The Stress of Her Regard

by Tim Powers

  “And just knowing that some person, like your man Barker there, is descended from Lilith or somebody is enough to make him irresistible to these deviates? I swear to you, John—”

  Keats overrode him. “The thing that blocked that pistol shot this morning was no half-breed. That was the most … poisonously beautiful example I’ve ever seen, and there are wealthy neffers that would get you a baronetcy and a manor and lands in exchange for just half an hour with it, even if they knew it would kill them.” He shook his head almost enviously. “How on earth did you meet it?”

  “Hell, man, you were there; it jumped out of that dead lad’s throat, you said.”

  “No, it was able to use him as a … a channel, because he was one of the people with a trace of their stony blood—or, conceivably, a victim of one such—but it came because it knew you.” He stopped, staring up into the darkness, then went on in a whisper. “Knew you and felt some obligation to you, as if you were … an actual member of the family, not just prey, like what the patrons of the Galatea would love to be. How did it happen? When did she bite off—” He smiled. “Shoot off your finger?”

  “I never saw the thing before, honestly. And the finger was shot off by some man in Sussex. He didn’t look like a vampire.”

  Keats looked skeptical.

  “Damn it, I’m telling the truth! And how do you happen to know all this stuff, anyway? Are you a snarfie?”

  The young man’s smile was like smiles Crawford had seen by firelight aboard battle-locked ships at night, on the faces of young sailors who had survived much already and hoped to survive until dawn. “I guess maybe I am. I’m told I have the look, and the old habitués here think I’m very priggish to avoid this place, not give them the benefit of my situation. But if I am one, it was a consequence of my birth, and no choice of mine; I’m a … what, a pursuee rather than a pursuer. I’m pretty certain you are too.”

  Keats stood up. “Ready to go? Come on, then. This is a good place to be out of.” He threw down some coins and started toward the ladder closest to the distant gray glow that was the front windows.

  A groan echoed hollowly from the other direction, from the dark depths of the place; glancing that way, Crawford thought he saw a cluster of figures around the foot of a cross, and he hesitantly took a step toward them.

  Keats caught him by the arm. “No, St. Michael,” he said softly. “Anyone who’s here is here voluntarily.”

  After a few seconds Crawford shrugged and followed him.

  Lamplight fell across Crawford’s eyes as he blundered past one table, and the elderly man sitting at it stared at Crawford for a moment—and then bit one of his fingers, struggled out of his seat and followed Crawford all the way to the door, whining like a begging dog and waving his bleeding hand enticingly.

  Back up at street level, Crawford’s nervousness only increased. He was fairly sure Josephine hadn’t followed them from the hospital, but she might well have given up on the idea of personal revenge and gone to the authorities, who could easily find out where he lived from the hospital records. Sheriffs might be waiting for him at the Dean Street house right now.

  He was wondering how fully he could trust Keats when Keats spoke. “Since you haven’t even referred to it, I guess you knew the nurse.”

  Deciding to trust the boy brought no feeling of relief. “Yes. She’s my sister-in-law. She thinks I murdered my wife Saturday night.” He peered ahead nervously. “Could we walk along the bankside to the west?”

  Keats had his hands in his pockets and was staring at the pavement, and for several seconds he didn’t answer. Then he squinted up at Crawford; it wasn’t quite a smile. “Very well,” he said quietly. “We could have a beer at Kusiak’s—

  it’s your round, and I have the feeling I’d better get it while I can.”

  They dodged across High Street between the jostling wagons, slowing again when they were under the overhang of the houses on the west side of the street. “She seems fairly sure of it,” Keats remarked when they were walking down one of the narrow streets that paralleled the river. “Your sister-in-law, that is.” The old housefronts to their right were bright with sunlight, and Crawford led Keats along on the left side of the street.

