Hide Me Among the Graves (30 page)

“But I can ignore his … wordless song,” Christina went on, “while I have you three to tell me things like … what cures cat malaise.”

“Veal,” said Trelawny firmly.

“Just as I said,” put in Crawford.

The gray daylight outside seemed bright after the dimness of the chapel, but the air was colder, and Crawford shivered and squinted after the funeral procession. The line of mourners had crossed a gravel-paved yard and was mounting a short stone stairway between high walls with tall green cypress trees beyond.

Christina hurried after them, her boots crunching in the windy silence, and Trelawny and Crawford and McKee lengthened their strides to catch up.

At the top of the steps the funeral party was shuffling and bobbing down a lane between trees and patchy lawns to the left, and Christina stepped after them—but McKee halted and caught Crawford's upper arm in a tight grip.

He glanced at her and noticed her wide-eyed stare—she was looking to the right, away from the funeral procession, and he nervously followed her gaze.

There was a small figure standing in deep shadow between a vine-draped oak and a marble monument with a stone dog on it.

It appeared to be a thin little girl standing there, and Crawford felt his scalp tighten and the backs of his hands tingle before he consciously realized who it might be.

McKee had released Crawford's arm and was hurrying across the gravel path toward the shadowy figure; Crawford looked back—Trelawny had paused, and met Crawford's eye and waved him on impatiently before turning away and following Christina.

Crawford ran after McKee and skidded to a halt when she paused on the verge of the grass.

“Johanna?” called McKee hoarsely, half extending her hands.

It was indeed a girl, Crawford could see now, and she stepped back out of the shadows into the gray daylight—she wore a long-sleeved black shift but her feet were just wrapped in bundled rags; the limp brim of a floppy hat framed and shadowed her face, and her hair was a weedy tangle over enormous dark eyes.

“I'm—your mother,” said McKee, her voice breaking.

Crawford took a breath. “And I'm your father,” he said.

“We want to take you home,” McKee said.

The girl blinked at them in evident confusion, and then she spun and began sprinting away across the hilly grass between the tall tombstones.

McKee hiked up her skirt and went running after her, and Crawford was right behind her.

The girl was shorter than many of the monuments along the lane, and while McKee ran straight after her, Crawford slanted out to the right and ran along the path, hoping to see the girl as she darted between the tall gray tombs and obelisks.

He was sure he was running faster than she was, but after a dozen paces he let himself clop and scuff to a halt.

“She disappeared,” he called to McKee, who was running more slowly on the damp grass.

McKee shook her head and kept running. When she had got even with Crawford, though, she stopped, panting and almost sobbing.

“She's close by,” she gasped. “We must search among the graves.”

What do we do if we catch her? wondered Crawford; but he nodded and began striding through the grass between the gravestones.

He quickly saw that there were only a few corners in the immediate area where even a very small person could hide, and within a minute he and McKee had walked around all the nearby blocks and columns of marble, and peered up into the bare tree branches, and were standing face-to-face.

“She's alive,” panted McKee. “She can't have vanished.”

Crawford remembered the way the doglike creature that Trelawny had called Miss B. had disappeared in Regent's Park last Tuesday, and he strode around the nearby stones peering more carefully at the damp grass; and at the foot of a chest-high granite tomb set against a low hill he noticed a patch of newly flattened grass blades.

He walked over to look at it more closely. The crushed area, he saw, extended right to the wall of the tomb—and some grass blades appeared to be lying
under
it.

The tomb wall was divided into nine coffered squares, each about a foot and a half across, and the streak of flattened grass was centered on the middle square of the bottom row.

He crouched beside it. “I think,” he began, and he pushed at the stone square. It slid inward.

McKee was beside him then, and she pushed it in as far as she could without lying down; and then she pulled her hat off and lay down prone on the damp grass and pushed the block inward until her shoulder was against the stone wall of the tomb. When she pulled her arm out, she was holding the hat the child had been wearing.

“I can fit through here,” McKee said, and she stretched her arms through the hole and began to pull herself forward.

“I should go first!” exclaimed Crawford, but already McKee's shoulders had disappeared inside the tomb; and the toes of her boots were tearing at the grass to push her farther in; and he bared his teeth and snapped his fingers impatiently until her boots disappeared into the narrow square of darkness.

And then he had tossed his hat and coat aside and was crouching to lie flat on the grass himself, and sliding his hands forward into the hole.

As the top of his head scraped under the low second-row square, he tried to spread his arms. To his left there was some empty space, and he could feel the block they had pushed inward, but to his right and above him the passageway was no wider than the hole he'd crawled in through; and when he had slithered in a yard farther, his groping hands discovered that the open space on the left closed up too. He was glad that he had left his coat behind; even so, his shirt was scraping the stone walls on both sides, and he had to keep his right shoulder lifted a bit so that his rib cage was diagonal in the square tunnel, since there was no room for him to lie flat. Very quickly he had left behind the gray daylight.

