Hide Me Among the Graves

by Tim Powers

Page 28

 

  And she knew that Polidori had caught that thought and ruefully agreed with it; though his intrusive identity seemed to promise a more lasting intimacy someday soon.

  Gabriel stepped forward and crouched beside the shovelful of dirt beside the grave, and he picked up a handful and scattered it gently into the grave.

  CRAWFORD HAD HEARD MCKEE splash into mud when she dropped from the last rung, and so he was not surprised when his boots plunged into viscous muck; and he had landed with bent knees and managed to stay upright.

  The humming he had heard earlier was louder now and sounded even less organic.

  "Johanna!" called McKee. "Where are you?"

  Crawford jumped as a chorus of harsh voices, all speaking in unison, echoed in reply, "She is here with me. Come in. " The voices seemed to reverberate from another chamber than the space in which Crawford and McKee stood.

  Crawford didn't move now, and from the silence that followed the echoes of the voices, he knew McKee didn't either; then he heard a rustle of clothing and a faint metallic scrape, and his nostrils caught the pungent smell of garlic. Hastily he dug his own little bottle out of his waistcoat pocket, though he didn't unscrew its lid yet.

  He heard her step forward in the mud to his left, in the direction the voices had seemed to come from; and, though his face was icy with sweat and his knees were shaking so badly that he feared he might fall down, Crawford made himself lift one foot and swing it ahead and then put it down in the unseen mud and set his weight on it, and then lift the other. His free hand was extended out in front of himself, and when he heard McKee slap some surface, he found no obstacle, though through his boot toe he felt a rounded shelf to step up onto.

  Her whisper came to him from a yard away to his left: "A sort of bent pillar, here. "

  "An opening here," he muttered. "And a step. "

  Her hand touched his shoulder, then slid down to his hand and squeezed it. "Thank you for staying," she whispered. "You are - Oh, hell. Thank you. "

  He could think of no answer, and only squeezed her hand in the moment before she drew it away.

  With his boot he could feel the edge of a hole in the curved surface of the step, and, carefully sliding his leading foot around it to move ahead, Crawford felt a close concave wall in front of him with an opening in it; he reached up and down to trace the shape of the opening - it was tall and narrow, and the top third curved to the right so that he would have to go through sideways, leaning forward. Whatever this structure was, it appeared to have no straight lines or corners.

  "Hole in the floor," he told McKee softly. "Opening in the wall directly ahead. "

  He could still see nothing, but he strongly sensed sentient presences on the far side of the curved slit in the stone wall.

  He managed to whisper, "I'm stepping through. "

  There was no reply beyond her fast breathing, so he gritted his teeth and slid through the narrow, bent gap and found himself standing on a smooth, slanted floor. The air was warmer on this side of the partition, and smelled of incense and machine oil.

  McKee scraped through behind him, and her shoulder bumped his.

  At that moment, glaringly bright yellow flames sprang up overhead all around them - Crawford yelled in surprise and leaped back, throwing one arm across his eyes, but the slick floor sloped up steeply behind him; his heels skidded and he found himself sitting down and sliding forward to where he'd been standing a moment before.

  He stood up again, slowly, holding his arms out for balance. McKee had dropped to a tense crouch. Blinking and squinting, he could now see that they were in the narrower end of a large, roughly egg-shaped chamber, as if they had entered a barn-sized bubble in solid tan marble; torches blazed at intervals high up on the incurving walls.

  A dozen vaguely man-shaped figures that seemed to be made of shifting mud swayed on a lower level in the middle of the chamber - the humming seemed to emanate from irregular sputtering holes in the fronts of their heads - but Crawford's attention was helplessly fixed on the man who stood on a wide rise beyond them. They were of human height, but the man towered above them, and Crawford's first impression was that the man was very far away, miles away, and stood as high as a mountain.

  Then Crawford saw that the man held in his arms the little girl they had seen running away among the gravestones, and this restored the perspective - the man and the girl were no more than forty feet away - though Crawford's eyes ached with the effort of trying to keep the man in focus.

