Ninty Nine
Karloff tells of a dead girl he met.

I'm going to have to assume it was 1998, so I'd been dead for fourty years. She died when she was 20 in 1980 so it worked out that we looked the same age even though she was six years old when I drilled a hole in my head. Kind of sick if you think about it man, it was quite an age gap. But you should have seen her face, you'd forget about that. I'm telling you, I didn't even care about the bullet hole.

Sublime. The smoothness of her skin, her green eyes, the gentle drip of her wound. Fuck man, I'm not a poet, but you get the idea.

She was lying on her back in the middle of a book store, smoking a cigarette. She had the soft magnetism of a girl who hadn't slept in days, you know what I mean? I think she was surprised to see me. A lot of people die but not many of them stick around to watch everyone else cop it. Anyway, I went over and lay down next to her, she was looking at me but she didn't smile which was unnerving, but she kept looking like she was waiting for me to answer a question she hadn't even asked.

"You don't read."

"I'm in a bookshop, aren't I?"

"That's what I can't figure out..."

"I read comic books."

"Aren't you a little old?"

"I'm about 50... So yeah. Smoking will kill you you know."

And then I got a smile, which was a huge fucking relief actually.

"So what do you read?" she evetually said,

"...The Invisibles," I said, as if it was actually really obvious. And then she let out like a half-laugh and said.

"I guess that was actually really obvious."

Maybe she can read my mind, I thought to myself. And then I picked her up and we both went out and got pissed.

You know what Karloff, don't let anyone tell you that you're not a master story teller. That's the best tale of true love I've heard in months.