Hide Me Among the Graves

Page 59

The room beyond was wide and lit from some undetectable source in flickering green, as if it were under sunlit water. The floor was polished stone. Immediately in front of Crawford stood a glass table with a handful of black gravel and sand on it, and against the far wall was a long couch flanked by two chairs, with shelves above it.
At first he couldn't see the woman who had spoken. He took two steps forward. "Er ... hello?" he said.
Then she spoke, and he saw that she was reclining on the couch amid a tumble of cushions. Her face, turned toward him, was narrow and youthful.
"Save me," she said, "please."
"How?" asked Crawford nervously. "From what?"
Then he jumped, for something had moved on one of the high shelves. He peered at it, and his stomach went cold when he realized that the object was a severed hand, pointing.
It was pointing at the table.
"Bless my broken body with some of your living blood," said the face on the couch.
Crawford's face was tingling, and he spread his hands and took a long, careful step backward, not looking at her.
Quickly she added, "You are Polidori's son; that's why he wants you. In the summer of 1822, in Italy, your mother, Josephine, belonged to him. Come to me, give me yourself."
He looked at her now - and he saw that there was no body reclining there, just the speaking head. Her eyes were enormous and glittered in the green glow.
With a choked shout, he spun toward the curtain, but a slim severed arm lay in the way now, and it immediately began a furious convulsing like an energetic fish hauled up onto a dock; the knocking of the elbow and the slapping of the hand against the floor were as rapid as a fast drumbeat.
He stepped back in horror, and, as other pieces of a woman's body stirred to life in various parts of the room, the head on the couch said, "My insect fingers permitted me to show you my one-time power. You would have seen more, been stung many more times, if you had not spoken to the Roman gods. I can save you and all you love. Only give me your blood."
Crawford had leaped to the side while she was speaking, the bottle swinging wildly in his coat, but the arm flipped over in that direction, blocking him. The fingers on the jumping hand were spasmodically curling and snapping out straight.
"Your blood already remembers the way," the woman said, speaking more loudly to be heard over the drumming of the arm. "My sweet Swinburne is lost to me, and I hold all the verses he would write - he writes only dead lines now under his unkindly master. Heal me, join my family, kill my enemies."
Crawford hesitated, trying to place himself for a jump over the flailing arm, when she added, "You know the way back."
The way back -
And, as he sometimes did very late on sleepless nights in one French city or another, Crawford remembered how he had felt after McKee's common-law husband had bitten him seven years ago: light and restless, eager to be striding quickly down dark streets. He had had no responsibilities or worries, hardly even any thoughts.
No home waited for him now, up there on the surface. His wife and child were lost.
His relaxing hand brushed the bottle in his pocket, but it was the lively face of Johanna that sprang into his head. And he remembered her clapping her hands when McKee agreed to marry him seven years ago and saying happily, Oh, well done, you two! And on the day they married, she had said, I'll kill myself before I'll let him have me again.
He gripped the bottle and told himself, No - you can't relax yet.
He said, clearly, "No," and vaulted straight over the flexing arm into the curtain.
He ducked, hoping the fabric would slow his fall, but the green glow winked out while he was in midair and he landed hard on the sandy floor of the tunnel, clanking the bottle alarmingly.
He scrambled to his feet, wincing at new pains in his shoulder and hip, and looked fearfully behind him - but he could see nothing in the darkness, and there was no sound except for his fast breath echoing away in a void, and there was no curtain underfoot.
The creature was lying, he told himself. I am not a vampire's son. My parents told me that they had wondered about that themselves, and concluded that it was not so.
And even if I am - I will save Johanna from him.
He felt the bottle and exhaled in relief to find that it was not broken.
He limped back to the central chamber and blindly stumbled into the next tunnel; its low ceiling was familiar, as was the deeper sand underfoot, and it curved perceptibly to the left. As he trudged along through the unseen damp sand, the curve became more pronounced.
