'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.'
