The Stress of Her Regard

by Tim Powers

  But though some power was helping him to see her as a temporary bit of noxious growth—some kind of mushroom that would appear fat on a lawn in the morning and be burst and spoiled by dusk—something in his mind, something more forceful, was making him see her in different contexts: he saw her helpless at sea, while he looked on without acting; trapped in a burning building while he drank nearby; crushed in a bed in which he slept, and went on sleeping.

  And then he remembered her pulling Byron and himself back from the abyss on the peak of the Wengern, and kissing him with a mouth full of glass and garlic in a Roman street, and pulling him out of the sea and massaging his leg with tortured hands, and he remembered the beach on which they had first made love, the day of Mary’s miscarriage.

  And, unhappily, he put the vial back into his pocket.

  At a little after one in the afternoon the boat hove to and lowered its sails, and Crawford and Josephine climbed over the gunwale and waded to shore, a few hundred yards south of the Casa Magni; the trip had only taken about five hours.

  The sun glared bright as static lightning in the burned purple sky.

  “She’ll be weak,” Crawford told Josephine harshly as he dragged a stick through the hot white sand, drawing a wide pentagram, “since it’s daytime. She’ll come, though, because she’ll imagine that Shelley and I are in danger,

  and she—” His throat narrowed, and he had to stop before going on. “—she loves us.” He had shed his jacket, but still the sweat ran down his face and soaked his shirt.

  Josephine didn’t say anything. She was standing at the top of the beach slope, just in front of the trees, and it occurred to Crawford that the spot where they had first made love must be somewhere nearby. He couldn’t be bothered now to try to figure out where it had been.

  Outside the pentagram he put down the iron case Shelley had given him, and he crouched to open it. For a moment the reek of garlic overpowered the sea smell, and even after the breeze had taken the first redolent puff away, the smell swirled back and forth in the warm air like strands of seaweed in a tide pool.

  He opened a little jar and turned to the pentagram and shook a mixture of wood shavings, shredded silver and chopped garlic into four of the five shallow grooves, leaving empty the groove that faced the sea. He set the jar down, still open, in the sand nearby. At last he straightened and stared out westward across the glittering blue Gulf toward the peaks of Portovenere.

  He knew that he was about to change his world forever, rob it of all its glamour and adventurous expectancy and what Shelley had once in a poem called “the tempestuous loveliness of terror.”

  Goodbye, he thought.

  “Come,” he called softly.

  He bit his finger savagely and held it over the pentagram so that the quick drops of blood fell onto the sand within it; then he took the vial out of his pocket and uncorked it and poured half of the contents onto the spatters of his own blood. There was still an inch or so of red fluid in the glass container, and he looked hopelessly at it for several seconds while he tried to summon the nerve to do what came next.

  “Screw your courage to the sticking point,” he whispered to himself, and then drank the blood and tossed the empty vial into the close sea.

  And then he was in two places at once. He was still on the beach and aware of the pentagram and Josephine and the hot sand under his boots, but he was also on the shifting deck of the Don Juan, back in the boat-crowded Livorno harbor.

  “He’s there,” he heard himself say in Shelley’s voice to the two other men on the boat with him. “Cast off.”

  A mirage was forming way out over Portovenere, and though there was no wind to deface the pentagram or stir Josephine’s skirt, Crawford felt something massive rushing toward them across the miles of ocean.

  Josephine gasped, and when he impatiently glanced at her he saw that she had clapped her hand over her glass eye. “I saw her,” she said, her voice husky with fear. “She’s coming here.”

  “To die,” Crawford said.

  He felt the deck of Shelley’s boat shift under his feet and he had to resist the impulse to roll with it. “So is Shelley,” he said, and he spoke loudly, because des Loge’s harsh laughter on the deck of the Don Juan was ringing in his ears. Through Shelley’s eyes he saw the low, dark clouds moving in toward Livorno from the southwest, and distantly he felt too Shelley’s rigidly suppressed horror at what was soon to happen.

  Then Crawford’s attention was entirely on what his own eyes were seeing, for now she was there on the beach, standing naked in the pentagram.

  She was blinking in the glare of the sun on the white sand, and before he could look at her closely he quickly crouched to pour the wood-and-sand-and-garlic along the last line, closing the geometrical figure and trapping her inside.

  When it was done he stood back and then let himself look at her.

  She was pearly white and smooth, and the sight of her mouth and breasts and long legs made the breath stop in his throat; and though he could see that the sunlight was hurting her terribly, her weirdly metallic eyes were looking at him with love and, already, forgiveness.

  “Where is my brother?” she asked. Her voice was like a melody played on a silver violin. “Why have you called me and imprisoned me?”

  Crawford made himself look away from her, and he saw the sand shifting in waves away from the pentagram. “Shelley is sailing this way,” he said tensely. “There’s a storm …”

  He heard her bare feet shift in the sand as she turned to look south. She whispered a sound that was half sigh and half sob, and he knew she was dreading the tortures of the long flight south to save Shelley. “You don’t want him to die,” she said. “Release me so that I can save him.”

  “No,” Crawford said, trying to sound resolute. “This is his plan. He wants me to do this.”

