sound of fire; and Bobby and Gable are lying on the rocky beach, laid out neat as an undertaker's work, their arms at their sides, pennies on their eyes. And they're both slit open from collar-bones to crotch, stem to stern, ragged Y-incisions and their innards glint wetly in the light of the bonfire.
'No, I don't think it was me,' Dead Girl says, even though it isn't true, and draws another half circle on the floor to keep the first one company. Barnaby has stopped scrubbing at the table and is watching her uneasily with his distrustful, scavenger eyes.
'Their hearts are lying there together on a boulder,' and she's speaking very quietly now, almost whispering as if she's afraid someone upstairs might be listening, too, and Barnaby perks up his ears and leans towards her. Their hearts on a stone, and their livers, and she burns the organs in a brass bowl until there's nothing left but a handful of greasy ashes.
'I think I eat them,' Dead Girl says. 'But there are blackbirds then, a whole flock of blackbirds, and all I can hear are their wings. Their wings bruise the sky.'
And Barnaby shakes his head, makes a rumbling, anxious sound deep in his throat, and he starts scrubbing at the table again. 'I should learn to quit while I'm only a little ways behind,' he snorts. 'I should learn what's none of my goddamn business.'
'Why, Barnaby? What does it mean?'
And at first he doesn't answer her, only grumbles to himself and the pigbristle brush flies back and forth across the surgical table even though there are no stains left to scrub, nothing but a few soap suds and the candlelight reflected in the scratched and dented silver surface.
'The Bailiff would have my balls in a bottle of brine if I told you that,' he says. 'Go away. Go back upstairs where you belong and leave me alone. I'm busy.'
'But you do know, don't you? I heard a story, Barnaby, about another dead girl named Mercy Brown. They burned her heart'
And the ghoul opens his jaws wide and roars like a caged lion, hurls his brush at Dead Girl, but it sails over her head and smashes into a shelf of Ball mason jars behind her. Broken glass and the sudden stink of vinegar and pickled kidneys, and she runs for the stairs.
'Go pester someone else, corpse' Barnaby snarls at her back. 'Tell your blasphemous dreams to those effete cadavers upstairs. Ask one of those snotty fuckers to cross him.' And then he throws something else, something shiny and sharp that whizzes past her face and sticks in the wall. Dead Girl takes the stairs two at a time, slams the basement door behind her and turns the lock. And if anyone's heard, if Miss Josephine or Signior Garzarek or anyone else even notices her reckless dash out the front doors and down the steps of the big, old house on Benefit Street, they know better than Barnaby and keep it to themselves.
In the east, there's the thinnest blue-white sliver of dawn to mark the horizon, the light a pearl would make, and Bobby hands Dead Girl another stone. 'That should be enough,' she says and so he sits down in the grass at the edge of the narrow beach to watch as she stuffs this last rock inside the hole where Gable's heart used to be. Twelve big rocks shoved inside her now, granite-cobble viscera to carry the vampire's body straight to the bottom of the Seekonk and this time that's where it will stay. Dead Girl has a fat roll of grey duct tape to seal the wound.
'Will they come after us?' Bobby asks and the question takes her by surprise, not the sort of thing she would ever have expected from him. She stops wrapping Gable's abdomen with the duct tape and stares silently at him for a moment, but he doesn't look back at her, keeps his eyes on that distant, jagged rind of daylight.
'They might,' she tell him. 'I don't know for sure. Are you afraid, Bobby?'
'I'll miss Miss Josephine,' he says. 'I'll miss the way she read us stories.'
And Dead Girl nods her head and 'Yes,' she says. 'Me too. But I'll always read you stories,' and he smiles when she says that.
When Dead Girl is finally finished, they push Gable's body out into the water and follow it all the way down, wedge it tight between the roots of the sunken willow tree below Henderson Bridge. And then Bobby nestles close to Dead Girl and in a moment he's asleep, lost in his own dreams, and she closes her eyes and waits for the world to turn itself around again.
A North Light
Gwyneth Jones
Gwyneth Jones is an author and critic of science fiction and fantasy, and a writer of teenage fiction under the pseudonym 'Ann Halam'. Recent credits include Dr Franklin's Island, a horror story for teenagers, and Bold as Love, the first part of a near-future fantasy series .
' Maybe every writer of fantasy fiction has a vampire story in them,' says Jones. 'This is my second foray. My teenage vampire story (The Fear Man by Ann Halam) won the Dracula Society's Children of the Night Award in 1995; but that was a pro-vampire version, in which the children of the night were aliens among us, and some of them at least were capable of virtue .
' 'A North Light' takes a harsher view. It's sort of a modern version of the J. Sheridan Le Fanu story 'Carmilla' (note the coincidence in names), and treats of the vampire as tourist and tourist as vampire. I think there's a lot to be said for the analogy. But from personal experience, I am convinced that there are Bed and Breakfast landladies (in Erin's green isle and elsewhere!) who would be the match for any sophisticated undead bloodsucker.
'Poor Camilla! Redemption is such a humiliating fate.'
A carefree traveller's life is full of evenings like this one. You have the money, you have the looks, you have the style; you even have what used to be called the letters of introduction , in the old days. Yet still you find yourself winding along the disturbingly narrow lanes, livid green pasture on either side, a voluptuous sunset overhead, and nowhere to spend the night. The grass, growing in a stiff mohican strip down the middle of the asphalt, confesses that this is a route only used by those high-slung, soot-belching, infuriating tractors. The desk staff at the quaint, olde-worlde (but surprisingly expensive) little inn that just turned you away — with the offensive smugness of a fully booked hostelry in high season obviously sent you on a wild-goose chase.
Never again! you say to yourself.
But the lure of the open road will prevail. Wanderlust.
'My God, here it is,' breathed Camilla.
