by Tim Powers
Page 5
What he smelled was river water, and it occurred to him that his watch was probably ruined. "You can't expect me to explain medical - "
"A waste of time, I'm sure. Let's talk about what happened just now. The thing on the bridge, the river - "
"Listen. " He shifted around on the carpet to face her more squarely. "Two years ago," he said. He noticed that he was still shaking, and he took another swallow of the whisky. "Two years ago I was drunk. Not like this - really drunk. And I thought I saw a - a ghost, and it attacked me. I - hid from it - " He gave a hitching gasp and realized to his embarrassment that he was on the verge of sobbing again, as he had been on the bridge before this woman had appeared. He shook his head and stared blindly into the fire.
After a moment she asked quietly, "Why were you so drunk, before you saw the ghost?"
"Why," he countered dully, "should it make a difference that we were close together, on the bridge?"
"Close together and out in the open, under the nighttime sky. Oh - " She shrugged. "I think it's like . . . two candle flames are more visible if they're held together, overlapping. Those things ordinarily don't see us very well, thank God. "
"What . . . are they? The g-ghost, two years ago, I used garlic and the river to hide from it. "
"Didn't you have any garlic tonight?"
He shook his head and again touched his damp waistcoat pocket. "Evidently not. My housekeeper is punctual about renewing the disinfectant garlic wash on the windowsills, but - these days I'm sometimes careless about carrying it with me. "
"Disinfectant garlic wash," she said, apparently savoring the jargon. "Well, I should have been carrying some myself. But you never invited one of those things in here, I hope?"
"No. " He yawned, more from tension than fatigue. "I would have, this ghost, before it attacked me - but I was outdoors, by the river. And in any case I've moved since. "
"Ah. " She reached out and took his hand. Her hand was warm from the fire, but he still didn't look at her. "Why were you so drunk?"
He was increasingly uncomfortable, with this conversation and also with the fact that he was alone here at this hour with this woman. Really he should summon Mrs. Middleditch.
"Drunks have hallucinations," he said, more to himself than to her. "It might have been a hallucination, the ghost; this thing tonight doesn't prove. . . "
She was still holding his hand. He glanced at her, and she was staring at him, her eyebrows raised.
Crawford took a deep gulp of the whisky and sighed. "Oh hell. The reason I was drunk was because my wife, and my two sons, had died the night before. They said, witnesses said, that lightning struck the ferryboat they were on. " He freed his hand to refill his glass, and he gave her a haggard caricature of a smile. "What of yourself? Do you have a family?"
"My husband died - uh, six months ago. We didn't have any children. " She stretched her arms over her head and then sat forward, staring into the fire. "But you carried garlic with you, after. And you knew to get us both into the river tonight. How is it that you know these things?"
"I hate all this filthy stuff," he said absently; then he frowned into the fire. "My parents had a history with creatures like that thing on the bridge, and they managed to elude them. They told me how. They were old and eccentric, and I didn't entirely believe them. "
She stared at him with no expression. "Who was the ghost? The one that you would have invited in, but it attacked you?"
"It was - it was probably a hallucination. "
She didn't look away.
He pressed his palms flat into the carpet but still felt as if he were losing his balance at the top of a high precipice.
But it was easier to go on than to stop now. "The witnesses - one of them said that my eldest son, Girard, was helping some person or - helping some person, onto the ferry from a boat that had drawn up alongside, in the moments before . . . before the vessel was struck. "
"The witness didn't know it was your eldest son," she said gently. "You knew it, later. When Girard's ghost appeared to you. And attacked you. "
The ferry deck had been shattered but not scorched, he recalled, and the only reason the other passengers guessed that it had been lightning was because of the deafening, echoing roar that had shaken the boat in the moment of impact.
Why did I go walking on the bridge tonight? he asked himself. I don't usually go out onto any of the bridges in my midnight walks. Why did I neglect to bring any garlic? Was I drunkenly hoping that Girard would come again, and finish me off?
Was that Girard?
"Attacked me, yes," he said, almost matter-of-factly. "And I broke the garlic jar and ran into the river. I hid from him. "
"Lucky thing for you that you did. "
"Girard was my son, and he came back to me - and I hid from him. "
"I'm sorry," she said. "But it wasn't really him, you know, anymore. Not mostly. "
"I'd like to believe you're right. " He thought of asking about her husband, then realized that he didn't need to.
"'The many men so beautiful,'" she said quietly, "'and they all dead did lie, / and a thousand thousand slimy things / lived on, and so did I. '"
He recognized it as a line from Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
The woman beside him shivered. "Thank you for rescuing me," she whispered. "And taking me in like a hurt cat. "
"All the cats I take in," he said, "are hurt cats. "
"I - I don't even know your name. "
"John Crawford. "
"I'm Lisa Griffin. " She got lithely to her feet, but when he had stood up beside her, she swayed against him and he caught her elbow to keep her from falling. "I'm afraid the whisky has rather got on top of me," she said with an awkward laugh. "Could you . . . escort me to this spare room?"
Mrs. Middleditch should escort her, he thought.
But he glanced at the curtained window and thought of the turbulent sky and all the lightless alleys out there in the cold rain, and he didn't want to let go of this woman's elbow.
"This way," he said unsteadily, starting toward the stairs. He forced the thought of Veronica out of his mind.
NOW, SEVEN YEARS LATER, Crawford again picked up his teacup, and his hand didn't shake.
"I - " he began hoarsely; then he cleared his throat and said, carefully, "I tried to find you, afterward. " He realized that he was stroking his beard as if miming deep thought and stopped.
The bird in the little cage on the table whistled several notes.
