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 any more, 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 parlour, the spacious, book-lined room with its stained-glass lampshades in all the sweet and sour colours 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, a 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, un-beating 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, a 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 and 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 parlour, 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-coloured 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.