Hide Me Among the Graves

by Tim Powers

Page 58

 

  That was the way to Chichuwee's underground chamber, and McKee would know to meet him there.

  HE REMEMBERED TO HAVE two pennies in his hand when he pushed open the door of the Spotted Dog, and he laid the brown coins on the counter of the little window in the entry hall and took his dented tin card before stepping through the open doorway into the remembered wide kitchen. And for nearly a minute he just stood on the flagstone floor and let the warmth sting his face and hands.

  Under the glaring gas jets between the ceiling beams, men and women stood around the black iron stove in the corner or sat with plates on the shelf-like bench that ringed all four walls, and as he shuffled farther inside Crawford wondered if any of them might have been here on that night fourteen years ago when McKee had brought him to this place.

  Again the room's warm air smelled of onions and bacon, and this time he crossed to the door in the far side of the room and hung his coat on one of the hooks in the hall beyond it, then shambled back into the kitchen, still holding the bottle, and joined the queue by the stove. He hadn't eaten since breakfast at a seaside pub in Southend, and McKee and Johanna would probably be arriving here soon.

  He looked down at himself - the knees of his trousers were torn, and black stains mottled the front of his white shirt. With his free hand he tried to brush his hair flat.

  A gritty voice behind him said, "When you going to open the bottle, then, eh?"

  Crawford turned and saw a toothless old fellow already taking hold of the bottle Crawford held.

  "It's not liquor," said Crawford hastily, pulling it away. "It's a, a laboratory specimen, in formaldehyde, a. . . " He glanced at the thing. "A platypus. A . . . baby one. "

  "A baby patty-puss!" exclaimed the old man, vastly impressed. "Can you shake it out?"

  "No," Crawford said desperately, "it would - crumble on exposure to air. "

  "Those things dance, I've heard," put in a haggard-looking girl in front of him. "Make it dance. "

  "A dancing panda-puss!" said the old man, nearly beside himself now with excitement.

  "Won't make much of a dinner," advised another man. "It'll render down even more when they cook it. Two bites and it's gone. "

  "It's a nun!" exclaimed a thin young girl in old leather trousers and a stained apron, who had crouched to peer at the bottle. "It's a baby nun! You can't cook her!"

  Crawford was sweating in his damp shirt now. Why couldn't Christina have kept the damn thing in an opaque jar? He frowned and looked worriedly toward the street door. And what the hell had become of McKee and Johanna?

  "It's not a nun," he said dizzily, "and I'm not going to cook it. " Several pairs of bloodshot eyes were still looking at him hopefully, and he added, "And it doesn't dance. "

  One by one, the people ahead of him in line were served plates of some steaming stuff, and when it was his turn to stand in front of the stove he paid four pence for a plate of half-burned ham and potatoes with strings of onion all over it. A man next to the stove was tilting mugs under the open tap of a beer cask, and Crawford paid another tuppence for a filled mug, which he gripped in the same hand that was holding the ghost bottle. He found an empty stretch of the bench and sat down. Some of the people in the room were still staring at him, hopefully or disapprovingly, but he concentrated on his plate.

  No one appeared to have any forks or spoons, so he set to with his fingers, and when he had wiped the plate clean and licked his finger and wiped his hand on his shirt, and drained the last of the beer, he wondered when he had ever found a dinner as satisfying - and then he remembered the ham and cheese and raw onion repast he had shared with Johanna in his basement on the first night he had met her. Met her to speak to, at any rate.

  She and her mother should have got here by now.

  Anything might have happened to them.

  He carried the bottle outside to stand for several minutes shivering in the dark snowy street, but he saw no pair of figures approaching, and then since he had left his tin card in his coat in the back room, he had to pay another tuppence to get back inside, glad all over again for the stove-warmed air in the kitchen.

  He resumed his place on the long bench, and after a few moments he tucked the bottle inside his shirt and leaned back against the wall.

  Movement of the bottle against his undershirt brought him awake, and he caught the wrist of the person who had tried to steal it.

  It was the girl who had thought the panda-puss ought to dance.

