The Mammoth Book Of Vampire Stories Written By Women

His jacket is a little rumpled but not dirty, and his black bow tie is perfectly in place. He is smiling. I catch up to him.

"Cigarette?" he says.

"No thanks, I just had one."

He takes one from a gold-plated case, lights it and inhales slowly and contentedly. Where his lips touched it I see a dark stain.

"Hungry?"

"Not a bit."

"Wonderful night," I say.

He nods, still smiling. "Let's go dancing," he says.

We'll have a good time.

Bootleg

Christa Faust

Christa Faust is a fetish model and bondage enthusiast living and writing in Los Angeles. Her fiction has appeared in anthologies such as Revelations (aka Millennium,) edited by Douglas E. Winter and Love in Vein edited by Poppy Z. Brite. Her debut novel , Control Freak, has recently been reissued by Babbage Press and she is currently working on a second. She has also written a four-part black and white bondage adventure serial for the Web entitled Dita in Distress, a sexy, campy homage to the old Republic Pictures cliff hangers .

"It's funny," reveals the author, "even though 'Bootleg' deals with blood fetish and the cosmetic accessories of vampirism, I always thought of it as more of a ghost story or maybe even a zombie story (if you could make dead love get up and walk again), rather than a traditional vampire story.

" While I do enjoy bloodplay as a sexual indulgence, as a writer I find very little blood left to suck from that old archetype. As with my other 'vampire' story, 'Cherry' in Love in Vein, in this story I tried to take the idea in a slightly different direction. I wanted to get away from the whole doomed immortal thing, the romantic wish-fulfilment fantasy of being pale and thin and pretty for ever and ever, and try to do something that was a little more human ."

Mona cut off his right hand first. It was more important to him than his penis, the source of all his brilliance, his ART (she could always hear the capital letters in his slow, jaded voice) and she took great pleasure in removing it. Then the left hand, severed just below the twisted copper bracelet she gave him last Christmas. Tattooed arms were next, lower then upper. Their swirling patterns seemed much more beautiful without him attached. She cut off his booted feet, left then right and added them to the growing pile. She sliced off his legs in thin denim sections until she reached his narrow hips. Before she detached his pelvis from the rest of his torso, she cut out his treacherous penis. (You'll never stick it in another anorexic art-school slut behind my back again, bucko.) She sliced up his belly and his stray-dog ribcage until there was nothing left but his head.

His face was serene, unaware of his own dismemberment as he was unaware of everything that did not fulfil his immediate needs. His eyes were as blue as the day Mona fell for him, a hard, pure shade of turquoise that she would for ever associate with lies. She cut them out separately, left then right. She cut out his sweet, lying mouth and his angular, aristocratic nose, then tossed what remained of his head on to the pile.

"Bastard," she said softly to herself and dumped all his severed parts into the fire.

She watched him burn for a long minute, coiling flames as blue as his eyes as they devoured him. Then she set to work on the other photographs.

There weren't that many. Mostly just snapshots taken by friends. Mona and Daniel at various stuffy parties, she uncomfortable in a strappy black, thrift-store dress and he in his eternal art uniform: paint-flecked T-shirt and torn jeans and hand-rolled cigarette, too cool to dress up. Mona and Daniel in Jackson Square, posed against wrought iron and surrounded by the bright chaos of Daniel's paintings. Mona and Daniel in love, arms wound around each other, smiling and not knowing any better. She shuddered and added these to the fire.

Then the rest of Daniel by himself, photos she had taken when the angles of his face and the smooth muscles of his arms meant something to her. Daniel with streaks of cerulean and viridian across his chest and cheeks, a thick paintbrush clenched between his teeth. Daniel sleeping like a child with his fists curled up under his chin. She slashed at them with her scissors and tossed the fragments into the fire.

The letters were all gone except for one, his most recent:

8/11/01

Mona,

I'm so sorry things went the way they did. I know I was an asshole and I would do anything to make it up to you if you'd let me. I know you're hurt, but you can't just shut me out after all we've been through together. Give me a chance to explain. If I could see you, talk to you, I'm sure we could work it out. This last week has been hell without you. I can't sleep. I can't eat. I can't paint. You're all I think about. I hate sleeping in this lonely studio, waking up every morning and reaching for you, only to find there's no one there. Look, I know what I did was wrong, but don't you think I've been punished enough? I miss you so much. Things will be different from now on I swear. Please call me, Mona. I need to hear your voice.

I still love you.

Daniel

Mona shook her head and added the single sheet of expensive sketch paper to the fire. It was really a pathetic little fire, nothing but dark, glowing coals and pale tongues of reluctant flame in the centre of the wide brick fireplace. It perked up a little with this latest addition, flaring bright and then dying down again. There was not much nourishment to be had from the leftovers of Mona's dead relationship.

All that was left was a handful of postcards from his trip to Paris. She fed them one by one to the fire, glancing only briefly at their charming little messages full of I love you and I miss you and sprawling doodles of hearts and spirals. She later found out he was fucking at least three different women during that trip. Burning these last shreds of their relationship was particularly satisfying.

As the postcards curled and blackened, their sweet lies devoured by the hungry flames, Mona felt giddy and light, buoyed up by her new freedom. Of course there had been tears and anger and broken dishes, but that seemed like a thousand years ago. Now, she felt cleansed and streamlined, stripped down to fighting weight. There was nothing left in the Magazine Street apartment that wasn't hers alone. She wandered slowly through the long rooms, touching things with strange reverence. Her curmudgeonly old word-processor, her spaceship-console stereo, bought with the unwieldy lump of money that accompanied the sale of her first novel. A glass bowl of chalky grey bone fragments gleaned from badly maintained graves in the city's many cemeteries. Tacky, colourful beads from her first Mardi Gras. Her things, her history. The uneven but sturdy shelves she constructed out of cannibalized scraps of wood and glass. A pair of spidery chairs she rescued from the trash and painted silver. Models of classic monsters, Frankenstein's creation and his bride, the tortured Wolf Man and the tragic Mummy, the Phantom of the Opera and the Creature from the Black Lagoon, all built and painted when Mona couldn't bear to look at the flashing cursor for another second. They were a habit that had horrified Daniel. He called them the most trashy, paint-by-numbers kind of non-art. But they were still here and Daniel and his ART were gone and this made Mona smile. It was as if there had never been a Mona-and-Daniel. There was only Mona, now and for ever. A little wiser and a lot stronger, ready to get out there and kick the world's ass.

She stripped and showered, luxuriating under the cool spray for nearly an hour. She sang "I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair" while she shaved the long, silky hair from her armpits. She only stopped shaving because Daniel thought it was sexy, so now she laughed as yet another fragment of the past went swirling down the drain.

Clean and fragrant, her skin still rosy from the shower, she sprawled across her new, post-Daniel sheets, on sale at Wool-worth's for nineteen dollars ninety-nine cents. They were dark, inky purple and smelled of innocence and fabric softener. Smiling to herself, she masturbated. She did not fantasize about anyone. Instead she dreamed of silk and water and the smell of her own skin. With each new orgasm, she felt empowered, propelled into the future.

8/17/01

Hey Mona,

You foxy bitch you. How the hell are ya? How's life in sultry New Orleans? You know I read your new book. It rules of course. Things are pretty cool here, workin hard and getting some decent sessions, but you know it's a boy's life and most guys don't trust a chick drummer (even a brilliant rhythm-goddess like myself). But I'm livin well and I got a loft in Willy-B where no one complains if I play all night. Life is good.

So anyway, my real reason for writing (besides undisguised lust for your body) is that Lulu and me are cutting a demo with this mad bass player named Nocturna and we wanna do "Blush". It was your best song and we'd really love it if you would come and sing. Come back to NYC and be Diva Demona again, just for a day, for old times sake. We'll even send you a ticket. Pretty please with sugar on top! We need to hang out and catch up. Maybe roll around with no clothes on. It's been too long, lady. I miss you.

Big love and a sloppy tongue-kiss,

Minerva

Sitting in an outdoor cafe in the Quarter with her bicycle leaning against the vine-covered brick beside her, Mona took a hot swallow of black coffee and frowned at the letter in her hand. It had been nearly ten years since she had kissed Minerva goodbye at JFK. They were never in love, only best friends and occasional, playful lovers. The night Mona fled the nightmare break-up of her live-in relationship with Victorine, Minerva had let her crash, had stayed up till dawn listening to scratchy old Kiss albums and the long and sordid tale of woe. Three days later, Minerva drove her to the airport with a single suitcase and a five hundred dollar loan. She picked New Orleans at random because it sounded exotic and romantic and she left her old life behind with visions of red-hot blues and chicory coffee and black-eyed Creole boys. She left everything, but most of all, she left Diva Demona.

Diva Demona, her long-lost alter ego. An apparition of ragged lace and torn velvet. Of leather and silver and dead-white flesh, of kabuki make-up and fang teeth and long black nails. She had wild black-briar hair streaked with lurid purple and a stage presence that was all blood and power, lust wrapped in razor-wire. Sometimes she wore latex, sleek and glossy like a futuristic wet dream, insectoid sexy and somehow more than human. Sometimes she wore silk, tattered gowns and vicious corsets, like a ghost from a lost age. Men paid to watch her pose and sing, paid to feel the bite of her lash and the humiliating sting of her cruel tongue. She was a goddess and she knew it, young and arrogant and doomed. She was a burning construct with the half-life of plutonium, too volatile to live past twenty-one. So when Mona turned twenty-two, she left Diva Demona behind. The boundaries of that version of herself had become restrictive and she found she could not maintain that level of angst and theatrical rebellion without losing herself in the role. Her life had been reduced to shtick and she needed something new, something totally unexpected, to make her feel alive again. So the idea of resurrecting that old persona was strange and even a little unpleasant, like lying down in your old crib. But even though Mona had been devoting all her time to writing over the past ten years, she hadn't lost her voice, and there was no reason why she should not go back home to see some old friends and sing some old songs. Diva Demona was dead and buried, but moderately successful writer Mona Merino was alive and well and looking for adventure. A vacation might do her good, wash the last traces of Daniel out of her system. So would a fling with a strong, beautiful woman like Minerva, simple and sweet with no strings attached. She remembered Minerva's long, lanky body and the way her bleached and dreadlocked hair fell over her kohl-smudged eyes. She remembered long nights of conversation, of cheap red wine and Mr Bubble baths, rock candy and stolen cigarettes. She wondered if her friend had changed as much as she had, if she still wore that smoky sandalwood perfume. Draining the rest of her coffee, Mona decided that she would go.

6/13/90

Victorine, my most exquisite slave,

I am at the dungeon, awaiting yet another repressed yuppie with a diaper fetish. Why must I endure these clowns with their desperate little pricks and their pedestrian masochism? Well, we all have to pay the bills and I'd rather be a mistress/mommy to my lame clients than slave/secretary to some misogynistic creep in the so called "real world".

But you, my love

Your delicious submission is the only thing that keeps me going on days like this. I miss you terribly, the pale, luscious curve of your upthrust ass beneath my lash, the trust in your bright eyes as I slide my last finger up inside you and curl my hand into a fist. I count the long hours until I can taste you again, the hot tang of your blood on my tongue.

Yours in Eternal Darkness,

Mistress Diva Demona

Victorine pressed the yellowed letter to her lips, fingers tracing the pale scars that criss-crossed her bare chest. If she closed her eyes, she could still feel the bite of her mistress's straight razor, the heat of that hungry mouth on her burning breasts. If she opened her eyes, she could see her mistress replicated a thousand times all around her. The stark, black and white photos that were her living and her art crowded the walls with images of Diva Demona. Diva Demona on stage, sweat like diamonds in her glossy hair, black lips peeled back from acrylic fang teeth. Diva Demona poised in leather, all spike heels and attitude. Diva Demona naked and haughty, her dark bush gleaming between pale thighs. Victorine still worked shooting hopeful bands in ill-lit clubs, but her best work was of her mistress.

Beside her on the bed that she had shared with a goddess so many years ago (yesterday) was a fetishistic arrangement of love letters and memorabilia. Keys to hotel rooms and scraps of black lace. Bar napkins kissed with black lips and fragile bundles of dried roses. Rings of silver and onyx and rosaries with filigree beads. Nipple clamps and razor blades. In the dim illumination, the careful sprawl might be mistaken for a long, lanky figure reclining with one knee cocked like a dancer. On the pillow, where the figure's head would lie, Victorine had set a ragged oval of black velvet soaked in her mistress's perfume, a heady brew of cloves and roses called Night's Breath. She refreshed it every day. Its haunting aroma was the thread that bound the illusion, that gave it form. When Victorine was caught in its olfactory web, the letters and dreams became flesh and her goddess was real, the sting of her kiss and the delicious agony of her touch as true as the first time. It was as if there had never been a betrayal, and she had never been alone.

Victorine took in a deep, greedy breath, letting the fragrance transport her. The steel rings her mistress had driven through the tender flesh of Victorine's pale nipples felt cold, electric almost. Diva Demona would come again tonight. Victorine could feel it.

Mona gripped the grungy sink in the bathroom of a coffee shop in the East Village, panic sweat clammy in her armpits and on the back of her neck. She stared at her wide-eyed reflection in the cracked mirror. Until now, she had always thought the thick twists of early silver that had sprung up in her dark hair were striking and classy, a genetic tip of the hat to her Italian heritage. Now she wondered in a desperate frenzy if she shouldn't have had some kind of rinse. Minerva would think she was an old fart. She felt like an old fart in her plain black jeans and motorcycle boots. Yet trying to squeeze her new self into the old crushed velvet and leather would have been a joke, an exercise in infantilism.

"You look like a successful, independent thirty-one-year-old woman," she told her reflection. "You know who you are."

She fiddled with her belt buckle and slicked her mouth with an unnecessary extra coat of dark lipstick. With a deep breath, she grabbed her suitcase and yanked the door open.

Minerva had arrived while she was having her little moment in the john. Her heart froze and then revved like a Harley. She considered retreating to the bathroom but Minerva spotted her and there was nothing to do but wave and smile sheepishly.

Minerva rushed over and swept Mona up in a warm sandal-wood embrace. The blonde dreadlocks were gone, shaved close to the scalp, and Minerva's tattoos seemed to have multiplied, colonizing her shoulders and the back of her neck. There were tiny lines around her dark eyes and a ring through her lower lip, but the rich scent of her skin and the mischievous curl in the corner of her wide mouth were just the way Mona remembered.

"You dirty bitch," Minerva cried, holding Mona's face between callused hands. "You look absolutely edible." She coiled a silver lock of Mona's hair around her finger. "I love the Elsa Lanchester thing. It makes you look like a real writer."

Mona pulled away, laughing. "You trying to say I look old?"

Minerva pulled her close. "I'm trying to say I missed you, you silly slit!"

Tears caressed the back of Mona's throat as she hugged Minerva back.

"I missed you, too," she said.

They held each other for a good minute, content to lean into the embrace and let silent memories wash over them. Then, feeling a little wobbly, Mona let Minerva guide her to a table and order her a double espresso.

As the tide of catch-up chat flowed between them, the story of Daniel, the story of Minerva's latest butch beloved and her subsequent police-escorted departure, Mona became aware of something waiting to be said. Something important and delicate that Minerva wasn't sure if she should keep her mouth shut about. She knew her friend well in spite of ten years gone and sure enough, there came a strange break in the conversation. Mona sipped her second espresso, caffeine glittering in her veins.

"Y'know," Minerva said finally. "Not like it's my business, but I saw something really strange the other day and I thought you might like to know about it."

"Yeah, what's that?" Mona asked over the rim of her tiny cup.

"Well" Minerva toyed with her napkin, folding it into chaotic origami. "Remember our new bass player, the one I told you about. Well, she lives in the building on East 9th where you used to live. In fact, she lives in the apartment directly underneath the one you lived in. With Victorine."

The espresso in Mona's stomach gurgled, burning up the remains of her airline lunch. Just the name Victorine was enough to make her feel like eating a bottle of Rolaids.

"So anyway," Minerva continued, obviously uncomfortable, but unable to stop now. "I'm over there hanging with Nocturna and fucking with this new song when power in her place just dies. We could see lights on in other buildings outside so we figure a fuse must've blown or something. There's no light in the hallway either, so we grab a flashlight and start knocking on doors, to see if any neighbours have power. There's no one home on her floor, so we go upstairs. In the upstairs hallway, one light is on and one is off. Before I know what's happening, she's knocking on the door to your old apartment."

Minerva finished her coffee, just to have something to do.

"All the old stickers you put on the door, Siouxie and Sisters of Mercy and those weird little drawings, they were all still there. We could hear music inside so we knew there was power. Someone had to be home, but it took 'em a really long time to answer."

She paused again and Mona closed her eyes, a thin coil of nausea twisting in her stomach. She didn't want to hear it, but somehow she needed to.

"It was Victorine. She was all sweaty and she looked really nervous. She hasn't changed at all, y'know. She still wears that Cleopatra make-up and black lipstick and teases her shoe-polish hair up into this big old rat's nest, but she looks I don't know. Dirty. Like she never washes all that white make-up off, just adds more. And the apartment, I mean, what I could see of it, was like a museum, a shrine to Diva Demona."

Mona turned her face away.

"Why are you telling me this?" She could feel the thick knot of a headache tightening in her skull. "I can't help it if some rejected psycho wants to keep a roadside Elvis Museum version of my past in her bedroom. That part of me is dead and buried. Why should I care what Victorine does with her wretched excuse for a life?"

"It's not that," Minerva said softly.

"Well what then?" Mona was beginning to feel sorry she came.

"When Victorine answered the door, she" Minerva bit her lip. "She had some else with her."

"Great, the little leech found a new host."

"No," Minerva said. "It was you."

Mona frowned.

"What?"

"Well, not you now ." Minerva's eyes were dark, remembering. "It was Diva Demona."

The nausea that had been building in Mona's guts flexed like a body builder and she clenched her teeth, refusing to be sick. This was crazy. Even the thought of someone imitating her, imitating who she used to be, made her feel deeply violated, as if someone had dug up the corpse of a favourite child.

