The Mammoth Book Of Vampire Stories Written By Women

"Put out your cigarettes!" the foreman called up, and we all stopped, trying to catch the smell of gas. If they were dead, as Jack had said, it was most likely gas leaking in from the broken mains that had killed them, and not internal injuries. The week before we had brought up a boy and his dog, not a scratch on them. The dog had barked and whimpered almost up to when we found them, and the ambulance driver said she thought they'd only been dead a few minutes.

I couldn't smell any gas and after a minute the foreman said excitedly, "I see them!"

The balaclava leaned over the shaft, his hands on his knees. "Are they alive?"

"Yes! Fetch an ambulance!"

The balaclava went leaping down the hill, skidding on broken bricks that skittered down in a minor avalanche.

I knelt over the shaft. "Will they need a stretcher?" I called down.

"No," the foreman said, and I knew by the sound of his voice they were dead.

"Both of them?" I said.

"Yes."

I stood up. "How did you know they were dead?" I said, turning to look at Jack. "How did"

He wasn't there. I looked down the hill. The balaclava was nearly to the bottom grabbing at a broken window sash to stop his headlong descent, his wake a smoky cloud of brick dust — but Jack was nowhere to be seen.

It was nearly dawn. I could see the grey hills and at the far end of them the warden and his "valuables". There was another rescue party on the third hill over, still digging. I could see Swales handing down a bucket.

"Give a hand here," the foreman said impatiently and hoisted the jack up to me. I hauled it over to the side and then came back and helped the foreman out of the shaft. His hands were filthy, covered in reddish-brown mud.

"Was it the gas that killed them?" I asked, even though he was already pulling out a packet of cigarettes.

"No," he said, shaking a cigarette out and taking it between his teeth. He patted the front of his coverall, leaving red stains.

"How long have they been dead?" I asked.

He found his matches, struck one, and lit the cigarette. "Shortly after we last heard them, I should say," he said, and I thought, but they were already dead by then. And Jack knew it. "They've been dead at least two hours."

I looked at my watch. I read a little past six. "But the mine didn't kill them?"

He took the cigarette between his fingers and blew a long puff of smoke. When he put the cigarette back in his mouth there was a red smear on it. "Loss of blood."

The next night the Luftwaffe was early. I hadn't got much sleep after the incident. Morris had fretted about his son the whole day and Swales had teased Renfrew mercilessly. "Goering's found out about your spying," he said, "And now he's sent his Stukas after you."

I finally went up to the third floor and tried to sleep in the spotter's chair, but it was too light. The afternoon was cloudy, and the fires burning in the East End gave the sky a nasty reddish cast.

Someone had left a copy of Twickenham's Twitterings on the floor. I read the article on the walking dead again, and then, still unable to sleep, the rest of the news-sheet. There was an account of Hitler's invasion of Transylvania, and a recipe for butterless strawberry tart, and the account of the crime rate. "London is currently the perfect place for the criminal element," Nelson was quoted as saying. "We must constantly be on the lookout for wrong-doing."

Below the recipe was a story about a Scottish terrier named Bonny Charlie who had barked and scrabbled wildly at the ruins of a collapsed house till wardens heeded his cries, dug down, and discovered two unharmed children.

I must have fallen asleep reading that because the next thing I knew Morris was shaking me and telling me the sirens had gone. It was only five o'clock.

At half past we had an HE in our sector. It was just three blocks from the post, and the walls shook and plaster rained down on Twickenham's typewriter and on Renfrew, lying awake in his cot.

"Frivolities, my foot," Mrs Lucy muttered as we dived for our tin hats. "We need those reinforcing beams."

The part-timers hadn't come on duty yet. Mrs Lucy left Renfrew to send them on. We knew exactly where the incident was Morris had been looking in that direction when it went — but we still had difficulty finding it. It was still evening, but by the time we had gone half a block, it was pitch black.

The first time that had happened, I thought it was some sort of after-blindness from the blast, but it's only the brick and plaster dust from the collapsed buildings. It rises up in a haze that's darker than any blackout curtain, obscuring everything. When Mrs Lucy set up shop on a stretch of pavement and switched on the blue incident light it glowed spectrally in the man-made fog.

"Only two families still in the street," she said, holding the register up to the light. "The Kirkcuddy family and the Hodgsons."

"Are they an old couple?" Morris asked, appearing suddenly out of the fog.

She peered at the register. "Yes. Pensioners."