  "Mine," he croaked at her, his voice still scratchy with sleep. Coughing as he looked past her, he saw several people watching, apparently hoping that she would succeed in getting the bottle. Clearly he hadn't slept for very long.

  Crawford stood up, only clearing his throat now, and a couple of rough-looking men stepped toward the street-side door as if to block his exit. Crawford pretended not to notice, and he carried the bottle across the room away from them, toward the back wall, where he made a show of reading the posters tacked up on the white-painted wood.

  Very aware of the doorway to his right, which led to the coat room and the remembered stairs that led down to the ancient well, Crawford absently read that Peter the Great Wikinsmill would soon be appearing at the Waterloo Music Hall, performing his signature song, "All Round My Hat, or Who Stole the Donkey?"

  Christina had said that Maria had been dead for three months; Trelawny had said her ghost should not have diminished too much in that time - and certainly it had been solid enough an hour ago in Tottenham Court Road! But what if that appearance had nearly used her up? Maria's ghost was apparently their last hope for saving Johanna - and Trelawny's granddaughter - and the last shreds of the ghost's vitality might be evaporating right now!

  After one more glance toward the street-side door - McKee and Johanna had still not appeared, and the bullyboys were still eyeing him - Crawford stepped through the doorway and grabbed his damp coat and walked directly to the wooden stairs and started down them. He remembered the smells of clay and smoke on the draft that welled up from the dimness below him. He recalled that there would be climbing to do, so he pulled on his coat and tucked the ghost bottle into a deep side pocket.

  Soon he was in total darkness, but the echoes of the thump of his boots on the stairs told him that he was in a narrow stairway; after forty or fifty steps, the banister he had been alternately clutching and releasing ended in a ragged stump, and after that he proceeded more slowly, dragging his hand along the gritty bricks.

  He was expecting it when the stairs ended and he found himself on a flat, slanted stone surface. His shuffling boots and panting breath echoed in a bigger space now - and after groping his way for several yards through the lightless chamber, he heard a distant windy groaning.

  It's got some Latin name, he told himself firmly, it's just pressure differences equalizing in the uneven levels of remote tunnels; but his outstretched hands were trembling, and he didn't realize that he was holding his breath until he let it all out in relief when his palms brushed the rim of the old well.

  He leaned over the edge, and the remembered smell like sourly fermented seaweed faintly stung his nostrils. He ran his hands around the curved inner surface and then he edged around the well until he felt the topmost iron rung. He sighed unhappily and swung one leg over the coping and carefully lowered his leg until his foot found the rung. There was a muffled clunk as the bottle in his pocket rapped the stone.

  Only then did the lingering thought Latin name remind him that McKee had recited some kind of ritual phrase before entering the well.

  He paused with both hands on the well rim and both boots on the rung, and across fourteen years he tried to remember what the phrase had been. There had been a mnemonic nursery rhyme to remind one of it, but he couldn't remember the nursery rhyme either. Something about frogs and snails? Sugar and spice?

  For a moment he thought of climbing out again and waiting in the total darkn
ess by the well for McKee to make her way down here, but the whistling wail sounded again, perhaps not quite so far away now, and he just gritted his teeth and lowered one foot to feel for the next rung down.

  He had descended down six of the rungs, about twelve feet, when something stung him painfully in the neck. It jolted him, but he clung to the rungs as his face suddenly chilled with sweat; and a moment later his left hand was stung twice. He let go of the rung to swat at the fluttering insects, and in that moment he remembered the nursery rhyme.

  "Oranges and - damn it - lemons," he gasped, turning his face away from another pair of invisible brushing wings. "Say the bells of St. Clement's. "

  And at that prompting the Latin came to him too. "Origo lemurum, you bastards!" he yelled.

  He climbed down as rapidly as he dared, panting against the close brick wall, but perhaps the invocation had worked - he wasn't stung again.