"You mean that crazy bitch has convinced someone to play the role of Diva Demona for her so she can pretend I never left?"

"It must be, although this was no bullshit dress-up. I mean, we've known each other since high school and I'm here to tell you, this chick even smelled like you. Or at least like you used to smell. If I hadn'ta known better"

Mona's nausea began to curdle into slow anger in the acidic cocoon of her belly.

"I believe it," she said. "I really do."

She paused, chewing her lip. She remembered the first time she saw Victorine. Back then she was plain old Vicky, just a mousy girl with a camera at one of the shows, looking like it took all her courage to walk in the door. She was like a blank slate, an empty vessel looking for an identity. She met Diva Demona and she thought she found it.

In the beginning, it was really flattering, the way she paid such careful attention to the things Mona liked and the things she hated. She was so subtle, the way she changed herself to fit Mona's ideals.

Mona shook her head.

"She didn't know who she was before she met me," she said, half angry, half sick. "She worked so hard to become everything I thought I wanted, the perfect slave, wanting nothing but to make me happy. She cooked and cleaned and let me torture her in every way I could imagine. She was a pretty little vampire housewife and I was queen of her world. As long as I never changed."

Minerva nodded sympathetically.

"Christ, you don't have to tell me," she said. "She was like your own version of Frankenstein's monster. You created her out of nothing, took a bland, blonde suburban chick and turned her into a Gothic vampire fan-girl from hell, and when you got bored with the game, it was too late for her because the game was all she had. It's like she used up all her energy trying to be everything you ever wanted and there's nothing left for anyone else."

Mona laid her head in her hands, guilt and anger warring inside her.

"It's not my fault," she said, hating the weak sound of her voice.

"Hey, of course not."

Minerva slid her chair around the little table and put her arm around her friend.

"Listen, I really didn't want to upset you with all this bullshit. I just thought you might want to know that someone is out there imitating you, that's all. Hey, look on the bright side. Maybe you can sue her for copyright infringement."

Mona smiled against Minerva's shoulder.

"Yeah, or go drive a stake through her heart!" Mona straightened up, fingers combing nervously through her silver-streaked hair. "Man, I thought I killed Diva Demona but that psycho bitch went and dug her up. Now my dead past is out there walking around and I feel like I oughta go shoot it in the head or something."

"Don't sweat it, kiddo. I'm sorry I brought it up." Minerva put her hand on her heart like a boy scout. "I swear it'll never happen again."

She leaned in and squeezed Mona's thigh.

"So, honey," she said, wiggling her eyebrows in preposterous imitation of some smooth-talking pick-up artist. "You wanna go back to my place and fool around?"

Mona laughed.

"Why, I thought you'd never ask!" she said.

Minerva had a session that night and so Mona struck out on her own, needing to move, to walk, to drink down the essence of the city, her long-lost lover. Some primal gravity drew her back to her old stomping grounds and she found herself walking the avenues of her misspent youth with a strange and clinging sense of unreality. It seemed the neighbourhood had changed as much as she had. So many of the old familiar bars and clubs that had nurtured Diva Demona were gone, scabbed over with rusted metal shutters or mysteriously replaced by trendy cafes full of immaculate counter-culture acolytes. The streets all seemed fake, like a low-budget movie set of themselves.

She stood on the corner of First Avenue and Ninth Street, letting the warm ache of nostalgia wash over her. There was the Korean fruit stand where she always bought oranges and cookies and cool white roses. There was the news-stand where the old Indian man used to scowl at her choice of fetish-oriented periodicals.

In a sudden rush, she was assailed by ghosts, flickering memories of all those old endless nights sparkling with dreamy, drunken glitter and arrogant passion as she stalked these streets like a high-heeled predator, marking territory, immortal in that moment like only the young and stupid can ever really be. She remembered tumbling like a kitten through the most extreme fantasies with the utter conviction that there would never be a tomorrow.

She took a deep breath. The rich smell of hot salted dough and spiced tomatoes wafting from the steamy interior of the corner pizzeria competed with the dark thundercloud of patchouli and jasmine surrounding a vendor of essential oils and the toxic-sweet exhalations of passing buses. So many memories.

Mona shook her head. It was easy to be seduced by the past, the good times. Easy to forget the way that lifestyle had nearly swallowed her with its unrelenting embrace and narcotic bite. The armour-plated image of the Vampire Goddess, the mistress of men's fear and desire, the Queen of Pain, that exotic persona that she had worked so hard to craft had become a prison, a mask fused to the soul, with no escape, no way out. With Victorine, she had to be on stage 24-7, always performing until she began to forget who she really was. Victorine could never accept her longing for simplicity, for humanity. Everything had to be like those damn photos she always took. Gorgeous and exotic and frozen in time, immune to the entropy and inanity of everyday life.

It was Mona who had crated Diva Demona, but it was Victorine who would not let her die.

Mona bit down on the soft flesh inside her cheek. No matter what Victorine decided to do with her irretrievable leftovers, Mona had already escaped, years ago. That crazy life was for ever past tense and she had grown up into a strong and unapologetic woman. A passionate writer who had mulched under the nightmares and ecstasies of the past to create fertile ground for unflinching fictions. She knew who she was.

She had missed three lights, lost in reverie. She wanted to laugh at herself, but her old apartment was less than a block away. She hustled across the street, determined to pass by that pit of hook-tipped memories without looking back. Two buildings away and then one. Her breath caught in her chest, and she cursed herself for a superstitious baby. She counted her footfalls as she walked along the coiled iron railing that fenced in the building's cluster of sad, dented garbage cans, passing the cement steps to the basement and the hot smell of fabric softener from the laundry room. Then the battered metal door with the number "3" still missing, visible only as a row of holes and an outline of older, lighter paint. She could see the ranks of mailboxes through the scratched safety glass. Her old mailbox still had the word "box" written on it by Victorine as part of some obscure joke. She stepped away from the door and leaned her back against someone's car, feeling suddenly overwhelmed. Her gaze crawled up the building's brick skin towards the window of that forgotten world, that place where she had lived a thousand lifetimes ago. The black lace and velvet curtains were faded and dusty. Mona didn't know what she was expecting to see: maybe her own younger self peering down at her. Instead, she saw nothing but the still and ratty backside of those old home-made curtains that had seemed so deliciously gloomy and perfect back then when Victorine had stitched them together from balding velvet and tattered scarves out of the dollar barrel at Dizzy Dot's used clothing store.

Mona stepped away from the car and passed her hand over her eyes. When she looked back up a skinny young Asian girl on rollerblades was opening the door with a keychain sporting more toys and trinkets than keys. She looked back over her shoulder, her glitter-glossed lips twisted into a sardonic smirk.

"You coming in or what?" she said.

Mona wanted to say no, but instead she put her palm against the open door. The metal was cool and gritty, scarred with fine scratches and scribbled names nearly worn away to nothing. The girl wheeled away down the hall without another word. Mona swallowed and went inside.

1/21/91

My Beloved Slut,

One year we have been together. It was one year ago that I first held the delicate stem of your vulnerable throat between my fingers. First felt the dance of blood beneath your white skin. First tasted the luscious nectar of your submission. You are still as precious to me as you were on that first blood-kissed night. I will always love you, my exquisite slave, dark companion of my soul.

Yours in Eternal Darkness,

Mistress Diva Demona

Victorine's lips tasted of tears and clove-sugar. She licked them repeatedly as she read the letter a third time before laying it back in place on the tattered bedspread. She stretched for the elderly tape player on her bedside table and ejected the Cure, tossing the cassette into the clutter. From the careful formation on the bed beside her, she selected a black and silver tape and slid it reverently into the machine. It was a much played copy of the only demo Diva Demona ever cut. Its title, written in silver marker, in her mistress's own dramatic hand, was "Licking Shadows".

The music unfurled in the aromatic dimness, swirling like incense around Victorine's naked body. Its gorgeous, hypnotic rhythms painted the inside of her closed eyelids with images of Diva Demona. When her mistress's voice slithered from the speakers, Victorine's flesh crawled with anticipation. Each visitation was stronger and longer-lasting than the one before it, and Victorine was sure that this time Diva Demona would come to stay.

She smelled her first. The exotic scent of Night's Breath, mingled with the subtle tang of passionate sweat and the secret musk of her thick, unshorn bush. She was afraid to open her eyes too soon, afraid that she might spoil it. Every tiny hair, every millimetre of skin was excruciatingly sensitive and she could feel the heat of her mistress's presence just seconds before she felt the touch.

Victorine gasped, tiny, secret muscles clenching deep inside her, and her eyes flew open.

Diva Demona stood over her, eyes burning and hungry black lips turned up in a sardonic smile. She was clad in torn black lace and a heavy leather corset, leather gloves and tall boots that laced all the way up her long white thighs. Her edges were hardly blurred at all, though her features still held a sort of soft-focus smoothness that bled out into the air around her.

"My most exquisite slave," she said. Her voice sounded slightly muddy, like a recording copied too many times.

Victorine's heart melted.

She slid to the floor and pressed her lips against the soft leather of her mistress's boots. She could almost taste the rich but vaguely unpleasant flavour of boot polish.

"My life for you, mistress," she whispered. "Anything for you."

Black-nailed fingers twined in the sticky snarls of Victorine's hair, pulling her up to the tips of her toes, yanking her head back to expose the scarred flesh of her throat. Her scalp burned and the knots of scar beneath her chin ached in curious anticipation, like track marks longing for the needle. She wanted to open her eyes, to drink in the living image of her beautiful mistress, but she was paralyzed with desperate desire. It didn't matter. Every angle, every curve of Diva Demona's fierce body and proud face was burned into her memory. She could see the lush black lips part, revealing shining canines like twin scalpels, seconds before she felt the caress of cold leather and the vicious, crushing pain of her mistress's bite.

Then, like a stiletto to the heart of her fantasy, the harsh voice of the doorbell.

Fighting for control outside the door of her old apartment, the doorway to the past, to the tomb of Diva Demona, the new Mona stood, hands opening and clenching without purpose. What the fuck did she think she was doing anyway? She had no desire to see Victorine or her new Diva knock-off. She told herself a thousand times to get out, to let dead dogs lie, but yet here she was. A film of chilly sweat coated her body. Her heart pirouetted madly. She had to piss. She could hear her own muffled voice, singing. She rang the bell again, following it up this time with her fist against the painted metal.

The door opened and in the thin slice of darkness, Victorine's narrow white face, first suspicious, then blank with shock.

The past ten years had been cruel to her former slave. Her hair and make-up was identical, but the face beneath was worn and plague thin. Her body beneath the tattered black kimono was hardly more than a skeleton, sharp bones straining against grey, unhealthy skin. She even smelled wrong. Under the heavy mask of her perfume lurked the thin, acrid stench of a skewed metabolism, of madness. Her unclean throat was smeared with blood.

"Victorine," Mona forced herself to say. "We need to talk."

Then, from over Victorine's knife-blade shoulder, a voice, her own. So young and arrogant, pretentious, real as flesh.

"Who dares to interrupt our pleasure?"

Mona would not allow the sickness in her belly to rise up and drown her. Anger was her only strength as she pushed the grimy door open all the way.

The apartment was unchanged, a meticulous shrine, just the way she remembered it.

And standing in the middle of the clutter with leather fists on her hips and black eyes blazing, was Diva Demona.

The air between them seemed to gel to a hideous thickness, skewing off into monstrously distorted perspective. Her own burning, kohl-smudged eyes stared back at her from the end of a howling tunnel. Greedy animal paws clutched at her intestines, pulling and twisting. She staggered to her knees in a pile of dirty black lace.

The stench of stale sweat seemed like the only normal thing in this mad new world, and Mona's floundering brain clung to this simple truth like a life preserver as the tips of her fingers began to split and bleed, spontaneous stigmata opening like crimson orchids, drops of blood slithering through the strange air towards a vast and gaping mouth (her mouth), pink tongue tasting, shiny black lips peeled back over fang teeth and there was blood in her mouth, just like it used to be, sweet and sickening, real as memories. She felt so weak, each beat of her heart like lifting a tremendous weight while Diva Demona stood above her, suddenly pure of outline like a living photograph superimposed on to the blue screen of the real world.

Mona's bloody hands seemed a thousand miles away, cold as moon rocks. Her flesh felt insubstantial, fading slowly, dissipating like some theoretical gaseous element. She felt so tired, but at her core was a white-hot rage slowly burning through the layers of narcotic lethargy. That thing walking around in Mona's cast-off skin was not her. It was nothing but a figment of Victorine's twisted imagination, clothed in fragments of dead love. Mona was real, flesh and blood, and she was furious.

"No," she said, forcing her numb lips to move. Heat pulsed though her body, bringing distant limbs back into focus. "You can't have this. I own who I am."

Mona closed her cold fingers into a fist and punched up through the apparition's pale chest.

The fine skin parted like rotted silk and a dull pain gripped Mona's struggling heart, but she would not flinch. Beneath the flesh of this lanky doppelganger lay not the heat of living organs, but a strange chaos of texture that came loose beneath her fingers. There was a screeching wail that twisted up through the octaves until it lost all resemblance to Mona's voice and when she pulled her hand free, she held a fistful of crumpled letters.

The apparition before her clutched at the gaping hole in its chest, dried rose petals falling from between its fingers. The thing's face began to lose detail, its imitation of Mona's dark eyes melting into twin holes, lipsticked mouth splitting into a reptilian slash.

Grabbing a wrought-iron candelabra from a low table (Mona remembered buying it in a second-hand shop, a gift for Victorine's nineteenth birthday), she thrust the five burning candles into the monster's softening face.

A scream that was like two voices woven together and as one faded, the other swelled until Mona thought her eardrums would burst. She squeezed her eyes shut, vertigo filling the cavity of her skull and coursing through her belly. She felt as if she were suffocating, choking on the stench of burning. When she was able to open her eyes, she saw dull orange flames swathed in black smoke. The sagging old bed was burning, careful piles of letters swallowed by the greedy flames and Victorine was screaming, beating at the fire with her bare hands. Her ratted hair caught in a burst of carnival colour and her screams became more frantic as she spun round and round like a flaming angel. In that moment, she was beautiful again and Mona remembered what it had been like to love her.

It must have been Mona who was screaming then when she sprang up and ripped the velvet curtains from the window. Throwing the heavy cloth over Victorine, she tackled the shrieking angel, knocking her to the floor.

The flames had begun a slow creep across the walls, tasting the photos and finding them good. All around them, the remnants of Diva Demona were being devoured one by one.

Victorine fought fiercely as Mona struggled to drag her out into the hallway, all the while ignoring the soft, reasonable voice in her head that whispered, Leave her. Let her die if she wants it. Let her die and Diva Demona will die with her .

It was all so preposterously B-movie-esque, monster and mad creator die together in the flaming ruin of the collapsing laboratory while the credits roll serenely over the destruction. But Mona knew that it could never be that simple. Diva Demona was a part of her and always would be. Victorine's patchwork version was gone, her festering obsession cauterized, cleansed and scraped clean. Letting her die now would be selfish and unnecessary, like shooting ex-lovers to avoid the uncomfortable experience of running into them at parties. Throat rough with ash and determination, Mona half carried, half dragged the girl she used to love out of the past and into the uncertain future.

There were already fire trucks outside the building when she staggered out into the street. Someone official took the struggling burden of Victorine from her arms and although she was still mostly covered by the singed velvet, Mona could see the skin that showed was shiny and lobster red, split bloodlessly in some places and charred black in others. Mona sat down on the kerb, light-headed and dizzy with blood pulsing and churning in her throat. She hoped that she had done the right thing.

"One more time, Mona," the low voice of the producer suggested in the intimate space inside her headphones. She turned slightly and saw Minerva giving her the thumbs up from the board. Then the music filled her head and she listened intently, waiting for her cue.

This new version of her old song was a little slower, more muscular. Nocturna and the new guitar player had both brought their own strange twists to the familiar notes, giving it a life of its own.

Mona took a deep breath and came in soft over the driving bass, her heart beating hard in her chest.

As she sang, she found herself playing around the sounds more than she ever had before, weaving in and out of the spaces between the notes.

"Do you remember how it used to be," she sang. "When you and I were one. Come home to me, my long-lost sister, and embrace the damage done."

And somewhere between her memory and her mouth, the old words gained a kind of rich melancholy that seemed to transform the simple lyrics into a love song to a lost era. It felt so good, so cleansing. When she was through, there was a sheen of tears in her eyes.

Minerva burst into the booth and pressed a wet kiss to Mona's forehead.

"That was fucking inspired!" she said, yanking one ear of the headphones away from Mona's head and then letting it snap back.

"Ow, hey!" She pulled the headphones off and smiled.

"Come on." Minerva took her chilly hand. "Don'tcha wanna hear how fabulous you are?"

Sitting in a folding chair behind the science-fiction glitter of the mixing board, Mona listened to herself. In her own ears, her voice sounded almost alien, like a living thing. There was an edge beneath the words, a rough tenderness that she had never heard before.

"There's a whole lot of living in that voice," the producer said, pushing brittle hair back from his eyes. "The old version was too pure, y'know. I don't go for that ethereal shit. You want to hear ethereal go to a fucking church. But this new version, it's meatier, more honest. I like it."

Minerva leaned in and handed Mona a pair of cassettes. One was new and unlabelled and the other was black and silver, labelled with her own handwriting.

"Why choose, when you can have both?" she said.

Mona turned the old demo over in her hands, fingers tracing the little silver roses she had drawn years ago.

"Where the hell did you dig this up?" she asked.

Minerva grinned. "You can't dig up what isn't buried, honey."

Mona slipped the tapes into her pocket, thinking of the past, of letters and lost love and the indelible images they leave behind, burned into the skin of history.

"I'll remember that," she said.

Outfangthief

Gala Blau

Gala Blau was born in Berlin in 1975. She has spent all her life in Germany, although her mother is English and she visits the United Kingdom whenever she can. She is currently a freelance jewellery designer, and she has been writing seriously for about three years. "Outfangthief is her first published story.

