scrambled forward, into the larger space, and here she came after. Her arm came out first. I kicked at it, wrenched it, broke it, but more of her just kept coming out. I lay on my back and stamped with both feet like a donkey, but her second arm was out now and her first arm had already healed and she caught my foot and twisted. I pulled my foot away and yelled.

The horrible mouth in the pipe hissed again.

Shhhlshhhl

I crawled on my hands and knees now; I was in a sort of natural fissure or something in the rock. It was getting smaller. Becoming a dead end.

I heard her come out of the pipe and start crawling behind me.

I ran out of crawl space. It just ended in a sort of wedge. I backed into it, crying, trying to kick at her. She got on top of my legs, wrestled my arms down. She had gotten small around me, flowed into the space with me.

“Please don’t,” I said.

I saw one eye, shut as tight as a puppy’s, I saw her roll her football-shaped head, felt a tooth drag my skin. She was working her way toward my neck. I breathed in, puffed up, tried to fill the space and keep her out of it, but she slipped her arms around me, squeezed me down, pushed the air out of my lungs. Got a little farther. I tried with all my might to push her down, but couldn’t budge her. When I rested from this exertion, she wriggled a little farther up, and then we did it all again. This went on for five minutes, ten, till she had folded my arms all the way down, filled the space around my neck. I know this sounds weird, but I smelled how old she was, smelled time pouring out of her like a bag of moths. I heard the sucking sound of her forming and re-forming her mouth around her teeth, felt her cold lips probing my neck, trying to get the right angle.

There came a point when I realized it was hopeless and relaxed. Let her do it. You would have, too. A long time before I did. She fed in hungry, spastic gulps. I could hear my blood trickling out of her; she wasn’t even trying to hold it in. She couldn’t feed efficiently like this. But she could bleed me out. I caved in like a jellyfish. I couldn’t see or hear anything anymore. I don’t think I dreamed.

When I came to, I was sitting on a ledge in a bricked-up room I recognized only too well, except that it was brighter than normal. Chloë sat to my right, holding fresh flowers in one skeletal hand. The other hand was in mine, our fingers interlaced, our hands bound together with human hair.

Margaret’s hair.

More flowers, mostly red roses, had been laid around us in a circle. Teacups and plastic Slurpee cups full of what looked like red wine sat among a riot of mismatched candles, all burning. My mouth hung open. It hurt. I couldn’t move even my tongue, but I was pretty sure my fangs had been taken out. They wouldn’t grow back unless I got blood, but I wasn’t ever going to get blood again.

A fly flew into my mouth, back out again, landed on my eye.

I couldn’t blink. I wished for it to fly away and, in its own good time, it did.

The kids sat at the bottom of the room, as I had sat so many times communing with Chloë. They sat like a class on a field trip, arranged in a loose horseshoe.

“Are you happy, god of small places?” Peter asked.

“We know Joey isn’t happy, poor Joey, but god-inside-Joey, are you happy?” said Camilla.

“If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands,” Alfie said, quite solemnly, and they all clapped three times hard.

CLAP!

CLAP!

CLAP!

Camilla raised her hands, palms open like a tiny priestess, and said, “Blessed be the tunnels and the staircases going down and the trains that bring us life. Blessed be the mothers and fathers diddling each other so babies might be born and grow and give us life. Blessed be the god of small places.”

CLAP!

CLAP!

CLAP!

“Blessed be Millie, who died the death in Wessex. Blessed be Sammy, who died the death in Manahatta.”

Duncan sobbed at this. Camilla walked over and pinched his cheek so hard she tore it a little, said, “No crying here. Not here.”

“Sorry,” Duncan peeped. She took her place again.

“Blessed be the god of small places.”

CLAP!

CLAP!

CLAP!

Now they all rose at once. Alfie beat a drum and Manu played a little horn and they danced together, wildly, as kids dance, until they got bored with that.

“Now the kiss,” Camilla said. Each of them kissed the others chastely on the lips, little hands holding little cheeks. Then they each, in turn, came up to where we sat.

“Good-bye, Mary,” Camilla said. “Give the god to Joey now.”

“Still funny he calls her Chloë. Joey and Chloë! Ha ha ha!”

That was Manu.

“Not here,” Camilla said, shooting him a look that killed his laughter.

“Good-bye, Joey,” she said, and kissed my cheek tenderly, so tenderly.

They each did this in turn.

My mouth hung open.

Manu took out a Polaroid camera and took a picture of me. The flash blinded me for a moment, but I heard the sound of the camera spitting out my photograph, I heard the flap-flap-flap of Manu shaking it.

“It’s going to be a good one,” he said.

In my head I was screaming DON’T GO DON’T GO DON’T GO but go they did, slipping out of the hole left by the missing bricks in the wall opposite.

NO!

Then I heard a sound that would have made my heart beat if I had enough blood left in me for that. Scraping, but not just any scraping. The scraping of a trowel with wet mortar on bricks. I saw the trowel flashing, saw each brick settle into place. And then they were gone. They left the candles burning. It took about six hours for the last one to burn down. That’s a guess. Without blood, we don’t see in the dark so well anymore.