But he remembered seeing lamplight on McKee's hair as she had preceded him down the tunnel fourteen years before, and he remembered the chittering of birds; this tunnel was dark and silent, and the draft from ahead smelled of the river, not birdcages.
When the tunnel came to an end, and he felt the open doorway to his left, he almost stepped out onto the remembered floor, but something was wrong about the echoes.
He crouched and waved his hand past the lip of the tunnel, but didn't feel the floor boards; so he stretched his legs out backward and lay on his stomach and reached down as far as he could - and there was no floor.
Then he jumped and scuttled back, squinting, for a light had sprung up somewhere ahead. He peered out, and by the glare of a paraffin lantern on the far wall he saw that he was looking into a wide stone shaft that extended away into darkness above and below.
Crawford recalled Trelawny saying that he had consulted Chichuwee on Wednesday, two days ago; had he consulted him here?
Now Crawford could make out a small white face next to the paraffin lantern fifteen feet away across the abyss, and he recalled that there had been a boy attending the old Hail Mary dealer fourteen years ago.
"I - want to see Chichuwee," Crawford called.
The boy pointed downward, and Crawford automatically looked in that direction, into what seemed an infinite pit. He slid a little farther back into the tunnel.
"But two days ago," he called, "a man named Trelawny consulted him?"
The face nodded, and the boy said, "And then the big vampire. It stopped the dice."
Crawford squeezed tears out of his stinging eyes and felt like just throwing the ghost bottle down the shaft.
"But I've - your name is - " What had it been? "Sam! Right?"
"George," the boy corrected him. "There might have been a Sam once."
Of course, Crawford thought, impatient with himself, the boy we saw would be grown up by now.
"I've got a ghost," he said desperately, reaching back to be sure he still had the bottle in his pocket. "I wanted to get it ... boiled, so I could ask it some questions."
The boy just pointed down the pit again. "The word is," he said, "all the great old Hail Mary artists got jacked Wednesday night."
The lantern was extinguished, and Crawford heard the boy scuffling away down the tunnel on the other side.
"Polidori doesn't want ghosts answering questions," said Crawford bleakly. In a louder voice, he added, "Specifically this ghost!"
He began to push himself backward, away from the open doorway to nothing, but the light on the other side of the pit flared back on again.
"What's your ghost?" the boy called.
"It's Maria Rossetti," Crawford answered. "Two arches to the right of this tunnel is the way back up, as I recall? - to Portugal Street?"
"If you're lucky. Who was Maria Rossetti?"
"She was the niece of Polidori. She knew of a way to kill him, but she was too religious to tell anybody because doing it would involve some dire sin. I hoped that her ghost could tell us the trick."
"Wait." The boy's face disappeared from the lantern glow, then after a few seconds was back again. "I'll throw something to you."
"Throw something? How can I - what is it?"
The boy was standing up in the opening on the other side, swinging his arm back and forth. The shadow swooped up and down the wall of the shaft.
"It's invisible," the boy called. "Drop it and there's no hope. Stand up."
Crawford got carefully to his feet, but he found it supremely difficult to stop looking at the abyss an inch in front of his boot toes.
"Look at me," called the boy.
Crawford made himself lift his eyes and squint steadily across the shaft.
"Can't you - " he began, but the boy had flung his arm up and opened his hand.
Swaying on the ledge, Crawford held his arms out over the drop - and a moment later something heavy bounced off his forearm and the inside of his elbow and he caught it in his hands before it could rebound away. He had begun to tip forward, and he flung out one hand sideways and clawed the rock wall to pull himself back, and he wound up sitting in the sand trembling and panting, still holding the thing the boy had thrown.
He could feel that it was round and rough, but when he looked down at his arms, he saw only his arms.
The light went out again, and he heard the boy say, "Good," before scuttling away down the other tunnel.
Crawford got wearily to his feet in the renewed darkness and, after taking anxious care that he was facing the right way, plodded back down the decreasingly curving corridor.