He could hear McKee pushing herself along ahead of him, and from beyond her puffed a cold, clay-scented draft.

He could feel that his feet were inside now. The surface under him felt like dirt-gritty stone, and then it was just flat stone, textured with what felt like chisel grooves.

Crawford was panting, and the noise of it was batted back at him by the very close stone surfaces, and it occurred to him that he could not touch his face: even if he raised his arm to the top of the square tunnel and ground his elbow into the corner, there wasn't room for him to swing his forearm backward.

Instantly the breath stopped in his throat and his palms slapped the floor and began pushing him backward while he tried to tug himself along with the skidding toes of his boots. His shirt was snagging against the walls and bunching up around his neck.

Then he was breathing again, in rapid gasps, but over the noise of that and his thunderous heartbeat he heard McKee call softly from the darkness ahead, “Crawford, what is it?”

And he could hear in her voice the tightness of nearly unbearable strain, of savage panic savagely suppressed.

Clearly she was experiencing everything that he was, and she was not clawing her way back out. She was ahead of him in this tunnel, and that was horrible, but all he could do about it was to be there too, with her.

He forced himself to exhale all the air from his lungs; then he flexed his invisible fingers and inhaled. He realized that his crumpled shirt was sodden with sweat.

“Nothing,” he said. “I—thought I felt a spider.”

After a moment he heard her cough out two tense syllables of a laugh. And then she was moving again, and he resumed pulling himself along after her, suppressing all thoughts.

A
DOZEN OF THE
mourners had come all the way to the grave in the familiar clearing among the elm trees, which Christina thought had grown taller since her father's funeral here eight years ago. She took a step closer to the deep rectangular hole cut in the grassy sod and looked across it at the faces—there was Gabriel, his face a sagging blankness, and William, and Maria with a handkerchief to her eyes, and their mother and aunt, and twitchy Swinburne who had not removed his hat, and the priest—and that white-bearded man was Edward Trelawny!—and, hanging back with their caps in their hands, the four gravediggers—but where had Adelaide and Mr. Crawford got to?

She looked down into the hole, but she wasn't standing close enough to see the top of her father's coffin, if indeed it was now exposed; but perhaps the gravediggers had left a layer of soil to lie between her father's coffin and this new one.

She had asked one of them about the condition of her father's grave before they had dug the fresh hole, and she had been disturbed to hear the man's offhand remark that there had been a mole hole in the grass over it, and that their shovels had ruptured segments of the hole all the way down.

But there was no way Christina could ask them to clear all the dirt away from her father's coffin to see if there was a hole in it.

The pile of earth they had dug out—for the second time in eight years—was a mound under a green tarpaulin off to her left, though a token shovelful of dark loam had been left on the brown grass beside the grave.

The priest was shaking holy water onto Lizzie's coffin now, the drops beading up on the varnished lid like raindrops, and he was reading something from the Bible in a frail voice that the breeze snatched away.

Lizzie's coffin lay now on a black-velvet-draped bier on the grass to the right of the group of mourners. It would have cost Gabriel quite a bit—not just the two-inch-thick polished oak and the brass handles and plaque, but, as William had whispered to her, the sacrificial offering inside it of all of Gabriel's poems!

Christina reflected with a shiver that she could never sacrifice her own poetry that way. It would be like burning an old lover's letters—destroying something that was not entirely hers to dispose of.

The thought of her poetry brought on another dizzy, fiddling wave of her uncle's attention, so strong that she almost expected to see him among the mourners, staring intently at her with the eyes of the portrait on the wall at home; but she knew he was down in that hole, inside her father's coffin, in fact inside her father's dead throat.

If only the damned priest could hurry, and at last …
at last let the gravediggers fill in the hole,
she thought quickly, steering her mind away from a thought she must not let her uncle perceive.

She frowned and shut her eyes and tried to pray, though she was even more afraid of God's attention than of John Polidori's.

EVENTUALLY, “A WELL,” CAME
McKee's voice from the darkness ahead. “I think.”

Crawford kept crawling forward until his fingertips brushed the soles of her boots in the pitch blackness.

“Don't crowd me,” she said. “I can feel rungs down in it, like the one by St. Clement's. Damn, I should have come in feet first.”

She was hesitating, and Crawford almost said,
Let me go first,
before he realized how useless that thought was; then she said softly, perhaps speaking to herself, “I think we're closest to St. Mary-le-Bow in Cheapside. ‘I do not know, says the great bell at Bow.'” Then, louder, she said,
“Aedis te deum nosco.”

Her boots moved forward, out of reach, and he heard the fabric of her dress sliding against stone.

“What are you going to do?” Crawford asked hoarsely.

“I'm going to grab hold of one of the rungs below me, and then—do a somersault, I suppose, and try to hang on through it.”

Crawford tried to picture what she was describing, and he couldn't see how she could maintain her grip through such a move.

“Are there,” he asked desperately, “rungs
above
you?”