by Tim Powers
“Lift him inside,” Byron said softly.
“What, a drunk?” protested Polidori. “On your famous upholstery? Let’s just leave word—”
“I said get him inside!” Byron roared. “And pour some wine into that amethyst cup that’s packed in the same case with my pistols! And then,” he went on gently, putting his hand on the startled young physician’s shoulder, “calculate how much I owe you. Your services are no longer required.”
For a moment Polidori was speechless. Then, “What?” he sputtered. “Are you mad, m’lord? A veterinarian? Not even a surgeon, as he claimed that day, but an animal doctor? To replace me, a graduate of Edinburgh University? Five glasses of wine in a morning, no wonder you’re talking this way! As your physician, I’m afraid I must—”
Byron had certainly not intended to hire this unconscious person as Polidori’s replacement, but the young man’s denunciation of such a course made him perversely seize upon it. “I have,” he said in his coldest tone, easily overriding Polidori’s shrill protests, “no further right as an employer to ask you to do anything; but as a fellow human being I’m asking you to help me carry my new personal doctor into my carriage.”
Though choking with rage and perhaps weeping, Polidori complied, and in a few moments Michael Crawford was sleepily spilling wine down his throat and his muddy shirt-front while sitting on the leather upholstery of Byron’s carriage. Soon the vehicle was under way again, and Polidori was walking shakily back toward the gates of the city of Geneva.
Crawford expected the wine to hit him hard, what with his empty stomach and weakened constitution—but instead it seemed to clear his head and restore some of his strength. He emptied the cup, and Byron refilled it.
“I told you to come to me for help, if you needed it,” Byron said.
“Thank you—but I didn’t need any until last night.”
Byron stared at him, and Crawford knew he was considering his thin face and fever-bright eyes. “Really.” Byron sighed and leaned back, replacing the bottle in the sloshing ice bucket on the floor. “What happened last night?”
Crawford looked speculatively at Byron, noting for the first time Byron’s own symptoms—the pale skin, the intense eyes. “I lost my—” What, he couldn’t precisely say wife; protector? Lover?
But Byron was nodding knowingly. “Not for long, you haven’t,” he said, “unless you climbed one of these mountains between then and now. How long has it been since … ‘melancholy marked you for her own'?”
“Since …? Oh. A month or so.”
“Huh.” Byron refilled his own more mundane glass with a not-quite-steady hand. “You must have been bitten hard, to get here so quickly. I’ve been their prey since I was fifteen.”
Crawford raised his eyebrows, reflecting that these poets tended to have drawn the deadly attentions of their vampires very young—Keats had fallen into the power of his at birth, and Shelley had been consecrated to them before he had even emerged from his mother’s womb!
Byron was staring at him. “Yes, that is young. It took me a long time to get here.” He drank some more of his wine and squinted out his window at the lake.
“I do owe you help,” he said quietly, perhaps to himself; then he sighed and turned to Crawford. “My family estate was some kind of focus for the things—there are such places even in England, ask Shelley sometime—and one of them made his tenancy legal by actually renting the place. Hah! Lord Grey de Ruthyn, he called himself. He liked me, and wanted me to live there with him—my mother thought that was prestigious, and made me go, and he knocked on the door of my room the first night I spent there. Like a lunatic I invited him in … but it was my mother’s fault too.”
He frowned and lifted the bottle out of the bucket again, then stared at the dripping label. “Of course she paid for it later,” he remarked, “as the families of people like us generally do. Did you know that? And Lord Grey has been … attending to me ever since, in one form or other, one sex or the other.”
He shuddered and poured some of the wine into his glass. “But now my sister, half sister, actually, has begun to show the symptoms of his attentions, and I won’t have that. And Claire’s fetus is mine, and even my bastards won’t suffer it if I can prevent it.”
“Can you prevent it?” asked Crawford. “Without dying yourself?”
