Hide Me Among the Graves (58 page)

Perhaps he didn't have to tell her. How reliable was Ollie? An unfounded rumor…

Still, Crawford would have to tell her what Ollie had said. He sighed, pitched the cigar butt into the street, and went inside.

The parlor to his left was an empty room now, with pale rectangles on the walls where the pictures had hung, and most of the floor was bright clean wood, protected for years by the now-removed carpet. He could hear clatter in the dining room and pushed open the door.

Johanna had resumed wrapping glass jars in flannel scraps and packing them into a crate in the middle of the floor where the table had stood, and Crawford wondered if they would be unpacked again in his lifetime, or ever.

“Your mother?” he asked.

“Upstairs, I believe,” said Johanna.

It was as if—in fact it was nearly literally the case that—his whole life was being disassembled from around and under him, and he had to let go of it and jump, as he had let go of the bottom-most rung in that well under Highgate Cemetery, with McKee and Johanna waiting below.

And they were with him now, and they were all he still had.

The whisky decanter sat on the floor near where Johanna was working, and he bent to pick it up and move it away from her, but he paused to take a mouthful from the neck of it.

He heard McKee's voice in the hallway now, and a man's voice.

Clearly he heard her say, “Oh, very well, come in then.”

He exchanged one horrified glance with his daughter, and then he had dropped the decanter and both of them burst through the dining-room door into the parlor.

McKee was just stepping into the room, and right behind her, still in the hall shadows, came a tall, burly figure.

Not caring if he was wrong, hoping he was, Crawford took two running steps and launched himself at McKee—he had one second in which to see her startled face, with another face looming behind her with its mouth opening—and then Crawford had grabbed McKee around the waist and flung her back toward Johanna.

Crawford's momentum sent him plunging into the man behind McKee, and the man's arm whipped around Crawford's shoulders and yanked him into a tighter embrace—the man's coat was damp and smelled of clay—and then sharp teeth punctured Crawford's throat.

HIS VIEW OF HIS
own house was odd—he could see the exterior and the hallway and the parlor all at once, and the figure of McKee was a wavy ribbon bending from the door around the interior corner and into the parlor. He could see himself too, a blurred streak from the dining room, and Johanna, whose streak extended to where the McKee ribbon met it.

The ribbon people—he knew the trails of their motions were threaded all through the City, if he cared to trace them backward—had detectable personalities, and he was one of them himself, but Crawford could feel an immensely bigger, older, fuller identity overshadowing him. It communicated simply by existing, and it promised him relief from the crushing disparity of their stations, and immortality, soon.

THEN SOUNDS CRASHED BACK
on him as he hit the bare wooden floor with his knee and elbow, and the smell of garlic burned in his nose, and bright red drops of his blood were pattering onto the boards.

One of Johanna's awful old shoes was directly in front of his face, grinding backward as she straddled him and lunged. He rolled over onto his back and saw that she had plunged her knife to the hilt into Tom's throat. Yellow fragments of garlic were spattered across Tom's shirt and unshaven face, and in Johanna's left hand was an empty jar.

Tom's eyes were rolled back in his head, showing only whites, and he convulsively jerked backward, off the knife, and he turned and clumped into the hall and away down the front steps. He seemed shorter than he had a moment ago when he had loomed over McKee's shoulder.

Johanna ran after him and slammed the door, and as Crawford struggled up to a sitting position, he heard her shoot the bolt. He clasped a trembling hand to his throat and then lifted it away, and the palm was bright and shiny with fresh red blood—but the blood wasn't spurting. No vein or artery had been punctured.

McKee was crouched in front of him, her face white as sea foam. A moment later Johanna was beside her, her eyes wide.

“He—killed himself,” Crawford gasped, “died, at least—” He waved at Johanna, who tersely told McKee what Ollie had said minutes earlier.

McKee wailed softly and pounded a fist on the floor. “And you took it, to save
me
!”

Crawford knew what he had to say, but for several seconds he simply couldn't do it.

“Go,” he choked at last, “now. Take the wagon, sell what's on it, but—” To his agonized impatience, Johanna ran out of the room, but she was back in a moment with a towel, which she wrapped tightly around his neck.

“Don't go to Newhaven,” he went on hoarsely, “or Dieppe. I know about those. Go by some other route, to some other country.” His vision blurred, for tears were spilling down his cheeks. “If you ever see me again—God forbid—run. And have garlic and silver bullets ready.”

“I invited him in!” said McKee. “Why in the name of—my
damnation
did I invite him
in
?”

“I should have told you immediately,” Crawford said. “Go, both of you—Polidori can see through me, I'm sure of it. Adelaide, I love you. Johanna, I love you.”

Johanna was sobbing, and she threw her arms around his neck, rubbing the towel painfully against his cut, but he caught her up in a fierce hug. “Don't get weepy,” he whispered.

“You are,” she choked.

He kissed her and pushed her back, and then McKee was hugging him, not sobbing but grinding her teeth and knotting her fingers in his hair.

