“Now, show me the lower terminus of the long peroneal,” Madam Terpsichore says, her professorial litany and the impatient clatter of Barnaby digging about in his kit for a pair of poultry shears or an oyster fork, one or the other or something else entirely.
“You want to go back upstairs for a while?” Dead Girl asks the boy and he shrugs, but doesn’t take his eyes off the basement door, doesn’t turn back around to watch the ghouls.
“Well come on then,” and she stands up, takes his hand, and that’s when Madam Terpsichore finally notices them.
“Please don’t go, dear,” she says. “It’s always better with an audience, and if Master Barnaby ever finds the proper instrument, there may be a flensing yet,” and the other ghouls snicker and laugh.
“I don’t think I like them very much,” Bobby whispers very quietly and Dead Girl only nods and leads him back up the stairs to the party.
—
Bobby says he wants something to drink, so they go to the kitchen first, to the noisy antique refrigerator, and he has a Coke and Dead Girl takes out a Heineken for herself. One chilly, apple-green bottle and she twists the cap off and sips the bitter, German beer; she never liked the taste of beer, before, but sometimes it seems like there were an awful lot of things she didn’t like before. The beer is very, very cold and washes away the last rags of the basement air lingering stale in her mouth like a dusty patch of mushrooms, basement-dry earth and a billion microscopic spores looking for a place to grow.
“I don’t think I like them at all,” Bobby says, still whispering even though they’re upstairs. Dead Girl starts to tell him that he doesn’t have to whisper anymore, but then she remembers Barnaby, his inquisitive, dog-cocked ears, and she doesn’t say anything at all.
Almost everyone else is sitting together in the front parlor, the spacious, booklined room with its stained-glass lampshades in all the sweet and sour colors of hard candy, sugar-filtered light that hurts her eyes. The first time she was allowed into the house on Benefit Street, Gable showed her all the lamps, all the books, all the rooms, like they were hers. Like she belonged here, instead of the muddy bottom of the Seekonk River, another pretty, broken thing in a house filled up with things that are pretty or broken or both. Filled up with antiques, and some of them breathe and some of them don’t. Some, like Miss Josephine, have forgotten how or why to breathe, except to talk.
They sit around her in their black funeral clothes and the chairs carved in 1754 or 1773, rough circle of men and women that always makes Dead Girl think of ravens gathered around carrion, blackbirds about a raccoon’s corpse, jostling each other for all the best bits; sharp beaks for her bright and sapphire eyes, for the porcelain tips of her fingers, or that silent, unbeating heart. The empress as summer roadkill, Dead Girl thinks, and doesn’t laugh out loud, even though she wants to, wants to laugh at these stiff and obsolescent beings, these tragic, waxwork shades sipping absinthe and hanging on Miss Josephine’s every word like gospel, like salvation. Better to slip in quiet, unnoticed, and find some place for her and Bobby to sit where they won’t be in the way.
“Have you ever seen a firestorm, Signior Garzarek?” Miss Josephine asks and she looks down at a book lying open in her lap, a green book like Dead Girl’s green beer bottle.
“No, I never have,” one of the waxworks says, tall man with slippery hair and ears that are too big for his head and almost come to points. “I dislike such things.”
“But it was beautiful,” Miss Josephine says and then she pauses, still looking at the green book in her lap and Dead Girl can tell from the way her eyes move back and forth, back and forth, that she’s reading whatever’s on the pages. “No, that’s not the right word,” she says, “That’s not the right word at all.”
“I was at Dresden,” one of the women volunteers and Josephine looks up, blinks at the woman as if she can’t quite remember what this particular waxwork is called.
“No, no, Addie, it wasn’t like that at all. Oh, I’m sure Dresden was exquisite, too, yes. But this wasn’t something man did. This was something that was done to men. And that’s the thing that makes it truly transcendent, the thing that makes it …” and she trails off and glances back down at the book as if the word she’s missing is in there somewhere.
“Well, then, read some of it to us,” Signior Garzarek says and he points a gloved hand at the green book and Miss Josephine looks up at him with her blue-brilliant eyes, eyes that seem grateful and malicious at the same time.