  The woman turned back toward him, and he found himself helplessly meeting her inhuman gaze. “Do you want him to die?”

  “I won’t stop him.”

  “Did he tell you,” she asked him, “that it will kill me too?”

  Her eyes seemed prodigiously deep, and were as dark as a cool moonless night on a Mediterranean island. “Yes,” he whispered.

  “Do you want me to die?”

  He felt Josephine’s hot hand take his; he wanted to shake it off irritably, but he forced himself to clasp it, even though he knew that he was clasping death—his own soon enough, and Shelley’s and the lamia’s today. He tried to think about Percy Florence Shelley, and Mary, and the Williams children, and Josephine.

  “Yes,” he answered the woman, hoping it would all be over before his fragile resolve crumbled. He looked away from her and saw, through Shelley’s tears, the thick skirt of rainy haze that hung under the dark clouds ahead of the Don Juan’s leaping bow.

  He sat down, for the rocking of the distant deck was making him weave on the sand—but the sand was moving too. The sand-waves moving away from the pentagram were higher now, though they seemed powerless to change the pentagram itself; and humped shapes, apparently made of sand, were beginning to rise up around the three human forms in a semicircle that was open on the seaward side. Rocks in the wooded slope cracked as if flexing themselves.

  “My mother the earth would harm you,” the woman said, “if I let her.”

  The three fingernails of Crawford’s free hand had dug bloodily, into his palm, and he couldn’t tell whether the tears blurring his vision were his own or Shelley’s. Everything that had happened since his week of glad bondage to the lamia in Switzerland seemed like a frustrating dream. “Let her,” he said softly.

  “How can I?” she asked. “I love you.”

  He was dimly aware that Josephine’s hand was no longer in his.

  The Don Juan was in the haze under the dark clouds when the wind struck, and she heeled wildly, her sails full of the hot damp breath of the storm; Crawford felt the pain as Shelley fell against the rail and clutched at it.

  A little Italian boat
, a felucca, was visible off the starboard bow, racing in for Livorno harbor, but she lowered her triangular lateen sails when she was near Shelley’s boat, and her captain called across the dark water, offering to take the Don Juan’s passengers aboard.

  Crawford felt the strain in his own throat as Shelley yelled, “No!” The felucca was already receding aft, though Shelley had to look upward as well as back to see it from where he was crouched at the edge of the Don Juan’s slanted deck.

  “Break the pentagram,” the silvery woman said, cringing against the weight of the sun on her, “and I will spare all of them—the children, that woman there—all of them. But do it now. Already I am so weakened that the task of saving Shelley will nearly kill me.”

  “Let her go, Michael,” said Josephine suddenly. “You can’t kill his sister!”

  Too, thought Crawford bitterly, you mean I can’t kill his sister too, in addition to your sister, is that it?

  “Remember her promise to Shelley,” he said. His voice was as harsh as the cracking of the rocks and the rustling of the sand.

  “You’re a woman too,” the lamia said to Josephine, “and you love him too. We’re alike, we’re identical, in that. I will let you have him—I’ll go away—if you will just let me save my brother. I don’t know why your Michael wants him to die.”

  “He’s jealous of Shelley,” said Josephine, “because Shelley … had you here, a month ago.”

  Crawford turned to Josephine to deny what she’d said, but the captain of the receding felucca had shouted, “If you will not come on board, for God’s sake reef your sails or you are lost!"—and Williams, his earlier resolve shattered by the real proximity of real death, had leaped for the halliards to lower the sails.

  Shelley sprang forward and punched him away from the rail, and the Don Juan labored on through the steamy rain, still under full sail, farther into the storm.

  Crawford saw Williams—no, it was Josephine—start toward the pentagram, her hand out to break the lines of it, and Crawford seized her by the arm and threw her away across the sand.

  Human-shaped forms made of flinty sand were standing around them now, waving fingerless arms in impotent rage of grief, and trees on the slope behind him were snapping and falling as though the hill itself were waking up and throwing off its organic blanket. The sea bubbled like a boiling pot, and the sky was full of rushing, agitated spirits.

  “Michael,” said the woman in the pentagram.

  Helplessly he looked at her. Burns were visible now on her pearly skin. Horribly, love still shone in her unnatural eyes. No human, he thought, could have continued to love me through this.

  “It is too late for me now,” she said. “I die today. Let me at least die going toward him, even though it is certain that I will die on the way.”

  He knew that only someone who hated himself thoroughly could do this, could continue to do this, and he wondered if Josephine and Mary and her child would ever know enough to be thankful that one such had been chosen for the job.

  “No,” he said.

  The Don Juan had foundered now under the dark, turbulent sky; water was cascading in over the gunwales, and the tightly bellied sails were pulling her over still farther.

  Shelley was clinging to the rail. “Goodbye, Aickman,” he said, having to spit out salt water before he could speak.

  “Crawford,” said Crawford, suddenly thinking it was important. “My name is Michael Crawford.”

  Crawford could feel the tension of Shelley’s smile as he held his head up into the warm rain above the solid water surging in over the gunwales. “Goodbye, Michael Crawford.”

