Hide Me Among the Graves

Page 24

"Clothe yourself in me! I love you! We can - travel, read, eat, drink, together!"
"I don't have that anymore."
"Have it all again, in me! Marry me! Here's a ship's captain, we can be together, a hermaphrodite - "
"No," came her voice; then, much louder, "No." And she was gone. The other ghosts, filling the night apparently to the invisible horizon, crowded closer, their arms waving like a moonlit kelp forest on the sea floor.
Swinburne gaped at the space where Lizzie's ghost had been.
Chess pushed away from the bow. "Shouldn't have spilled your blood till she agreed to take it," he said before striding back along the rocking deck.
The old man shouted to his two dead crewmen, and they shambled to the tiller and rigging, and in moments the boat was heeling around in the wind.
Ghost limbs flailed at the taut shrouds and were whisked into vanishing fragments, and for a few tense moments as Swinburne clung to the bow their voices were a buzzing, clattering racket in his freezing ears.
"Don't listen to them!" shouted Chess from behind him.
But Swinburne couldn't ignore their voices, the things they were saying: "Here, where the world is quiet; / Here, where all trouble seems / Dead winds' and spent waves' riot / In doubtful dreams of dreams..." These were lines he had written himself, and so they were convincing. "Even the weariest river / Winds somewhere safe to sea..."
He had already got one knee up on the gunwale when Chess tugged him back to sprawl painfully on the deck.
"Not your style," Chess called to him.
Then the boat had come around and was surging northwest before the wind, and the ghost multitude quickly receded into the remote blackness.
Swinburne got wearily to his feet and gripped the rail, lowering his head and taking deep breaths of the cold sea air.
"You'll be among 'em soon enough," said Chess, not unkindly. "Why don't you get in out of the wind now."
Swinburne climbed back down to the belowdecks cabin, stunned and despairing, for he had thought his main challenge would be finding Lizzie's ghost - it had not occurred to him that she might refuse his proposal.
WHEN THE BOAT'S PITCHING fell to a gentle rise and fall, he knew they had passed the Sheerness breakwater, and he pulled himself back up onto the deck. The kerosene torches had been extinguished, and the old lantern was again glowing on the mast.
The lights on the Kentish hills were bright yellow dots in the night. Out in the cold air again, Swinburne was shivering violently, and he had to ask Chess, who shambled up to him, to repeat something he had just said.
"It don't work with fishing-boat captains," the old man said more loudly.
"Wh-what doesn't?"
"Shipboard marriages." He shook his head. "But did you truly expect me to marry you to a ghost?"
"Oh, what d-does it matter now?"
Chess grinned, without cheer. "Just so you know in future - they couldn't say 'I do.' There's no I, and they haven't the wherewithal to choose to do anything."
"She chose to reject me!"
"That wasn't a choice, lad - that was an empty gun saying click."
"She chose to reject me," said Swinburne again, and Chess shook his head and shambled back to rejoin his laboring dead ancestors.
After a few minutes, the mariners let the sail go slack and one of them leaned on the tiller, and Swinburne saw the pier only moments before Chess threw a line over a bollard on it and began pulling the bow in.
And the figure standing at the foot of the pier wasn't visible until a match flared in the darkness and lit what must have been the end of a cigar.
Chess and his ancestors finished mooring the boat and tying up the lowered sail, and then Chess plodded wearily across the deck to the mast and extinguished the lantern; the darkness was total. A minute later Swinburne heard the hatch cover clatter down.
His business here seemed to be ended.
Swinburne shrugged and stepped up onto the pier.
"And how do you do, sir?" he called toward the tiny orange-glowing coal of the cigar.
"Stupidest question I've ever heard," came the gruff answer.
Swinburne clenched his teeth and made himself step forward, but the cigar coal bobbed in quick retreat.
"Stay back, you fool!" came the unseen man's voice. "Don't you know anything? I can survive their notice, but I doubt you could."