“I hope to. Switzerland is dangerous—they seem to have a stronger foothold in this country than anywhere else—but I believe that at the same time, ironically, it’s possible here to climb up out of their field of power, and throw off their yoke.” He pointed at Crawford’s cup. “Drinking wine from an amethyst cup is a good way to start.”
Crawford remembered something Keats had told him in the Galatea. “I thought neffers liked to do that—and they certainly don’t want to … throw off any yoke. They seem to be seeking that yoke.”
“Neffers?” Byron seemed amused by the word. “I know the sort of people you mean—God knows I’ve been hounded by them. One of them, Lady Caroline Lamb, cut her hand at a ball I was at four years ago, and waved her bloody fingers at me, to entice me. Christ. At any rate, they misunderstand the real nature of the quartzes. Some tantalizing dreams can be induced by the uses of them, but such dreams are just … echoes still ringing in the remoter halls of a castle after the inhabitants are long gone. Some crystals can give more vivid echoes than others, but none of them can recall the departed tenants; in fact, such crystals tend to repel a living member of the nephelim. Not that there are many such left anymore.”
Crawford took a deep sip of the wine, and he could feel alertness and energy trickling back into him. “Nephelim?”
“You’re not a biblical scholar,” Byron observed. “The nephelim were the ‘giants in the earth’ they had in those days, the descendants of Lilith, who sometimes laid with the sons and daughters of men—it’s one of the ways they can reproduce, through human wombs. Ask Shelley about that, sometime, too, but catch him when he’s tranquil. They’re the creatures God promised to protect us from when He hung the rainbow in the sky as a sign of his covenant.”
“I thought that was a promise of no more floods.”
“No—did you ever read the Greek version of the flood? Deucalion and Pyrrha?” The carriage shook as it crossed an unevenness in the road, and some of the wine splashed out of Byron’s glass onto his shirt front, but he didn’t appear to notice.
“Of course. They were the only survivors of the flood, and the oracle told them to repopulate the earth by throwing behind them the bones of their mother; and they figured out that the mother being referred to was the earth, so they threw stones behind them as they walked across the mud,” Crawford’s voice was becoming more thoughtful, “and the stones they threw became humans.”
The image of throwing stones had reminded him of St. Stephen, who had been stoned to death, and suddenly he was sure that the phrase loaves of St. Stephen referred to stones—dangerous stones.
“Almost right,” Byron said. “That’s actually a much older story, which those primeval historians confused with their own stories about a relatively recent flood. The things that the stones turned into looked like people—it’s mimicry—but they were this other species, the nephelim. The rainbow, I’m told, is a reference to the fact that the nature of sunlight changed sometime, God knows when, and now it’s bad for them—in heavy doses it can even crystallize them, freeze them where they stand. They turn into a sort of dirty quartz. Lot’s wife was one of these creatures, and that’s what happened to her—it wasn’t actually salt that she became a pillar of.”
“So quartz crystals repel them because they’re … bits of dead friends?”
“More than that.” Visibly drunk by now, Byron waved his hand in the air as he groped for an analogy. “If you were a glass of water in which three dozen spoonfuls of sugar had been dissolved, would you—I don’t know—collect rock candy?”
“Uh … oh! I get it! It might provoke the whole glassful into crystallizing.”
/> “Exactly. I don’t think it’s a rig bisque … uh, a big risk for them, and I’ve heard that unless they’re diminished they can change to crystal or stone and back again without any … with relative impunity, but it does repel them.” He nodded heavily and pointed at Crawford’s cup. “And wine drunk from an amethyst cup, amethyst being a quartz, is a tiny but real first step in freeing yourself. It will help clear you of the fevers those creatures induce—so drink up.” Byron blinked at him owlishly. “Assuming, that is, that you want to be rid of the creature that did this to you.”
Crawford raised the cup, then hesitated; he licked his lips nervously, and his forehead was suddenly chilly with sweat—but a moment later he tilted the cup up and drained it in three big swallows, and held it out for a refill.
