The Book of the Dead by Gail Carriger, Will Hill, Jesse Bullington, Paul Cornell, Maria Dahvana Headley, Molly Tanzer Read Free Book Online Page A

“…Kelly, I don’t –“
    “Jesus, mate, give me a little credit!” The Vampire’s smile is watery. “Someday we’ll have us a long talk about what a joke is. I’m talking about court, Seth. I got filled in by my neighbours and told the copper they sent round that I was looking out the window and saw everything. Star witness for a hate crime. Attempted murder. Rich is going down so hard. His mates, too, with any luck – accomplices.”
    “No,” the Mummy shakes his head. “No, it was just… I shouldn’t have… I…”
    “You didn’t do anything!” The Vampire is livid, which the Mummy thinks is appropriate. “Those… bastards are the ones who deserve this, not you. Heartless fucking arseholes.”
    The Mummy realizes that tears are only running down one of his cheeks. Heartless. He wants to tell the Vampire that the reason mummies were buried with their hearts intact, instead of removed to canopic jars along with the bulk of their organs, is that the soul resides there, and must be present for when Anubis weighs their deeds against the Feather of Truth. There is no such thing as a heartless man, any more than there is a heartless mummy.
    Try lecturing a vampire about matters of the heart, though.
    A week later, an eye-patch bedecked Seth Rasul is let out of hospital and strides from his would-be tomb not as a bandaged mummy, but a living man once more. Six months later, Kelly buys him a fez for his birthday just like the one Karloff wore, and tries to stay awake for the duration of The Mummy . She almost makes it, too.



Old Souls
    David Thomas Moore
    “It’s weird. I honestly never talk about this sort of stuff, even with my friends.”
    She smiles at me, vulnerably, warmly, with a hint of a frown, genuine confusion in her eyes.
    It’s getting late. The sun’s setting, somewhere out of sight behind the shops and terraces of whatever backwoods town it is I’ve got stuck in. The sky’s deepening to that rich lavender colour it holds for maybe a quarter of an hour before the evening truly sets in. A few of the cars drifting past every few minutes now have their lights on. There’s the beginning of a chill in the air; she’s started to hunch her shoulders, and has taken to reflexively tugging her cardigan tighter every few minutes. I don’t think she’s even noticed, yet.
    The table outside the coffee shop – Costa, AMT, something like that; the first place we found outside the train station – is cluttered with the detritus of a wasted afternoon. Wide cups holding drying teabags and the foamy dregs of lattes. An overflowing ashtray, and an empty Silk Cut packet. A battered old book that was too big to keep in my pocket. The scarf she took off when the sun was still out and has, for the moment, forgotten. Her notebook. Plates bearing the crumbs of the sandwiches we ordered an hour or so ago, when her stomach audibly gurgled. She laughed, then, easily and happily, and suggested, since we were showing no signs of leaving, that we get lunch. It wasn’t a question, anxiously feeling out my intentions – you do want to stay, right? – but an admission of something we both knew.
    That’s over-romanticising a bit. She’s bold, self-assured, but I’d be lying if I said there was no insecurity in her at all. She knows she wants to stay here with me, knows I want to stay in turn, but she doesn’t know why – doesn’t understand – and so she doesn’t quite trust it. She’s waiting to wake up from a dream. It would be more honest to say she’s enjoying the moment and choosing to take me at face value, than that she doesn’t feel any uncertainty at all.
    We met on the platform, having both been kicked off the same train. There was a problem on the lines, something to do with signalling, and it had to be cancelled. Another train would be along. But no other train was forthcoming, and we got to talking. When it was clear we were going to be here for a while, I suggested a coffee. Initially we