“Are you sure?” she asks them all. “I wouldn’t want to bore any of you.”
“Please,” says the man who hasn’t taken off his bowler, and Dead Girl thinks his name is Nathaniel. “We always like to hear you read.”
“Well, only if you’re sure,” Miss Josephine says and she sits up a little straighter on her divan, clears her throat, and fusses with the shiny folds of her black, satin skirt, the dress that only looks as old as the chairs, before she begins to read.
“That was what came next—the fire,’” she says, and this is her reading voice now and Dead Girl closes her eyes and listens. “‘It shot up everywhere. The fierce wave of destruction had carried a flaming torch with it—agony, death and a flaming torch. It was just as if some fire demon was rushing from place to place with such a torch. Flames streamed out of half-shattered buildings all along Market Street.
“‘I sat down on the sidewalk and picked the broken glass out of the soles of my feet and put on my clothes.
“‘All wires down, all wires down!’”
And that’s the way it goes for the next twenty minutes or so, the kindly half-dark behind Dead Girl’s eyes and Miss Josephine reading from her green book while Bobby slurps at his Coke and the waxwork ravens make no sound at all. She loves the rhythm of Miss Josephine’s reading voice, the cadence like rain on a hot day or ice cream, that sort of a voice. But it would be better if she were reading something else, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” maybe, or Keats or Tennyson. But this is better than nothing at all, so Dead Girl listens, content enough and never mind that it’s only earthquakes and conflagration, smoke and the screams of dying men and horses. It’s the sound of the voice that matters, not the words or anything they mean, and if that’s true for her it’s just as true for the silent waxworks in their stiff, colonial chairs.
When she’s finished, Miss Josephine closes the book and smiles, showing them all the stingiest glimpse of her sharp, white teeth.
“Superb,” says Nathaniel, and “Oh yes, superb,” says Addie Goodwine.
“You are indeed a wicked creature, Josephine,” says the Signior and he lights a fat cigar and exhales a billowing phantom from his mouth. “Such delicious perversity wrapped up in such a comely package.”
“I was writing as James Russell Williams, then,” Miss Josephine says proudly. “They even paid me.”
Dead Girl opens her eyes and Bobby’s finished his Coke, is rolling the empty bottle back and forth across the rug like a wooden rolling pin on cookie dough. “Did you like it?” she asks him and he shrugs.
“Not at all?”
“Well, it wasn’t as bad as the ghouls,” he says, but he doesn’t look at her, hardly ever looks directly at her or anyone else these days.
A few more minutes and then Miss Josephine suddenly remembers something in another room that she wants the waxworks to see, something they must see, an urn or a brass sundial, the latest knick-knack hidden somewhere in the bowels of the great, cluttered house. They follow her out of the parlor, into the hallway, chattering and trailing cigarette smoke, and if anyone even notices Bobby and Dead Girl sitting on the floor, they pretend that they haven’t. Which is fine by Dead Girl; she dislikes them, the lifeless smell of them, the guarded desperation in their eyes.
Miss Josephine has left her book on the cranberry divan and when the last of the vampires has gone, Dead Girl gets up and steps inside the circle of chairs, stands staring down at the cover.
“What does it say?” Bobby
asks and so she reads the title to him.
“San Francisco’s Horror of Earthquake, Fire, and Famine,” she reads, and then Dead Girl picks the book up and shows him the cover, the letters stamped into the green cloth in faded gold ink. And underneath, a woman in dark-colored robes, her feet in fire and water, chaos wrapped about her ankles, and she seems to be bowing to a shattered row of marble columns and a cornerstone with the words IN MEMORIAM OF CALIFORNIA’S DEAD—APRIL 18TH, 1906.
“That was a long time ago, wasn’t it?” Bobby asks and Dead Girl sets the book down again. “Not if you’re Miss Josephine, it isn’t,” she says. If you’re Miss Josephine, that was only yesterday, the day before yesterday. If you’re her—but that’s the sort of thought it’s best not to finish, better if she’d never thought it at all.