“You're the best man I ever knew,” she whispered, “or could ever hope to know.”

“Likewise,” was all he could think to say to her. “Go. Save our daughter. Don't look back.”

“I—can't,” said Johanna, shaking her head. “It's—too much, after everything.”

“I love you both,” Crawford said desperately. “Save the people I love, please.”

McKee nodded and stood up and jerked Johanna to her feet. “We can do this for him,” she told her daughter, and the two sets of footsteps, one dragging, receded down the hall as Crawford resolutely looked away.

After a few minutes he heard horses being harnessed to the wagon—and faintly heard McKee say “No” sharply—and then the wagon creaked and rumbled away toward the Strand.

His shoulders shook with nearly silent weeping as he struggled to stand up, and he looked with despair at the gleaming shards of the broken whisky decanter.

For what might have been several minutes he just leaned against the wall, breathing and pressing the towel to the throbbing wound in his neck.

Then motion to his left caught his eye, and he was not altogether surprised to see a chair in the previously empty street-side corner, nor to see that a man sat in it, holding out a glass.

“Drink up,” the man said.

He was older now, appearing to be perhaps thirty, with a golden beard and broad shoulders, but Crawford recognized him.

“Girard,” he said softly. Another chair stood now near the first, and Crawford wearily shambled over to it and sat down, accepting the glass of whisky with his free hand.

Crawford took a sip and then said, “Is it endurable?”

His son pursed his lips and rocked his head back and forth. “More endurable than being a plain ghost in the river, I think,” he said, “though that does have the advantage of not lasting long. And I'm not much of myself anymore, in any case.” He smiled, and Crawford remembered the smile. “You won't be either.”

Crawford took a sip of the whisky and relaxed—and he wondered if he had truly relaxed in years, or ever. The wound in his throat didn't pain him now, and he let the towel fall away.

“I'm sorry I ran away from you, by the river,” he said. “All those years ago.”

Girard nodded judicially. “It would have been better for everyone if you had not,” he agreed. “But you're at peace now.”

“Is there … you're my son, still, in some ways … is there any way out?”

“Immediate high amputation has been known to prevent possession,” said Girard, “but it's far too late for that, the seeds are all through your bloodstream by now—and in your case it would have involved cutting off your head.” He laughed softly.

Crawford stared at him. “Your mother, and Richard—they're gone?”

“Down dead in the river beyond our reach, and certainly dissolved out in the sea long ago.”

“Do you—can you—miss them?”

“No. You don't miss them either, do you?”

Crawford realized that in fact he did not. “If I hadn't run away from you,” he said, looking curiously at the glass in his hand, “I'd never have met Adelaide. Johanna would not exist.”

“Our patron would have got another girl. He will now, if he can't find this—this
Johanna
.” Girard's nostrils flared as he pronounced the name.

“You hate her,” Crawford noted. The glass in his hand was more transparent than it should have been, and it occurred to him that the taste of the whisky was more a memory of whisky than an immediate sensation.

The glass had no weight either. He opened his hand, and the glass dissolved in place, like a puff of smoke.

“You'll soon find better drink than whisky,” said the figure in the other chair. It still had the appearance of a young man, but the likeness to Crawford's son had faded in a nondescript blandness. “When a son of mine, an extension of me, squanders his love on a mayfly, I hate the mayfly, and I would kill it. But she may yet become an extension of me.” The figure smiled again, but it was no longer the smile Crawford remembered. “You can help us find her. She would be vulnerable to you—her emotions are stronger than her reason.”

Crawford nodded. That was probably true.

He was aware of a springy lightness in his chest, a restlessness that had begun faintly to disperse the relaxation he'd been feeling moments ago. He wanted to be outdoors, in the streets, in the dark.

“Night is your time now,” said the thing that was now simply Polidori, with the remembered dark hair and mustache and deep-set eyes. “You'll come to hate daylight. Your place by day will be among the tombs, and the regions under the tombs, but by night you will be a citizen of every place under the moon.”

Crawford stood up, and when he looked around his chair was gone; and when he looked back, there was no chair or person in the corner.

He found that he was walking to the hall, and then that he was opening the door and descending to the street.

T
HE FULL MOON
was visible to Crawford's left, just clearing the sawtooth rooftops and transfixed by the black spire of St. Clement's, but he walked the other way, into the shadows to Newcastle Street, and then he dodged cabs and carriages across the lamplit Strand to skirt the austere pillars and arches of Somerset House and turn left at Wellington Street, which led out onto Waterloo Bridge.

Polidori's attention was as constant as a faint smell or a distant noise, but Crawford was already able to ignore it most of the time.

It wasn't raining tonight, but when he had paid his ha'penny at the turnstile and walked out as far as the recessed stone seat above the third of the bridge's arches over the river, he stopped with such deliberateness that he roused himself from the acquiescent daze that had been almost pleasantly dispersing all connected thoughts.

It seemed to him that it had been raining, here, on some night long ago. Why had he come here tonight?