  But though his hands and feet continued to grip and press against the iron bars, his eyes gradually registered a glow that was not vision, for it was in front of him no matter which way he turned his head. He kept palpably climbing down the iron brackets moored in the brick wall as the sour draft from below continued to whisper up around him, but what he was seeing became a wide landscape - he saw a pillared temple and stone buildings with towers, surrounded by straight streets and low white houses with plaster walls and arched gateways and red tile roofs; there was a broad river, with a lone long timber bridge spanning it, and ships with short masts and curved sternposts were moored along wooden wharves. Smaller rivers slanted through the city, and boats with sails moved slowly up and down them.

  Into his head came the thought that this was London when it was called Londinium by these invaders from overseas, before the tributary rivers were roofed over to become sewers. Farms stretched in green squares outside the city wall.

  And now the fields were overrun by men in furs whose faces and arms were dyed blue and who carried black iron swords; the Romans fought them with spears and shields and short steel swords, but the wild Celts vastly outnumbered them, and the Romans fled; but the Celts retreated too - and then the city began to ripple like lilies on a disrupted pond. The towers and houses fell, and the river rose and swept the bridge away, and clouds of tan dust shaken up from the low hills mingled with black smoke as the broken city burned.

  The vision faded, but he was dimly able to see his hand on the rung in front of him; and it occurred to him that the vision had been in his mind alone, not in front of his eyes, or he wouldn't have been able to see anything at all in this near-total blackness right afterward.

  He held still, remembering having glimpsed fragments of this vision before. Clearly what he had just seen was the destruction of Roman London - by Boadicea in A. D. 60, according to Trelawny. And it had certainly involved an earthquake. She'd very much like to do it again, Trelawny had said this afternoon.

  Crawford resumed climbing downward, and soon his reaching foot found no lower rung, so he lowered himself joltingly by his hands alone to the bottom-most rung, swung for a moment, and then dropped.

  He fell about ten feet into damp sand and managed not to fall over or bang his chin on his knee, and he patted his pocket and was reassured to feel that the bottle was still there. When he straightened up, he could see the faint round-topped vertical glows of at least four arched doorways around him - he had forgotten that there were more than one, and he didn't have an ave to guide him.

  He paced from one arch to another in the near-total gloom, listening carefully for the chirping of birds. At one arch he heard a distant susurrus like rushing water, and at another the remote windy groaning, and so he brushed his hair back from his face with both hands, took a deep breath, and ducked into one of the silent tunnels.

  It curved to the left, which was familiar, but soon, instead of the broad glow of Chichuwee's chamber, he saw a dot of yellow light ahead. It seemed some yards away at first, but quickly dropped in apparent height as he approached it, and when it disappeared in the moment before his groping hands brushed a wall of upright planks - and then his fingers felt down the length of it to a pitted doorknob - he realized that the tiny glow was a keyhole.

  He crouched to peer through it and saw, perhaps twenty feet beyond the door, a lamplit row of high desks at which visored young clerks wrote with pens in big ledger books.

  Crawford sat back on his heels, frowning. Could this be the deepest sub-basement of some enormous bank? He straightened up and tried to twist the doorknob, but it didn't move at all.

  Crouching again, he put his mouth to the keyhole and called, "Hello! I wonder if any of you could direct me?"

  Quickly he put his eye to the keyhole again, and he had to blink - this time the lamplight was much dimmer, and the clerks were bent with age, their beards long and white.

  "Still here?" called one of them wearily. "On your way and face your sins, phantom, we can erase no names. "

  Crawford recoiled and sat down on the sandy tunnel floor, nearly losing the bottle, then got to his feet and hurried away, back to the central chamber below the well, and he made his way down another of the tunnels.

  This one did not bend, but he didn't remember whether Chichuwee's did right away or not, so he followed it for a few yards before concluding that it wasn't the right one either; but ahead of him now he could see a faint vertical streak of emerald light that widened and narrowed, as if it were a gap between a curtain and a wall, and he stole forward to peek at what might lie beyond.

  But as he hesitantly touched the curtain, a woman's voice said, faintly, "Oh, help me, please, brother!"

  He froze, and a moment later shook his head and started to turn around, and then was appalled to realize that he could not in good conscience walk away from it; and so he braced himself and pushed the curtain aside.