Hide Me Among the Graves

Page 40

Gabriel's "Yes" overlapped the single knock.
"Do you know I love you?" asked Gabriel, his voice a controlled monotone.
Ten seconds passed with no knock.
William cleared his throat. "Do you - "
"Give her time!" interrupted Gabriel.
Another ten seconds passed, and Gabriel looked away and fluttered his hand.
William said, "Do you know if the statue of our uncle is still in our father's grave?"
Three knocks sounded, then, after a pause, two more. No, thought Christina. Not sure.
Abruptly there were five knocks in a row. Christina jumped.
William obediently reached out to touch the alphabet letters again; and he touched S-T-O-P-T-H-I-S. Then, after a pause, G-O-D-B-Y.
"Lizzie," said William, "are you still with us?"
Three sharper knocks shook the wood. No.
"Are you a different spirit?"
A single rap. Yes.
God help us, thought Christina, who is this?
"Do you know if the statue is still in our father's grave?"
A single knock sounded in reply.
"Is it?" blurted Christina. "Still there?"
Again a single knock.
"This might be anyone," William cautioned softly. More loudly, he went on, "Can you tell us your name?"
Three raps. No.
"Do you have a name?"
Three more raps.
William looked up at his brother and sister and shook his head in evident bafflement.
A thought occurred to Christina. "Can you spell?" she asked.
Three more knocks sounded in reply.
William shrugged. "I don't know how much we can learn from this spirit, with just yes and no and maybe."
It's not Uncle John, thought Christina - he can write whole stories. "Can you draw," she asked, "if one of us holds the pencil?"
A single knock sounded in reply. Yes.
"Christina," called Maria from the other end of the room, "don't give it your hand!"
But Christina had already picked up the pencil, and Gabriel tore the top sheet of paper off the pad.
"Draw yourself," said Christina.
Her hand dropped the pencil and then picked it up again, holding it now as if it were a lever; and then it lunged toward the pad and quickly outlined two crude figures, one tall with circles for breasts and a rank of lines for long hair, the other figure shorter and stick-thin. Then four lines and a zigzag made a broken window behind them.
It's Lizzie again, thought Christina; no, Boadicea - but her hand drew a circle around the head of the smaller figure.
"Damn me," whispered Gabriel, "it's that starved child-ghost!"
"How do you know," asked William, "that the statue is still in our father's grave?"
Christina's hand was beginning to ache from its awkward grip of the pencil, which now again moved jerkily, outlining a horizontal rectangle and, inside it, a quick back-and-forth squiggle that seemed to be a recumbent body - and between the round head-loop and the oval of the chest it ground a black dot into the paper.
"That's our father's coffin!" whispered Gabriel. "And that dot is in his throat."
"But how do you know?" persisted William. "Who are you?"
Christina winced as her hand now drew another rectangle directly above the first one.
"I wish he could hold a pencil properly!" she gasped.
More slowly, the pencil outlined another supine body in profile, inside this second rectangle. Peering past her own hand, Christina saw a curve indicating a bosom and another curve, bigger ... pregnancy? A coffin directly over our father's ... that must be meant to represent Lizzie's body.
Her hand drew a little spidery asterisk inside the pregnancy curve, then circled the asterisk shape and drew a line from it to the circle it had drawn around the head of the stick-thin figure in the first drawing.
Gabriel gave a choked gasp and pushed himself back from the table. "Merciful God!" he whispered. "It's my child; it's the child Lizzie was carrying when she died!"
William leaned back quickly, half raising a hand, and Christina knew that her own face must be as stiff with horror as his was.
But her hand would not release the pencil, and she could not pull it away from the paper.
The pencil lifted and returned to the figure of the pregnant woman - and though the point was getting blunted, it drew a curve from the spidery fetus to the bottom line of the coffin, and there it drew a series of Xs along that line; then the point made a line straight up, right out of the coffin rectangle and off the top of the paper.
Perhaps because it was her own hand making the picture, Christina understood it. "It broke the mirrors," she said softly, "and carried the pieces away to the surface."
"He," said Gabriel in a hollow tone. "Not it."
A hand on Christina's shoulder made her jump, but it was just Maria, who had at some point walked up behind her.
And now Christina's hand sprang open, dropping the pencil, and she pulled it back and massaged it with her left hand.
"Destroy that drawing," said Maria, and her voice was oddly low in pitch, and getting lower: "and ... the ... pencil..."
Sudden gray light dazzled Christina, and her chair shifted as if in an earthquake; she grabbed for the table but fell forward and her outstretched hands slapped against a horizontal plank, and she wasn't in the chair at all but sitting on a similar plank; and when she squinted quickly around herself she saw gunwale rails and rope rigging, and realized dazedly that she was sitting alone in a boat.
And the boat was swaying from side to side, but with the keel swinging most widely, as if the boat were a pendulum. She gasped and leaned back, gripping the thwart she was sitting on, and the cold wind that fluttered her hair smelled of steamy smoke, like a fire doused with water.
She looked upward to see what moored the top of the mast, but saw only gray sky above it.
Then she wasn't alone. "It won't fall," said a heavy voice from in front of her.
She gasped and lowered her head and was not entirely surprised to see the young man sitting now on the thwart across from her. The deep eyes and curly dark hair and mustache were of course familiar from the portrait that had hung on the wall of every house she'd lived in. But he was hunched over and deathly pale.
For one flickering moment the figure was the squat, eyeless form of Mouth Boy, and then it was John Polidori again.
Christina could hear her pulse throbbing in her temples.
"You crave two things," he said. "Your poetry and me. And we are one thing. You have found my attention again, but not yet my help again. You must let me help you. And therefore you must help me."
Three lines of one of her poems occurred to her: There's blood between us, love, my love, / There's father's blood, there's brother's blood, / And blood's a bar I cannot pass.
