Hide Me Among the Graves

Page 50

"Oh God. He's not my son. No, damn it, he is my son - how did our poor father do this to us?" He got to his feet, looking much older than his forty-one years. "Not that we didn't cooperate." He held up one trembling hand. "Me too, 'Stina; I did it too."
"I haven't done it," said William, and Christina was unhappily sure that the statement had an unspoken yet at the end of it.
"Fetch your pencils and papers," said Christina. "If the creature can appear in your bedroom during the day, it can likely participate in a daytime seance."
THE CAB DRIVER WHO slanted his two-wheeled hansom cab in toward the curb when Trelawny waved at him didn't register any surprise or suspicion at being hailed by such a wild-haired and casually dressed figure in front of a Pelham Crescent house, and he didn't ask to see the money in advance, so Trelawny assumed that the man had dealt with him before.
"A tour of the river," he said as he climbed in. "Battersea Bridge first."
The morning's rain had stopped, and the arches and chimneys and business signs of the buildings along the Fulham Road flickered and dimmed with the intermittent returning sunlight.
He took out the box from under his coat and laid it on the seat beside him. "A last look 'round," he said to it, squinting against the bracing headwind. "You always preferred the night, but - can you hear me, even all broken up? The hell of it is, I know you still love me." He patted it with his wrinkled old hand. "We have had some times, these twelve years - haven't we? - since I found you in that ravine, and took you in."
This morning he had realized, with a chill, that he had not yet disposed of the box containing the petrified kernel of the Boadicea creature. And when this thought was quickly followed by a lately familiar breezy feeling that all was well and he should think of something else, he recognized the latter thought as ... not his own.
Immediately he had pulled the mirror box out from under his bed, fetched a hammer from the downstairs kitchen, and on the fireplace hearth he had spilled the tiny statue out of the mirror box and quickly pounded it to tiny fragments. Then he had carefully swept up all the broken pieces, along with a good deal of the inadvertently shattered hearth bricks, and tipped them back into the mirror box.
And now he was going to sift a third of the debris into the river from Battersea Bridge, a third from Waterloo Bridge, and the last, down to the final shake of dust, from London Bridge.
The cab rattled on past Beaufort Street, which was the most direct way to the bridge; Trelawny glared up over his shoulder toward the driver, but the man had closed the communicating hatch. Then the vehicle went right past Park Walk too, and Trelawny reached out through the open side window and pounded on the outside of the cab.
"Idiot!" he yelled. "Turn south!"
The reins slithered through the bracket on the roof and the cab slowed, and at the same time a young man ran up alongside on the right and hopped up onto the step in front of the wheel, leaning in over Trelawny. He was smiling under disordered curly dark hair, and he was holding a wide-barreled old flintlock pistol aimed at Trelawny's side.
"Silver bullets," he said, with an accent Trelawny recognized as Italian. "Just sit tight for another minute."
From where he sat, Trelawny couldn't hope to knock the pistol aside, nor reach his own at all quickly.
The cab finally turned right, between the close buildings of Limerston Street, and then it was steered into the yard of the gray, narrow-windowed Chelsea Workhouse. The smell of bad meat and old oil was beginning to reassert itself over the acid scent of rain-washed pavement.
The mare had slowed to a walk, and the cab was rolling slowly toward a shadowed arch at the north end of the four-story building, where three men stood around a good-sized carriage with a couple of horses harnessed to it.
One of the men stepped out of the shadows and held up his hand - and even at a distance of a dozen yards Trelawny saw the black mark on the palm.
"You're Carbonari," he said to the man on the cab's step. "Don't interfere with me - in this box I've got the female vampire herself, petrified and shattered. I'm going to scatter her into the river."
"That was good work," said the man, smiling and cocking his head. "We'll toss your box in a dustbin for you."
"Dustbin? You idiot, did you understand what I said? It's the female vampire, the British one! Let me explain it to one of your dago friends who has more English."
