Hide Me Among the Graves (20 page)

“It's true,” said Christina mournfully.

Crawford was looking at her, and so he didn't see why Gabriel had abruptly leaped to one side and drawn a revolver from under his coat and McKee was suddenly crouching and holding a short-bladed knife; both of them were squinting past Crawford to the east.

Crawford spun in that direction, losing his footing and falling to one knee as his left hand tore open his coat so that his right could dive into his waistcoat pocket.

The dog in the shawl was sixty feet away and rushing directly at them, tearing up spurts of snow and dirt—and somehow its lunging head was entirely wrapped in gray cloth—

—Crawford's vision narrowed in shrill shock when he realized that it wasn't a dog at all, but a little misshapen human figure, wrapped in cloth like a mummy, its knees and elbows flexing rapidly like spider limbs as it ate up the intervening ground—

A loud bang like a hammer on stone numbed Crawford's ears, and the rushing figure did a ragged backflip, spasmodically ripping at the ground even as it still slid heavily toward them; Gabriel's second shot stopped its slide, and his third and fourth shots shook the creature violently. Faint echoes of the shots were batted back from the distant Cumberland Terrace housefronts.

Crawford stared, the wind cold on his wide eyes—the thing's limbs were retracting; it was shrinking inside its flapping cloth coverings even as it thrashed furiously.

The frozen ground seemed to shiver, and for a moment the ringing in Crawford's ears seemed to be a remote chorus climbing through impossibly high notes to inaudibility.

Gabriel fired his revolver twice more at the heaving pile of cloth; bits of thread and sprays of black dirt flew away from the ragged holes.

The man who had been walking with the thing was running up now, but he was running a good deal more slowly than the creature had, and he was still twenty yards distant. He was carrying a black angular case, and Crawford wondered if he were a doctor. Far too late, he thought.

Crawford looked back at the women. Both were standing and staring at the subsiding cloth-covered mound. McKee caught his eye and actually grinned, tensely.

Crawford found that he couldn't smile. His face was stinging with sweat, and his hands were shaking.

Gabriel lowered his pistol, panting hoarsely. He glanced at Crawford beside him and nodded. “Garlic in the bottle?”

Crawford could barely hear him over the ringing in his ears, but he nodded.

“Not useless, if you could have got it open in time.”

“Is it dead?” Crawford asked, sure that he was speaking too loudly but wanting to hear his own voice.

“No,” said Christina, stepping up beside her brother. “It will have burrowed into the earth, I imagine.”

“Injured, though, definitely,” said Gabriel. He wiped his mouth with his free hand.

“Can you reload?” asked Crawford, nodding toward the man who was striding toward them now. It was, Crawford saw, an old man in a black Chesterfield overcoat and a black silk hat, and the object he was carrying was a violin case. All Crawford could make out of his face was a white beard and dark features—but he recognized him.

Apparently McKee did too. “I don't think you'll need to shoot him,” she said, though she had not yet put away her knife.

“It takes me half an hour to reload this,” Gabriel muttered. To Christina he added, “I
shot
that thing, did you see?”

The old man paused on the far side of the now-motionless lump of cloth on the frosty grass, and with the toe of his boot he flipped most of the fabrics aside. Underneath was a mound of fresh-churned dirt.

He looked up at the four people on the other side of the mound, and for a moment his scarred lips seemed to be sneering; then his lean brown face flexed in a wolfish smile.

“She'll be a thing like a crab now,” he said. “No use digging for her; you won't catch her and she'll still weigh upward of two hundred pounds—you'd never lift her.”

“Who the bloody hell are you?” demanded Gabriel, still visibly shaky. “And what
was
that thing?”

Edward Trelawny shook his head impatiently. “Don't waste my time. You know what it was, or you wouldn't have had a gun loaded with silver bullets, now would you? Nothing else could have done that to her. Well, gold may be a better electrical conductor, but I doubt someone like you could afford gold bullets.” He laughed. “As to who I am, it's better you don't know, and I don't want to know who you are. Even a captured mind can't reveal what it's never learned, right? If you all have any brains, you don't know each other's names either, but I suppose you haven't any brains, walking around in a damn clump out here like red flags in front of a bull. Are you
surprised
that you drew the bitter attentions of”—he waved back toward the pile of dirt—“
her?
”

He made a tossing motion toward Crawford and McKee. “You two especially! You killed her Judas Goat last night—you might have had the sense to lay low.”

“By daylight—” began Crawford weakly.

“I knew you were a fool the first time I laid eyes on you, sitting in that ring of failed poets. Daylight. She's mighty hampered in daylight, but not immobile. She'd have torn
your
empty heads off.”

Christina surprised Crawford by stepping forward and saying, “You can call me Diamonds.”

“Hah!” said Gabriel. “At that rate I'm Hearts.”

Christina gave McKee a frail smile. “A childhood game,” she said. “We have a sister we called Clubs and a brother we called Spades.”

“You,” said Trelawny, pointing at McKee, “I'll call Rahab.”

McKee blinked and frowned, and Crawford guessed that she wasn't entirely pleased to be given the name of the Biblical ex-prostitute who betrayed Jericho to the Hebrews; but she nodded.

She pointed at the violin case in the old man's hand. “Are you a musician?”