“We don’t have to go back to the basement, do we?” Bobby asks and Dead Girl shakes her head. “Not if you don’t want to,” she says. And then she goes to the window and stares out at Benefit Street, at the passing cars and the living people with their smaller, petty reasons for hating time. In a moment, Bobby comes and stands beside her and he holds her hand.
Dead Girl keeps her secrets in an old Hav-A-Tampa cigar box, the few she can’t just keep inside her head, and she keeps the old cigar box on a shelf inside a mausoleum at Swan Point. This manicured hillside that rises up so sharp from the river’s edge, steep and dead-adorned hill, green grass in the summer and the wind-rustling branches of the trees, and only Bobby knows about the box and she thinks he’ll keep it to himself. He rarely says anything to anyone, especially Gable; Dead Girl knows what Gable would do if she found out about the box, thinks she knows and that’s good enough, bad enough, that she keeps it hidden in the mausoleum.
The caretakers bricked up the front of the vault years and years ago, but they left a small cast-iron grate set into the masonry just below the marble keystone and the verdigris-streaked plaque with the name STANTON on it, though Dead Girl can’t imagine why. Maybe it’s there so the bugs can come in and out, or so all those dead
Stantons can get a breath of fresh air now and then, but not even enough room for bats to squeeze in, or the swifts, or rats. But plenty of space between the bars for her and Bobby to slip inside whenever she wants to look at the things she keeps inside the old cigar box.
Nights like tonight, after the long parties, after Miss Josephine finally loses interest in her waxwork ravens and chases them all away (everyone except the ghouls, of course, who come and go as they please through the tunnels in the basement); still a coal-gray hour left until dawn and she knows that Gable is probably already waiting for them in the river, but she can wait a few minutes more.
“She might come looking for us,” Bobby says when they’re inside the mausoleum and he’s standing on tiptoes to see out but the grate is still a foot above his head.
“No, she won’t,” Dead Girl tells him, tells herself that it’s true, that Gable’s too glad to be back down there in the dark to be bothered. “She’s probably already asleep by now.”
“Maybe so,” Bobby says, not sounding even the least bit convinced, and then he sits down on the concrete floor and watches Dead Girl with his quicksilver eyes, mirror eyes so full of light they’ll still see when the last star in the whole goddamned universe has burned itself down to a spinning cinder.
“You let me worry about Gable,” she says and opens the box and everything’s still inside, just the way she left it. The newspaper clippings and a handful of coins, a pewter St. Christopher’s medal and a doll’s plastic right arm. Three keys and a ragged swatch of indigo velvet stained maroon around the edges. Things that mean nothing to anyone but Dead Girl, her puzzle and no one else knows the way that all these pieces fit together. Or even if they all fit together; sometimes even she can’t remember, but it makes her feel better to see them, anyway, to lay her white hands on these trinkets and scraps, to hold them.
Bobby is tapping his fingers restlessly against the floor, and when she looks at him he frowns and stares up at the ceiling. “Read me the one about Mercy,” he says and she looks back down at the Hav-A-Tampa box.
“It’s getting late, Bobby. Someone might hear me.”
And he doesn’t ask her again, keeps his eyes on the ceiling directly above her head and taps his fingers on the floor.
“It’s not even a story,” she says, and fishes one of the newspaper clippings from the box. Nut-brown paper gone almost as brittle as she feels inside and the words printed there more than a century ago, and “It’s almost like a story, when you read it,” Bobby replies.
For a moment, Dead Girl stands very still, listening to the last of the night sounds fading slowly away and the stranger sounds that come just before sunrise; birds and the blind, burrowing progress of earthworms, insects and a ship’s bell somewhere down in Providence Harbor, and Bobby’s fingers drumming on the concrete. She thinks about Miss Josephine and the comfort in her voice, her ice-cream voice against every vacant moment of eternity. And, in a moment, she begins to read.