And though she had only thought the lines, he gave her a stiff smile that did nothing to change the humorless cast of his eyes.
"You use my gift to say me no," came his voice, and she noticed that the sound of it lagged behind the motion of his lips, as if he were far away.
"I am a jealous god," he went on, "and I offer you the same. Will you be jealous if I take ... your sister, Maria?"
"Maria," Christina said hoarsely, gripping the thwart under her, "is consecrated to your adversary."
Polidori opened his mouth, and now he quoted four lines of a poem of Gabriel's:
Of the same lump (as it is said)
For honour and dishonour made,
Two sister vessels. Here is one.
It makes a goblin of the sun.
"Help me," he said. "I have always loved you best. Maria is not who I want."
Christina's heartbeat had slowed, since the impossible boat did appear to be securely moored somehow, and she ventured a glance out over the gunwale - in the middle distance, winged things with bodies like octopi and jellyfish flapped heavily through the humid air, and dimly in the remoter grayness she could just make out tall mountains or towers.
Maria would recoil from any whiff of this, she thought. And I will at least turn away.
"No," she said, blinking back tears. "I can live without me - I mean, without you."
"What you can do without me," he said sadly, "is die. Talk to me - you know how."
And then she was sitting at the table in Gabriel's dimly lit dining room again, panting hard and clutching the seat of her chair and wincing at Maria's tight grip on her shoulder. She glanced around wildly, but the pinpoint radiances of the few candles in the room were not enough for her dazzled eyes to see anything.
"Maria, let go!" she gasped, and Maria's hand was gone. "Gabriel, William, are you here?"
From across the table came a croaked "Yes" that might have been either of them. "Yes," came a second assent, this one recognizably Gabriel's breathless voice.
"Ach!" coughed Maria from behind Christina's chair. "Why did I touch you? Our terrible uncle! I must wash my hand."
"Gabriel," said Christina, "light, for God's sake."
One of the figures on the other side of the table blundered to its feet, and she heard the rattle of a matchbox.
"I," said William, "saw none of you there."
A match flared, and then Gabriel had lit a gas jet on the wall and turned the valve all the way open. Christina squinted in the relative glare as the cabinets and wallpaper of the familiar room became visible again. She looked over her shoulder and saw Maria scowling.
"Where were you?" Gabriel asked.
"A room," said William, rubbing his eyes, "in a tower, I think. It was full of scrolls, poetry, and I could read them all. And I knew - " He stopped and shook his head. "And I can't remember any of the verses now - and they were all beautiful."
Like Coleridge unable to remember the unwritten bulk of Kubla Khan, thought Christina - and suddenly she was sure that, in William's vision, he himself had been the author of the vanished verses. Recalling his real-world attempts at poetry, Christina winced now in pity.
"I was on a beach made of glass," said Gabriel. He shuffled carefully to the next gas jet and struck another match. "There was an ocean, and it was made of water, but the waves ... walked, toward me." He shivered visibly, and had to strike another match.
William dropped his hands and blinked at Christina.
She hesitantly described her own vision but found that she had finished without having mentioned their uncle's presence in it.
"Into my head," came Maria's voice from behind Christina, "against my will! - he projected a view of the interior of a - a skull, an enormous skull. I seemed to be standing inside it. And he was there, and he said filthy things to me."
"What did he say?" asked William, but Maria just shook her head.
Christina wondered if their uncle had been in all their visions, and only Maria was innocent enough to mention it.
And she wondered if he had said, to each of them, Talk to me - you know how.
Maria was still staring at her hand, which had been gripping Christina's shoulder when the visions began. "All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand," Maria said, perhaps to herself.
"You shouldn't have touched me during it," said Christina crossly. Then she shook her head and said, "I'm sorry, Maria! You're always getting into trouble trying to help me."
William cleared his throat. "This ... statue," he said, "is evidently still in our father's grave. We need to - you say we need to - get it."
"And destroy it," added Maria.
Now Gabriel strode to the windows and pulled them closed, and Christina saw him peer fearfully outside as he latched them.
And she wondered if his son was out there - how had he described him? A boy, like a starved corpse galvanized.
JOHANNA SNAPPED AWAKE WHEN the air was suddenly cold and metallic in her nose and the light brightened beyond her closed eyelids, and her hand was on the old leather grip of her knife in the same moment that she opened her eyes.
And she flinched back in the bed, but it wasn't a bed - she was on a curved, hard ivory slope that was broken at the top edge, and though two figures stood forty feet away on the opposite side of the bumpy ivory bowl, her gaze was helplessly caught by what was moving outside and above the broken-edged rim.
What seemed to be a tower as tall as a mountain stood in the yellow sky - but it was just perceptibly broader in the middle, and she knew it was a wheel viewed from directly in front. It was too far away for its motion to be immediately visible, but she knew that it was rushing in her direction at horrifying speed.
Knowing what she would see, she nevertheless looked up to left and right, and saw sky-scraping wheels in those directions too; and, looking straight up, she saw the miles-high rim of another above the cracked edge of this wide ivory cup.
She had been here before, and she remembered that the wheels never did actually arrive or roll past - that in fact it became difficult, if you watched them, to know in which direction any one of them was turning, though they were palpably spinning at mind-withering speeds - and that soon it would be possible to make out eyes like stars along their rims.
She shivered and drew her knife, panting. It had been a long time since she had felt at home in this place.
Her gaze snapped back down then, for one of the figures on the other side of the bowl had begun to move.
She had never seen it before; it was a skeletal boy in an overcoat of something like dead leaves, and his eyes and white teeth protruded from the gray skin stretched tightly over his skull.
He was hopping toward her over the bumps and hollows of the skull bottom, and Johanna quickly got up in a crouch and held her knife ready.