"The vampires are about to be made obsolete," the man said, speaking the term with relish.
Trelawny guessed what the man must mean by "made obsolete," and he yawned and tensed himself for a grab at the gun barrel.
"Na-ah," the man said, hopping backward off the step to the cobblestones and raising his pistol to aim it at Trelawny's head. "We may not kill you if you play along, but we got no reluctance to deal with your corpse."
"May not kill me!" said Trelawny bitterly, relaxing back into the seat. "By cutting my throat!"
"Our man is a surgeon," called the young Carbonari, walking alongside the cab now and keeping the pistol raised. "He'll try to do no more cutting than's necessary to stop you being the bridge man."
Trelawny made himself breathe deeply and evenly. He touched his throat, feeling the bulge of the stone lump behind the pulse of his jugular. The thing had definitely grown, in these dozen years since he had invited Miss B. to come home with him.
And by trapping her a week ago, and breaking up her physical form, he had evidently lost her protective attention! Until a week ago the Carbonari would never have dared to threaten him with violence.
Trelawny forced himself to relax and think.
Perhaps this was the appropriate way for it all to end at last - Edward John Trelawny, onetime friend to Byron and Shelley, murdered by Carbonari agents in the yard of a London workhouse at the age of seventy-seven. He had long since made arrangements to be buried beside Shelley in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. The goal of these Carbonari was to eradicate the vampire race and save London, just as his was - could he fight them?
He laughed silently and flexed his hands. Only to the death, he thought, and he rehearsed how he would draw his revolver and spring out of the cab on the left side, away from the men by the carriage.
The rattle of the cab was louder when it rocked in under the arch, and Trelawny quickly pushed the cab's leather flap aside and rolled out, dropping to his hands and knees as he drew his revolver and noting the men's legs and ankles as he brought the barrel up.
But one man simply dropped, with a spatter of red blood at his throat, and the others were now shouting and running; Trelawny got to his feet, cursing the pain in his knees that slowed him and set his heart to knocking.
The driver of his cab had drawn a revolver of his own, but he was pointing it away from Trelawny, at the other side of the cab. The pistol went off with a flare and a resounding crack, and then the man jumped down from the cab, landing awkwardly but limping away without a pause.
Two more pistol shots hammered the air under the arch, and somewhere on the other side of the horse a man screamed.
The mare was frantically shying away, backing the cab and grinding her flank against the brick wall, and Trelawny forced his sharply protesting knees to step back to avoid being knocked down and trampled. Through the slack reins he glimpsed men in some thrashing struggle, but his focus now was simply on the wedge of clear pavement between the wall and the jigging cab, and he grabbed the cab lamp with his free hand and pulled himself farther toward the rear of the cab, away from the stamping mare. He was panting and blinking sweat out of his eyes.
Then a squat figure had blocked the gray daylight in front of him, between the rear of the cab and the wall. Trelawny raised his shaking pistol and forced himself to focus on the lumpy silhouette, and he saw that it had no head, just a broad flat hat that rested right on its shoulders.
Trelawny recognized it - he had seen it in Rossetti's bedroom only a few hours ago - but in that instant the thing once again dissolved into oily smoke, and when the gun jumped and cracked in Trelawny's hand, it was too late. The pistol ball whacked into brick somewhere across the street.
Trelawny wasn't able to take a deep breath, and his vision was darkening; and he didn't resist when an arm caught him around the ribs and braced him up. He barely had the strength to lift the revolver and tuck it into his belt, and he let his unseen companion boost him up into the cab.
The long reins slid through the bracket on the roof and then were caught and drawn inside hand over hand, and the cab was rocking as the mare eagerly backed out of the shadowed arch into the bright yard.
After a few seconds of the cab rolling backward, the reins snapped and the mare snorted and stamped but began trotting obediently forward. Trelawny was rocked against the cab's right panel.
He rolled his throbbing head to look at the stranger who was now driving the cab from inside.
