Camillo said, "Do you like the fish's hat? I found it in a jumble sale. Too good for a woman."

"You gave me the key," she said, "which let Ruth out. They won't talk about Ruth. Ruth burned the house. Did they tell you about Miriam?"

"They don't tell me things, they never did."

"But you're resurrected, Camillo. That must make a difference."

He did not look like Camillo anymore, not with the dreadlocks and beads. His old forearms were muscular as steel. Hair grew on them, steel colored.

Yet since he had come here, he had grown introspective. He had shut himself away, sending the two girls out alone with handfuls of money so they could have their hair done, and could buy countless almost identical tiny black clothes, and silver for their golden limbs, and bags of chips and ice-creams, which was all they ever seemed to eat.

On his new music machine above in the house, Camillo played The Sisters of Mercy, Carter U.S.M., and Iron Maiden. Rachaela heard the murmur of these musics, like the sea in a cave.

Sometimes he cleaned the trike in a large utility room beyond the kitchen. Sometimes he and the two girls went riding it. The stuffed horse's head attached between the handlebars had once been scorched to the bone.

She did not know why she wanted to hear the story of his escape. Perhaps only because, in a curious way, Camillo had been bound up for her with Adamus. And there was no way on earth Adamus, hanged by the neck and devoured by flames, could come back from the dead.

"They don't open doors, here, after dark," Camillo said. "Very wise. London was always a jungle."

Once before he had told her a story of an escape. She had wanted him to stop. She had thought he might be dying, that time. He was almost three hundred years of age. Or was he only a terribly crazy, normal old man, insanely sane like the other three gray hamsters watching TV.

"Down on the beach," he said, "that's where I was. I'd gone to make a fire."

His words pulled her back. She stared at him.

"To make a—"

"A fire. Like the time Sylvian was cremated."

The Scarabae burned their dead. Who had this fire been for? For Ruth? For Anna's memory? Or for himself?

"Go on," she said.

"Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet."

Rachaela said, "The hat suits the fish. It needed something."

"Then I saw the house catch alight," he said. "It was a vision."

"Like the burning town, when your father and mother fled in the sleigh."

"No, not like that. That looked real, convincing. The house looked like a stage set in a bad film. I watched until it had all come down. Then the daylight broke."

"Why didn't you—" she said "—why didn't you come up from the beach?"