I had forgotten what real dark looked like.

If you’re the kind of person who believes things are as they seem, and who doesn’t buy it when good things happen at the last minute, then you should stop reading now. It makes sense that I should kick off here, and if you can figure out how I still wrote all this down, or if you don’t really give a shit because you think this is all bullshit anyway, then, yes, stop here.

Everything sucks just as bad as it seems to, no more, no less.

I died slowly, in the dark that has no end, thinking at great length about what a poor show I’d made of my one-song life and its ten-song encore.

Final stop.

Everybody off the train.

This is the real world, right?

DISNEYLAND

Still here, are you?

All right, you sap, let’s go.

So there I was in the dark that had no end, like I said, only it had an end after all. But before the darkness cracked, something metal chip-chip-chipped a chink in the silence and also in the brick wall facing me, and I heard low voices. The smallest bit of light came in then, light from a small flame I think, but whether it was a candle or an oil lamp I couldn’t say. My eyes had dried out enough so everything was blurry; my eyes felt like two blisters. Starving to death is probably never a great way to go, but it really hurts as a vampire.

More bricks came out. A face filled the hole in the masonry, a face bedecked with blind-as-a-mole glasses. George the Jesus-looking carpenter came in and I would have laughed if I could have done anything but stare straight ahead with my matchbook-dry kisser hanging open, I would have laughed myself into a bellyache saying, Hey guys! Jesus saves! No shit, he really saves!

George climbed down with some difficulty, really it was more of a scarcely controlled fall; he was strong in the arms and shoulders but not much in the legs department. After him, I saw the sweetest sight I ever saw—a chump in a suit slipping through the hole, never a guy I thought of as graceful until I saw him follow Blond Jesus’s scuffing, elbow-skinning example.

Cvetko.

No, let me say it more like it sounded in my head:

“Hurry,” he said to himself more than to George, who was slobbering all over himself, and he climbed the wall under me and made his way to the nook I shared with Chloë. He lifted the flowers off me, he undid my hand of cold flesh from hers of cool bone, bit through the twine. He might as well have been lifting a wooden sculpture when he lifted me from the ledge, but he moved my stiff limbs so my arms hooked around him, my face buried in his neck, I was like Pinocchio. He leapt with me, caught us on his strong legs. He was standing with my arms around him, like I was his drunk friend; he bit George and filled his mouth, shotgunning the blood into mine. He did this again and again until George began to wilt, then set us both down and continued. My tongue began to wiggle a little in its bath of warm liquid, my eyes lubricated, I made myself blink a dry, painful blink, and then a smoother one. A tear rolled down my cheek, whether from sheer joy or my eye healing itself I couldn’t say.

When Cvetko thought George couldn’t take any more, he bit his own wrist and drew hard, filling his cheeks again so he looked like a giant chipmunk. He squirted this into my mouth and now I closed my lips, actually swallowed, moved my head a little. You get the idea. He brought me back. Cvetko came back for me and he gave me back my life on a silver platter. He didn’t even kill Blond Jesus doing it, though I think he maybe came close.

I ran my tongue over the sockets where my fangs used to be. Felt little points coming in. I didn’t mean to smile, but I did. Life as a vampire is pretty awful, but it still seems to beat the alternative. For now, at least. I think we all get night fever eventually. Except the kids. Those kids stay kids, keep a sense of wonder and reinvent themselves every day, even if their wonder feeds on cruelty and they reinvent themselves into different kinds of viciousness. That’s what Cvetko thinks, anyway, and Cvetko’s pretty smart.

We talked it all out later, of course. Here’s a snatch of that:

“How did you do it? Save me, I mean.”

“I knew they would take you. I guessed that they would make a little god of you, that they would bleed you and leave you there. It is possible they do that everywhere they go, make sacrifices in thanks for the hunt, make shrines enclosing defeated rivals. I saw photographs among Manu’s things, vampires bedecked with flowers and wearing expressions of bewilderment; vampires who did not appear to have been beheaded or burned or staked with wood; vampires who appeared to have been exsanguinated, which is not a swift death and one which best preserves our remains. I deduced from the ages of the vampires in the photographs that the children preferred their godlings to be pubescent, something between children and adults. Perhaps they imagine you as gateways or conduits to the godhead, as they perceive it. I had seen the remains of the girl you call Chloë and connected her with them, realized they had killed her, taken her fangs, deified her. It seemed likely that they would do the same to you, and, when they turned their attention back to the business of meeting their massive need for blood, I might have a chance to reclaim you.”

“How old are they, Cvets? Really?”

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

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

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

“Crossed?”

“The Atlantic.”

“They flew.”

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

“They had a ticket! I saw it.”

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

“Oh,” I said.

“Exactly. Neither did I.”

“But what boat?”

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

I apologize.

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

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

“We have to tell somebody.”

Cvetko just looked at me.

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

He didn’t speak.

He said nothing because nothing was the answer.

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

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

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

Because I met somebody.

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

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

Turns out I like California.

Are you ready?

Here comes your happy ending.

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

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

Here’s your last image:

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

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

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

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

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

Please put the goddamned book down.