Swinburne forced his voice to be steady. "Whose notice?"
"Not at night, under an open sky. Noon tomorrow - in the Whispering Gallery in the dome of St. Paul's. Stand at the southernmost point, by the stairs. Don't fail to be there, if you hope to save your life or your soul."
Then the cigar coal fell to the ground and went out, probably under a heel. After Swinburne had called hello a few times, he slowly but resolutely began walking forward, but his measured trudging took him all the way up to the road without hearing a sound from the man who had spoken to him; and he exhaled and relaxed and began trudging back toward Sheerness to get a room at the hotel for the remainder of the night.
ST. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL WAS a particularly daunting white splendor in the cold noonday sun. It stood blocking out most of the blue sky on a wide railed square at the crest of Ludgate Hill, the highest point in the City, and though he couldn't see the dome from the foot of the broad marble stairs out front, the two widely separated towers and the two lofty rows of paired columns between them made Swinburne feel as insignificant as the limitless dark ocean had done last night. The bottom third of the enormous building, the hundred-foot extent from the projecting entablature between the two galleries of columns down to the pavement, seemed a slightly darker shade of white, as if the sea had once tried to engulf the cathedral and then impotently receded.
And I'm out of my depth, he thought as he began reluctantly tapping up the steps. He was wearing a hat and gloves, not because of the cold but because direct sunlight had begun lately to irritate his skin - at least this distasteful place offered welcome shade.
It was of course a church, a Christian church, and mentally he recited lines from a poem he'd written: Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath; We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death.
Certainly Swinburne didn't seem to be conquering by pursuing the pagan sorts of supernaturalism. They were real enough - as proved by the two ghosts he had spoken to out at sea last night! - but the world had indeed grown gray, grayer than he had guessed when he had written the poem; and he was afraid that he would never be able to drink of Lethe's river: to forget his love for Lizzie ... and her refusal of him.
The broad interior of the cathedral, with its columns and the arches of its ceiling peaking impossibly far overhead, made him feel like a rodent; no service was going on at the moment, fortunately, and the isolated figures praying in the pews were all facing away from him. Who, he wondered as he scuttled through slanting beams of rainbow-colored light from the south-facing stained-glass windows, is this man who wants to talk to me? And why does he?
Far overhead, the interior of the great dome ballooned up in what must have been eight huge triangular concave panels with vague dark murals painted on them, but Swinburne slanted off to the right across the marble floor, to the stairs, before he would have to walk under its ornate high immensity; and the tall white-and-gold altar was thankfully still farther away down the long central aisle.
The corkscrew staircase was comfortably narrow and dim; it was warmer than the vast nave had been and smelled reassuringly of tallow and old book paper. He took off his hat to keep from bumping it against the low ceiling. After about a hundred ascending steps, he reached a gallery with a library at one end of it, but the Whispering Gallery proved to be higher up, so he returned to the stairs and kept climbing.
After puffing his way up an even greater number of stone stairs than before, he stepped out into the highest gallery inside the cathedral, a circular catwalk high above the nave, at the very base of the incurving dome.
A ring of tall windows in the dome above him let in bright daylight, and above them were the huge murals he had glimpsed the bottoms of from the nave floor below. He stepped out to the railing and looked down - a hundred feet directly below, the white-and-black checkerboard pattern of the floor was interrupted by a wide compass-rose mosaic.
The enormous Gothic geometry of it all, the slanting insubstantial buttresses of sunlight, and the sheer volume of empty space above and below him, were dizzying, and it was several moments before he remembered that he was supposed to meet someone right here - at the south rim of the dome, by the stairs.
He pulled out his watch and squinted at it: noon exactly. Three or four other people stood at other points around the gallery's circumference, peering up at the murals, but none of them was paying any evident attention to him.
The view below chilled his belly, and he stepped back to lean against the rounded wall below the windows.
And at his ear came a whisper: "Poet" - he glanced around quickly, but no one was within a dozen yards of him - "stay where you are."