  “Everybody is. That’s how I lost my finger, actually—somebody shot at me while I was running.” Crawford shook his head. “We, she and I, were in a locked room with a tiny window, and when I woke up in the morning, Julia—that’s my wife, or was—was—”

  Abruptly he was crying quietly as he walked along, not even sure why, for he knew now that he hadn’t really loved Julia; he quickly turned his face toward the doors and brick walls and windows that were passing at his left, hoping that somehow Keats wouldn’t notice. Behind one of the windows a fat merchant met his tear-blurred gaze and wheeled around in alarm to look at the far doorway of his office, evidently supposing that Crawford had seen something lamentable behind him.

  “Not tuberculosis, I gather,” said Keats in a casual tone, looking ahead attentively for Kusiak’s. “More often than not it’s tuberculosis, or something so close to it that the doctors don’t bother to look further. That’s how my mother went.” He was walking faster, and Crawford had to blink his eyes and hurry to keep up. “It had been coming on for years. I … knew it was my fault even when I was a child—when I was five I stood outside her bedroom door with an old sword, trying to keep out a thing I’d dreamt about. It wasn’t the fact of its being a sword so much, I remember, as the fact that it was iron. Didn’t do any good, though.” He stopped, and when he wheeled around there were tears in his eyes too. “So don’t assume that I agree with your sister-in-law,” he said angrily. Crawford nodded and sniffed. “Right.”

  “What are your plans?”

  Crawford shrugged. “I thought I could become a surgeon again under the name Frankish—my real name is Crawford, and I’m—”

  “Crawford the accoucheur? I’ve heard of you.”

  “But that plan went to hell when Josephine recognized me. The sister-in-law. I suppose she’s been doing nurse work at several London hospitals in case I might try getting back into medicine. So I guess I’ll leave England. No court would judge me innocent if it came to a murder trial.”

  Keats nodded. “Damn few neffers in the judiciary … that would admit to their knowledge, anyway. Here’s Kusiak’s.”

  The inn they had arrived at was a broad, two-story place with a stable at the side and a dock out back so that patrons could arrive by boat; Keats led the way into the taproom, which, with its oak panelling and leather-upholstered chairs, was a reassuring contrast to Galatea’s. Crawford hoped he didn’t still smell of the place.

  “You … said you thought you were to blame for your mother’s death,” he said when they had found a table by a window that overlooked the river. “How is that? And does that mean I’m responsible for Julia’s?”

  “Jesus, man, I don’t know. If so, it was obviously unintentional on your part. I think there’s a number of ways these things can attach themselves to people, but only most of them involve the people’s actual consent. In my case I’m pretty sure it was because of the night on which I was born. I think the things can get at infants born on the night of the thirty-first of October—some normal protection is missing on that night, and if you’re born then you’re … honorary family to these things. You’re adopted. They can … focus their attention on such a newborn, and then, once they’ve focussed on anyone, they seem to keep track of him throughout his life. And keep track, keep disastrous track, of his family, too. A glass of claret, please,” he added to the aproned girl who had walked up to the table.

  “And a pint of bitter,” added Crawford.

  “Do you have a family?” Keats asked when the girl had walked away toward the bar. A river beer-seller’s bell could be heard ringing far out across the water.

  Crawford thought of the foundered boat, the burning house, and the imploded corpse in the bed. “No.”

  “Lucky man. Think
hard before ever changing that status.” He shook his head. “I have two brothers and a sister. George and Tom and Fanny. We’re orphans, and we’ve always been very close to each other. Had to be, you know?” He held his hand up and stared at it. “The—thought—of anything like this happening to them, of their becoming a part of this … especially Fanny, she’s only thirteen and I’ve always been her favorite …”

  Crawford had to keep reminding himself that Julia really had died inexplicably and that he really had seen that levitating serpent this morning; what Keats was telling him might not be the true explanation, but there would never be a natural explanation for it.

  The drinks arrived, and Crawford remembered to pay for them. He took a sip of the beer, then opened his mouth to speak.