"A number of happy coincidences brought about the idea," explains the author. "I had been checking on the word 'migrations' in the dictionary, thinking of calling this story by that name. But when I opened the dictionary, my eye fell upon 'outfangthief. Nothing to do with vampires (although it sounds as though it might!), but it suited the chase I wanted to work on for the spine of the narrative.

" Also, about a year ago, I cut out a story in The Guardian newspaper about a botched operation performed by a 'freelance' surgeon upon a then seventy-nine-year-old devotee of apotemnphilia, a sexual fetish involving the voluntary removal of limbs for sexual gratification. I kept the idea of a mercenary surgeon, but changed the fetish to acrotomophilia, which is a fetish enjoyed by those who prefer to have sex with amputees .

"All delightful stuff, isn't it?"

At the moment the car slid out of control, Sarah Running had been trying to find a radio station that might carry some news of her crime. She had been driving for hours, risking the M6 all the way from Preston. Though she had seen a number of police vehicles, the traffic had been sufficiently busy to allow her to blend in, and anyway, Manser would hardly have guessed she would take her ex-husband's car. Michael was away on business in Stockholm and would not know of the theft for at least another week.

But Manser was not stupid. It would not be long before he latched on to her deceit.

As the traffic thinned, and night closed in on the motorway, Sarah's panic grew. She was convinced that her disappearance had been reported and she would be brought to book. When a police Range Rover tailed her from Walsall to the M42 turn-off, she almost sent her own car into the crash barriers at the centre of the road.

Desperate for cover, she followed the signs for the A14. Perhaps she could make the 130 miles to Felixstowe tonight and sell the car, try to find passage on a boat, lose herself and her daughter on the Continent. In a day they could be in Dresden, where her grandmother had lived; a battered city that would recognize some of its own and allow them some anonymity.

"Are you all right back there, Laura?"

In the rear-view mirror, her daughter might well have been a mannequin. Her features were glacial; her sunglasses formed tiny screens of animation as the sodium lights fizzed off them. A slight flattening of the lips was the only indication that all was well. Sarah bore down on her frustration. Did she understand what she had been rescued from? Sarah tried to remember what things had been like for herself as a child, but reasoned that her own relationship with her mother had not been fraught with the same problems.

"It's all okay, Laura. We'll not have any more worries in this family. I promise you."

All that before she spotted the flashing blue and red lights of three police vehicles blocking her progress east. She turned left on to another A road bound for Leicester. There must have been an accident; they wouldn't go to the lengths of forming a roadblock for her, would they? The road sucked her deep into darkness; on either side wild hedgerows and vast oily swells of countryside muscled into them. Headlamps on full beam, she could pick nothing out beyond the winding road apart from the ghostly dusting of insects attracted by the light. Sarah, though, felt anything but alone. She could see, in the corner of her eye, something blurred by speed, keeping pace with the car as it fled the police cordon. She took occasional glances to her right, but could not define their fellow traveller for the dense tangle of vegetation that bordered the road.

"Can you see that, Laura?" she asked. "What is it?"

It could have been a trick of the light, or something silver reflecting the shape of their car. Maybe it was the police. The needle on the speedometer edged up to eighty. They would have to dump the car somewhere soon, if the police were closing in on them.

"Keep a lookout for a B&B, okay?" She checked in the mirror; Laura's hand was splayed against the window, spreading mist from the star her fingers made. She was watching the obliteration of her view intently.

Sarah fumbled with the radio button. Static filled the car at an excruciating volume. Peering into the dashboard of the unfamiliar car, trying to locate the volume control, she perceived a darkening in the cone of light ahead. When she looked up, the car was drifting off the road, aiming for a tree. Righting the swerve only took the car more violently in the other direction. They were still on the road, but only just, as the wheels began to rise on the passenger side.

but i wasn't drifting off the road, was i ? Sarah caught sight of Laura, expressionless, as she was jerked from one side of the car to the other and hoped the crack she heard was not caused by her head slamming against the window.

i thought it was a tree big and black it looked just like a tree but but but And then she couldn't see much because the car went into a roll and everything became part of a violent, circular blur and at the centre of it were the misted, friendly eyes of a woman dipping into her field of view.

But but but how can a tree have a face?

She was conscious of the cold and the darkness. There was the hiss of traffic from the motorway, soughing over the fields. Her face was sticky and at first she thought it was blood, but now she smelled a lime tree and knew it was its sap being sweated on to her. Forty metres away, the road she had just left glistened with dew. She tried to move and blacked out.

Fingers sought her face. She tried to bat them away but there were many fingers, many hands. She feared they might try to pluck her eyes out and opened her mouth to scream and that was when a rat was pushed deep into her throat.

Sarah came out of the dream, smothering on the sodden jumper of her daughter, who had tipped over the driver's seat and was pressed against her mother. The flavour of blood filled her mouth. The dead weight of the child carried an inflexibility about it that shocked her. She tried to move away from the crushing bulk and the pain drew grey veils across her eyes. She gritted her teeth, knowing that to succumb now was to die, and worked at unbuckling the seat-belt that had saved her life. Once free, she slumped to her left and her daughter filled the space she had occupied. Able to breathe again, she was pondering the position in which the car had come to rest, and trying to reach Laura's hand, when she heard footsteps.

When she saw Manser lean over, his big, toothy grin seeming to fill the shattered window frame, she wished she had not dodged the police; they were preferable to this monster. But then she saw how this wasn't Manser after all. She couldn't understand how she had made the mistake. Manser was a stunted, dark man with a face like chewed tobacco. This face was smooth as soapstone and framed by thick, red tresses: a woman's face.

Other faces, less defined, swept across her vision. Everyone seemed to be moving very fast.

She said, falteringly, "Ambulance?" But they ignored her.

They lifted Laura out of the window to a cacophony of whistles and cheers. There must have been a hundred people. At least they had been rescued. Sarah would take her chances with the police. Anything was better than going home.

The faces retreated. Only the night stared in on her now, through the various rents in the car. It was cold, lonely and painful. Her face in the rear-view mirror: all smiles.

He closed the door and locked it. Cocked his head against the jamb, listened for a few seconds. Still breathing.

Downstairs, he read the newspaper, ringing a few horses for the afternoon races. He placed thousand pound bets with his bookies. In the ground-floor washroom, he took a scalding shower followed by an ice-cold one, just like James Bond. Rolex Oyster, Turnbull & Asser shirt, Armani. He made four more phone calls: Jez Knowlden, his driver, to drop by in the Jag in twenty minutes; Pamela, his wife, to say that he would be away for the weekend; Jade, his mistress, to ask her if she'd meet him in London. And then Chandos, his police mole, to see if that bitch Sarah Running had been found yet.

Sarah dragged herself out of the car just as dawn was turning the skyline milky. She had drifted in and out of consciousness all night, but the sleet that had arrived within the last half-hour was the spur she needed to try to escape. She sat a few feet away from the car, taking care not to make any extreme movements, and began to assess the damage to herself. A deep wound in her shoulder had caused most of the bleeding. Other than that, which would need stitches, she had got away with pretty superficial injuries. Her head was pounding, and dried blood formed a crust above her left eyebrow, but nothing seemed to be broken.

After quelling a moment of nausea when she tried to stand, Sarah breathed deeply of the chill morning air and looked around her. A farmhouse nestled within a crowd of trees seemed the best bet; it was too early for road users. Cautiously at first, but with gathering confidence, she trudged across the muddy, furrowed field towards the house, staring all the while at its black, arched windows, for all the world like a series of open mouths, shocked by the coming of the sun.

She had met Andrew in 1985, in the Preston library they both shared. A relationship had started, more or less, on their hands bumping each other while reaching for the same book. They had married a year later and Sarah gave birth to Laura then, too. Both of them had steady, if unspectacular work. Andrew was a security guard and she cleaned at the local school and for a few favoured neighbours. They eventually took out a mortgage on their council house on the right-to-buy scheme and bought a car, a washing machine and a television on the never-never. Then they both lost their jobs within weeks of each other. They owed seventeen thousand pounds. When the law centre they depended on heavily for advice lost its funding and closed down, Sarah had to go to hospital when she began laughing so hysterically she could not catch her breath. It was as Andrew drove her back from the hospital that they met Malcolm Manser for the first time.

His back to them, he stepped out in front of their car at a set of traffic lights and did not move when they changed in Andrew's favour. When Andrew sounded the horn, Manser turned around. He was wearing a long, newbuck trenchcoat, black Levis, black boots and a black T-shirt without an inch of give in it. His hair was black save for wild slashes of grey above his temples. His sunglasses appeared to be sculpted from his face, so seamlessly did they sit on his nose. From the trenchcoat he pulled a car jack and proceeded to smash every piece of glass and dent every panel on the car. It took about twenty seconds.

"Mind if I talk to you for a sec?" he asked, genially, leaning against the crumbled remains of the driver's side window. Andrew was too shocked to say anything. His mouth was very wet. Tiny cubes of glass glittered in his hair. Sarah was whimpering, trying to open her door, which was sealed shut by the warp of metal.

Manser went on: "You have 206 pieces of bone in your body, fine sir. If my client, Mr Anders, does not receive seventeen grand, plus interest at ten per cent a day — which is pretty bloody generous if you ask me — by the end of the week, I will guarantee that after half an hour with me, your bone tally will be double that. And that yummy piece of bitch you've got ripening back home. Laura? I'll have her. You test me. I dare you."

He walked away, magicking the car jack into the jacket and giving them an insouciant wave.

A week later, Andrew set himself on fire in the car which he had locked inside the garage. By the time the fire services got to him he was a black shape, thrashing in the back seat. Set himself on fire . Sarah refused to believe that. She was sure that Manser had murdered him. Despite their onerous circumstances, Andrew was not the suicidal type. Laura was everything to him; he'd not leave this world without securing a little piece of it for her.

What then? A nightmare time. A series of safe houses that were anything but. Early morning flits from dingy addresses in Bradford, Cardiff, Bristol and Walsall. He was stickier than anything Bostik might produce. "Bug out," they'd tell her, these kind old men and women, having settled on a code once used by soldiers in some war or another. "Bug out." Manser had contacts everywhere. Arriving in a town that seemed too sleepy even to acknowledge her presence, she'd notice someone out of whack with the place, someone who patently did not fit in but had been planted to watch out for her. Was she so transparent? Her migrations had been random; there was no pattern to unpick. And yet she had stayed no longer than two days in any of these towns. Sarah had hoped that returning to Preston might work for her in a number of ways. Manser wouldn't be expecting it for one thing; for another, Michael, her ex-husband, might be of some help. When she went to visit him though, he paid her short shrift.

"You still owe me fifteen hundred quid," he barked at her. "Pay that off before you come grovelling at my door." She asked if she could use his toilet and passed any number of photographs of Gabrielle, his new squeeze. On the way, she stole from a hook on the wall the spare set of keys to his Alfa Romeo.

It took twenty minutes to negotiate the treacherous field. A light frost had hardened some of the furrows while other grooves were boggy. Sarah scuffed and skidded as best she could, clambering over the token fence that bordered an overgrown garden someone had used as an unauthorized tipping area. She picked her way through sofa skeletons, shattered TV sets, collapsed flat-pack wardrobes and decaying, pungent black bin-bags.

It was obvious that nobody was living here.

Nevertheless, she stabbed the doorbell with a bloody finger. Nothing appeared to ring from within the building. She rapped on the door with her knuckles, but half-heartedly. Already she was scrutinizing the windows, looking for another way in. A narrow path strangled by brambles led around the edge of the house to a woefully neglected rear garden. Scorched colours bled into each other, thorns and convulvulus savaged her ankles as she pushed her way through the tangle. All the windows at the back of the house had been broken, probably by thrown stones. A yellow spray of paint on a set of storm doors that presumably led directly into the cellar picked out a word she didn't understand: scheintod . What was that? German? She cursed herself for not knowing the language of her elders, not that it mattered. Someone had tried to obscure the word, scratching it out of the wood with a knife, but the paint was reluctant. She tried the door but it was locked.

Sarah finally gained access via a tiny window that she had to squeeze through. The bruises and gashes on her body cried out as she toppled into a gloomy larder. Mingled into the dust was an acrid, spicy smell; racks of ancient jars and pots were labelled in an extravagant hand: cumin, coriander, harissa, chilli powder . There were packs of flour and malt that had been ravaged by vermin. Dried herbs dusted her with a strange, slow rain as she brushed past them. Pickling jars held back their pale secrets within dull, lustreless glass.

She moved through the larder, arms outstretched, her eyes becoming accustomed to the gloom. Something arrested the door as she swung it outwards. A dead dog, its fur shaved from its body, lay stiffly in the hallway. At first she thought it was covered in insects, but the black beads were unmoving. They were nicks and slashes in the flesh. The poor thing had been drained. Sarah recoiled from the corpse and staggered further along the corridor. Evidence of squatters lay around her in the shape of fast-food packets, cigarette ends, beer cans and names signed in the ceiling by the sooty flames of candles. A rising stairwell vanished into darkness. Her shoes crunched and squealed on plaster fallen from the bare walls.

"Hello?" she said, querulously. Her voice made as much impact on the house as a candyfloss mallet. It died on the walls, absorbed so swiftly it was as if the house was sucking her in, having been starved of human company for so long. She ascended to the first floor. The carpet that hugged the risers near the bottom gave way to bare wood. Her heels sent dull echoes ringing through the house. If anyone lived here, they would know they were not alone now. The doors opened on to still bedrooms shrouded by dust. There was nothing up here.

"Laura?" And then more stridently, as if volume alone could lend her more spine: " Laura !"

Downstairs she found a cosy living-room with a hearth filled with ashes. She peeled back a dust cover from one of the sofas and lay down. Her head pounded with delayed shock from the crash and the mustiness of her surroundings. She thought of her baby.

It didn't help that Laura seemed to be going off the rails at the time of their crisis. Also her inability, or reluctance, to talk of her father's death worried Sarah almost as much as the evidence of booze and drug use. At each of the safe houses, it seemed there was a Laura trap in the shape of a young misfit, eager to drag someone down with him or her. Laura gave herself to them all, as if glad of a mate to hasten her downward spiral. There had been one boy in particular, Edgar a difficult name to forget whose influence had been particularly invidious. They had been holed up in a Toxteth bedsit. Sarah had been listening to City FM. A talk-show full of languid, catarrhal Liverpool accents that was making her drowsy. The sound of a window smashing had dragged her from slumber. She caught the boy trying to drag her daughter through the glass. She had shrieked at him and hauled him into the room. He could have been no older than ten or eleven. His eyes were rifle green and would not stay still. They darted around like steel bearings in a bagatelle game. Sarah had drilled him, asking him if he had been sent from Manser. Panicked, she had also been firing off instructions to Laura, that they must pack immediately and be ready to go within the hour. It was no longer safe.

And then: Laura, crawling across the floor, holding on to Edgar's leg, pulling herself up, her eyes fogged with what could only be ecstasy. Burying her face in Edgar's crotch. Sarah had shrank from her daughter, horrified. She watched as Laura's free hand travelled beneath her skirt and began to massage at the gusset of her knickers while animal sounds came from her throat. Edgar had grinned at her, showing off a range of tiny, brilliant white teeth. Then he had bent low, whispering something in Laura's ear before charging out of the window with a speed that Sarah thought could only end in tragedy. But when she rushed to the opening, she couldn't see him anywhere.

It had been the devil's own job trying to get her ready to flee Liverpool. She had grown wan and weak and couldn't keep her eyes off the window. Dragging her on to a dawn coach from Mount Pleasant, Laura had been unable to stop crying and as the day wore on, complained of terrible thirst and unbearable pain behind her eyes. She vomited twice and the driver threatened to throw them off the coach unless Laura calmed down. Somehow, Sarah was able to pacify her. She found that shading her from the sunlight helped. A little later, slumped under the seat, Laura fell asleep.

Sarah had begun to question ever leaving Preston in the first place. At least there she had the strength that comes with knowing your environment. Manser had been a problem in Preston but the trouble was that he remained a problem. At least back there, it was just him that she needed to be wary of. Now it seemed Laura's adolescence was going to cause her more of a problem than she believed could be possible. But at the back of her mind, Sarah knew she could never have stayed in her home town. What Manser had proposed, sidling up to her at Andrew's funeral, was that she allow Laura to work for him, whoring. He guaranteed an excellent price for such a perfectly toned, tight bit of girl.

"Men go for that," he'd whispered, as she tossed a fistful of soil on to her husband's coffin. "She's got cracking tits for a thirteen-year-old. High. Firm. Nipples up top. Quids in, I promise you. You could have your debt sorted out in a couple of years. And I'll break her in for you. Just so's you know it won't be some stranger nicking her cherry."

That night, they were out of their house, a suitcase full of clothes between them.

"You fucking beauty ."

Manser depressed the call-end button on his Motorola and slipped the phone into his jacket. Leaning forward, he tapped his driver on the shoulder. "Jez. Get this. Cops found the bitch's car in a fucking field outside Leicester. She'd totalled it."

He slumped back in his seat. The radio masts at Rugby swung by on his left, lights glinting through a thin fog. "Fuck London. You want the A5199. Warp Factor two. And when we catch the minging little tart, we'll show her how to have a road accident. Do the job properly for her. Laura though, Laura comes with us. Nothing happens to Laura. Got it?"

At Knowlden's assent, Manser closed his eyes. This year's number three had died just before he left home. It had been a pity. He liked that one. The sutures on her legs had healed in such a way as to chafe his thigh as he thrust into her. But there had been an infection that he couldn't treat. Pouring antibiotics down her hadn't done an awful lot of good. Gangrene set in. Maybe Laura could be his number four. Once Doctor Losh had done his bit, he would ask him the best way to prevent infection. He knew what Losh's response would be: let it heal . But he liked his meat so very rare when he was fucking it. He liked to see a little blood.