Of course, he thought nervously, the Whispering Gallery! The interior of the dome must carry sounds right around the whole stone ring.
"What?" he said softly.
"Speak against the stone," came the disembodied whisper again.
Swinburne obediently pressed his cheek against the cold stone wall.
"What do you have to tell me?" he muttered.
"You're in love with a ghost." The disembodied sentence seemed to carry an implicit you fool at the end of it. "You shouldn't need me to tell you this, and if you've got a brain in your head you understood it last night, but - have no further contact with the thing. I'd say 'with her,' but - as you probably noticed - it's not really a 'her' anymore. Go meet a real flesh-and-blood girl, and fall in love with her."
Swinburne was frowning. Could this man somehow represent the Church, or the government? Was there some old law about necromancy still on the books? He peered at the other people standing at intervals around the gallery, trying to guess which of them might be the one speaking to him. "You - " he began. "This is absurd. A ghost? You're obviously drunk - "
"One of us probably is," came the whisper, "but it's not me. Chichuwee told me all about your conversation with him, and I know a couple of things that the bird man doesn't."
Swinburne could feel his face blushing against the cold stone, and he blinked out across the dome - a beam of sunlight from one of the windows had moved onto him, and he shuffled sideways to be out of the sun's glare. There was a tall, white-bearded old man standing on the opposite side of the railed ring, a hundred feet away across the empty air of the dome - surely that was the furtive speaker. "This is none of your - "
"It is of mine, boy," came the eerily far-traveling whisper, and the tall old man at the northernmost point of the gallery hunched his shoulders as the voice reached Swinburne's ears. "If it weren't for a sin of mine, the embodiment of which was broken but now grows again behind my jugular vein - if not for that - you could go sailing out to talk to your dead girl every night; but you're not the only one who loves her now, and your rival is inclined toward tumultuous jealousy and will surely kill you."
"Rival? Who, Gabriel? He doesn't - "
"No," and this time it was spoken: "you fool. I don't know who Gabriel is, nor who you are, and it doesn't matter. I only know the rival. Hah! Ask Chichuwee about the Nephilim, though I expect the answer will cost you many more birds than your previous consultation did. There's a creature, call it a goddess, an archaic goddess, who loves your ghost-girl, and who will kill any mortals who love her too, or who she loved, back when she still could. Fortunately for you, this - this goddess is wounded and blinded right now, for another day or so, and is not aware of your ill-advised expedition last night. Don't repeat it."
Swinburne shuffled sideways again to stay out of the sunbeam. He was trying to be amused by this grotesque conversation. "Her husband, Gabriel - he loved her, and she loved him. Is this goddess of yours going to kill him?"
"Unless he has joined a god's family too. And I don't need yet another member of that sort of family to deal with, so heed me. This - why are you moving?"
"Moving?"
"Along the wall."
Swinburne shrugged. "Staying out of the sunlight. What is this family - "
"Step back into it." The old man on the far side of the dome was clearly staring at him now. "Yes, you've seen me. Now humor me - step back into the sunbeam - or I'll drag you outside without a hat."
Swinburne was sweating, and he glanced sideways at the sunlit patch of wall.
He took a deep breath and let it out. "I'd truly rather not."
"Bloody hell. Does it hurt, sting?"
Swinburne shrugged, then reluctantly nodded.
"And have you lately begun to ... write poetry?"
"I've always written poetry, I - "
A hundred feet away across the dome, the old man waved impatiently. "Damn you," came the whisper along the wall, "has it suddenly become very good? Better than you had imagined you could write?"
Swinburne's mouth fell open. "Yes," was all he could say.
"Step into the light. It won't hurt your sorry hide today, trust me."
This stranger knew so much about him that Swinburne, dazed, did as he was told: he shuffled sideways into the shaft of sunlight - and it was simply warm, not astringent.
"Well, through glass," he muttered, mistrustful of the apparent relief, "and holy glass, at that - "