Letter from the Pawtuxet Valley Gleaner, dated March 1892:
“Exeter Hill”
Mr. Editor,
As considerable notoriety has resulted from the exhuming of three bodies in Exeter cemetery on the 17th inst., I will give the main facts as I have received them for the benefit of such of your readers as “have not taken the papers” containing the same. To begin, we will say that our neighbor, a good and respectable citizen, George T. Brown, has been bereft of his wife and two grown-up daughters by consumption, the wife and mother about eight years ago, and the eldest daughter, Olive, two years or no later, while the other daughter, Mercy Lena, died about two months since, after nearly one year’s illness from the same dread disease. About two years ago Mr. Brown’s only son Edwin A., a young married man of good habits, began to give evidence of lung trouble, which increased, until in hopes of checking and curing the same, he was induced to visit the famous Colorado Springs, where his wife followed him later on and though for a time he seemed to improve, it soon became evident that there was no real benefit derived, and this coupled with a strong desire on the part of both husband and wife to see their Rhode Island friends, decided them to return east after an absence of about 18 months and are staying with Mrs. Brown’s parents, Willet Himes. We are sorry to say that Eddie’s health is not encouraging at this time. And now comes in the queer part, viz: The revival of a pagan or other superstition regarding the feeding of the dead upon a living relative where consumption was the cause of death and now bringing the living person soon into a similar condition, etc. and to avoid this result, according to the same high authority, the “vampire” in question which is said to inhabit the heart of a dead consumptive while any blood remains in that organ, must be cremated and the ashes carefully preserved and administered in some form to the living victim, when a speedy cure may (un) reasonably be expected. I will here say that the husband and father of the deceased ones, from the first, disclaimed any faith at all in the vampire theory but being urged, he allowed other, if not wiser, counsel to prevail, and on the 17th inst., as before stated the three bodies alluded to were exhumed and then examined by Doctor Metcalt of Wickford (under protest, as it were, being an unbeliever). The two bodies longest buried were found decayed and bloodless, while the last one who has been only about two months buried showed some blood in the heart as a matter of course, and as the doctor expected but to carry out what was a forgone conclusion, the heart and lungs of the last named (M. Lena) were then and there duly cremated, but deponent saith not how the ashes were disposed of. Not many persons were present, Mr. Brown being among the absent ones. While we do not blame anyone for these proceedings as they were intended without doubt to relieve the anxiety of the living, still, it seems incredible that anyone can attach the least importance to the subject, being so entirely incompatible with reason and conflicts also with scripture, which requires us “to give a reason for the hope that is in us,” or the why and wherefore which
certainly cannot be done as applied to the foregoing.
With the silt and fish shit settling gentle on her eyelids and lungs filled up with cold river water, Dead Girl sleeps, the soot-black ooze for her blanket, her cocoon, and Bobby safe in her arms. Gable is there, too, lying somewhere nearby, coiled like an eel in the roots of a drowned willow.
And in her dreams Dead Girl counts the boats passing overhead, their prows to split the day-drenched sky, their wakes the roil and swirl of thunderstorm clouds. Crabs and tiny snails nest in her hair and her wet thoughts slip by as smooth and capricious as the Seekonk, one instant or memory flowing seamlessly into the next. And this moment, this one here, is the last night that she was still a living girl. Last frosty night before Halloween and she’s stoned and sneaking into Swan Point Cemetery with a boy named Adrian that she only met a few hours ago in the loud and smoky confusion of a Throwing Muses show, Adrian Mobley and his long yellow hair like strands of the sun or purest, spun gold.
Adrian won’t or can’t stop giggling, a joke or just all the pot they’ve been smoking, and she leads him straight down Holly Avenue, the long-paved drive to carry them across The Old Road and into the vast maze of the cemetery’s slate and granite intestines. Headstones and more ambitious monuments lined up neat or scattered wild among the trees, reflecting pools to catch and hold the high, white moon, and she’s only having a little trouble finding her way in the dark.
“Shut up,” she hisses, casts anxious serpent sounds from her chapped lips, across her chattering teeth, and “Someone’s going to fucking hear us,” she says. She can see her breath, her soul escaping mouthful by steaming mouthful.
Then Adrian puts his arm around her, sweater wool and warm flesh around warm flesh, and he whispers something in her ear, something she should have always remembered but doesn’t. Something forgotten the way she’s forgotten the smell of a late summer afternoon, or sunlight on sand, and he kisses her.
The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women Page 63