  Keats spoke first. “You want me to fetch your things from the house and bring them to you somewhere and be careful not to be followed.”

  Disconcerted, Crawford shut his mouth and then opened it again. “Uh, right, as a matter of fact. I’d be very damned grateful … and though I can’t reward you now, as soon as I get settled abroad, I’ll—”

  “Forget it. I may need a favor myself someday from a reluctant neff-host.” He raised his eyebrows. “Switzerland?”

  Crawford could feel his face getting red as he stared at the younger man, for he knew that he hadn’t told anyone about his travel plans, and he himself didn’t know why he had decided to go to the Swiss Alps—Keats seemed to know more about Crawford than Crawford himself did.

  “Look,” he said levelly, “I’m willing to admit that I’ve stumbled into something … supernatural here, and you obviously know more about the whole sordid business than I do. But I’d appreciate it if you’d just tell me what you know about my situation straight away, and save your sense of dramatic timing for your goddamn poetry.”

  Keats’s confident smile was gone, and he suddenly looked young and embarrassed. “… Stephens?” he said. “Told you?”

  “He did indeed. And how can you go on about how contemptible all these people are, these neffers, when you’ve saved those disgusting bladder stones to help you write your stuff? Do they work like good luck pieces? I suppose someday you’ll have old Barker’s deformed jawbone on your mantle—and then Byron and Wordsworth and Ashbless had better just fold up their tents and go home, right?”

  Keats grinned, but his complexion was looking spotty. “Not your fault,” he said tightly, almost to himself. “You don’t know enough about it all for me to take offense … much offense, anyway.” He sighed and ran his fingers through his reddish hair. “Listen to me. I am one of the people who’ve attracted the attention of a member of this other race; as I said, it happened on the night I was born. If I wanted to use that connection to help my writing—and I think I could, these things may very well be the creatures remembered in myth as the Muses—I could summon my … my what, my fairy godmother, call it. I certainly wouldn’t have to hang around the neffy wards looking to snatch a bladder stone or a cup of blood, in the hope of getting the kind of dim contact that only really shows up in the warping of certain dreams.”

  Crawford started to speak, but Keats waved him to silence and went on.

  “Did you know—but no, you wouldn’t—that it’s fashionable among neffers to carry a blood-spotted handkerchief, so as to seem consumptive? It implies that you really got the attention of one of the vampires, that one of them can spare the time to devour you. Quite an honor … but I’m a member of the goddamned family. So are you, clearly. They pay so much attention to us that they won’t let us die—though they’ve got no such scruples about members of our real, earthly families.” Keats shook his head. “But my poetry is my own, damn you. I—I can’t help a lot of my situation—the protection, the extended life—but I will not let them have anything to do with my writing.”

  Crawford spread the fingers of his maimed hand. “Sorry. So why do you save those things?”

  Keats was staring out the window at the river. “I don’t know, Mike. I suppose it’s for the same reason I didn’t quit when the hospital administrators decided I was ignorant and unobservant enough to be assigned to Lucas. The more I know about these creatures, these vampires, the more likely it is that I’ll be able to get free of the one that oversaw my birth … and killed my mother.”

  Crawford nodded, but he thought that Keats was lying, and mostly to himself. “The hospital administrators know about this stuff?”

  “Sure … though it’s hard to say to what extent. A lot of patients vary from the human norm, of course, especially once you get a look inside them, but there’s a consistency to the neffy variations. And they’re generally less dramatic, too—the kidney and bladder stones just look a little quartzy, or the skin turns hard and brittle when they stay out too long in the sun, or they see fine at night but are blinded by daylight. I guess the hospital has decided to try to ignore it—not turn patients away for no reason, which would cause talk, but give the neffy cases to the most inept staff members. I wonder if something like today’s adventure has ever happened before—the senior surgeon sure closed the book on it in a hurry.”

  “So why am I going to Switzerland?”

