Shirts and jeans litter the asphalt, the empty fabric limbs askew as if they're attempting to escape. Blood smears Sarah's lips as she struggles against the chest of a dirty looking man with a beard. Terror. Terror is the only word my mind can seize on and it forgets what it means. I forget how to think - to move.

You know what__ worse than burying your own child? Not burying your own child.

I will come,' the priest answered, 'for I have read in old books of these strange beings which are neither quick nor dead, and which lie ever fresh in their graves, stealing out in the dusk to taste life and blood.

With horror he perceived that, by uniting himself as he had with the dead, he had cut himself off from the living. Stripped of all earthly hope, bereft of every consolation, he was rendered as poor as mortal can possiblybe on this side of the grave.

That done, I sank into an uneasy sleep wherein I dreamed of an assembly line of pale, bloodless girls walking down an endless dark street and moaning softly for help. Somewhere, toward the edge of my inner vision, a shadowy figure pursued them with long, beckoning arms.Goddamn booze!Somewhere in the midst of this ghoulish girl parade Cairncross materialized and hung a garland of garlic around my neck, glaring at me with his good eye and intoning, 'Go and sin no more.' Vincenzo appeared at Cairncross' side and together they laughed insanely, then vanished in a puff of sulphurous smoke.I made several high-minded resolutions, muttered half-heard but sincere-sounding prayers to all the recently deposed saints, thrashed and rolled clean off the bed.I might just as well have stayed up.

Is it because I'm a girl?"Reluctantly, Bill nodded his head.She looked at him for a moment, her lips trembling, and Richie thought she would cry. Instead, she exploded. "Well, fuck you!" She whirled around to look at the others, and they flinched from her gaze, so hot it was nearly radioactive. "Fuck all of you if you think the same thing!" she turned back to Bill and began to talk fast, rapping him with words. "This is something more than some diddly shit kids game like tag, or guns, or hide and go seek, and you know it, Bill! We're supposed to do this, that's part of it! And you're not going to cut me out just because I'm a girl, do you understand? You better. Or I'm leaving right now!