Sarah woke up to find that her right eye had puffed closed. She caught sight of herself in a shard of broken mirror on the wall. Blood caked half her face and the other half was black with bruises. Her hair was matted. Not for the first time, she wondered if her conviction that Laura had died was misplaced. Yet in the same breath, she couldn't bear to think that she might now be suffering with similar, or worse, injuries. Her thoughts turned to her saviours — if that was what they were. And if so, then why hadn't she been rescued?

She relived the warmth and protection that had enveloped her when those willowy figures had reached inside the car and plucked out her child. Her panic at the thought of Laura either dead or as good as had been ironed flat. She felt safe and, inexplicably, had not raged at this outrageous kidnap; indeed, she had virtually sanctioned it. Perhaps it had been the craziness inspired by the accident, or endorphins stifling her pain that had brought about her indifference. Still, what should have been anger and guilt was neutralized by the compulsion that Laura was in safe hands. What she didn't want to examine too minutely was the feeling that she missed the rescue party more than she did her own daughter.

Refreshed a little by her sleep, but appalled at the catalogue of new aches and pains that jarred each movement, Sarah made her way back to the larder where she found some crackers in an airtight tin. Chewing on these, she revisited the hallway and dragged open the heavy curtains, allowing some of the late afternoon light to invade. Almost immediately she saw the door under the stairs. She saw how she had missed it earlier; it was hewn from the same dark wood and there was no door handle as such, just a little recess to hook your fingers into. She tried it but it wouldn't budge. Which meant it was locked from the inside. Which meant that somebody must be down there.

"Laura?" she called, tapping on the wood with her fingernails. "Laura, it's Mum. Are you in there?"

She listened hard, her ear flush against the crack of the jamb. All she could hear was the gust of subterranean breezes moving through what ought to be the cellar. She must check it out; Laura could be down there, bleeding her last.

Sarah hunted down the kitchen. A large pine table sat at one end of the room, a dried orange with a heart of mould at its centre. She found a stack of old newspapers bound up with twine from the early 1970s by a back door that was forbiddingly black and excessively padlocked. Ransacking the drawers and cupboards brought scant reward. She was about to give in when the suck of air from the last yanked cupboard door brought a small screwdriver rolling into view. She grabbed the tool and scurried back to the cellar door.

Manser stayed Knowlden with a finger curled around his lapel. "Are you carrying?"

Knowlden had parked the car off the road on the opposite side to the crash site. Now the two men were standing by the wreck of the Alfa. Knowlden had spotted the house and suggested they check it out. If Sarah and her daughter had survived the crash — and the empty car suggested that they had — then they might have found some neighbourly help.

"I hope you fucking are," Manser warned.

"I'm carrying okay. Don't sweat it."

Manser's eyebrows went north. "Don't tell me to not sweat it, pup. Or you'll find yourself doing seventy back up the motorway without a fucking car underneath you."

The sun sinking fast, they hurried across the field, constantly checking the road behind them as they did so. Happy that nobody had seen them, Manser nodded his head in the direction of the front door. "Kick the mud off your boots on that bastard," he said.

It was 5:14 p.m.

Sarah was halfway down the cellar stairs and wishing she had a torch with her when she heard the first blows raining down on the door. She was about to return to the hallway when she heard movement from below. A lot of movement. Creaks and whispers and hisses. There was a sound as of soot trickling down a flue. A chatter: teeth in the cold? A sigh.

"Laura?"

A chuckle.

The door gave in just before Knowlden was about to. His face was greasy with sweat and hoops of dampness spoiled his otherwise pristine shirt.

"Gun," Manser said, holding his hand out. Knowlden passed him the weapon, barely disguising his disdain for his boss. "You want to get some muesli down you, mate," Manser said. "Get yourself fit." He checked the piece was loaded and entered the house, muzzle pointing ahead of him, cocked horizontally. Something he'd done since seeing Brad Pitt do the same thing in Se7en .

"Knock, knock," he called out. "Daddy's home."

Sarah heard, just before all hell broke loose, Laura's voice, firm and even, say: "Do not touch her." Then she was knocked back on the stairs by a flurry of black leather and she was aware only of bloody-eyed, pale-skinned figures flocking past her. And teeth. She saw each leering mouth as if in slow motion, dark lips peeled back to reveal teeth so white they might have been sculpted from ice.

She thought she saw Laura among them and tried to grab hold of her jumper but she was left clutching air as the scrum piled into the hallway, whooping and screaming like a gang of kids let out early from school. When the shooting started she couldn't tell if the screaming had changed in pitch at all, whether it had become more panicked. But at the top of the stairs she realized she was responsible for most of it. There appeared to be some kind of stand-off. Manser, the fetid little sniffer dog of a man, was waving a gun around while his henchman clenched and unclenched his hands, eyeing up the opposition, which was substantial. Sarah studied them properly for the first time, these women who had rescued her baby and left her to die in the car. And yet proper examination was beyond her. There were four of them, she thought. Maybe five. They moved around and against each other so swiftly, so lissomely that she couldn't be sure. They were like a flesh knot. Eyes fast on their enemy, they guarded each other with this mesmerizing display. It was so seamless it could have been choreographed.

But now she saw that they were not just protecting each other. There was someone at the heart of the knot, appearing and disappearing in little ribbons and teasers of colour. Sarah need see only a portion of face to know they were wrapped around her daughter.

"Laura," she said again.

Manser said, "Who the fuck are these clowns? Have we just walked into Goth night down the local student bar, or what?"

"Laura," Sarah said again, ignoring her pursuer. "Come here."

"Everyone just stand back. I'm having the girl. And to show you I'm not just pissing in my paddling pool" Manser took aim and shot one of the women through the forehead.

Sarah covered her mouth as the woman dropped. The three others seemed to fade somewhat, as if their strength had been affected.

"Jez," said Manser. "Get the girl."

Sarah leaped at Knowlden as he strode into the pack but a stiff arm across her chest knocked her back against the wall, winding her. He extricated Laura from her guardians and dragged her kicking back to his boss.

Manser was nodding his head. "Nice work, Jez. You can have jelly for afters tonight. Get her outside."

To Sarah he said, "Give her up." And then he was gone.

Slumped on the floor, Sarah tried to blink a fresh trickle of blood from her eyes. Through the fluid, she thought she could see the women crowding around their companion. She thought she could see them lifting her head as they positioned themselves around her. But no. No. She couldn't accept that she was seeing what they began to do to her then.

Knowlden fell off the pace as they ran towards the car. Manser was half dragging, half carrying Laura who was thrashing around in his arms.

"I'm nearly ready," she said. "I'll bite you! I'll bite you, I swear to God."

"And I'll scratch your eyes out," Manser retorted. "Now shut the fuck up. Jesus, can't you do what girls your age do in the movies? Faint, or something?"

At the car, he bundled her into the boot and locked it shut. Then he fell against the side of the car and tried to control his breathing. He could just see Knowlden plodding towards him in the dark. Manser could hear his squealing lungs even though he had another forty metres or so to cover.

"Come on Jez, for fuck's sake! I've seen mascara run faster thah that."

At thirty metres, Manser had a clearer view of his driver as he died.

One of the women they had left behind in the house was moving across the field at a speed that defied logic. Her hands were outstretched and her nails glinted like polished arrowheads. Manser moved quickly himself when he saw how she slammed into his chauffeur. He was in third gear before he realized he hadn't taken the handbrake off and he was laughing harder than he had ever laughed in his life. Knowlden's heart had been skewered on the end of her claws like a piece of meat on a kebab. He didn't stop laughing until he hit the Ml, southbound.

Knowlden was forgotten. All he had on his mind now was Laura, naked on the slab, her body marked out like the charts on a butcher's wall.

Dazed, Sarah was helped to her feet. Their hands held her everywhere and nowhere, moving along her body as soft as silk. She tried to talk but whenever she opened her mouth, someone's hand, cold and rank, slipped over it. She saw the pattern in the curtains travel by in a blur though she could not feel her feet on the floor. Then the night was upon them, and the frost in the air sang around her ears as she was swept into the sky, embedded at the centre of their slippery mesh of bodies, smelling their clothes and the scent of something ageless and black, lifting off the skin like forbidden perfume. Is she all right now ? she wanted to ask, but her words wouldn't form in the ceaseless blast of cold air. Sarah couldn't count the women that cavorted around her. She drifted into unconsciousness thinking of how they had opened the veins in their chests for her, how the charge of fluid had engulfed her face, bubbling on her tongue and nostrils like dark wine. How her eyes had flicked open and rolled back into their sockets with the unspeakable rapture of it all.

Having phoned ahead, Manser parked the car at midnight on South Wharf Road, just by the junction with Praed Street. He was early, so instead of going directly to the dilapidated pub on the corner he sauntered to the bridge over Paddington Basin and stared up at the Westway, hoping for calm. The sounds emanating from that elevated sweep were anything but soothing. The mechanical sigh of speeding vehicles reminded him only of the way those witches' mouths had breathed, snake-like jaws unhinged as though in readiness to swallow him whole. The hiss of tyres on rain-soaked tarmac put him in mind of nothing but the wet air that had sped from Knowlden's chest when he was torn open.

By the time he returned, he saw in the pub a low-wattage bulb turning the glass of an upstairs window milky. He went to the door and tapped on it with a coin in a prearranged code. Then he went back to the car and opened the boot. He wrestled with Laura and managed to clamp a hand over her mouth, which she bit, hard. Swearing, he dragged a handkerchief from his pocket and stuffed it in her mouth, punching her twice to get her still. The pain in his hand was mammoth. She had teeth like razors. Flaps of skin hung off his palm; he was bleeding badly. Woozy at the sight of the wound, he staggered with Laura to the door, which was now open. He went through it and kicked it shut, checking the street to make sure he hadn't been seen. Upstairs, Losh was sitting in a chair containing more holes than stuffing.

"This was a good boozer before it was closed down," Manser said, his excitement unfolding deep within him.

"Was," Losh said, keeping his eyes on him. He wore a butcher's apron that was slathered with blood. He smoked a cigarette, the end of which was patterned with bloody prints from his fingers. A comma of blood could be mistaken for a kiss-curl on his forehead. "Everything changes."

"You don't," Manser said. "Christ. Don't you ever wash?"

"What's the point? I'm a busy man."

"How many years you been struck off?"

Losh smiled. "Didn't anybody ever warn you not to piss off the people you need help from?"

Manser swallowed his distaste of the smaller man. "Nobody warns me nothing," he spat. "Can't we get on?"

Losh stood up and stretched. "Cash," he said, luxuriously.

Manser pulled a wad from his jacket. "There's six grand there. As always."

"I believe you. I'd count it but the bank get a bit miffed if they get blood on their bills."

"Why don't you wear gloves?"

"The magic. It's all in the fingers." Losh gestured towards Laura. "This the one?"

"Of course."

"Pretty thing. Nice legs." Losh laughed. Manser closed his eyes. Losh said, "What you after?"

Manser said, "The works."

Wide eyes from Losh. "Then let's call it eight thou."

A pause. Manser said, "I don't have it with me. I can get it tomorrow. Keep the car tonight. As collateral."

Losh said, "Done."

The first incision. Blood squirted up the apron, much brighter than the stains already painted upon it. A coppery smell filled the room. The pockets of the pool table upon which Laura was spread were filled with beer towels. "Soft tissue?"

Manser's voice was dry. He needed a drink. His cock was as hard as a house brick. "As much off as possible." "She won't last long," Losh said. Manser stared at him. "She'll last long enough." Losh said, "Got a number five in mind already?" Manser didn't say a word. Losh reached behind him and picked up a Samsonite suitcase. He opened it and pulled out a hacksaw. Its teeth entertained the light and flung it in every direction. At least Losh kept his tools clean.

The operation took four hours. Manser fell asleep at one point and dreamed of his hand overpowering the rest of his body, dragging him around the city while the mouth that slavered and snarled at the centre of his palm cupped itself around the stomachs of passers-by and devoured them.

He wakened, rimed with perspiration, to see Losh chewing an errant hangnail and tossing his instruments back into the suit-case. Laura was wrapped in white bath towels. They were crimson now.

"Is she okay?" Manser asked. Losh's laughter in reply was infectious and soon he was at it too.

"Do you want the offcuts?" Losh asked, wiping his eyes and jerking a thumb at a bucket tastefully covered with a dishcloth.

"You keep them," Manser said. "I've got to be off."

Losh said, "Who opened the window?"

Nobody had opened the window; the lace curtains fluttering inward were being pushed by the bulge of glass. Losh tore them back just as the glass shattered in his face. He screamed and fell backwards, tripping on the bucket and sprawling on to the floor.

To Manser it seemed that strips of the night were pouring in through the broken window. They fastened themselves to Losh's face and neck and munched through the flesh like a caterpillar at a leaf. His screams were low and already being disguised by blood as his throat filled. He began to choke but managed one last, hearty shriek as a major blood vessel parted, spraying colour all around the room with the abandon of an unmanned hosepipe.

How can they breathe with their heads so deep inside him ? Manser thought, hypnotized by the violence. He felt something dripping on his brow. Touching his face with his fingers, he brought them away to find them awash with blood. He had time to register, as he looked up at the ceiling, the mouth as it yawned, dribbling with lymph, the head as it vibrated with unfettered anticipation. And then the woman dropped on him, ploughing her jaws through the meat of his throat and ripping clear. He saw his flesh disappear down her gullet with a spasm that was almost beautiful. But then his sight filled with red and he could understand no more.

She had been back home for a day. She couldn't understand how she had got here. She remembered being born from the warmth of her companions and standing up to find both men little more than pink froth filling their suits. One of the men had blood on his hands and a cigarette smouldered between his fingers. The hand was on the other side of the room, though. She saw the bloody, tiny mound of towels on the pool table. She saw the bucket; the dishcloth had shifted, revealing enough to tell her the game. Two toes was enough. She didn't need to be drawn a picture.

And then somehow she found herself outside. And then on Edgware Road where a pretty young woman with dark hair and a woven shoulder bag gave her a couple of pounds so that she could get the tube to Euston. And then a man smelling of milk and boot polish she fucked in a shop doorway for her fare north. And then Preston, freezing around her in the early morning as if it were formed from winter itself. She had half expected Andrew to poke his head around the corner of their living-room to say hello, the tea's on, go and sit by the fire and I'll bring some to you.

But the living-room was cold and bare. She found sleep at the time she needed it most, just as her thoughts were about to coalesce around the broken image of her baby. She was crying because she couldn't remember what her face looked like.

When she revived, it was dark again. It was as if daylight had forsaken her. She heard movement towards the back of the house. Outside, in the tiny, scruffy garden, a cardboard box, no bigger than the type used to store shoes, made a stark shape amid the surrounding frost. The women were hunched on the back fence, regarding her with owlish eyes. They didn't speak. Maybe they couldn't.

One of them swooped down and landed by the box. She nudged it forward with her hand, as a deer might coax a newborn to its feet. Sarah felt another burst of unconditional love and security fill the gap between them all. Then they were gone, whipping and twisting far into the sky, the consistency, the trickiness of smoke.

Sarah took the box into the living-room with her and waited. Hours passed; she felt herself become more and more peaceful. She loved her daughter and she hoped Laura knew that. As dawn began to brush away the soot from the sky, Sarah leaned over and touched the lid. She wanted so much to open it and say a few words, but she couldn't bring herself to do it.

In the end, she didn't need to. Whatever remained inside the box managed to do it for her.

My Brother's Keeper

Pat Cadigan

Pat Cadigan is the two-time winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the author of twelve books. Her fiction is included in many anthologies, including The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, Dark Terrors 3, The Ex Files, Disco 2000 and A Whisper of Blood, and her short stories have been collected in Patterns. Born in Schenectady, New York, and formerly a resident of Kansas, she now lives and works in North London .

"Addiction really scares me," she reveals. "There are many different drugs, but addiction is addiction is addiction. It's harder to kill than a vampire and a whole lot hungrier, and it doesn't have limitations like sunlight or garlic or religious symbols.

" 'My Brother's Keeper' was a story I had been writing on and off for several years before I finally finished it. It grew out of a rather unsavoury experience I had back in my extreme and misspent youth, in a time before AIDS. Heroin chic, my ass."

All this happened a long time ago. Exactly when doesn't matter, not in a time when you can smoke your coke and Mommy and Daddy lock their grass in the liquor cabinet so Junior can't toke up at their expense. I used to think of it as a relevant episode, from a time when lots of things were relevant. It wasn't long before everyone got burned out on relevance. Hey, don't feel too guilty, bad, smug, perplexed. There'll be something else, you know there will. It's coming in, right along with your ship.

In those days, I was still in the midst of my triumphant rise out of the ghetto (not all white chicks are found under a suburb). I was still energized and revelling at the sight of upturned faces beaming at me, saying, "Good luck, China, you're gonna be something some day!" as I floated heavenward attached to a college scholarship. My family's pride wore out some time after my second visit home. Higher education was one thing, high-mindedness was another. I was puffed up with delusions of better and my parents kept sticking pins in me, trying to make the swelling go down so they could see me better. I stopped going home for a while. I stopped writing, too. But my mother's letters came as frequently as ever: Your sister Rose is pregnant again, pray God she doesn't lose this one, it could kill her; your sister Aurelia is skipping school, running around, I wish you'd come home and talk to her; and your brother Joe your brother Joe your brother Joe .

My brother Joe. As though she had to identify him. I had one brother and that was Joe. My brother Joe, the original lost boy. Second oldest in the family, two years older than me, first to put a spike in his arm. Sometimes we could be close, Joe and me, squeezed between the brackets of Rose and Aurelia. He was a boner, the lone male among the daughters. Chip off the old block. Nature's middle finger to my father.

My brother Joe, the disposable man. He had no innate talents, not many learned skills other than finding a vein. He wasn't good-looking and junkies aren't known for their scintillating personalities or their sexual prowess or their kind and generous hearts. The family wasn't crazy about him; Rose wouldn't let him near her kids, Aurelia avoided him. Sometimes I wasn't sure how deep my love for him went. Junkies need love but they need a fix more. Between fixes, he could find the odd moment to wave me goodbye from the old life.

Hey, Joe , I'd say. What the hell, huh ?