“Not me, no.” Trelawny turned to Crawford and went on, “You're a medical man, I heard, so I'll call you Medicus. In fact, you look uncannily like a medical man I knew in Italy years ago, but we'll let that go.”

“If you like,” said Crawford. His father
had
been a physician, and
had
been in Italy in the 1820s, but Crawford couldn't recall his parents mentioning Edward Trelawny.

“And call me Samson,” Trelawny said. “My spiritual hair has almost completely grown back, I believe. I hope.” He glanced at the scattered cloths and the mound of dirt on the grass, and then looked up at all four of them. “You've left me unchaperoned, for a few days at least. It may be that we can help one another. Where were you walking to, so carefree?”

Christina nodded toward the long wall at the north end of the lawn. “The zoo cages outside the wall,” she said, “on the north side of the outer circle just below the canal. They're for cassowaries and zebras, and they're empty in the winter. If we could find one around the back where nobody's likely to be, on a day like this, and get into it, with cold iron bars on all sides—”

“Ah!” said Trelawny. “I could see from the start that you're the only one of your lot with any sense, Diamonds. The iron bars, yes, they should hide our auras just as a Faraday cage deflects electric fields—block our radiances, keep the other big one from sniffing us.”

“The other big one,” said Gabriel.

“We can discuss it when we're caged,” said Trelawny, “like a pack of sickly cassowaries.”

W
HAT IS ‘THE
other big one'?” asked McKee.

They had found a row of empty and unlocked cages well west of the offices of the superintendent and ducked into the farthest one, pulling the barred door nearly closed behind them. Bare trees hid them from most of the park.

“If anyone
should
stroll by,” advised Trelawny, “all of us just make hooting sounds and hop up and down. Scratch.”

Gabriel giggled. “One of us sh-should—be outside to t-take money,” he stammered, and then he coughed and scowled around at the others.

They were shaded from the bright sunlight by a wooden roof that extended out past the rows of vertical bars confining them, and the wind that whistled through seemed much colder than it had outside. The black bars were ornate with stylized ironwork vines and flowers at the tops, but the cage was no more than ten feet square, and though wide shelves had been bolted to the bars at various heights, all five of them remained standing. Any smells the cage might once have had were lost in the stinging astringence of the icy air. Crawford thought of taking off his hat, but neither of the other two men did, so he left it on.

“The other one,” said Trelawny, sliding his violin case onto a shelf and pulling a cigar from inside his coat. Crawford noticed that the old man wore no gloves or scarf. “Miss B., who you just now shot, has a
partner.
He was a doctor too,” the old man said, nodding to Crawford, “when he was a normally living man. Name of Polidori. I never met him, but we had friends in common.”

Christina had collapsed her parasol and laid it on one of the metal shelves, and now leaned back against the shelf and made the sign of the cross. Gabriel rolled his eyes. McKee glanced at the palm of her gloved hand.

“You know of him,” said Trelawny, raising his white eyebrows as he struck a match to his cigar.

“He is,” said Gabriel, “the one who menaces my wife and unborn child—and the daughter of,” he added with a sideways wave, “of Rahab and Medicus here.” Then a thought seemed to strike him. “Could they,” Gabriel went on quickly, and Crawford was surprised to see sweat on Gabriel's face now, in spite of the freezing breeze, “Miss B. and Polidori—could it ever happen that they might
share
possession of a person?”

Trelawny cocked his head at him. “I suppose so, if the person were so unwise as to welcome one of them and then welcome the other one as well.”

Gabriel's expression didn't change, but Crawford got the impression that some effort had been required for it not to.

“Who is this Miss B.?” asked Christina. “How was
she
quickened?”

Trelawny puffed smoke for several seconds, staring at Christina. “You seem to know how the Polidori creature was quickened,” he said. “I'll want to hear about that. But—as for Miss B.—I'm afraid it was my fault.”

The breeze whistled through the bars, and flurries of snow spun around their boots.

“Your fault,” prompted McKee impatiently, hugging herself in her coat.

Trelawny eyed his companions speculatively and spoke around the cigar. “Do you all know about statues? Living statues?”

“A little,” said Christina softly.

Trelawny went on, “I have made it possible—well, others forced it on me, actually—I have made it possible again to do what Deucalion and Pyrrha did, in the old Greek stories: establish a link between humans and the stony tribe, those pre-Adamite creatures that the ancient Hebrews called the Nephilim.”

A moment went by in which no one spoke.

“Forced it on you,” said Crawford, remembering the story his parents had told him.

“I'd say
forced
is too mild a word, to be honest,” said Trelawny testily. “A mountain bandit who hoped to establish an alliance with these creatures arranged for me to be shot in the back—and one of the two balls the gun was loaded with was a tiny statue. It broke, bouncing around among my bones, and I spat half of it out, along with several teeth. The other ball was silver, and it's lodged in me somewhere, and it kept me safe for a long time. Balanced. Net zero.”

Ash blew away from the tip of his cigar, and the coal glowed as he inhaled. “But—the problem is—the other half of the
stone
ball, the little statue”—he lifted his chin and patted his collar—“is, I'm afraid … growing. And as it grows, the Nephilim become stronger.” He snapped his fingers. “What's the word? Rosetta!”