The Mammoth Book Of Vampire Stories Written By Women

"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.

"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 Harbour, 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,