The woman nodded. "I believe you. But as I said, I gave you a false name that night. Griffin, wasn't it? That was the street I was - living on. And I never had a husband. " She gulped some of the tea in her own cup, then abruptly set it down and whispered, "Of all the times I could ever have used a glass of whisky. "
It was only an hour or two after dawn, but Crawford said, "Would you like some? I might join you. "
"I gave it up. " She exhaled and stared squarely at him. "I was a prostitute, in those days. 'Living upon the farm of my person,' as the law has it. I'm not any longer. "
The little bird was darting glances from one of them to the other.
"Oh," said Crawford blankly. "Good. That you - stopped. "
Over the years he had wondered about that, a woman walking alone on Waterloo Bridge after midnight, but it was still a shock to hear it confirmed.
"I enrolled myself in the Magdalen Penitentiary for Fallen Women, on Highgate Hill, and I spent two years there. Thanks to the sisters there, I was able to change my ways. "
"Oh. "
"And - before that" - she took a deep breath - "we had a daughter, you and I. "
CRAWFORD HELD UP HIS hand to stop her, then stood up and crossed to the mantel and poured several inches of whisky into a glass, from, he realized, the same decanter he had poured from seven years earlier. He drained half of it and then clicked the glass down on the mantel,
and for several seconds he kept his hand on the glass and squinted at it. Finally he let go of it and turned toward her.
"How can you be - if you were - "
"I used what they call prophylactic measures when I was on the job," she said flatly. "That night seven years ago was . . . spontaneous. "
Crawford wished he had not drunk the scotch, for he was dizzy and nauseated now, and his heart was pounding.
She glanced toward the inner door, behind which he could hear Mrs. Middleditch ascending the steps from the below-stairs kitchen.
"Let's go for a walk," McKee said, picking up her gloves from the table.
But Crawford sat down again. "The last time you and I were together, we got into trouble. "
She opened her mouth as if to say something, then apparently thought better of it.
"I mean outdoors," he added, feeling his face heat up. "Overlapping candle flames, you said. We were more visible, to" - he waved vaguely - "things. "
"That was at night. They don't generally travel abroad during the day. "
He shrugged and nodded. He recalled his parents telling him that. And Mrs. Middleditch was now audibly bustling around in the little dining room behind him.
He got to his feet again, reluctantly. "Very well. Let me get a hat and coat. And - " He stepped to the mantel and found the little bottle of ground garlic and slipped it into his waistcoat pocket.
She smiled. "In case we're out past sunset?"
He ignored that and waved distractedly at the little cage on the table. "I can put the bird somewhere the cats can't get to. "
"He can come along with us. "
CHAPTER TWO
She sleepeth: would ye wake her if you could?
Is her face sad that ye should pity her?
Did Death come to her like a messenger
From a far land where is not any good?
- Christina Rossetti, "O Death, Where Is Thy Sting?"
MCKEE LOOKED LEFT and right at the brick and wood houses along the narrow street as Crawford pulled the door closed behind them, and then she peered up at the variety of snow-capped roofs and gables and projecting upper floors.
Her fur-trimmed bonnet hid her face. "This is an old street," she said, her breath wisping away on the breeze like tobacco smoke.
"These are mostly Tudor houses," he said gruffly. The air was so cold that it hurt his teeth to talk. "The Great Fire missed this area. I moved here nine years ago. Which way?"
The bird in her ermine muff chirped several notes, and she said, "East, I think - through the Temple Gate. Where did you live before?"
"Clerkenwell. But I wanted to be closer to the river, after - "
"After Girard," she said, nodding.
He was startled, and even almost pleased, that she remembered the name after all these years. "And the next street toward the river is Holywell, and the story is that there was a holy well there once. It's said to be under an inn now - still, a nice thing to have nearby. "
"Yes, it is," she said. "I don't know how holy it is anymore. "
Crawford blew away a cloud of his own. They were walking past the dark windows of the Angel pub, and the tall spire of St. Clement Danes stood on its island in the lanes of the Strand ahead.
McKee nodded. "Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement's. "
Crawford frowned impatiently. "'Had a daughter,' you said. Not 'have. '"
McKee wasn't wearing the metal pattens now; her boot soles just scuffed on the old cobblestones under the swirls of snow.
"Her name," she said, "was Johanna. She died. The woman who . . . housed and fed us, an old witch called Carpace who maintained a number of girls in a bawdy house in Southwark, she took Johanna away from me and then let her die, of neglect. Cold and starvation. "
They had emerged from the shadowy defile that was Wych Street into the crowded open square around St. Clement Danes, and the sky was a bright blue behind the smoke-stained spires and cupolas and chimney clusters of London's skyline. Below that close horizon, pedestrians strode along in hats and overcoats, mostly clerks who lived out in suburbs like Hanwell or Dulwich and every morning walked to their jobs in shops and factories and inns of court, their boots now adding a tympanic rattle to London's perpetual background rumble.
And already the broad lanes of the Strand were crowded with wheeled traffic. Crawford found himself squinting at the horses that pulled the tall omnibuses and cabs and barrel-laden carts, and he was cautiously pleased to see glossy coats, clear eyes, and firm steps.
I may well have treated some of these, he thought, for dysentery or mange or bronchitis. I can't save people - especially the ones I've loved - but I can help animals. It's God's job, His neglected job, to save people.
But McKee's words echoed in his head: cold and starvation.
If this woman hoped to wring money from him with her sordid tale, surely she would have claimed that the daughter was still alive.
"Was she," he asked, "baptized?"
McKee was looking away, toward the columned gray front of the Provident Institution on the far side of the street, but he heard her say, "I try not to lie to people anymore. "
Ah, thought Crawford bleakly.
Then God had not claimed the child as His own - any more than He claimed all the blameless suffering animals.
"When?" he asked.
McKee looked back at him, her face pale in the ring of white fur. "In March of '58. She was just two years old. "