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.
And for a kiss she shows him the place where Lovecraft is buried, the quiet place she comes when she only wants to be alone, no company but her thoughts and the considerate, sleeping bodies underground. The Phillips family obelisk and then his own little headstone; she takes a plastic cigarette lighter from the front pocket of her jeans and holds the flame close to the ground so that Adrian can read the marker: 20 August 1890-15 March 1937, "I am Providence", and she shows him all the offerings that odd pilgrims leave behind. A handful of pencils and one rusty screw, two nickels, a small rubber octopus and a handwritten letter folded neat and weighted with a rock so the wind won't blow it away. The letter begins "Dear Howard," but she doesn't read any further, nothing there written for her, and then Adrian tries to kiss her again.
"No, wait. You haven't seen the tree," she says, wriggling free of Adrian Mobley's skinny arms, dragging him roughly away from the obelisk; two steps, three, and they're both swallowed by the shadow of an enormous, ancient birch, this tree that must have been old when her great-grandfather was a boy. Its sprawling branches are still shaggy with autumn-painted leaves, its roots like the scabby knuckles of some sky-bound giant, clutching at the earth for fear that he will fall and tumble for ever towards the stars.
"Yeah, so it's a tree," Adrian mumbles, not understanding, not even trying to understand, and now she knows that it was a mistake to bring him here.
"People have carved things," she says, and strikes the lighter again, holds the flickering orange flame so that Adrian can see all the pocket-knife graffiti worked into the smooth, pale bark of the tree. The unpronounceable names of dark, fictitious gods and entire passages from Lovecraft, razor steel for ink to tattoo these occult wounds and lonely messages to a dead man, and she runs an index finger across a scar in the shape of a tentacle-headed fish.
"Isn't it beautiful?" she whispers and that's when Dead Girl sees the eyes watching them from the lowest limbs of the tree, their shimmering, silver eyes like spiteful coins hanging in the night, strange fruit.
"This shit isn't the way it happened at all," Gable says. "These aren't even your memories. This is just some bitch we killed."
"Oh, I think she knows that," the Bailiff laughs and it's worse than the ghouls snickering for Madam Terpsichore.
"I only wanted him to see the tree," Dead Girl says. "I wanted to show him something carved into the Lovecraft tree."
"Liar," Gable sneers and that makes the Bailiff laugh again. He squats in the dust and fallen leaves and begins to pick something stringy from his teeth.
And she would run, but the river has almost washed the world away, nothing left now but the tree and the moon and the thing that clambers down its trunk on spider-long legs and arms the colour of chalk dust.
Is that a death? And are there two?
"We know you would forget us," Gable says, "if we ever let you. You would pretend you were an innocent, a victim ." Her dry tongue feels as rough as sandpaper against Dead Girl's wrist, dead cat's tongue, and above them the constellations swirl in a mad, kaleidoscope dance about the moon; the tree moans and raises its swaying branches to heaven, praying for dawn, for light and mercy from everything it's seen and will ever see again.
Is death that woman's mate?
And at the muddy bottom of the Seekonk River, in the lee of the Henderson Bridge, Dead Girl's eyelids flutter as she stirs uneasily, frightening fish, fighting sleep and her dreams. But the night is still hours away, waiting on the far side of the scalding day, and so she holds Bobby tighter and he sighs and makes a small, lost sound that the river snatches and drags away towards the sea.
Dead Girl sits alone on the floor in the parlour of the house on Benefit Street, alone because Gable has Bobby with her tonight; Dead Girl drinks her Heineken and watches the yellow and aubergine circles that their voices trace in the stagnant, smoky air, and she tries to recall what it was like before she knew the colours of sound.
Miss Josephine raises the carafe and carefully pours tap water over the sugar cube on her slotted spoon; the water and dissolved sugar sink to the bottom of her glass and at once the liqueur begins to louche, the clear and emerald bright mix of alcohol and herbs clouding quickly to a milky, opaque green.
"Oh, of course," she says to the attentive circle of waxwork ravens. "I remember Mercy Brown, and Nellie Vaughn, too, and that man in Connecticut. What was his name?"
"William Rose," Signior Garzarek suggests, but Miss Josephine frowns and shakes her head.
"No, no. Not Rose. He was that peculiar fellow in Peace Dale, remember? No, the man in Connecticut had a different name."
"They were maniacs, every one of them," Addie Goodwine says nervously and sips from her own glass of absinthe. "Cutting the hearts and livers out of corpses and burning them, eating the ashes. It's ridiculous. It's even worse than what they do," and she points confidentially at the floor.
"Of course it is, dear," Miss Josephine says.
"But the little Vaughn girl, Nellie, I understand she's still something of a sensation among the local high-school crowd," Signior Garzarek says and smiles, dabs at his wet, red lips with a lace handkerchief. "They do love their ghost stories, you know. They must find the epitaph on her tombstone an endless source of delight."
"What does it say?" Addie asks and when Miss Josephine turns and stares at her, Addie Goodwine flinches and almost drops her glass.
"You really should get out more often, dear," Miss Josephine says.
"Yes," Addie stammers. "Yes, I know. I should."
The waxwork named Nathaniel fumbles with the brim of his black bowler and, "I remember," he says. '"I am watching and waiting for you.' That's what it says, isn't it?"
"Delightful, I tell you," Signior Garzarek chuckles and then he drains his glass and reaches for the absinthe bottle on its silver serving tray.
"What do you see out there?"
The boy that Dead Girl calls Bobby is standing at the window in Miss Josephine's parlour, standing there with the sash up and snow blowing in, small drifts of snow at his bare feet and he turns around when she says his name.
"There was a bear on the street," he says and puts the glass paperweight in her hands; glass dome filled with water and when she shakes it all the tiny white flakes inside swirl around and around, a miniature blizzard trapped in her palm, plastic snow to settle slow across the frozen field, the barn, the dark and winterbare line of trees in the distance.
"I saw a bear," he says again, more insistent than before, and points at the open window.