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EIGHT

Darkness has its charht can be as enchanting as any foreign port with its exotic architectures Between dusk and dawn, the cohts that only the moon, the stars, and richly textured shadows can provide

But pitch-black glooination And e share absolute lightlessness with a grotesque h its ht becoht set ourselves afire to provide it, if we had a match

Fortunately, I have no match and am spared self-iht, to which she resorts (if you want my considered opinion) much too slowly under the circumstances When at last she does switch on that little torch, she ai on the floor of the corridor when the lights go out and the desiccated corpse begins to shriek, but then I erupt to -loaded novelty toothpick dispenser offering an afterdinner wooden probe The beam is so narrow that it illu it to her left, where the les it upward, to ht here and needs to confirm my identity

Jolie is twelve and I’m almost twenty-two, so it is incumbent upon me to act like the adult in the rooirl, because the little girl herself isn’t screa human, I will no doubt have made a fool of er I can delay behaving idiotically, the less huood-byes just before I ride off into the sunset with my faithful companion, Tonto So with ht and in measured tones I say, “Show me the mummy”

The bea rip, lowers from the pistol to the floor, and sweeps a few feet to the left, revealing that et The creature, for which I have no biological classification, is still lying on its back, in the withered posture of a juiceless death The only part of it that ainst the floor as if in life it was a pianist and still longs to pound out some hot jazz on a keyboard

My understanding thus far has been that this fallen beast is a dry husk surrounding a brittle skeleton that encloses the dust to which all creatures—those of us who are monsters and those of us who aren’t—ulti and can cope with it This seeking hand is too much

I stand over the thing, holding the pistol, pleased to see that ht be expected, certainly less than those of an octogenarian with familial tremors

The cove lights along both sides of the corridor co ceases Its tapping hand falls still

As Jolie switches off her ht and puts it on the floor beside her, I wonder aloud, “What the hell just happened?”

She’s still sitting cross-legged on her folded s “It never amounts to more than that”

“You said nothing ever happens after the whu”

“I forgot about this”

“How could you forget such a thing?”

“It doesn’t happen a whole lot It’s rare The hand business is like a post”

“Totally dehydrated mummies don’t have postmortem reflexes”

“Well, it’s so Orc open, you know, dissecting him, see what’s in there”

“That’s a bad idea”

“Orc is har important”

“Yeah, you’ll learn Orc isn’t har?”

“Wasn’t screairl says “Mouth didn’t move Chest didn’t rise and fall And if you think about it, that sound was electronic like the whummm but different, freakier What see broadcast the sound, and Orc’s dead vocal cords or its bones or so inside it is maybe like a receiver that just happened to pick up the transmission”

She sits there on her blanket, like little Miss Muffet on a tuffet, except that if a spider sits down beside her, she won’t be scared away She’ll just crush it in her hand

I lower rief, kid, the first tihts went out and you heard it, you were here alone?”

“Yeah”

“And you came back?”

“Like I told you, after years of Hiskott, I’m not afraid of much I’ve seen lots that’s terrible I saw”

She has suffered soin the face of unthinkable adversity, and that inspires me

“Please sit down, Mr Potter”

“How do you know my name?”

“It’s what you told Hiskott when he was controlling Uncle Donny And he told us to stay away from you”

I almost reveal my true identity to her Then I realize that if she leaves this subterranean refuge and returns to the Corner, within the puppetirl, read her memory, and know my real name

They say that voodoo priests, witches, and warlocks can’t lay a spell upon you if they don’t know your true nawash Anyway, this Hiskott guy isn’t a voodoo priest or a witch or a warlock

Nevertheless, I decide to keep

Until the recent scare gaveon the floor, facing the girl, with the ht Now I reposition the blanket and sit with a clear view of both Jolie and Orc

“You said those three days in his cottage, Hiskott was sick and then he changed, he wasn’t just Hiskott anymore What do you mean—that you don’t think he had this pohen he checked in, that it ca there?”

Now Jolie, as seven when life in the Corner changed, relies on faend, which has been crafted and polished around dinner tables and firesides, in days of despondency and days of fragile but enduring hope, when they dared not discuss rebellion and, instead, told and retold one another the stories of their years of oppression, thereby transfor into a tale of endurance froe

As that legend has it, Dr Norris Hiskott arrives in a Mercedes S600, a far uest at their motor court drives On first appearance,