If you have to ask, babe, you don't really want to know . Already looking for another vein. Grinning with the end of a belt between his teeth.

My brother Joe was why I finally broke down and went home between semesters instead of going to suburban Connecticut with my room-mate. Marlene had painted me a bright picture of scenic walks through pristine snow, leisurely shopping trips to boutiques that sold Mucha prints and glass beads, and then, hot chocolate by the hearth, each of us wrapped in an Afghan crocheted by a grandmother with prematurely red hair and an awful lot of money. Marlene admitted her family was far less relevant than mine, but what were vacations for? I agreed and was packing my bag when Joe's postcard arrived.

Dear China, They threw me out for the last time . That was all, on the back of a map of Cape Cod. Words were something else not at his command. But he'd gone to the trouble of buying a stamp and sending it to the right address.

The parents had taken to throwing him out the last year I'd lived at home. There hadn't been anything I could do about it then and I didn't know what Joe thought I could do about it now but I called it off with Marlene anyway. She said she'd leave it open in case I could get away before classes started again. Just phone so Mummy could break out the extra linens. Marlene was a good sort. She survived relevance admirably. In the end, it was hedonism that got her.

I took a bus home, parked my bag in a locker in the bus station and went for a look around. I never went straight to my parents' apartment when I came back. I had to decompress before I went home to be their daughter, the stuck-up college snot-nose.

It was already dark and the temperature well south of freezing. Old snow lined the empty streets. You had to know where to look for the action in winter. Junkies wore coats for only as long as it took to sell them. What the hell, junkies were always cold anyway. I toured; no luck. It was late enough that anyone wanting to score already had and was nodding off somewhere. Streep's Lunch was one place to go after getting loaded, so I went there.

Streep's wasn't even half full, segregated in the usual way straights by the windows, hopheads near the juke-box and toilets, cops and strangers at the U-shaped counter in the middle. Jake Streep didn't like the junkies but he didn't bother them unless they nodded out in the booths. The junkies tried to keep the juke-box going so they'd stay awake but apparently no one had any quarters right now. The black and purple machine (Muzik Master) stood silent, its lights flashing on and off inanely.

Joe wasn't there but some of his friends were crammed into a booth, all on the nod. They didn't notice me come in any more than they noticed Jake Streep was just about ready to throw them out. Only one of them seemed to be dressed warmly enough; I couldn't place him. I just vaguely recognized the guy he was half leaning on. I slid into the booth next to the two people sitting across from them, a lanky guy named Farmer and Stacey, who functioned more like his shadow than his girlfriend. I gave Farmer a sharp poke in the ribs and kicked one of the guys across from me. Farmer came to life with a grunt, jerking away from me and rousing Stacey.

"I'm awake, chrissakes." Farmer's head bobbed while he tried to get me in focus. A smile of realization spread across his dead face. "Oh. China. Hey, wow." He nudged Stacey. "It's China."

"Where?" Stacey leaned forward heavily. She blinked at me several times, started to nod out again and revived. "Oh. Wow. You're back. What happened?" She smeared her dark hair out of her face with one hand.

"Someone kicked me," said the guy I vaguely knew. I recognized him now. George Something-Or-Other. I'd gone to high school with him.

"Classes are out," I told Stacey.

Perplexed, she started to fade away.

"Vacation," I clarified.

"Oh. Okay." She hung on Farmer's shoulder as though they were in deep water and she couldn't swim. "You didn't quit?"

"I didn't quit."

She giggled. "That's great. Vacation. We never get vacation. We have to be us all the time."

"Shut up." Farmer made a half-hearted attempt to push her away.

"Hey. You kick me?" asked George Whoever, scratching his face.

"Sorry. It was an accident. Anyone seen Joe lately?"

Farmer scrubbed his cheek with his palm. "Ain't he in here?" He tried to look around. "I thought" His bloodshot gaze came back to me blank. In the act of turning his head, he'd forgotten what we were talking about.

"Joe isn't here. I checked."

"You sure?" Farmer's head dropped. "Light's so bad in here, you can't see nothing, hardly."

I pulled him up against the back of the seat. "I'm sure, Farmer. Do you remember seeing him at all lately?"

His mouth opened a little. A thought was struggling through the warm ooze of his mind. "Oh. Yeah, yeah . Joe's been gone a couple days." He rolled his head around to Stacey. "Today Thursday?"

Stacey made a face. "Hey, do I look like a fuckin' calendar to you?"

The guy next to George woke up and smiled at nothing. "Everybody get off?" he asked. He couldn't have been more than fifteen and still looked pretty good, relatively clean and healthy. The only one with a coat. Babe in Joyland.

"When did you see Joe last, Farmer?" I asked.

"Who?" Farmer frowned with woozy suspicion.

"Joe. My brother Joe."

"Joe's your brother?" said the kid, grinning like a drowsy angel. "I know Joe. He's a friend of mine."

"No, he's not," I told him. "Do you know where he is?"

"Nope." He slumped against the back of the seat and closed his eyes.

"Hey," said Stacey, "you wanna go smoke some grass? That's a college drug, ain't it? Tommy Barrow's got some. Let's all go to Tommy Barrow's and smoke grass like college kids."

"Shut up" said Farmer irritably. He seemed a little more alert now. "Tommy's outa town, I'm tryin' to think here." He put a heavy hand on my shoulder. "The other day, Joe was around. With this older woman. Older, you know?"

"Where?"

"You know, around. Just around. No place special. In here. Driving around. Just around."

I yawned. Their lethargy was contagious but I hadn't started scratching my face with sympathetic quinine itch yet. "Who is she? Anyone know her?"

"His connection. His new connection," Stacey said in a sudden burst of lucidity. "I remember. He said she was going to set him up nice. He said she had some good sources."

"Yeah. Yeah ," Farmer said. "That's it. She's with some distributor or something."

"What's her name?"

Farmer and Stacey looked at me. Names, sure. "Blonde," said Farmer. "Lotta money."

"And a car," George put in, sitting up and wiping his nose on his sleeve. "Like a Caddy or something."

"Caddy, shit. You think anything ain't a Volkswagen's a Caddy," Farmer said.

"It's a big white Caddy," George insisted. "I saw it."

"I saw it, too, and it ain't no Caddy."

"Where'd you see it?" I asked George.

"Seventeenth Street." He smiled dreamily. "It's gotta tape deck."

" Where on Seventeenth?"

"Like near Foster Circle, down there. Joe said she's got two speakers in the back. That's so cool."

"Okay, thanks. I guess I'll have a look around."

"Whoa." Farmer grabbed my arm. "It ain't there now . You kidding? I don't know where they are. Nobody knows."

"Farmer, I've got to find Joe. He wrote me at school. The parents threw him out and I've got to find him."

"Hey, he's okay. I told you, he's with this woman. Staying with her, probably."

I started to get up.

"Okay, okay" Farmer said. "Look, we're gonna see Priscilla tomorrow. She knows how to find him. Tomorrow."

I sighed. With junkies, everything was going to happen tomorrow. "When will you be seeing her?"

"Noon. You meet us here, okay?"

"Okay."

Streep glared at me as I left. At least the junkies bought coffee.

I thought about going down to Foster Circle anyway. It was a traffic island some idealistic mayor had decided to beautify with grass and flowers and park benches. Now it was just another junkie hangout the straights avoided even in daytime. It wasn't likely anyone would be hanging out there now, certainly not anyone who wanted to see me. I trudged back to the bus station, picked up my bag, and went to my parents' place.

I hadn't told my parents to expect me but they didn't seem terribly surprised when I let myself in. My father was watching TV in the living-room while my mother kept busy in the kitchen. The ail-American nuclear salt of the earth. My father didn't look at me as I peeled off my coat and flopped down in the old green easy-chair.

"Decided to come home after all, did you?" he said after a minute. There was no sign of Joe in his long, square face, which had been jammed in an expression of disgust since my sister Rose had had her first baby three months after her wedding. On the television, a woman in a fancy restaurant threw a drink in a man's face. "Thought you were going to Connecticut with your rich-bitch girlfriend."

I shrugged.

"Come back to see him, didn't you?" He reached for one of the beer cans on the end table, giving it a little shake to make sure there was something in it. "What'ud he do, call you?"

"I got a postcard." On TV the drink-throwing woman was now a corpse. A detective was frowning down at her. Women who threw drinks always ended up as corpses; if she'd watched enough TV, she'd have known that.

"A postcard. Some big deal. A postcard from a broken-down junkie. We're only your parents and we practically have to get down on our knees and beg you to come home."

I took a deep breath. "Glad to see you, too. Home sweet home."

"You watch that smart mouth on you. You coulda phoned. I'd a picked you up at the bus station. It ain't like it used to be around here." My father finished the can and parked it with the other empties. "There's a new element coming in. You don't know them and they don't know you and they don't care whose sister you are. Girl on the next block, lived here all her life raped. On the street and it wasn't hardly dark out."

"Who was it?"

"How the hell should I know, goddamuit? What am I, the Census Bureau? I don't keep track of every urchin around here."

"Then how do you know she lived here all her life?"

My father was about to bellow at me when my mother appeared in the doorway to the kitchen. "China. Come in here. I'll fix you something to eat."

"I'm not hungry."

Her face didn't change expression. "We got salami and Swiss cheese. I'll make you a sandwich."

Why not. She could make me a sandwich, I wouldn't eat it, and we could keep the enmity level up where it belonged. I heaved myself up out of the chair and went into the kitchen.

" Did you come home on his account?" my mother asked as I sat down at the kitchen table.

"I got a postcard from him."

"Did you." She kept her back to me while she worked at the counter. Always a soft doughy woman, my mother seemed softer and doughier than ever, as though a release had been sprung somewhere inside her, loosening everything. After a bit, she turned around holding a plate with a sandwich on it. Motherhood magic, culinary prestidigitation with ordinary salami, Swiss cheese and white bread. Behold, the family life. Too many Leave It To Beaver reruns. She set the plate down in front of me.

"I did it," she said. "I threw him out."

"I figured."

She poured me a cup of coffee. "First I broke all his needles and threw them in the trash."

"Good, Ma. You know the police sometimes go through the trash where junkies are known to live?"

"So what are they going to do, bust me and your father? Joe doesn't live here any more. I wouldn't stand for him using this place as a shooting gallery. He stole. Took money out of my purse, took things and sold them. Like we don't work hard enough for anything that we can just let a junkie steal from us."

I didn't say anything. It would have been the same if he'd been staying with me. "I know, Ma."

"So?" She was gripping the back of a chair as though she didn't know whether she wanted to throw it or pull it out and sit down.

"So what," I said.

"So what do you want with him?"

"He asked for me, Ma."

"Oh, he asked for you. Great. What are you going to do, take him to live with you in your dorm room? Won't that be cozy."

I had an absurd picture of it. He'd have had a field day with all of Marlene's small valuables. "Where's Aurelia?"

"How should I know? We're on notice here — she does what she wants. I asked you to come home and talk to her. You wouldn't even answer my letters."

"What do you think I can do about her? I'm not her mother."

She gave me a dirty look. "Eat your sandwich."

I forced a bite and shoved the plate away. "I'm just not hungry."

"Suit yourself. You should have told me if you wanted something else."

"I didn't want something else. I didn't want anything." I helped myself to a cigarette. My mother's eyebrows went up but she said nothing. "When Aurelia comes home, I'll talk to her, okay?"

" If she comes home. Sometimes she doesn't. I don't know where she stays. I don't know if she even bothers to go to school sometimes."

I tapped ashes into the ashtray. " I was never able to get away with anything like that."

The look she gave me was unidentifiable. Her eyelids lowered, one corner of her mouth pulling down. For a few moments I saw her as a stranger, some woman I'd never seen before who was waiting for me to figure something out but who was pretty sure I was too stupid to do it.

"Okay, if she comes home, I'll talk to her."

"Don't do me any favours. Anyway, you'll probably be out looking for him ."

"I've always been closer to him than anyone else in the family was."

My mother made a disgusted noise. "Isn't that sweet?"

"He's still a human being, Ma. And he's still my brother."

"Don't lecture to me about family, you. What do you think I am, the custodian here? Maybe when you go back to college, you'd like to take Joe and Aurelia with you. Maybe you'd do better at making her come home at night and keeping him off the heroin. Go ahead. You're welcome to do your best."

"I'm not their mother or father."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah." My mother took a cigarette from the pack on the table and lit it. "They're still human beings, still your brother and sister. So what does that make me?"

I put my own cigarette out, picked my bag up in the living-room and went to the bedroom I shared with Aurelia. She had started to spread out a little in it, though the division between her side and my side was still fairly evident. Mainly because she obviously wasn't spending a lot of time here.

For a long time, I sat on my bed fully clothed, just staring out the window. The street below was empty and dark and there was nothing to look at. I kept looking at it until I heard my parents go to bed. A little later, when I thought they were asleep, I opened the window a crack and rolled a joint from the stuff in the bottom drawer of my bureau. Most of the lid was still there, which meant Aurelia hadn't found it. I'd never liked grass that much after the novelty wore off, but I wanted something to blot out the bad taste the evening had left in my brain.

A whole joint to myself was a lot more than I was used to and the buzz was thick and debilitating. The smoke coiled into unreadable symbols and patterns before it was sucked out the window into the cold and dark. I thought of ragged ghosts fleeing a house like rats jumping off a sinking ship. It was the kind of dopey thought that occupies your mind for hours when you're stoned, which was fine with me. I didn't want to have to think about anything that mattered.

Eventually, I became aware that I was cold. When I could move, I reached over to shut the window and something down on the street caught my eye. It was too much in the shadows close to the building to see very well if it was even there at all. Hasher's delirium, or in this case Grasser's delirium. I tried to watch it anyway. There was a certain strength of definition and independence from the general fuzziness of my stoned eyesight, something that suggested there was more to it than the dope in my brain. Whatever it was a dope exaggeration of a cat or a dog or a big rat — I didn't like it. Unbidden, my father's words about a new element moving in slid into my head. Something about the thing made me think of a reptile, stunted evolution or evolution reversed, and a sort of evil that might have lain thickly in pools of decay millions of years ago, pre-dating warmblooded life. Which was ridiculous, I thought, because human beings brought the distinction between good and evil into the world. Good and evil, and stoned and not stoned. I was stoned. I went to bed.

But remember, said my still-buzzing mind as I was drifting into stupor-sleep, in order to make distinctions between any two things like good and evil, they first have to exist, don't they.

This is what happens when would-be intellectuals get stoned, I thought and passed out.

The sound of my father leaving for work woke me. I lay listening to my mother in the kitchen, waiting for the sound of bacon and eggs frying and her summons to get up and have a good breakfast. Instead, I heard water running briefly in the sink and then her footsteps going back to the bedroom and the door closing. That was new: my mother going back to bed after my father went to work in spite of the fact that the college kid was home. I hadn't particularly wanted to talk to her anyway, especially if it were just going to be a continuation of the previous night but it still made me feel funny.

I washed and dressed, taking my time, but my mother never re-emerged. Apparently she was just not going to be part of my day. I left the house far earlier than I'd intended to, figuring I'd go find something to do with myself until it was time to meet Farmer and the others.

In the front vestibule of the apartment building, I nearly collided with my sister Rose, who seemed about ready to have her baby at any moment. She had dyed her hair blonde again, a cornsilk yellow colour already brassing at the ends and showing dark roots.

"What are you doing home?" she asked, putting her hands protectively over her belly, protruding so much she couldn't button her coat.

"Vacation," I said. "How are you?"

"How am I ever? Pregnant."

"There is such a thing as birth control."

"Yeah, and there is such a thing as it not working. So?"

"Well. This is number five, isn't it?"

"I didn't know you were keeping score." She tried pulling her coat around her front but it wouldn't go. "It's cold down here. I'm going up to Ma."

"She went back to bed."

"She'll get up for me."

"Should you be climbing all those stairs in your condition?"

Rose lifted her plucked-to-nothing eyebrows. "You wanna carry me?" She pushed past me and slowly started up the first-flight of steps.

"Come on, Rose," I called after her, "what'll happen if your bag of waters breaks or something while you're on the stairs?"

She turned to look at me from seven steps up. "I'll scream, what do you think I'll do?" She resumed her climb.

"Well, do you want me to walk up with you?" I asked, starting after her. She just waved a hand at me and kept going. Annoyed and amused, I waited until she had made the first landing and begun the next flight, wondering if I shouldn't run up after her anyway or at least stay there until I heard my mother let her in. Then I decided Rose probably knew what she was doing, in a half-assed way. My theory was that she had been born pregnant and waited sixteen years until she found someone to act as father. She hadn't been much smaller than she was now when she and Roger had got married, much to my parents' dismay. It hadn't bothered Rose in the least.

The sun was shining brightly but there was no warmth to it. The snow lining the kerb was dirtier than ever, pitted and brittle. Here and there on the sidewalk old patches of ice clung to the pavement like frozen jellyfish left after a receding tide. It wasn't even 10:30 but I went over to Streep's Lunch, in case anyone put in an early appearance. That wasn't very likely but there wasn't much else to do.

Streep had the place to himself except for a couple of old people sitting near the windows. I took a seat at the counter and ordered breakfast to make up for the night before. My atonement didn't exactly impress him but he surprised me by actually speaking to me as he poured my coffee. "You home on vacation?"

"That's right," I said, feeling a little wary as I added cream from an aluminium pitcher.

"You like college?"

"It would be heaven if it weren't for the classes."

Streep's rubbery mouth twitched, shaking his jowls. "I thought that was what you went for, to go to classes and get smart."

I shrugged.

"Maybe you think you're already smart."

"Some people would say so." I smiled, thinking he should have asked my father.

"You think it's smart to keep coming around here and hanging out with junkies?"

I blinked at him. "I didn't know you cared."

"Just askin' a question."

"You haven't seen my brother Joe lately, have you?"

