The Lesser Dead by Christopher Buehlman

Author:Christopher Buehlman
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: Penguin Group, USA
Published: 2014-09-21T16:00:00+00:00

THE HESSIAN

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

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

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

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