As afternoon drew on, the shadow of the law office fell across the bench where Rogasz lay, and after a while he felt strong enough to sit up. The dog followed him down the street, past an army checkpoint that waved him through with directions to the nearest hospital. When Rogasz turned the opposite way, none of the soldiers bothered to correct him.

In time, vampire and dog reached the church where Rogasz had spent the previous night. The walls had toppled in, but by some quirk of combustion, the massive pipes of the organ had survived the fire. They stood side by side, towering over the rubble like a stockade wall, their false gold paint leprous with blisters.

Rogasz searched until he found the body of the girl: peaceful looking, he thought, once he had arranged her limbs properly. He wrenched the metal frame from the grand piano’s skeleton and propped it, harp-shaped, over the girl’s head. With a blackened stick of wood, he wrote

JULIET JULIET JULIET

on the frame, then called the dog to see what he’d done. “This is Juliet,” he told the dog; then he remembered Juliet was someone from long ago, and this was just a dead street kid whose name he’d never known.

“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” he murmured. “I should have asked her name. That’s what clean people do — they ask each other’s name.” He leaned over the corpse and shouted, “Why didn’t you tell me your name? Stupid!”

The dead girl answered with silence... not a profound silence, just the flat silence of death. When the living don’t speak, they’re always saying something with their silence; but a lifeless body has no implied message, no secret it might whisper if coaxed or intimidated. The corpse was now an “it,” not a “she” — a thing lying on rubble, as meaningless as air.