Streep made a fast little noise that was less than a laugh and walked away. Someone had left a newspaper on one of the stools to my right. I picked it up and read it over breakfast just for something to do. An hour passed, with Streep coming back every so often to refill my cup without any more conversation. I bought a pack of cigarettes from the machine just to have something else to do and noticed one of the old people had gone to sleep before finishing breakfast. She was very old, with frizzy grey hair and a sagging hawk nose. Her mouth had dropped open to show a few long, stained teeth. I had a half-baked idea of waking her when she gave an enormous snore. Streep didn't even look at her. What the hell, her hash browns were probably stone cold anyway. I went back to my newspaper.

When the clock over the grill said 12:10, I left some money on the counter and went outside. I should have known they'd be late, I thought. I'd probably have to stand around until close to dark, when they'd finally remember they were supposed to meet me here and not show, figuring I'd split.

A horn honked several times. George poked his head out the driver's side window of a car parked across the street. I hurried over as the back door swung open.

"Christ, we been waiting for you," Farmer said irritably as I climbed in. "You been in there the whole time?"

"I thought you were meeting Priscilla here."

"Change of venue, you should pardon the expression," Farmer said. "Streep won't give you a cup of water to go." He was in the front with George. Stacey and the kid were in the back with me. The kid didn't look so good today. He had dark circles under his eyes and wherever he'd spent the night hadn't had a washroom.

"Why aren't you in school?" I asked him.

"Screw it, what's it to you?" he said flippantly.

"Haven't been home yet, have you?"

"Chrissakes, what are you, his probation officer?" said Farmer. "Let's go, she's waiting."

The car pulled away from the kerb with a jerk. George swore as he eased it into the light noontime traffic. "I ain't used to automatics," he complained to no one.

Farmer was rummaging in the glove compartment. "Hey, there's no works in here. You got any?"

"I got them, don't worry. Just wait till we pick up Priscilla, okay?"

"Just tell me where they are."

"Don't sweat it, I told you I got them."

"I just want to know where."

"Up my ass, all right? Now let me drive."

"I'll give you up your ass," Farmer said darkly.

Stacey tapped him on the back of the head. "Come on, take it easy, Farmer. Everybody's gonna get what they need from Priscilla."

"Does Priscilla know where Joe is?" I asked.

"Priscilla knows everything," said Stacey, believing it.

Priscilla herself was standing on the sidewalk in front of a beauty parlour, holding a big Styrofoam cup. She barely waited for the car to stop before she yanked the door open and got into the front seat next to Farmer.

"You got works?" he asked as she handed him the cup. "This asshole won't tell me if he's got any."

"In a minute, Farmer. I have to say hello to China." She knelt on the front seat and held her arms out to me. Obediently, I leaned forward over the kid so she could hug me. She was as bizarre-looking as ever, with her pale pancake make-up, frosted pink lipstick, heavily outlined eyes, and flat black hair. The junkie version of Elizabeth Taylor. She was a strange little girl in a puffy woman's body and she ran hot and cold with me, sometimes playing my older sister, then snubbing me outright, depending on Joe. They'd been on and off for as long as he'd been shooting, with her as the pursuer unless Joe knew for sure that she had a good connection.

Today she surprised me by kissing me lightly on the lips. It was like being kissed by a crayon. "How's our college kid?" she asked tenderly.

"Fine, Priscilla. Have you"

"I haven't seen you since the fall," she went on, gripping the back of the seat as George pulled into the street again. "How do you like school? Are you doing real well?"

Farmer pulled her around. "This is very sweet, old home week and all, but do you have anything?"

"No, Farmer, I always stand around on the street with a cup of water. Don't spill it."

"I've got a spoon," said the kid, holding one up. Stacey took it from him.

"Me first?" she asked hopefully.

Priscilla turned around and stared down her nose at her, junkie aristocracy surveying the rabble. "I understand I'm not the only one in this car with works?"

George was patting himself down awkwardly as he drove, muttering, "Shit, shit, shit."

"Asshole," said Farmer. "I knew you didn't have any."

"I had some, but I don't know where they are now."

"Try looking up your ass. Priscilla?"

Priscilla let out a noisy sigh. "I'm not going to do this any more. Some day we're all going to get hep and die."

"Well, I'm clean," the kid announced proudly.

"Keep borrowing works, you'll get a nice case of hepatitis," I said. "Joe got the clap once, using someone else's."

"Bullshit."

"Tell him whose spike it was, Stacey," I said, feeling mean. Stacey flushed.

"And you want to go first?" Priscilla said. "No way."

"That was last year. I'm cured now, honest. I don't even have a cold." She glared at me. "Please, Priscilla. Please."

Priscilla sighed again and passed her a small square of foil and a plastic syringe. "You give me anything and I'll fucking kill you, I swear."

"Here, hold this." Stacey dumped everything in the kid's lap and took the water from Farmer. "Who's got a belt?"

Somehow, everyone looked at everyone else and ended up looking at me.

"Shit," I said and slipped it off. Stacey reached for it and I held it back. "Somebody tell me where Joe is or I'll throw this out the window right now."

"China, don't be like that. You're holding things up," said Priscilla chidingly, as though I were a bratty younger sister.

"I just want to know where Joe is."

"Just let us fix first, okay? Now give Stacey your belt."

Stacey snatched the belt away from me before I could say anything else and shoved her shirt and sweater sleeves high up on her arm. "Wrap it on me," she said to the kid. Her voice was getting shaky. The kid got the belt around her upper arm and pulled it snug. He had to pour a little water into the bowl of the spoon for her, too, and shake the heroin out of the foil. Someone had a ragged piece of something that had to pass for cheesecloth. Stacey fidgeted with it while the kid held a match under the spoon. When the mix in the bowl started to bubble, Stacey laid the cloth over the surface and drew some solution into the syringe. Her hands were very steady now. She held the syringe up and flicked it with her finger.

"Will you hurry it up?" Farmer snapped. "There's other people besides you."

"Keep your shirt on, I'm trying to lose some bubbles. Help me," Stacey said. "Tighten that belt."

The kid pulled the belt tighter for her as she straightened her arm. She felt in the fold of her elbow with her pinky. "There he is. Old Faithful. He shoulda collapsed long ago but he just keeps on truckin'. I heard about this guy, you know? Who shot an air bubble and he saw it in his vein just as he was nodding out, you know?" She probed with the needle, drew back the plunger and found blood. "That poor guy just kept stroking it down and stroking it down and would you believe" her eyelids fluttered. I reached over the kid to loosen the belt on her arm. "He actually got rid of it. He's still shooting." She started to say something else and passed out.

"Jesus, Priscilla." I took the needle out of Stacey's arm. "What kind of stuff have you got?"

"Only the best. Joe's new connection. You next?" she asked the kid.

"He's not an addict yet," I said. "He can pass this time."

"Who asked you?" said the kid. "You're not my fucking mother."

"You have to mainline for two weeks straight to get a habit," I said. "Take the day off."

But he already had the belt around his arm. "No. Give me the needle."

I plunged the syringe into the cup he was holding. "You have to clean it first, jerk-off." I cranked down the window and squirted a thin stream of water into the air. "If you're going to do this anyway, you might as well do it right."

Suddenly he looked unsure of himself. "I never shot myself up before. Stacey always did me."

I looked at her, sprawled out on his other side. "She's a big help, that girl. Looks like you're on your own. I don't give injections."

But I flicked the bubbles out of the syringe for him. It was better than watching him shoot an air bubble. He had veins like power cables.

Priscilla went next. I barely had time to clean the needle and spoon for her. Farmer fixed after her. The spoon was looking bad. I was scrubbing the mess out of it with a corner of my shirt when I noticed it was real silver. The kid's spoon. Probably stolen out of his mother's service for eight. Or maybe it was the one they'd found lodged in his mouth when he'd been born. I looked at him slumped next to Stacey, eyes half-closed, too ecstatic to smile. Was this part of the new element moving in that my father had mentioned, a pampered high-school kid?

"Priscilla, are you awake?" I asked, squirting water from the needle out the window while Farmer cooked his load.

"Maim," she said, lazily.

"Do you really know where Joe is?"

She didn't answer. I dipped the needle into the water one last time and squirted a stream out the window again. It arched gracefully into the air and splattered against the passenger side window of the police car that had pulled up even with us. I froze, still holding the needle up in plain sight. Farmer was telling me to hand him the fucking spike but his voice seemed to be coming through miles of cotton batting. I was back in the buzz of the night before, the world doing a slow-motion underwater ballet of the macabre while I watched my future dribble down the window along with the water. The cop at the wheel turned his head for a year before his eyes met mine. Riding all alone, must be budget-cutting time, my mind babbled. His face was flat and I could see through the dirty glass that his skin was rough and leathery. His tongue flicked out and ran over his lips as we stared at each other. He blinked once, in a funny way, as though the lower lids of his colourless eyes had risen to meet the upper ones. A kind of recognition passed between us. Then he turned away and the police car accelerated, passing us.

"Did you see that?" I gave the needle to Farmer, who was calling me nine kinds of bastard.

"Nope," George said grimly. "And he didn't see us, neither."

I tried to laugh, as though I were in on the joke. "Oh, man. I thought for sure we were all busted."

"Times are changing."

"Don't tell me the junkies are pooling their money to buy off the cops."

Priscilla came to and sighed happily. "Somebody is. We got all the conveniences. Good dope, bad cops. Things ain't so bad around here these days."

The kid was pulling himself up on me. I sat him up without thinking about it. "Priscilla? Do you know where Joe is? Priscilla?"

"Joe? Oh, yeah. He's at my place."

"I thought he was going around with his connection."

"He's at my place. Or he was."

George pulled the car over again as Farmer woozily began cooking his shot for him. "Let me fix and I'll drive you over there, okay?" he said, smiling thinly over his shoulder at me.

The kid threw himself over my lap and fumbled the car door open. "Wanna go for a walk," he mumbled, crawling over my legs and hauling himself upright on the door. He stood swaying and tried a few tentative steps. "Can't make it. Too loaded." I caught him and pulled him back in, shoving him over next to Stacey. He smiled at me. "You're a real nice girl, you know that? You're a real nice girl."

"Shit!" George slammed his hand against the steering wheel. "It broke, the fucking needle broke!"

"Did you fix?" asked Farmer.

"Yeah, just in time. Sorry, Priscilla." George turned to look at her and nearly fell across Farmer. "I'll find mine and give it to you. Never been used, I swear."

Priscilla made a disgusted noise.

"Hey, if everybody's happy, let's go over to Priscilla's place now," I said.

George wagged his head. "Not yet. Can't get that far, stuff was too strong. I gotta let it wear off some first. Where are we?" He opened his door and nearly fell out. "Hey, we're back near Streep's. Go there for a while, okay?" No one answered. "Okay? Go to Streep's, get some coffee, listen to some music. Okay?" He nudged Farmer. "Okay?"

"Shit." I got out, hauled the kid out after me and left him leaning on the door while I dragged Stacey out. She woke up enough to smile at me. Farmer and Priscilla found their way around the car, stumbling over each other. I looked around. A few cars passed, no one paying any attention. Here we are in scenic Junk City in the Land of Nod, where five loaded hop-heads can attract no interest. What's wrong with this picture?

George reeled past me and I grabbed him, patting his pants pockets.

"What?" he said dreamily.

"Let me borrow your car."

"It's not my car. It's" His voice trailed off as his head drooped.

"That's okay," I said, shaking him, "just give me the keys." I dug them out of his right pants pocket, giving him a thrill he was too far gone to appreciate. George wasn't wearing any underwear. "Priscilla."

She had managed to go nearly half a block unassisted. At the sound of her name, she swivelled around, hugging herself against a cold she probably wasn't really feeling.

"Is Joe really at your place?"

She shrugged elaborately. "Hurry, you might catch him." Farmer went by and yanked her along with him. I watched them all weaving and staggering away from me, a ragged little group minus one, who was still leaning against the car.

"My name's Tad," he said. Probably short for tadpole, I thought. "Take me with you."

I went to call out to Farmer and the rest of them but they had already turned the corner. I was stuck with their new friend unless I chose to leave him in some doorway. He was grinning at me as he swayed from side to side. The coat was dirty now but it was still pretty nice. His gloves looked like kidskin and the boots were brand-new. If I left him, I'd come back and find him up on blocks, nude. I shoved him into the back seat.

"Lie down, pass out, and don't give me any trouble."

"You're a real nice girl," he mumbled.

"Yeah, we could go to the prom together in a couple of years."

The front seat was too far back for me and wouldn't move up. I perched on the edge of the broken-down cushion and just managed to reach the pedals. I got the car started but pulling out was the tricky part. I'd never learned to drive. The car itself wasn't in terrific running condition — it wanted either to stall or race. I eased it down the street in half a dozen jerks that pushed me against the steering wheel and sent the kid in back off the seat and on to the floor. He didn't complain.

Priscilla had an apartment in one of the tenements near the railroad yard. The buildings looked abandoned at first glance; at second glance, they still looked abandoned. I steered the car off the road into an unpaved area that served as a parking lot and pulled up in front of the building nearest to the tracks. In the back, my companion pulled himself up on the seat, rubbing his eyes. "Where are we?"

"Wait here," I said, getting out of the car.

He shook his head emphatically. "No, I was here last night. This is Priscilla's. It ain't safe. I should go with you." He stumbled out of the car and leaned against it, trying to look sober. "I'm okay now. I'm just high."

"I'm not going to wait for you." I headed towards the building with him staggering after me. The heroin in his system had stabilized somewhat and he fell only three times. I kept going.

He gave up on the first flight. I left him hanging on the railing muttering to himself while I trotted up to Priscilla's place on the second floor. The door was unlocked, I knew — the lock had been broken ages ago and Priscilla wasn't about to spend good junk money on getting it fixed — but the sagging screen door was latched. I found a torn place in the screen and reached in to unhook it.

"Joe?" I called, stepping into the filthy kitchen. An odour of something long dead hit me square in the face, making me gag. "Joe?" I tiptoed across the room. On the sink was a package of hamburger Priscilla had probably left out to thaw then forgotten about, three weeks before, it seemed like. I wondered how she could stand it and then remembered how she liked to brag that coke had destroyed her nose. The rest of them wouldn't care as long as they could get fixed. My stomach leaped and I heaved on the floor. It was just a bit of bile in spite of the breakfast I'd eaten but I couldn't take any more and headed for the porch.

"Whaddaya want?"

I whirled, holding my hand over my mouth and nose as my gag reflex went into action again. A large black man wearing only a pair of pyjama bottoms was standing in the doorway to the bedroom. We stared at each other curiously.

"Whaddaya want?" he asked me again.

"I'm looking for Joe," I said from behind my hand.

"I'm Joe." He scratched his face and I saw a thin line of blood trickling from the corner of his mouth.

"Wrong Joe," I said, cursing Priscilla. She knew goddamm well, the con artist. What did she think, that I'd forget about finding Joe and curl up with this guy instead? Yeah, that was Priscilla all over. A Joe for a Joe, fair deal. "The Joe I'm looking for is my brother."

"I'm a brother."

"Yeah. You're bleeding."

He touched his mouth and looked dully at his fingers. "I'm blood."

I nodded. "Well, if you see a white guy named Joe, he's my brother. Tell him China was looking for him."

"China."

"Right. China."

"China's something real fragile. Could break." His expression altered slightly and that same kind of recognition that had passed between me and the cop in the patrol car seemed to pass between us now in Priscilla's stinking kitchen.

I glanced at the rotting hamburger on the counter and suddenly it didn't look like rotting meat any more than the man standing in the doorway of Priscilla's bedroom looked like another junkie, or even a human being. He tilted his head and studied me, his eyes narrowing, and it all seemed to be going in slow motion, that underwater feeling again.

"If you ain't in some kinda big hurry, why don't you hang around," he said. "Here all by myself. Not too interesting, nobody to rap with. Bet you got a lot of stuff you could rap about."

Yeah, he was probably craving to find out if I'd read any good books lately. I opened my mouth to say something and the stink hit me again in the back of the throat.

"Whaddaya say, you stick around here for a while. I don't bite. 'Less I'm invited to."

I wanted to ask him what he'd bitten just recently. He touched his lip as though he'd been reading my mind and shrugged. I took a step back. He didn't seem awfully junked up any more and it occurred to me that it was strange that he wasn't with Priscilla instead of here, all by himself.

Maybe, I thought suddenly, he was waiting for someone. Maybe Joe was supposed to be here after all, maybe he was supposed to come here for some reason and I'd just arrived ahead of him.

I swallowed against the stink, almost choked again, and said, "Hey, did Priscilla tell you she had a friend coming by, a guy named Joe, or just a guy maybe? I mean, have you been waiting for someone?"

"Just you, babe."

I'd heard that line once or twice but it never sounded so true as it did just then. The kid's words suddenly came back to me. This is Priscilla's. I was here last night . Farmer must have run right over after I'd seen him, to tell her I was looking for Joe. So she decided to send me on a trip to nowhere, with Farmer and the rest of them in on it, playing out the little charade of meeting her today so I could ask her about Joe and she could run this ramadoola on me. But why? What was the point?

"No, man," I said, taking another step back. "Not me."

"You sure about that?" The voice was smooth enough to slip on, like glare ice. Ice. It was chilly in the apartment, but he didn't seem to feel it. "Must be something I can help you with."

Outside there was the sound of a train approaching in the distance. In a few moments, you wouldn't be able to hear anything for the roar of the train passing.

I turned and fled out to the porch. The dead-meat smell seemed to follow me as I galloped back down the stairs and woke the kid still hanging in the banister. "Let's go, let's get out of here."

The train was thundering past as I shoved him back into the car and pulled out.

"You find Joe?" he shouted as we bounced across the parking lot.

"Yeah, I found him. I found the wrong fucking Joe."

The kid giggled a little. "There's lots of guys named Joe."

"Thanks for the information, I'll keep it in mind." I steered the car on to the street again, unsure of what to do next. Maybe just cruise around, stopping random junkies and asking them if they'd seen Joe, or look for the white Caddy or whatever it was. A white luxury car would stand out, especially if a pretty blonde woman were driving it.

