"You did not see a bear," Dead Girl says, but she doesn't look to see for herself, doesn't take her silver eyes off the paperweight; she'd almost forgotten about the barn, that day and the storm, January or February or March, more years ago than she'd have ever guessed and the wind howling like hungry wolves.
"I did ," Bobby says. "I saw a big black bear dancing in the street. I know a bear when I see one."
And Dead Girl closes her eyes and lets the globe fall from her fingers, lets it roll from her hand and she knows that when it hits the floor it will shatter into a thousand pieces. World shatter, watersky shatter to bleed heaven away across the floor, and so there isn't much time if she's going to make it all the way to the barn.
"I think it knew our names," the boy says and he sounds afraid, but when she looks back she can't see him any more. Nothing behind her now but the little stone wall to divide this field from the next, the slate and sandstone boulders already half buried by the storm, and the wind pricks her skin with icing needle teeth. The snow spirals down from the leaden clouds and the wind sends it spinning and dancing in dervish crystal curtains.
"We forget for a reason, child," the Bailiff says, his rust-crimson voice woven tight between the air and every snowflake. ' 'Time is too heavy to carry so much of it strung about our necks.''
"I don't hear you," she lies, and it doesn't matter anyway, whatever he says, because Dead Girl is already at the barn door; both the doors left standing open and her father will be angry, will be furious if he finds out. The horses could catch cold, he will say to her. The cows, he will say, the cows are already giving sour milk, as it is.
Shut the doors and don't look inside. Shut the doors and run all the way home.
"It fell from the sky," he said, the night before. "It fell screaming from a clear, blue sky. No one's gone looking for it. I don't think they will."
"It was only a bird," her mother said.
"No," her father said. "It wasn't a bird."
Shut the doors and run
But she doesn't do either, because that isn't the way this happened, the way it happens, and the naked thing crouched there in the straw and the blood looks up at her with Gable's pretty face. Takes its mouth away from the mare's mangled throat and blood spills out between clenched teeth and runs down its chin.
"The bear was singing our names."
And then the paperweight hits the floor and bursts in a sudden, merciful spray of glass and water that tears the winter day apart around her. "Wake up," Miss Josephine says, spits out impatient words that smell like anise and dust, and she shakes Dead Girl again.
"I expect Madam Terpsichore is finishing up downstairs. And the Bailiff will be back soon. You can't sleep here."
Dead Girl blinks and squints past Miss Josephine and all the colourful, candy-shaded lamps. And the summer night outside the parlour window, the night that carries her rotten soul beneath its tongue, stares back with eyes as black and secret as the bottom of a river.
In the basement, Madam Terpsichore, lady of rib spreaders and carving knives, has already gone, has crept away down one of the damp and brick-throated tunnels with her snuffling entourage in tow. Their bellies full and all their entrail curiosities sated for another night, and only Barnaby is left behind to tidy up; part of his modest punishment for slicing too deeply through a sclera and ruining a violet eye meant for some graveyard potentate or another, the precious vitreous humour spilled by his hand, and there's a fresh notch in his left ear where Madam Terpsichore bit him for ruining such a delicacy. Dead Girl is sitting on an old produce crate, watching while he scrubs bile from the stainless-steel tabletop.
"I'm not very good with dreams, I'm afraid," he says to her and wrinkles his wet black nose.
"Or eyes," Dead Girl says and Barnaby nods his head.
"Or eyes," he agrees.
"I just thought you might listen, that's all. It's not the sort of thing I can tell Gable, and Bobby, well"
"He's a sweet child, though," Barnaby says, and then he frowns and scrubs harder at a stubborn smear the colour of scorched chestnuts.
"But I can't tell anyone else," Dead Girl says; she sighs and Barnaby dips his pig-bristle brush into a pail of soapy water and goes back to work on the stain.
"I don't suppose I can do very much damage, if all I do is listen." And the ghoul smiles a crooked smile for her and touches a claw to the bloody place where Madam Terpsichore nicked the base of his right ear with her sharp incisors.
"Thank you, Barnaby," she says and draws a thoughtless half circle on the dirt floor with the scuffed toe of one shoe. "It isn't a very long dream. It won't take but a minute," and what she tells him, then, isn't the dream of Adrian Mobley and the Lovecraft tree and it isn't the barn and the blizzard, the white thing waiting for her inside the barn. This is another dream, a moonless night at Swan Point and someone's built a great, roaring bonfire near the river's edge. Dead Girl's watching the flames reflected in the water, the air heavy with wood smoke and the hungry sound of fire; and Bobby and Gable are lying on the rocky beach, laid out neat as an undertaker's work, their arms at their sides, pennies on their eyes. And they're both slit open from collar-bones to crotch, stem to stern, ragged Y-incisions and their innards glint wetly in the light of the bonfire.
"No, I don't think it was me," Dead Girl says, even though it isn't true, and draws another half circle on the floor to keep the first one company. Barnaby has stopped scrubbing at the table and is watching her uneasily with his distrustful, scavenger eyes.
"Their hearts are lying there together on a boulder," and she's speaking very quietly now, almost whispering as if she's afraid someone upstairs might be listening, too, and Barnaby perks up his ears and leans towards her. Their hearts on a stone, and their livers, and she burns the organs in a brass bowl until there's nothing left but a handful of greasy ashes.
"I think I eat them," Dead Girl says. "But there are blackbirds then, a whole flock of blackbirds, and all I can hear are their wings. Their wings bruise the sky."
And Barnaby shakes his head, makes a rumbling, anxious sound deep in his throat, and he starts scrubbing at the table again. "I should learn to quit while I'm only a little ways behind," he snorts. "I should learn what's none of my goddamn business."
"Why, Barnaby? What does it mean?"
And at first he doesn't answer her, only grumbles to himself and the pigbristle brush flies back and forth across the surgical table even though there are no stains left to scrub, nothing but a few soap suds and the candlelight reflected in the scratched and dented silver surface.
"The Bailiff would have my balls in a bottle of brine if I told you that," he says. "Go away. Go back upstairs where you belong and leave me alone. I'm busy."
"But you do know, don't you? I heard a story, Barnaby, about another dead girl named Mercy Brown. They burned her heart"
And the ghoul opens his jaws wide and roars like a caged lion, hurls his brush at Dead Girl, but it sails over her head and smashes into a shelf of Ball mason jars behind her. Broken glass and the sudden stink of vinegar and pickled kidneys, and she runs for the stairs.
"Go pester someone else, corpse" Barnaby snarls at her back. "Tell your blasphemous dreams to those effete cadavers upstairs. Ask one of those snotty fuckers to cross him." And then he throws something else, something shiny and sharp that whizzes past her face and sticks in the wall. Dead Girl takes the stairs two at a time, slams the basement door behind her and turns the lock. And if anyone's heard, if Miss Josephine or Signior Garzarek or anyone else even notices her reckless dash out the front doors and down the steps of the big, old house on Benefit Street, they know better than Barnaby and keep it to themselves.
In the east, there's the thinnest blue-white sliver of dawn to mark the horizon, the light a pearl would make, and Bobby hands Dead Girl another stone. "That should be enough," she says and so he sits down in the grass at the edge of the narrow beach to watch as she stuffs this last rock inside the hole where Gable's heart used to be. Twelve big rocks shoved inside her now, granite-cobble viscera to carry the vampire's body straight to the bottom of the Seekonk and this time that's where it will stay. Dead Girl has a fat roll of grey duct tape to seal the wound.