The Laughing Corpse

He leaned across the table. “Don’t tell. Please don’t tell.” There was real fear in his eyes.

“Who would I tell?”

“You know.”

I shook my head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Willie.”

“The MASTER.” You could hear “master” was in all caps.

“Why would I tell Jean-Claude?”

He was whispering now. A new comedian had come up on stage, there was laughter and noise, and still he whispered. “You’re his human servant, whether you like it or not. When we speak to you, he tells us we’re speaking to him.”

We were leaning almost face-to-face now. The gentle brush of his breath smelled like breath mints. Almost all vampires smell like breath mints. I don’t know what they did before mints were invented. Had stinky breath, I guess.

“You know I’m not his human servant.”

“But he wants you to be.”

“Just because Jean-Claude wants something doesn’t mean he gets it,” I said.

“You don’t know what he’s like.”

“I think I do...”

He touched my arm. I didn’t jerk back this time. I was too intent on what he was saying. “He’s been different since the old master died. He’s a lot more powerful than even you know.”

This much I had suspected. “So why shouldn’t I tell him you’re afraid of zombies?”

“He’ll use it to punish me.”

I stared at him, our eyes inches apart. “You mean he’s torturing people to control them.”

He nodded.

“Shit.”

“You won’t tell?”

“I won’t tell. Promise,” I said.

He looked so relieved, I patted his hand. The hand felt like a hand. His body didn’t feel wood hard anymore. Why? I didn’t know, and if I asked Willie, he probably wouldn’t know either. One of the mysteries of...death.

“Thanks.”

“I thought you said that Jean-Claude was the kindest master you’ve ever had.”

“He is,” Willie said.

Now that was a frightening truth. If being tormented by your darkest fear was the kindest, how much worse had Nikolaos been. Hell, I knew the answer to that one. She’d been psychotic. Jean-Claude wasn’t cruel just for the sake of watching people squirm. There was reason to his cruelty. It was a step up.

“I gotta go. Thanks for helping with the zombie.” He stood.

“You were brave, you know,” I said.

He flashed a grin my way, fangs glinting in the dim light. The smile vanished from his face like someone had turned a switch. “I can’t afford to be anything else.”

Vampires are a lot like wolf packs. The weak are either dominated or destroyed. Banishment is not an option. Willie was moving up in the ranks. A sign of weakness could stop that rise or worse. I’d often wondered what vampires feared. One of them feared zombies. It would have been fu

The comic on stage was a vampire. He was the new dead. Skin chalk-white, eyes like burned holes in paper. His gums were bloodless and receding from canines that would have been the envy of any German shepherd. I had never seen a vampire look so monstrous. They all usually made an effort to appear human. This one wasn’t.

I had missed the audience’s reaction to his first appearance, but now they were laughing. If I had thought the zombie jokes were bad, these were worse. A woman at the next table laughed so hard, tears spilled down her cheeks.

“I went to New York, tough city. A gang jumped me, but I put the bite on them.” People were holding their ribs as if in pain.

I didn’t get it. It was genuinely not fu

He was using mind tricks. I’d seen vampires seduce, threaten, terrify, all by concentrating. But I had never seen them cause laughter. He was forcing them to laugh.

It wasn’t the worst abuse of vampiric powers I’d ever seen. He wasn’t trying to hurt them. And this mass hypnosis was harmless, temporary. But it was wrong. Mass mind control was one of the top scary things that most people don’t know vampires can do.

I knew, and I didn’t like it. He was the fresh dead and even before Jean-Claude’s marks, the comic couldn’t have touched me. Being an animator gave you partial immunity to vampires. It was one of the reasons that animators are so often vampire slayers. We’ve got a leg up, so to speak.

I had called Charles earlier, but I still didn’t see him. He is not easy to miss in a crowd, sort of like Godzilla going through Tokyo. Where was he? And when would Jean-Claude be ready to see me? It was now after eleven. Trust him to browbeat me into a meeting and then make me wait. He was such an arrogant son of a bitch.

Charles came through the swinging doors that led to the kitchen area. He strode through the tables, heading for the door. He was shaking his head and murmuring to a small Asian man who was having to quick-run to keep up.

I waved, and Charles changed direction towards me. I could hear the smaller man arguing, “I run a very good, clean kitchen.”

Charles murmured something that I couldn’t hear. The bespelled audience was oblivious. We could have shot off a twenty-one-gun salute, and they wouldn’t have flinched. Until the vampire comic was finished, they would hear nothing else.

“What are you, the damn health department?” the smaller man asked. He was dressed in a traditional chef’s outfit. He had the big floppy hat wadded up in his hands. His dark uptilted eyes were sparkling with anger.

Charles is only six-one, but he seems bigger. His body is one wide piece from broad shoulders to feet. He seems to have no waist. He is like a moving mountain. Huge. His perfectly brown eyes are the same color as his skin. Wonderfully dark. His hand is big enough to cover my face.

The Asian chef looked like an angry puppy beside Charles. He grabbed Charles’s arm. I don’t know what he thought he was going to do, but Charles stopped moving. He stared down at the offending hand and said very carefully, voice almost painfully deep, “Do not touch me.”

The chef dropped his arm like he’d been burned. He took a step back. Charles was only giving him part of the “look.” The full treatment had been known to send would-be muggers screaming for help. Part of the look was enough for one irate chef.

His voice was calm, reasonable when he spoke again, “I run a clean kitchen.”

Charles shook his head. “You can’t have zombies near the food preparation. It’s illegal. The health codes forbid corpses near food.”

“My assistant is a vampire. He’s dead.”

Charles rolled his eyes at me. I sympathized. I’d had the same discussion with a chef or two. “Vampires are not considered legally dead anymore, Mr. Kim. Zombies are.”

“I don’t understand why.”

“Zombies rot and carry disease just like any dead body. Just because they move around doesn’t mean they aren’t a depository for disease.”

“I don’t...”

“Either keep the zombies away from the kitchen or we will close you down. Do you understand that?”

“And you’d have to explain to the owner why his business was not making money,” I said, smiling up at both of them.

The chef looked a bit pale. Fancy that. “I...I understand. It will be taken care of.”

“Good,” Charles said.

The chef darted one frightened look at me, then began to thread his way back to the kitchen. It was fu

Charles sat down across from me. He seemed too big for the table. “I got your message. What’s going on?”

“I need an escort to the Tenderloin.”

It’s hard to tell when Charles blushes, but he squirmed in his chair. “Why in the world do you want to go down there?”

“I need to find someone who works down there.”

“Who?”

“A prostitute,” I said.

He squirmed again. It was like watching an uncomfortable mountain. “Caroline is not going to like this.”