The junkies were starting to come out in force now, appearing on the sidewalks and street corners A few of them waved at the car and then looked confused when they saw me at the wheel. It seemed to me there were more new faces among the familiar ones, people I didn't even know by sight. But that would figure, I thought; had I really expected the junkie population to go into some kind of stasis while I was away at college? Every junkie's got a friend and eventually the friend's got a habit. Like the jailbait in the back seat.

I glanced in the rear-view mirror at him. He was sitting up with his head thrown back, almost conscious. If I were going to find Joe or at least his lady friend, I'd have to dump the kid.

"Wake up" I said, making a right turn on to the street that would take me past Foster Circle and down to Streep's. "I'm going to leave you off at the restaurant with everyone else. Can you handle that?"

He struggled forward and leaned over the front seat. "But we ain't found Joe yet."

" 'Haven't found Joe yet.' What's the matter, do you just nod out in English class?"

He giggled. "Yeah. Don't everyone?"

"Maybe. I can't be hauling your ass all over with me. There's no end-of-class bell around here. You're on your own." I took another look at him as he hung over the seat, grinning at me like God's own fool. "You don't know that, do you?"

"Know what?" He ruffled my hair clumsily.

"Quit that. You don't know that you're on your own."

"Shit, I got lots of friends."

"You've got junkies is what you've got. Don't confuse them with friends."

"Yeah?" He ruffled my hair again and I slapped his hand away. "So why are you so hot to find Joe?"

"Joe isn't my friend, he's my brother."

"Jeez, no kidding? I thought you were like his old lady or something."

How quickly they forget, junkies. I was about to answer him when I saw it, gleaming like fresh snow in the afternoon sunlight, impossibly clean, illegally parked right at the kerb at Foster Circle. George had been right — it was a Caddy after all. I looked for a place to pull over and found one in front of a fire hydrant.

"Wait here," I said, killing the engine. "If I'm not back in ten minutes, you're free to go."

"Uh-uh," the kid said, falling back and fumbling for the door handle. "I'm coming with you."

"Fuck off." I jumped out of the car and darted across two lanes of oncoming traffic, hoping the kid would pass out again before he solved the mystery of the door handle. The Caddy was unoccupied; I stepped over the low thorny bushes the ex-mayor had chosen for their red summer blooms and look around wildly.

At the time, it didn't seem strange that I almost didn't see her. She was sitting on a bench fifty feet away looking as immaculate as her car in a thick brown coat and spike-heeled boots. Her pale blonde hair curved over her scarf in a simple, classy pageboy, like a fashion model. More like an ex-fashion model, from the careful, composed way she was sitting with her ankles crossed and her tidy purse resting on her knees, except the guy on the bench next to her wasn't material for the Brut ad campaign. It was Farmer. He still looked pretty bleary but he raised one arm and pointed at me. She turned to look and her elegantly made-up face broke into that sort of cheery smile some stewardesses reserve for men who drink heavily in first class.

She beckoned with a gloved hand and I went over to them.

"Hello," she said in a warm contralto. "We've been waiting for you."

"Oh, yeah?" I said casually. "Seems like there's always someone waiting for me these days. Right, Farmer?" He was too busy staring at the woman to answer. "I thought you didn't know how to find her."

"I don't," Farmer said and smiled moonily at the woman, which pissed me off. "She found me. Kind of."

"At Streep's ?" I didn't look right at her but I could see she was following the exchange with that same cheery smile, completely unoffended that we were talking about her in the third person.

"Nah. After you left us off, I left everybody at Streep's and came down here, figuring maybe I could find somebody who'd get in touch with Joe for you."

"Sure. Except Priscilla told me Joe was at her place. Only he wasn't. What about that, Farmer? You wanna talk about that a little? Like how you were there last night?"

Farmer could have cared less, though it was hard to see how. "Yeah, we was there. She wouldn't let us in, said she'd meet us today like we planned." He shrugged. "Anyway, I came down here and there was her car going down the street, so I flagged her down and told her you were looking for Joe. So then we came here. I figured you'd look here sooner or later because this was there I told you I saw her and Joe. And, you know, Streep's, shit, it's not a good place."

Sure wasn't, especially if you thought you could make your own connection and not have to let the rest of your junkie pals in on it directly. "So you decided to sit out in the cold instead." I blew out a short, disgusted breath. "I'd have gone back to Streep's eventually."

"Well, if it got too cold, we was gonna get in the car." Farmer looked uncomfortable. "Hey, what are you bitching at me for? I found her, didn't I?"

I turned to the woman. "Where's Joe?"

Her eyes were deep blue, almost navy. "He's at my place. I understand you're his sister, China?" She tilted her head like game-show women do when they're showing you the year's supply of Turtle Wax behind the door number three. "I had no idea Joe had a sister in college. But I see the resemblance, you have the same eyes, the same mouth. You're very close to Joe?"

"I'd like to see him."

She spread her hands. "Then we'll go see him. All of us." She smiled past me and I turned around. The kid was standing several feet behind me, still doped up and a little unsteady but looking eager and interested in that way junkies have when they smell a possibility of more heroin. Fuck the two weeks; he'd been a junkie all his life, just like Joe.

I turned back to the woman, intending to tell her the kid was only fifteen and surely she didn't want that kind of trouble but she was already on her feet, helping Farmer up, her expensive gloves shining incongruously against his worn, dirty denim jacket.

But then again, she didn't have to touch him with her bare hands.

She made no objection when I got into the front seat with her and jerked my thumb over my shoulder instead of moving over so Farmer could get in next to me. He piled into the back with the kid and we drove off just as a meter maid pulled up next to George's car. I looked over my shoulder at the Cushman.

"Looks like we're leaving just in time," I said.

"They never ticket my car." She pushed a Grateful Dead eight-track into the tape deck and adjusted the volume on the rear speakers.

"That's funny," I said, "you don't seem like the Grateful Dead type. I'd have thought you were more of a Sinatra fan. Or maybe Tony Bennett."

"Actually, my own taste runs to chamber music," she said smoothly. "But it has a very limited appeal with most of our clients. The Grateful Dead have a certain rough charm, especially in their ballads, though I will never have the appreciation for them that so many young people do. I understand they're quite popular among college students."

"Yeah, St Stephen with a rose," I said. "Have another hit and all that. Except that's Quicksilver Messenger Service."

"I have one of their tapes, too, if you'd prefer to hear that instead."

"No, the Dead will do."

She almost looked at me. Then Farmer called out, "This is such a great car!" and she turned up the volume slightly.

"They can't hear us," she said.

"They sure can't."

Her face should have been tired from smiling so much but she was a true professional. Don't try this at home. Suddenly I wished I hadn't. My father was right: cocky snot-nosed college know-it-all. I hadn't had the first idea of what I'd got into here with this white Cadillac and this ex-fashion model who referred to junkies as clients but I was beginning to get a clue. We were heading for the toll bridge over the river. The thing to do was jump out as soon as she stopped, jump out and run like hell and hope that would be fast enough.

There was soft, metallic click. Power locks.

"Such a bad area," she said. "Must always keep the doors secure when you drive through."

And then, of course, she blinked. Even with her in profile, I could see her lower eyelid rise to meet the upper one.

She used the exact change lane, barely slowing as she lowered the window and reached towards the basket. For my benefit only, I guessed: her hand was empty.

She took us to a warehouse just on the other side of the river, one of several in an industrial cluster. Some seemed to be abandoned, some not. It wasn't quite evening yet but the place was shadowy. Still, I was willing to make a run for it as soon as we stopped and fuck whatever was in the shadows, I'd take my chances that I'd be able to get away, maybe come back with the cops. After I'd given them a blink test. But she had some arrangement; no stops. While the Dead kept on trucking, she drove us right up a ramp to a garage door, which automatically rumbled upward. We drove on to a platform that had chicken-wire fencing on either side. Two bright lamps hanging on the chicken wire went on. After a moment, there was a jerk and the platform began to lift slowly. Really some arrangement.

"Such a bad area," she said. "You take your life in your hands if you get out of the car."

Yeah, I thought, I just bet you did.

After a long minute, the elevator thumped to a stop and the doors in front of us slid open. We were looking into a huge, elegantly furnished living-room. House and Garden conquers the universe.

"This is it," she said gaily, killing the engine and the Dead. "Everybody out. Careful when you open the door, don't scratch the paint. Such a pain getting it touched up."

I waited for her to release the locks and then I banged my door loudly against the chicken wire. What the hell, I figured; I'd had it anyway. Only a cocky snot-nosed college know-it-all would think like that.

But she didn't say anything to me about it, or even give me a look. She led the way into the living-room and gestured at the long beige sofa facing the elevator doors, which slid closed just as Farmer and the kid staggered across the threshold.

"Make yourselves, comfortable," she said. "Plenty of refreshments on the table."

"Oh, man," said Farmer, plumping down on the couch. "Can we play some more music, maybe some more Dead?"

"Patience, Farmer," she said as she took off her coat and laid it on one of the stools in front of a large mahogany wet bar. It had a mirror behind it and, above that, an old-fashioned picture of a plump woman in bloomers and corset lounging on her side eating chocolates from a box. It was like a stage set. She watched me staring at it.

"Drink?" she said. "I didn't think people your age partook in that very much nowadays but we have a complete stock for those who can appreciate vats and vintages and whatnot."

"I'll take a shot of twenty-year-old Scotch right after you show me where Joe is."

The woman chuckled indulgently. "Wouldn't you prefer a nice cognac?"

"Whatever you think is best," I said.

"I'll be right back." She didn't move her hips much when she walked, but in that cream-coloured cashmere dress she didn't have to. This was real refinement, real class and taste. Smiling at me over her shoulder one more time, she slipped through a heavy wooden door at the far end of the room next to an enormous antique secretary.

I looked at Farmer and the kid, who were collapsed on the sofa like junkie versions of Raggedy Andy.

"Oh, man" said Farmer, "this is such a great place! I never been in such a great place!"

"Yeah," said the kid, "it's so far out."

There were three silver boxes on the coffee table in front of them. I went over and opened one; there were several syringes in it, all clean and new. The box next to it held teaspoons and the one next to that, white powder. That one was next to the table lighter. I picked it up. It was an elaborately carved silver dragon coiled around a rock or a monolith or something, its wings pulled in close to its scaly body. You flicked the wheel in the middle of its back and the flame came out of its mouth. All I needed was a can of aerosol deodorant and I'd have had a flamethrower. Maybe I'd have been able to get out with a flamethrower. I doubted it.

"Jeez, will you look at that!" said the kid, sitting up in delayed reaction to the boxes. "What a set-up!"

"This is such a great place!" Farmer said, picking up the box of heroin.

"Yeah, a real junkie heaven," I said. "It's been nice knowing you."

Farmer squinted up at me. "You going?"

"We're all going."

He sat back, still holding the box while the kid eyed him nervously. "You go ahead. I mean, this isn't exactly your scene anyway. But I'm hanging in."

"You just don't get it, do you? You think Blondie is just going to let you wander back put across the river with all the horse you can carry?"

Farmer smiled. "Shit, maybe she wants me to move in. I think she likes me. I get that very definite feeling."

"Yeah, and the two of you could adopt Tadpole here, and Stacey and Priscilla and George can come over for Sunday roast."

The kid shot me a dirty look. Farmer shrugged. "Hey, somebody's got to be out there, takin' care of the distribution."

"And she throws out Joe to make room for you, right?" I said.

"Oh, yeah, Joe." Farmer tried to think. "Well, hell, this is a big place. There's room for three. More, even." He giggled again.

" Farmer . I don't think many people see this place and live."

He yawned widely, showing his coated tongue. "Hey, ain't we all lucky, then."

"No. We're not lucky."

Farmer stared at me for a long moment. Then he laughed. "Shit, You're crazy."

The door at the far end of the room opened again and the woman came out. "Here he is!" she announced cheerfully and pulled Joe into the room.

My brother Joe, the original lost boy, the disposable man in an ankle-length bathrobe knotting loosely at the waist, showing his bony chest. The curly brown hair was cleaner than it had been the last time I'd seen him but duller and thinner, too. His eyes seemed to be sunk deep in the sockets and his skin looked dry and flaky. But he was steady on his bare feet as he came towards me.

"Joe," I said. "It's me, Chi"

"I know, babe, I know." He didn't even change expression. "What the fuck?"

"I got your card."

"Shit. I told you, it was for the last time."

I blinked at him. "I came home because I thought" I stopped, looking at the woman who was still smiling as she moved behind the bar and poured a little cognac into a glass.

"Well, go on," she said. "Tell him what you thought. And have your cognac. You should warm the bowl between your hands."

I shook my head slightly, looking down at the plush carpet. It was also beige. Not much foot traffic around here. "I thought you needed me to do something. Help you or something."

"I was saying goodbye, babe. That's all. I thought I should, you know, after everything you seen me through. I figured, what the hell, one person in the world who ever cared what happened to me, I'd say goodbye. Fucking parents don't care if they never see me again. Rose, Aurelia — like, forget it."

I looked up at him. He still hadn't changed expression. He might have been telling me it was going to snow again this winter.

"Have your cognac," the woman said to me again. "You warm the bowl between your hands like this." She demonstrated and then held the glass out to me. When I didn't move to take it, she put it down on the bar. "Perhaps you'll feel like it later." She hurried over to the couch where Farmer and the kid were rifling the syringes and the spoons. Joe took a deep breath and let it out in a not-quite sigh.

"I can tell her to let you go," he said. "She'll probably do it."

" Probably?" I said.

He made a helpless, impotent gesture with one hand. "What the fuck did you come here for?"

"For you, asshole. What the fuck did you come here for?"

Bending over the coffee table, the woman looked back at us. "Are you going to answer that, Joe? Or shall I?"

Joe turned towards her slightly and gave a little shrug. "Will you let her go?"

That smile. "Probably."

Farmer was holding up a syringe. "Hey, I need some water. And a cooker. You got a spoon? And some cloth."

"Little early for your next fix, isn't it?" I said.

"Why wait?" He patted the box of junk cuddled in his lap.

The woman took the syringe from him and set it on the table. "You won't need any of that. We kept it around for those who have to be elsewhere — say, if you had an appointment to keep or if Joe were running an errand — but here we do it differently."

"Snort?" Farmer was disgusted. "Lady, I'm way past the snort stage."

She gave a refined little laugh and moved around the coffee table to sit down beside him. "Snort. How revolting. There's no snorting here. Take off your jacket."

Farmer obeyed, tossing his jacket over the back of the couch. She pushed up his left shirtsleeve and studied his arm.

"Hey, China," Farmer said, watching the woman with junkie avidity, "gimme your belt."

"No belt," said the woman. "Sit back, relax. I'll take care of everything." She touched the inside of his elbow with two fingers and then ran her hand up to his neck. "Here is actually a lot better."

Farmer looked nervous. "In the neck? You sure you know what you're doing? Nobody does it in the neck."

"It's not an easy technique to master but it's far superior to your present methods. Not to mention faster and far more potent."

"Well, hey." Farmer laughed, still nervous. "More potent, sure, I'm for that."

" Relax" the woman said, pushing his head back against the couch. "Joe's done it this way a lot of times, haven't you, Joe?"

I looked at his neck but I didn't see anything, not even dirt.

The woman loosened Farmer's collar and pushed his hair back, ignoring the fact that it was badly in need of washing. She stroked his skin with her fingertips, making a low, crooning noise, the kind of sound you'd use to calm a scared puppy. "There, now," she murmured, close to Farmer's neck. "There it is, there's our baby. All nice and strong. That's a good one."

Farmer moaned pleasurably and reached for her but she caught his hand and held it firmly on his thigh.

"Don't squirm around now," she said. "This won't take long. Not very long."

She licked his neck.

I couldn't believe it. Farmer's dirty old neck. I'd have licked the sidewalk first. And this woman — I looked at Joe but he was watching the woman run her tongue up Farmer's neck and still no expression on him, as though he were watching a dull TV programme he'd already seen.

Farmer's eyelids were at half-mast. He gave a small laugh. "Tickles a little."

The woman pulled back and then blew on the spot gently.

"There now. We're almost ready." She took the box of heroin from his lap.

I didn't want to see this. I looked at Joe again. He shook his head slightly, keeping his gaze on the woman. She smiled at me, scooped up a small amount of heroin and put it in her mouth.

"Fucking lowlife," I said, but my voice sounded far away. The woman nodded, as if to tell me I had it right and then, fast, like a snake striking, she clamped her mouth on Farmer's neck.

Farmer jumped slightly, his eyes widening. Then he went completely slack, only the woman's mouth on him holding him up.

I opened my mouth to yell, but nothing came out. As though there was a field around me and Joe that kept us still.

She seemed to stay like that on Farmer's neck for ever. I stood there, unable to look away. I'd watched Farmer and Joe and the rest of them fix countless times. The scene played in my brain, the needle sliding into skin, probing, finding the vein and the blood tendriling in the syringe when it hit. Going for the boot because it made the rush better. Maybe this made the rush better for both of them.

Time passed and left us all behind. I'd thought it was too soon to fix again, but yeah, it would figure that she'd have to get them while they were still fucked up, so they'd just sit there and take it. Hey, was that last fix a little strange? — Strange? What's strange? Nod.

Then the woman drew her head back a little and I saw it. A living needle, like a stinger. I wished I were a fainter so I could have passed out, shut the picture off, but she held my gaze as strongly as she held Farmer. I'd come to see Joe and this was part of it, package deal. In another part of my mind, I was screaming and yelling and begging Joe to take us both out of there, but that place was too far away, in some other world where none of this was possible.

She brought her mouth down to Farmer's neck again, paused, and lifted her head. There was a small red mark on Farmer's skin, like a vaccination. She wallowed and gave me that professional smile.

"That's what he came here for," she said. "Now, shall I do the next one, Joe, or would you like to?"

"Oh, Jesus, Joe," I said. "Oh, Jesus ."

"I don't like boys," he said. And blinked.

"Oh, Jesus . . ."

"Well, there's only one girl here for you." She actually crinkled her nose.

