The authors' commentary edition of FIRST BITE includes deleted material from the original novel -- scenes that didn't make the cut, including this preface:
In the basement of the British Museum lies a curiosity
in a crate, long ago purchased at auction and forgotten by its curator. Inside a wooden box the object sits, covered
in a tattered sheet which protected it from the moldering, dank stone walls
which once housed it.
To open the crate reveals nothing striking. A woman's
dressing table, its dark wood carved with flowering vines and mythic
figures. Drawers missing knobs, legs
gnawed by mice, wood stained with age and water. Where the mirror should be is
but an empty frame, carved intricately from wood much older than even the
dresser. Pieces of glass cling to the edges, rich with cobwebs and flecks of
patina.
It is said that once a powerful woman gazed into the
glass every morning. A woman whose name history has forgotten in connection to
any particular king or village, for even the town from which the dresser was
retrieved does not remember her name. Only that long ago the villagers carried
away the contents of its house to burn them, but the bonfire was never lit. Why
anyone would burn such delicate objects was beyond the memory of even the aged
wisdom of the village.
Within its drawer lies an empty wooden box, its
compartment stained black as with blood.
That is the only object remaining in this table. No cosmetics or jeweled
combs, no ornaments or ribbons which would surely belong to any woman who sat
before such an elegant frame.
Those who have seen this piece of furniture with their
own eyes claim there is something powerful in its presence. They are but few,
still fewer the number who sat before its empty frame when it was dragged forth
from the cellars of a stone castle in rural France. Their stories are hardly to
be trusted — for who believes in ghost stories surrounding a battered old chest
from the provincial landscape hundreds of miles from any celebrated seat of
power?
Only
those who believe in the other stories from the village. Pieces of folklore
fragmented from a larger tale, like a tapestry unraveled into threads and
crumbling fibers. A far greater story than the mild one told to children before
the hearth's fire, the obscure superstitions no longer observed by even the
sagest of the countryside. Fragments of a forgotten darkness which only a
clever weaver could piece together with the existence of a broken curio box and
the mists reflected in stubs of fragmented glass.