  “I could still release her,” Crawford heard himself say.

  “No,” Shelley said, with a sort of desperately held serenity. “Stand with me.”

  “Goodbye, Shelley,” Crawford managed to say.

  He felt Shelley free one hand from the rail to wave.

  Crawford caught a last thought of Shelley’s as the young poet despairingly lifted his feet and let go of the rail and let the savagely eager sea batter him off the deck: bleak gratitude that he had never learned to swim.

  The hot sand was in Crawford’s mouth then, for he had fallen face down, gasping for air even though it wasn’t his lungs that were being choked with cold seawater.

  In a minute or two his breathing returned to normal, and he was able to lift his sand-caked face.

  The woman in the pentagram was impossibly shrinking, shrivelling in the harsh sunlight. She seemed more reptile than human now, and soon she was unmistakably a serpent, her bright scales glittering purple and gold. And as if to match the foggy tempest in which the Don Juan had met its doom, the shaking hill had thrown up a cloud of dust, and a savage wind sprang up in which the sand-figures flung themselves apart in clouds of stinging, gritty spray.

  With filming eyes the diminished creature gave him a last glance full of love and torment, and then there was just a little statue lying in the center of the pentagram. The wind died, and he was alone on the beach with Josephine, who was sitting in the sand where he had thrown her, rubbing her arm.

  Crawford felt unpleasantly drunk, out of touch with the world. Throwing my women around, he thought, as he bent to pick up the little statue; he drew his arm back and flung it as far as he could out over the water of the Gulf. It seemed to hang in the sky, turning slowly, for a long time before it finally sped downward and made a brief, small splash and was gone.

  All the cubic miles of hot air seemed to stagger, as if a vast but subsonic chord had been struck on some cosmic organ.

  Josephine had stood up by the time he turned back from the sea, and she gave him a frail, bewildered smile. “We did it,” she said, her voice quiet but pitched higher than usual. “We planned it and we did it. I even thought I had some idea of what it was we were going to do. Now I—” She shook her head, and though she was smiling he thought she might cry. “I don’t have any idea what it is that we’ve done.”

  Crawford went to her and gently took the arm by which he had flung her away a minute earlier. He knew what to say, and he tried to give the sentence a tone of importance. “We saved Mary, and her son—and helped to save Jane Williams and her children.”

  Josephine’s lips were slightly parted, and she was squinting around at the sea and the sand and the rocks. The haze of dust from the hill had blown away out over the sea.

  “An enormity,” she said. “I’ll never grasp all of what we did, but it was an enormity.”

  They walked north along the beach. Crawford wanted to take her hand, but it seemed too trivial an action to be appropriate right now. The taste of Shelley’s blood was metallic acid in his head. He was out of touch with the world, and he was vaguely glad that he was dressed, for he didn’t think he would be able to put on clothes correctly—to remember what went on where, and which side out. He had to look down from time to time to make sure he was still walking.

  The squat stone structure that was the Casa Magni appeared ahead, and shortly after they reached it he found himself drinking wine and chatting cheerfully with Mary and Jane.

  He made an effort to listen to what he was saying, and was dimly reassured to hear himself telling the two women that their husbands had planned to leave Livorno in the afternoon, and would no doubt arrive sometime during the evening. “Percy sent you his love,” he remembered to tell Mary.

  They slept chastely that night in the room that Shelley had let them have, and they were awakened at midnight by a remote inorganic singing, a distant chorus that seemed to be in the sky and the sea and the hill behind the house. Without speaking, they both got up and went into the dining room and opened the glass doors and walked out onto the terrace.

  The singing was a little louder, heard from out here, and deeper. The tide had receded out so far that if Shelley and Williams really had been coming home tonight they would have had a hard time finding a mooring at all close to the house—and the exposed shells and black hummocks of sodden, weedy sand seemed to b
e resonating to the inhuman chorus.

  The house was creaking as if in accompaniment; and when he had to take a step sideways to keep his balance Crawford realized that the house was shifting in an earthquake.

  “It’s what we heard last week in Montenero,” Josephine whispered finally, “the night Byron killed Allegra. It’s the earth, mourning.”

  When they returned inside, Josephine insisted on spending the rest of the night in the women’s servants’ room; wearily, Crawford acquiesced and went back to bed alone.

  CHAPTER 18

  No diver brings up love again

  Dropped once, my beautiful Felise,

  In such cold seas.

  —A. C. Swinburne,

  Felise

  How elate

  I felt to know that it was nothing human …

  —Percy Bysshe Shelley,

  The Aziola

  Mary Shelley and Jane Williams were awake early the next morning, and as they drank their breakfast coffee they anxiously scanned the blue horizon of the Gulf; Claire got up later, and volunteered to watch from the terrace while the other two women tried to read and to conceal their uneasiness from the children—but it wasn’t until the sun began to sink over Portovenere in the late afternoon, with no boat having appeared, that the three of them began to be alarmed.

  Josephine had resumed her job as governess of the children, and Crawford spent the day drinking on the terrace. Claire stood by the rail near him, but they hardly spoke.

  That night he and Josephine again slept separately.