"No. No , oh, Jesus, Joe " I grabbed two fistfuls of his bathrobe and shook him. He swayed in my grasp and it felt like I was shaking a store mannequin. Even in his deepest junked-out stupor he'd been a million times more alive then he was now. My late brother, Joe, the original lost boy now lost for all time, the disposable man finally disposed of.

He waited until I stopped shaking him and looked down at me. I took a step back. A dull television programme he'd already seen. "Let her go, okay?"

"Now, Joe," she said, admonishing.

I bolted for the elevator but the doors didn't open. She had the power over them, over everything, junkies, me, even toll-booths. I just stood there until I felt Joe's hands on my shoulders.

"China."

I jumped away from him and backed up against the elevator doors. There was a buzzing in my ears. Hyperventilating. In a moment, I was going to pass out and they could do whatever they liked. Standing between Farmer comatose on the couch and the kid, who was sitting like a junked-up lump, the woman looked bored.

"China," my brother repeated, but he didn't reach for me again.

I forced myself to breathe more slowly. The buzzing in my ears receded and I was almost steady again. "Oh, Jesus, Joe, where did you find these — these whatever they are? They're not people."

"I didn't really find them," he said. "One day I looked around and they were just there. Where they've always been."

"I never saw them before."

"You never had to. People like me and Farmer and what's-his-name over there, the kid, we're the ones they come for. Not for you."

"Then why did I find them?"

"I don't like to think about that. It's" he fumbled for a moment. "I don't know. Contagious, I guess. Maybe some day they'll come for everyone."

"Well, that is in the plan," the woman said. "There are only so many Joes and Farmers in the world. Then you have to branch out. Fortunately, it's not hard to find new ways to reach new receptors." She ran a finger along the collar of her dress. "The damnedest things come into fashion and you know how that is. Something can just sweep the country."

"Let her go now," Joe said.

"But it's close to time for you, dear one."

"Take her back to Streep's. Stacey and George'll be there, maybe Priscilla. You can bring them here, leave her there."

"But, Joe" she said insistently, "she's seen us."

"So you can get her later."

I began to shake.

" Joe ." The stewardess smile went away. "There are rules . And they're not just arbitrary instructions designed to keep the unwashed multitude moving smoothly through intersections during rush hour." She came around the coffee table to him and put her hand on his arm. I saw her thumb sink deeply into the material of his bathrobe. "You chose this, Joe. You asked for it, and when we gave it to you, you agreed. And this is part of the deal."

He pried her hand off his arm and shoved it away. "No, it's not. My sister isn't a junkie. It wouldn't go right, not now. You know it wouldn't. You'd just end up with a troublesome body to dispose of and the trail would lead directly to me. Here. Because everyone probably knows she's been looking for me. She's probably asked half the city if they've seen me. Isn't that right, China?"

I nodded, unable to speak.

"You know we've got the cops."

"Not all of them. Not even enough of them."

The woman considered it. Then she shook her head at him as though he were a favoured, spoiled pet. "I wouldn't do this for anyone else, I hope you know that."

"I know it," said Joe.

"I mean, in spite of everything you said. I might have decided just to work around the difficulties. It's just that I like you so much. You fit in so well. You're just so — appropriate ." She glanced back at the kid on the couch. "Well, I hope this can wait until I take care of our other matter."

"Whatever you like," Joe said.

She turned her smile on me again but there was a fair amount of sneer in it. "I'll be with you shortly."

I turned away as she went back to the couch so I wouldn't have to see her do the kid. Joe just stood there the whole time, making no move towards me or away from me. I was still shaking a little; I could see my frizzy bangs trembling in front of my eyes. The absurd things you noticed, I thought, and concentrated on them, out of focus against the background of the fabulous antique bar, trying to make them hold still. If they stopped trembling, then I would have stopped shaking. The kid on the couch made a small noise, pleasure or pain or both, and I looked up at Joe, wanting to scream at him to make her stop it but there was nothing there to hear that kind of scream. The kid was on his own; I was the one who really hadn't known that. We were all on our own, now.

The dead eyes stared at me, the gaze as flat as an animal's. I tried to will one last spark of life to appear, even just that greedy, gotta-score look he used to get, but it wouldn't come. Whatever he'd had left had been used up when he'd got her to let me go. Maybe it hadn't even been there then; maybe he'd been genuinely concerned about the problem of getting rid of my corpse. Junkies need love but they need a fix more.

Eventually, I heard the kid slump over on the couch.

"Well, come on," the woman said, going over to the bar to pick up her coat. The elevator doors slid open.

"Wait," Joe said.

I paused in the act of going towards the car and turned back to him.

"She goes back to Streep's," Joe said. "Just like I told you. And you pick up Stacey and George and Priscilla and whoever else is around if you want. But you fucking leave her off. Because I'll know if you don't."

I wanted to say his name but I still couldn't make a sound.

Hey, Joe. What the hell.

If you have to ask, babe, you don't really want to know.

"All right, Joe," the woman said amiably. "I told you I'd do it your way."

His lower lids rose up and stayed shut. Good-bye, Joe .

"Too bad you never got to drink your cognac," the woman said to me as she put on her coat. She nodded at the snifter where it still stood on the bar. "It's VSOP, you know."

Night was already falling as she took me back across the river. She put on the Quicksilver Messenger Service tape for me. Have another hit. Neither of us said anything until she pulled up in front of Streep's.

"Run in and tell them I'm waiting, will you?" she asked cheerfully.

I looked over at her. "What should I say?"

"Tell them Joe and I are having a party. They'll like that."

"You and Joe, huh? Think you'll be able to handle such an embarrassment of riches, just the two of you?"

"Oh, there'll be a few others by the time I get back. You don't think we need all that space for just the two of us, do you?"

I shrugged. "What do I know?"

"You know enough." We stared at each other in the faint light from the dashboard. "Sure you don't want to ride back? Priscilla's friend will undoubtedly have arrived by the time we get there."

I took a deep breath. "I don't know what she told him about me, but it wasn't even close."

"Are you sure about that?"

"Real sure."

She stared at me a moment longer, as though she were measuring me for something. "Then I'll see you later, China."

I got out of the car and went into Streep's.

After that I went home just long enough to pack my bag again while my father bellowed at me and my mother watched. I phoned Marlene from the bus station. She was out but her grandmother sounded happy to hear from me and told me to come ahead, she'd send Marlene out with the car.

So that was all. I went home even less after that, so I never saw Joe again. But I saw them. Not her, not Joe's blonde or the cop or the guy from Priscilla's apartment, but others. Apparently once you'd seen them, you couldn't not see them. They were around. Sometimes they would dive me a nod, like they knew me. I kept on trucking, got my degree, got a job, got a life, and saw them some more.

I don't see them any more frequently but no less, either. They're around. If I don't see them, I see where they've been. A lot of the same places I've been. Sometimes I don't think about them and it's like a small intermission of freedom, but it doesn't last, of course. I see them and they see me and some day they'll find the time to come for me. So far, I've survived relevance and hedonism and I'm not a yuppie. Nor my brother's keeper.

But I'm something. I was always going to be something some day. And eventually, they're going to find out what it is.

So Runs the World Away

Caitlin R. Kiernan

Caitlin R. Kiernan's short fiction has been collected in Tales of Pain and Wonder and Candles for Elizabeth, as well as the forthcoming From Weird and Distant Shores., and has appeared in such anthologies as Love in Vein II, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror and The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Her multiple award-winning first novel , Silk, was published in 1998 and it was followed recently by Trilobite.

" Some time in 1995," she reveals, "I publicly vowed to stop writing stories about vampires for at least six years and also encouraged other writers to do the same. Though I am a great admirer of good vampire fiction, a commodity almost as scarce as hens' teeth, and although I'd written and sold a vampire novel of my own (the wisely 'suppressed', or fortunately stillborn , The Five of Cups,), I could see very little sense in fantasy writers continuing to grind out mediocre tales of bloodsucking fiends when the shelves were already haemorrhaging with the things .

" So I did stop. I wrote no new vampire stories for five years (that's almost six, I tell myself). And then I got an idea, which actually had a lot more to do with ghouls, originally; but, somehow, vampires ended up worming their way in and taking over. I suppose that's what vampires do .

Anyway, that's how I came to write 'So Runs the World Away'.

" Now, if I can only make it another five years "

A falling star for your thoughts," she says and Gable, the girl with foil-silver eyes and teeth like the last day of winter, points at the night sky draped high above Providence and the wide Seekonk River. Night-secret New England sky, and a few miles further north you have to call it the Pawtucket River, but down here, where it laps fishy against Swan Point and the steep cemetery slopes, down here it's still the Seekonk and way over there are the orange industrial lights of Phillips-dale; Dead Girl blinks once or twice to get the taste out of her mouth, and then she follows Gable's grimy finger all the way up to heaven and there's the briefest streak of white light drawn quick across the eastern sky.

"That's very nice, but they aren't really, you know," she says and Gable makes a face, pale face squinched up like a very old woman, dried-apple face to say she doesn't understand and, "Aren't really what ?" she asks.

"Stars," says Dead Girl. "They're only meteorites. Just chunks of rock and metal flying around through space and burning up if they get too close. But they aren't stars. Not if they fall like that."

"Or angels," Bobby whispers and then goes right back to eating from the handful of blackberries he's picked from the brambles growing along the water's edge.

"I never said anything about angels," Gable growls at the boy, and he throws a blackberry at her. "There are lots of different words for angels."

"And for falling stars," Dead Girl says with a stony finality so they'll know that's all she wants to hear about it; meteorites that stop being meteors, Seekonk changing into Pawtucket, and in the end it's nothing but the distance between this point and that. As arbitrary as any change, and so she presses her lips against the jogging lady's left wrist again. Not even the sheet-thin ghost of a pulse left in there, cooling meat against her teeth, flesh that might as well be clay except there are still a few red mouthfuls and the sound of her busy lips isn't all that different from the sound of the waves against the shore.

"I know seven words for grey," Bobby says, talking through a mouthful of seeds and pulp and the dark juice dribbling down his bloodstained chin. "I got them out of a dictionary."

"You're a little faggot," Gable snarls at the boy, those narrow mercury eyes and her lower lip stuck way out like maybe someone's been beating her again, and Dead Girl knows she shouldn't have argued with Gable about falling stars and angels. Next time, she thinks, I'll remember that. Next time I'll smile and say whatever she wants me to say. And when she's finally finished with the jogging lady, Dead Girl's the first one to slip quiet as a mousey in silk bedroom slippers across the mud and pebbles and the river is as cold as the unfailing stars speckling the August night.

An hour and four minutes past midnight in the big house on Benefit Street and the ghouls are still picking at the corpses in the basement. Dead Girl sits with Bobby on the stairs that lead back up to the music and conversation overhead, the electric lights and acrid-sweet clouds of opium smoke; down here there are only candles and the air smells like bare dirt walls and mildew, like the embalmed meat spread out on the ghouls' long carving table. When they work like this, the ghouls stand up on their crooked hind legs and press their canine faces close together. The very thin one named Barnaby (his nervous ears alert to every footfall overhead, every creaking door, as if anyone up there even cares what they're up to down here) picks up a rusty boning knife and uses it to lift a strip of dry flesh the colour of old chewing gum.

"That's the gastrocnemius," he says and the yellow-orange iris of his left eye drifts nervously towards the others, towards Madam Terpsichore, especially, who shakes her head and laughs the way that all ghouls laugh. The way starving dogs would laugh, Dead Girl thinks, if they ever dared, and she's starting to wish she and Bobby had gone down to Warwick with Gable and the Bailiff after all.

"No, that's the soleus, dear," Madam Terpsichore says, and sneers at Barnaby, that practised curl of black lips to flash her jaundiced teeth like sharpened piano keys, a pink-red flick of her long tongue along the edge of her muzzle, and " That's the gastrocnemius, there," she says. "You haven't been paying attention."

Barnaby frowns and scratches at his head. "Well, if we ever got anything fresh, maybe I could keep them straight," he grumbles, making excuses again, and Dead Girl knows the dissection is beginning to bore Bobby. He's staring over his shoulder at the basement door, the warm sliver of light getting in around the edges.

"Now, show me the lower terminus of the long peroneal," Madam Terpsichore says, her professorial litany and the impatient clatter of Barnaby digging about in his kit for a pair of poultry shears or an oyster fork, one or the other or something else entirely.

"You want to go back upstairs for a while?" Dead Girl asks the boy and he shrugs, but doesn't take his eyes off the basement door, doesn't turn back around to watch the ghouls.

"Well, come on then," and she stands up, takes his hand, and that's when Madam Terpsichore finally notices them,

"Please don't go, dear," she says. "It's always better with an audience, and if Master Barnaby ever finds the proper instrument, there may be a flensing yet," and the other ghouls snicker and laugh.

"I don't think I like them very much," Bobby whispers very quietly and Dead Girl only nods and leads him back up the stairs to the party.

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.

"Not if you don't want to," she says. And then she goes to the window and stares out at Benefit Street, at the passing cars and the living people with their smaller, petty reasons for hating time. In a moment, Bobby comes and stands beside her and he holds her hand.

Dead Girl keeps her secrets in an old Hav-A-Tampa cigar box, the few she can't just keep inside her head, and she keeps the old cigar box on a shelf inside a mausoleum at Swan Point. This manicured hillside that rises up so sharp from the river's edge, steep and dead-adorned hill, green grass in the summer and the wind-rustling branches of the trees, and only Bobby knows about the box and she thinks he'll keep it to himself. He rarely says anything to anyone, especially Gable; Dead Girl knows what Gable would do if she found out about the box, thinks she knows and that's good enough, bad enough, that she keeps it hidden in the mausoleum.

The caretakers bricked up the front of the vault years and years ago, but they left a small cast-iron grate set into the masonry just below the marble keystone and the verdigris-streaked plaque with the name "Stanton" on it, though Dead Girl can't imagine why. Maybe it's there so the bugs can come in and out, or so all those dead Stantons can get a breath of fresh air now and then, but not even enough room for bats to squeeze in, or the swifts, or rats. But plenty of j space between the bars for her and Bobby to slip inside whenever she wants to look at the things she keeps inside the old cigar box.

Nights like tonight, after the long parties, after Miss Josephine finally loses interest in her waxwork ravens and chases them all away (everyone except the ghouls, of course, who come and go as they please through the tunnels in the basement); still a coal-grey hour left until dawn and she knows that Gable is probably already waiting for them in the river, but she can wait a few minutes more.

"She might come looking for us," Bobby says when they're inside the mausoleum and he's standing on tiptoes to see out but the grate is still a foot above his head.

"No, she won't," Dead Girl tells him, tells herself that it's true, that Gable's too glad to be back down there in the dark to be bothered. "She's probably already asleep by now."

"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,

As considerable notoriety has resulted from the exhuming of three bodies in Exeter cemetery on the 17th inst., I will give the main facts as I have received them for the benefit of such of your readers as "have not taken the papers" containing the same. To begin, we will say that our neighbor, a good and respectable citizen, George T. Brown, has been bereft of his wife and two grown-up daughters by consumption, the wife and mother about eight years ago, and the eldest daughter, Olive, two years or no later, while the other daughter, Mercy Lena, died about two months since, after nearly one year's illness from the same dread disease. About two years ago Mr Brown's only son Edwin A., a young married man of good habits, began to give evidence of lung trouble, which increased, until in hopes of checking and curing the same, he was induced to visit the famous Colorado Springs, where his wife followed him later on and though for a time he seemed to improve, it soon became evident that there was no real benefit derived, and this coupled with a strong desire on the part of both husband and wife to see their Rhode Island friends, decided them to return east after an absence of about 18 months and are staying with Mrs Brown's parents, Willet Himes. We are sorry to say that Eddie's health is not encouraging at this time. And now comes in the queer part, viz: the revival of a pagan or other superstition regarding the feeding of the dead upon a living relative where consumption was the cause of death and now bringing the living person soon into a similar condition, etc. and to avoid this result, according to the same high authority, the "vampire" in question which is said to inhabit the heart of a dead consumptive while any blood remains in that organ, must be cremated and the ashes carefully preserved and administered in some form to the living victim, when a speedy cure may (un) reasonably be expected. I will here say that the husband and father of the deceased ones, from the first, disclaimed any faith at all in the vampire theory but being urged, he allowed other, if not wiser, counsel to prevail, and on the 17th inst., as before stated the three bodies alluded to were exhumed and then examined by Doctor Metcalt of Wickford (under protest, as it were, being an unbeliever). The two bodies longest buried were found decayed and bloodless, while the last one who has been only about two months buried showed some blood in the heart as a matter of course, and as the doctor expected but to carry out what was a foregone conclusion, the heart and lungs of the last named (M. Lena) were then and there duly cremated, but deponent saith not how the ashes were disposed of. Not many persons were present, Mr Brown being among the absent ones. While we do not blame anyone for these proceedings as they were intended without doubt to relieve the anxiety of the living, still, it seems incredible that anyone can attach the least importance to the subject, being so entirely incompatible with reason and conflicts also with scripture, which requires us "to give a reason for the hope that is in us", or the why and wherefore which certainly cannot be done as applied to the foregoing.

With the silt and fish shit settling gentle on her eyelids and lungs filled up with cold river water, Dead Girl sleeps, the soot-black ooze for her blanket, her cocoon, and Bobby safe in her arms. Gable is there, too, lying somewhere nearby, coiled like an eel in the roots of a drowned willow.

And in her dreams Dead Girl counts the boats passing overhead, their prows to split the day-drenched sky, their wakes the roil and swirl of thunderstorm clouds. Crabs and tiny snails nest in her hair and her wet thoughts slip by as smooth and capricious as the Seekonk, one instant or memory flowing seamlessly into the next. And this moment, this one here, is the last night that she was still a living girl. Last frosty night before Hallowe'en and she's stoned and sneaking into Swan Point Cemetery with a boy named Adrian that she only met a few hours ago in the loud and smoky confusion of a Throwing Muses show, Adrian Mobley and his long yellow hair like strands of the sun or purest spun gold.

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.

"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