  The man's outlines and colors flickered, as though he were a magic lantern projection, but at the same time he radiated so aggressive an impression of physical volume that his body seemed to possess mass beyond its boundaries, as if it occupied more space than ordinary dimensions permitted - what quality was this that transcended volume, as volume transcended mere area? It took Crawford a moment to note the mundane details - dark curly hair, a mustache, an indistinct black coat, and eyes like glittering black glass.

  The mud figures below him all suddenly spoke clearly, in unison: "My name has been John Polidori," and Crawford knew that the man beyond them was speaking through them.

  "You are the fleshly origins of this child," the voices went on, "and she is ready now to abandon the cords of merely human flesh. "

  McKee took a step forward on the concave ivory floor. "No," she said in a loud but level voice, raising her little bottle of crushed garlic, "she is not. "

  Crawford desperately wished she hadn't advanced, but he made himself shuffle forward to stand beside her. The bright torchlight was still making him squint, and he couldn't stare directly at Polidori - but in his peripheral vision he could see the little girl swinging his watch on its chain.

  McKee threw the opened bottle toward Polidori - and several of the mud figures instantly splashed upward in a single solid sheet; the bottle and its spilled contents cratered into the mud surface, which then collapsed back to the pit in the floor.

  CHRISTINA NOTICED THAT SWINBURNE kept looking back toward the grave as the funeral party trudged away toward the stairs that led down toward the yard and the chapel and the waiting coaches. Does he think we left someone behind? she wondered.

  When the group had descended the stairs from the lawns to the crushed-stone yard, Swinburne exhaled and shoved his hands into his coat pockets and looked around at the mourners - and then his eyes widened and he stepped back toward the rear of the group.

  Christina looked in the direction Swinburne had been facing and saw that Trelawny was staring after him.

  Trelawny caught her gaze and fell into step beside her. The white-bearded old man's back was straight and his shoulders were almost militarily squared - in something like defiance, Christina thought.

  "Who is the young poet?" he asked.

  Christina glanced back after Swinburne. "He is a poet, actually! Algernon Swinburne. "

  "One of your damned crowd? I should have expected it. "

  "He's a friend," said Christina, "an especially good friend to Gabriel and Lizzie. "

  "I daresay. "

  "Thank you for coming," she remembered to say.

  "You mentioned, Diamonds, that you know where that statue is - "

  "I don't want to think about - I don't want to think," she said desperately. "'The world is a tragedy to those that think,'" she recited at random, "'a comedy to those that feel. '"

  She had reversed Walpole's aphorism, but Trelawny nodded, conceding the point. "Even from here I can feel his attention on you still, like heat from a fire. I won't question you now. " He frowned for a moment, then said, "I once bought a Negro slave, in Charleston, in America, it must be thirty years ago now - shall I tell you about that?"

  "Oh, yes, please," said Christina, exhaling as if she'd been holding her breath. "As long as it's not . . . relevant. "

  "No, not relevant to anything this side of the Atlantic. They're fighting a war to free the slaves
over there now - well, I did my part back in, let's see, in '34, by buying this fellow and immediately freeing him. . . "

  As he rambled on, Christina listened hungrily to each distracting detail, though she noted every step that took her farther away from the grave and the thing in her father's throat. Soon, she thought, soon, our uncle's terrible attention will fall off me like a snagged cape.

  THE BLACKLY SHIMMERING FIGURE of Polidori still stood holding the little girl at the far side of the chamber.

  "Garlic," said the remaining mud figures, and then they made a rackety snuffling sound. "Sulfur, that is, and an agent that interferes with us binding ourselves to the defining spiral threads of your fabric. "

  McKee had straightened up from her throw and stood beside Crawford, panting. Crawford gripped his own bottle of crushed garlic in his pocket and waited tensely for Polidori to go on, but for several seconds none of the figures in the chamber moved, and the only sound was an occasional pop from one of the torches stuck into holes high up in the domed ceiling. Polidori seemed to have stopped paying attention to the two intruders, and the little girl in his flickering arms was swinging Crawford's watch and quietly reciting something in a nursery-rhyme cadence.

  Crawford's gaze darted around the chamber, and he noticed a wavy seam across the top of the dome, and the term that occurred to him was coronal suture. He blinked sweat from his eyes and looked at the low curling ridge to McKee's left, and he thought, ethnoid bone and cribriform plate. We entered through the right superior orbital fissure, and we are standing on the frontal bone.