  Keats smiled—a little sadly. “The Alps are the biggest part of the neffer dream.” He stared out at the river as if for help in explaining. “There’s supposed to be a plant in South America that gives people hallucinations if they drink a tea brewed from its leaves—like opium, but in this case everybody sees the same vision. A vast stony city, I understand. Even if a person hasn’t been told what to expect, he’ll still see the city, same as every other person who’s taken the drug.”

  He paused to finish his wine, and Crawford waved for a refill. “Thanks. Anyway, being a neffer is similar. You dream about the Alps. A couple of months ago they brought a child from one of the worst Surreyside rookeries to the hospital because he was dying of consumption, and he didn’t last long here; but before he died, he found a piece of charcoal and drew a beautiful picture of a mountain on the wall by his bed. One of the doctors saw it and wanted to know what book the boy had copied the perfectly detailed picture of Mont Blanc from. Everybody just said they didn’t know—it would have been too much trouble to explain to him that the boy had done it out of his head, and that he had never seen a book nor ever been east of the Tower, and that his mother said he’d never drawn anything in his life, not even in mud with a stick.”

  “Well, maybe I won’t go there. Maybe I’ll—I don’t know—” He looked up and saw Keats’s smile. “Very well, damn it, I have to go there. Maybe the way out of this whole entanglement is there.”

  “Sure. Like the exit from the very bottom of Dante’s hell—and that just led to Purgatory.” Keats got to his feet and put his hand for a moment on Crawford’s shoulder. “You may as well wait for me here. I’ll make sure I’m not followed, and I’ll tell you if I see any official-looking types hanging about. If I haven’t come back in an hour, you’d better assume I’ve been arrested, and just go with what you’ve got on your back and in your pockets.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Desire with loathing strangely mixed

  On wild or hateful objects fixed.

  —Samuel Taylor Coleridge,

  The Pains of Sleep

  After Keats had left, Crawford estimated the amount of money in the inner pocket of his coat—he hadn’t spent much of Appleton’s fifty pounds, and he figured he still had a fairly good stake—probably eighty pounds, certainly seventy. A little reassured, he waved to the girl and pointed at his empty glass.

  He would travel and live cheaply now, and make his money last. In London a person could live, albeit without many new clothes or much meat in the diet, on fifty pounds a year, and things were sure to be less expensive on the continent. And with even a year’s leeway he certainly ought to be able to find himself a niche somewhere in the world.

  All he had to do was get across the English Channel, and he was drunkenly confident that he’d be able to do that; hadn’t he
been a shipboard surgeon for nearly three years? He assured himself that he still knew his way around a dock, and that even without a passport he would be able to get aboard a ship somehow.

  The new beer arrived, and he sipped it thoughtfully. I suppose Julia’s been buried by now, he thought. I think I know now why I wanted to marry her—because a doctor, especially an obstetrician, ought to be married, and because I wanted to prove to myself that I could have children, and because all my friends told me what a stunning catch she was … and partially, I admit, because I wanted to obscure my memories of my first wife—but why did she want to marry me? Because I am, or was, a successful London doctor who seemed sure to come into real wealth before too long? Because she loved me? I guess I’ll never know.

  Who were you, Julia? he thought. It reminded him of what she had said about her sister: “She’s got to become Josephine—whoever that may turn out to be.”

  It seemed to him that what he would remember about England would be its graves: the grave of his older brother, who from out in the Moray Firth surf had shouted to young Michael for help, twenty years ago—shouted uselessly, for the sea had been a savage, elemental monster that day, crashing on the rocks like gray wolves tearing at a body, and Michael had sat on the high ground and watched through his tears until his brother’s arm had stopped waving and he could no longer identify the lump in the fragmented waves that was his body; and Caroline’s meager memorial, which was just the initials and dates that, one drunken night, he had furtively carved into the wall of the pub that had been built on the site of the house that had burned down with her in it; and now Julia’s grave, which he would never see. And each one was a monument to his failure to be what a man was supposed to be.