Now she looks into my eyes. Hers are nearly black, with a deep light in them.

“Let’s get inside, you might be seen with me.”

Hand in hand we go back into the tower. I walk right over to the stone seat, pulling her. I sit, and draw her to me. She seems to feel this daring but drapes herself sidesaddle on my lap and twines her arms around my neck; her eyes are warm, luminous black. A fleeting look that tugs one sharp corner of her mouth up in a smile expresses pleasure and surprise at me. A few moments later there is a step on the stair below and instantly she bounds away from me. Straightening herself, she steps out again into the air.

“Closing soon, ma’am.”

Then, as I yank casually at my shoelaces (which are tied), “Closing.”

What do I feel inside me? A succession of warmly glowing haloes rise in layers in my heart and burst like bubbles without vanishing.

*

“Come on loverboy,” Jil Punkinflake swings a shovel up onto his shoulder. “Tonight we’re for some good old-fashioned grave robbing.”

An anticipatory gurgle of laughter draws a ring around me.

The embalming students make their pocket money by distilling a tincture from the spiracles of young female cadavers and use it to make grigrio, a depilatory agent favored by courtesans and discreet wives.

They drop the latest batch of grigrio off in the market and we slide in line through the alleys, passing again along the row of alphabet stores. It’s deepest night, and I see clandestine runners slip in and out of the backs of the stores like daring lovers keeping forbidden trysts, all dressed in tight velvet liveries, capes and masks. We run beyond the city limits and into a no man’s land of crumbling walls and listing wrought iron, riven graves and heaps of unburied remains, animal and man bones and meat tangled all in red and black, striped with fat, lined with sinew and fine skeins of grease, tingling with flies. Here slumps in the mud a collapsed set of shelves spilling bottled animal specimens onto the ground, and from shells of broken glass have emerged frail, custard-fleshed creatures quivering like mute newborns.

Still in a madcap row we make our way faster and faster, hurdling over huge fallen trees and burping sloughs, cut through a derelict crematorium whose brick stacks tower into the sky. The moon rolls between them. Bodies here were burned to papery ash flakes and bone shards, and some of the ovens stand open, gagged with the stuff, spilling down the fronts and onto the ground in a petrified vomit. On the other side of the crematorium we bound over a low wall, and now we are making our way much more slowly and with greater care across a cemetery where the ground is upholstered with moss, and big standing stones interrupt the regular disposition of the graves. I think Lilly takes my hand in the dark. The fingers that hold mine are cool and wet and cling, like slugs. The stimulant wind that blows down the sluice of the Idle, past the tombs, wants to spatter us with cold, jingling silver spray, and make weightless ghosts out of us.