'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