“That’s a start. You have a family? Brothers, sisters?”
Crawford shook his head.
“No? There’s no twin-half, no mirror image, that you’re trying to save? Then you must be split yourself—one of the ones who is ‘like two spent swimmers that do cling together and choke their art.’
Oddly, Crawford found himself remembering the raised figures on the oatcake Josephine had refused to break. He shrugged, then asked, “Are you a twin of this sister of yours?”
Byron seemed suddenly ill at ease; he answered with an air of duty, as if he owed some degree of honesty to Crawford. “Well, almost closer than that—it’s all my own fault, but it’s why Lord Grey is so jealous. These things are jealous, you know—they don’t want you to love any being but themselves, not even yourself. That must be why they attack families—our families are extensions of us.” He shook his head sombrely. “Poor Augusta. I’ve got to get free of this creature.”
Though it was just the sort of thing they had come to the Continent to see, few of the English tourists who were clustered on the couches in the lobby of the Hôtel d’Angleterre had succeeded in getting a glimpse of the infamous Lord Byron or his friend Shelley, who habitually listed his occupation as “atheist” in hotel registers. Rumor had it that the two men were living carnally with two sisters in a house across the lake, but hired boat excursions and rented telescopes had all failed to make the private lives of the pair accessible to the public.
So Polidori found an audience when, over a restorative bottle of mineral water, he began describing how badly his former employer had treated him. Most of his listeners wanted stories to bring home about the daughters of William Godwin, but one young woman pushed through the crowd that jostled around the young physician to ask for more details about the drunk who had caused Polidori to lose his position this morning.
“That was the craziest thing I ever saw Lord Byron do,” declared Polidori, shaking his head. “This man claimed to be a doctor when we first saw him three weeks ago, a Navy doctor, but I got a look at his passport. His real name is Michael Aickman, and he’s—” Polidori paused for effect. “—a veterinarian.”
Laughter and bemused head-shakings followed this, and then one old fellow revived the laughter by opining that an animal doctor was perhaps the most appropriate attendant for such as Byron and Shelley; but the girl who had asked the question turned away, abrupt as a weathervane in a sudden gale, and walked stiffly to the opposite side of the lobby—she sat down on a bench and, in a quick series of tiny releases and catches, lowered her head into her hands.
After several minutes of deep breathing, Josephine Carmody was able to raise her head.
It had been a shock to learn that Michael Crawford was so close—this had to be him, she had tracked him as far as this city—and the shock had now knocked her back, for the first time in nearly two months, into her Josephine personality.
For most of the fifty-seven days since Julia’s murder, she had been the woman-shaped machine, thoughtlessly and automatically following Crawford’s trail east across France to Switzerland.
A few times she had been Julia, and that had not been too bad. When she’d been Julia she had had to use her money, any money there might have been, to check into hotels and get cleaned up and buy clothes. Always she had inquired at the desk if there were any messages from her husband, Michael Crawford—and always she was told that there were not any, and she decided to press on and meet him “at a later point in our itinerary.”
Sometimes when she was Julia she would write cheery notes home to her mother, who had always been a prey to melancholy, and was particularly sad now that her only daughter was married and moving away from home. Julia’s father had told her that her mother blamed herself for the death of Julia’s twin sister, who had died at birth. Julia thought this was awfully sensitive and motherly of the old darling, but at the same time unrealistic. Why, the whole thing might have turned out so much worse! The second twin could very easily have been born alive, but at the expense of Julia’s mother’s life!
It was the Julia personality that she hoped eventually to occupy for the rest of her life, as soon as Josephine or the machine had succeeded in killing Michael Crawford.
His death had to come first, of course, for she could hardly inhabit a world that also contained the man who had … who had done something that it was impossible for her to think about, something to negate Julia’s very existence. A bed soaked in blood, piled with terrible fleshy ruin …
She flailed her mind away from the inadmissible image.