  On the far side of the chamber, Polidori was standing on the central ridge of the occipital bone. The mud things were standing down in the concavities of the temporal bone.

  Crawford was suddenly shivering as if he were very cold, though he was able to think, objectively, We are inside a giant's skull.

  And as soon as he thought it, the light went dim and the air was moving and very cold and smelled of rust and wet stone; the floor under his feet had changed in an instant, and he skipped to keep his balance on what was now flat stone. He could hear water splashing and echoing.

  His eyes were still dazzled by the vanished torchlight, and he took hold of McKee's hand and peered ahead. The only light was a dim gray glow, possibly daylight reflecting down a shaft, from a gap in the arched stone ceiling.

  They were standing on a projection of cracked old masonry, a stone ramp that was broken off jaggedly a yard in front of their boots, and below it rushed a shadowed stream about twenty feet across.

  The tall darkly glowing figure on the far side, which at first Crawford mistook for a streak of residual retinal glare since it almost appeared to shift when he moved his eyes, must be Polidori.

  Now Crawford could see that Polidori was standing on, or was projected onto, a similar broken ramp on that side; clearly there had once been a bridge across this stream. Crawford couldn't see Johanna, but he heard her ongoing soft recitation mingle with the rattle of water against stone.

  Polidori spoke in a deep and oily voice, and Johanna's little-girl voice spoke too, matching his, syllable for syllable; Crawford was horrified to feel his own tongue and throat twitch, as if Polidori's will were partly eclipsing his own too, even way over here on this side of the stream.

  "The child and her organic father are strangers to each other," said the voices of Polidori and Johanna, "but her mother loves her. The mother must be snuffed out. "

  Johanna's voice alone said, "Will you unravel her?" in a tone of mild curiosity.

  "No, child," answered Polidori's not-quite-human voice, "that would leave a ghost unquiet in the river. I will crush her identity to nothing. "

  McKee called hoarsely, "I do love you, Johanna!"

  Crawford pulled his own bottle of garlic out of his pocket - there were apparently no mud men here to block his throw, and his free hand darted toward the screw-on lid -

  - but Polidori had raised his arm, and the air solidified around Crawford's hands and violently twisted the bottle away; he heard it splash into the stream.

  "My garlic," he whispered bleakly to McKee. "He reached across somehow before I could open it. "

  McKee just exhaled.

  "I'd like to have her ghost to keep with me," said Johanna.

  "You shall have the man's ghost, if you like. I will simply kill him. "

  "Unravel him?"

  Polidori raised one hand.

  Crawford grabbed McKee's arm and took a quick step backward, but he was unable to pull her after him; he peered back to see what had caught her.

  A black halo encircled McKee's head, a ring so much darker than the surrounding gloom that it seemed to glow. Her face was in deeper shadow than it should have been, and he realized that her head was in a translucent globe that only looked like a ring because he was seeing the apparent boundary curve end-on.

  He stopped trying to pull her. Crawford reached for McKee's face - and he was able to push his hand into the dark globe against resistance, though tugging at her jaw didn't move her head at all. He felt her rapid panicky breath on his hand in the moment before he drew it back - and then he took a deep breath and simply thrust his own head in beside hers.

  The globe visibly expanded to enclose his head too, and he couldn't hear or see anything, and his body had gone completely numb - he didn't even know if he was still standing.

  He was aware of two minds existing in a nonspatial proximity to his, one female and one male; the male one was in some sense vastly more prominent, and had begun exerting inexorable pressure on the female one, but -

  Crawford's mind spasmodically conjured up a string of images to fill the intolerable sensory vacuum and visualize what was happening: he imagined a walnut in a lever-operated nutcracker shaped like a squirrel with a gaping mouth; a hairy hand picking up one drinking glass and then fumbling it because it was actually two glasses, one nested in the other; a machinist stepping back from a workbench to wiggle one of the two handles of a pair of pliers so that the slip-joint would allow a wider spread of the jaws, for a grip bigger than had originally seemed necessary.