The teeth were bared in a permanent rictus grin in the skeletal gray face, and its wide eyes swiveled toward him and then back to the horse. The spidery gray hands on the reins were splashed with fresh blood.
The thing spoke then, and its voice was a flat squeak: "A spirit present? In a sense!" And it reached up with its left hand and knocked once against the cab's low ceiling. A few moments later it sighed, with a sound like sand spilling from a shovel.
It rolled its eyes toward Trelawny, and its involuntary grin widened. "Marry!" it said then in a voice like wood creaking. "Well, not the ceremony, but one part of 'marry,' yes!"
It reached up and knocked again.
GABRIEL HAD PULLED THE curtains across the brightening view of the river, and William had fetched the table while Christina assembled papers and pencils, and the first question they had asked when the three of them had sat down was, Is there a spirit present?
The table had shaken with a single knock - yes.
The next question had been, Are you Gabriel's son, who wants to marry the horse-doctor's daughter?
After a pause, there had again been a single knock.
"Our uncle," said Christina now, speaking into the air below the high ceiling, "was locked up for seven years. Do you know how we might banish him forever?"
THE GRAY BOY HAD guided the cab into an alley across Limerston Street, and then its nimble fingers had untied the strings on a canvas rain-flap that tumbled down to block the view of shadowed windows and doors ahead. The only light in the cab's narrow interior now was the dim reflection from the close brick walls visible through the windows on either side.
Trelawny made himself face his grotesque companion without flinching, though he allowed himself to press against the right panel. The creature had tucked a ragged parasol between its knees, and Trelawny noticed for the first time that it was wearing a big blanket wrapped around its shoulders like a toga, and a couple of little round holes in it seemed to be bullet holes, though there was no blood around them. The thing's breath, he noticed, was colder than the outside air and smelled of river mud.
The dead boy had picked up the mirror box in its left hand and was clutching it to itself, away from Trelawny.
"I do know a way," it said, and raised its right hand to the roof and rapped on it once.
THE TABLE SHOOK AT a single knock under Christina's fingertips.
"How?" she whispered.
The clock on the mantel ticked off a dozen seconds, and William cleared his throat.
"Remember it can't spell."
"Does it," asked Christina, "involve cutting Edward Trelawny's throat?"
"THEY KNOW ABOUT YOU," quacked the gray thing as it rapped the cab's roof once. It wiggled its bloody fingers. "Just as these dead men did."
"Those ... dead men wanted to kill me."
"Fools," said the thing.
"They didn't want the box," Trelawny added, nodding toward the box in the thing's left hand.
"Fools," it said again.
Trelawny's heart was knocking hollowly in his chest, and he had to take a breath to speak again.
"You ... rescued me from them?"
"I rescued her," the thing said, shaking the mirror box.
Trelawny's head ached. "Stop hitting the roof, will you?"
The dead boy shrugged his knobby shoulders under the blanket. "I can do it just as well with my teeth."
The thing wasn't looking at him, so Trelawny let his hand slip toward the flap of his coat that concealed the revolver.
"THAT'S A YES," SAID Gabriel. "I should have cut the old bastard's throat in Regent's Park."
"I wonder if that's what Maria won't tell us," said William. "She can't condone murder."
"Neither can we," said Christina.
"What do you call killing our uncle?" asked William.
"He's not human," said Christina desperately, "and he's died already, by his own hand."
"You," said Gabriel, speaking toward the ceiling, "had two human parents - "
THE DEAD BOY BESIDE Trelawny clicked its teeth together - three distinct times.
"I had at least three human parents," the thing said to Trelawny. "The first time, though, I was lost in a miscarriage."
"You look it," said Trelawny.
Then he snatched out the revolver, rammed it against the blanket over the dead boy's ribs, and pulled the trigger.
Even with the muzzle against the cloth, the detonation battered Trelawny's eardrums in the curtained cab interior.
"NO?" SAID GABRIEL AFTER the latest three knocks, and the dawning relief was evident in his high-pitched voice. "Am I your father or not?"