When Crawford was killed and erased from the world, she would be able to relax and be Julia. She knew she could do it—hadn’t she had lots of practice?
She touched the lump under her dress that was the pistol, and smiled jerkily. She stood up all in one movement and marched out of the lobby with a precision a soldier might have envied … though several men looked after her uneasily, and one small boy burst into tears as she went scissoring past him.
It wasn’t until night fell that Crawford began to miss the cold woman.
At first he wasn’t sure what was bothering him—he thought it might be the measured thudding of Byron’s foil tip against the wooden silhouette on the wall of the dining room, but when Crawford took his wine out onto the balcony and stared down the slope at the darkening lake, it seemed to be the birds and the wind in the orchard that had him on edge. He drained his glass and went back inside for the bottle, but when he had refilled the glass and emptied it twice he knew that it wasn’t drunkenness he wanted. And he wasn’t hungry, and he wasn’t any more worried than usual about his situation.
He was leaning against the railing with increasing pressure, and he wondered if his problem could be simple sexual deprivation … and then he knew what it was that was missing. He missed her, and the orgasmic amnesia that had for three weeks freed him from his intolerable memories of a boat in heavy surf, and of a burning house, and of an unthinkably mutilated body in a bed.
But she was gone, and had forbidden him to follow her … and he didn’t want to follow her, anyway. He swore to himself that he didn’t.
For the first time in quite a while he thought of Julia, and of how totally he had failed to avenge her—he had, for God’s sake, gone to bed with her murderer, and then told Shelley that he wasn’t particularly sorry about the way things had worked out.
Rain began spotting the rail and coldly tapping the backs of his hands; he shoved them into his coat pockets, and the fingers of his right hand curled around some small, gritty object. A sudden wind blew the wet hair back from his forehead as he pulled the thing out and turned it over in his palm, but it wasn’t until lightning flared distantly out over the lake that he recognized the ancient, rusted nail he had pulled out of the wooden face nine days ago. The nail’s head proved to be broad and flat enough for it to stand on the rail with its point toward the sky.
He held his right hand out flat, as though about to lay it on a Bible for the taking of an oath, and then he lowered it until the cold point dented his palm.
He pressed down very slowly, and felt his skin painfully stretch and then abruptly part; and by the time another person’s hand slapped his forearm f
rom below, knocking Crawford’s hand up and sending the nail spinning away into the darkness, he had been able to feel the iron probing between the metacarpal bones.
He turned and saw Byron behind him, silhouetted against the yellow glow of the windows. Byron had tucked the fencing foil under his arm, and the bell-guard and grip bobbed in front of him now as though he’d been run through.
“No, my friend, believe me, patience is all that’s required,” Byron said softly, taking Crawford’s left elbow and leading him toward the doors. “I can assure you that if you’ll only wait, the world will flay you much more thoroughly than you ever could yourself.”
Back inside, Byron tossed the foil onto a couch and poured wine into two fresh glasses. A couple of dogs wandered into the high-ceilinged room, followed after a moment by one of Byron’s tame monkeys; neither man paid them any attention, and the animals began tossing couch pillows around.
“What were you punishing yourself for?” Byron asked Crawford in a conversational tone as he handed him a glass.
Crawford took it in his right hand, and blood quickly slicked the base and ran unnoticed down his sleeve. He considered the question as he drank. “Deaths I did nothing to prevent,” he said finally.
Byron grinned, but in such a fellow-soldierly way that Crawford couldn’t take offense. “People close to you?”
“Brother … wife … and wife.” Crawford took a deep, ragged breath. “I tell you, seeing that thing, that vampire, recede … is like watching a tide recede from some evil waterfront. All the horrible old skeletons and wrecks and deformed creatures are exposed to the sun and the air, and you would rather have drowned in the high tide—than lived to see these terrible things again.”
“You’re a fugitive?”
Crawford considered lying, but then decided that sometimes one fugitive could trust another. He nodded.