In the central chamber, he felt along the wall to the right of the tunnel he had just come out of, shuffled past the next open arch - from the depths of which he seemed to hear some distant but enormous person snoring - and then stepped through the next one. This tunnel widened out, and the sandy floor was indeed sloping perceptibly upward.
Behind him, distorted by echoes, he heard a voice call, "Origo lemurum."
He paused and turned back, glad now of the total darkness.
He could hear boots scuffing on the iron rungs; more than one set of boots. The sound grew louder.
He crouched, taking deep breaths to quell his noisy panting, and he clutched the thing that the boy had thrown to him, which seemed to be a light iron pot. In the darkness, he began to doubt that it really was invisible.
After listening, for a longer time than he would have expected, to the boots descending the rungs, he heard the hard chuff of someone dropping to the sand in the central chamber, and then he heard McKee say, hoarsely, "John? Are you down here?"
"Yes!" he said, aloud so that she would know it really was him, and not some lonely whispering ghost. He shuffled carefully back down the unseen slope to the dimly visible chamber of arches.
His groping hand found hers in the darkness, and a moment later another pair of boots impacted the sand and then Johanna had found him and was hugging him.
CHAPTER FOUR
And the old streets come peering through
Another night that London knew
And all as ghostlike as the lamps.
- Dante Gabriel Rossetti, "Jenny"
"DIRECTLY BEHIND ME," he whispered, "is the tunnel that leads up to the surface. I just came back out of it."
"I heard you," McKee whispered back. "I can walk to it from right here. But you were leaving? What happened with Chichuwee?"
"Dead and gone - floor, wagon, and everything. But I've got his invisible boiling pot."
He felt her hand brush the thing and then jiggle the bottle in his coat pocket. "How - ? No, later. Quiet now."
She started forward, taking his left hand - and Johanna's right hand, he gathered, for he could hear her footsteps now too - and soon the three of them were trudging up the inclined sand slope.
The sand underfoot was wetter than he remembered, and his right hip and both knees were soon aching at each labored uphill step. He was about to whisper a suggestion that they rest, when he gasped and involuntarily squeezed McKee's hand.
Someone else was stepping along, very lightly, a few yards to his right. And then he could hear the faint crunch and slither of other footsteps beyond those. None seemed to impose much weight on the sand.
McKee gripped his hand more tightly, clearly conveying Don't pause or speak.
He remembered encountering the ghosts of his first wife and his son Richard down here, last time, and, as sweat chilled his face and he forced himself to inhale and exhale evenly, he wondered if they were among the things pacing them here.
He could hear footsteps now on the far side of Johanna too; and ahead of them, and behind them. The windy vox cloacarum moaning started up, and it was faint only because the voices were very soft this time, not because its source was far away at all. Crawford could almost feel the mingled breaths from the cold throats on his right hand.
Pressure - differences! he thought furiously as his aching legs kept pushing him up the slope.
And then he was aware of weak plucking at his sleeve, and fragments of whispers: "whatcha got ... lemme just ... ye spare a bit of..."
These seemed to be a frailer sort of ghost than those of Veronica and Richard had been, perhaps because they didn't have any intrinsic psychic power over him from which to draw virtual substance, but there seemed to be hundreds of them.
And McKee was pulling him strongly ahead and up, and her grip on his hand was still tight.
Crawford's sleeve was snagged, and when he shook off the thing that clung to it, he felt a tug and heard cloth tear; then his boots were tangled in something that audibly gnawed at his boot before he could kick it away. He heard sharp breaths and scuffles from McKee and Johanna too.
We don't dare fall, he thought as the three of them kept plodding uphill, all of them panting audibly. How much farther?
Little cold hands were tugging at the bottle in his pocket, and the whispered voices were now saying, "Give us the nun, we need a nun ... she's in brandy, we need that too ... and your blood, your blood..."
McKee had just whispered, "If any of us falls - throw the bottle - " when a new sound intruded from behind them.