Hide Me Among the Graves (32 page)

“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.

And then the imagined readjusted pliers were brought to bear and closed in and something began to go wrong with his mind. Memories intruded forcefully into his narrowed attention, broken and jammed together, like roof beams crashing into a bedroom under an unsustainable weight: the image of his son Girard replaced a dog that Crawford was cutting open for surgery; and he saw the heads of his parents on crows flying over the London Bridge; and his wife Veronica's face instead of his own staring at him from a mirror, and then the mirror sprang forward and shattered against his forehead and Veronica's mind was leaking into his.

Her memories were brutal—a hot haze of drunkenness veiled a dim view of naked men with the heads of bulls and birds of prey, and a wailing baby that was carried away by animated skeletons, and fingers tense on the wet grip of a knife—

And his flickering awareness grasped that these were not a distortion
of Veronica's
memories, but of
McKee's
—

Adelaide!
he thought.

The psychic pressure increased, and he caught one last image from her smothered mind—it was of McKee in a white wedding dress in a church, and Crawford was standing beside her on the altar.

And then his mind was too compressed to sustain consciousness.

A
T FIRST CHRISTINA
thought the sense of constriction signaled the onset of a headache or some distress in her stomach, and she shifted on the leather carriage seat and looked away from Cayley to face the window and take deep breaths of the cold fresh air. The carriage had passed under the stone arch of Highgate Cemetery's entrance and rocked in a left turn onto the road, and she dreaded the shaking of the increased speed that was sure to follow.

But the uncomfortable tightness was somewhere else, not in her—somewhere in the oppressive and unceasing attention of her uncle.

“Are you well, my dear?” asked Cayley, leaning forward solicitously.

Polidori's disembodied attention was all to do with squeezing and crushing something, and Christina had to breathe deliberately just to convince herself that she could. She held up her hand to put off answering Cayley.

And then it was gone. She had apparently moved at last out of the sphere of Polidori's ground-state attention, and she felt all at once lighter and younger. The increasing headwind sluicing through the open window as the horses quickened their pace was pleasantly cooling on her damp forehead.

“Yes, Charles,” she said, her voice lively with surprised relief, “I'm fine.”

Deeply and gladly she inhaled the cold air, and she stretched her fingers on her lap, feeling as though she had at last shed a pair of gloves that she'd worn for decades.

His attention was always on me to some extent, she thought, during these seventeen years, and it's finally completely gone.

I'm alone on my own.

LIKE A TAUT ROPE
suddenly cut, the stretched awareness of the thing that was largely John Polidori snapped back—and then reflexively reached out again to reestablish the broken connection; and its attention fixed on what seemed to be its goal but was instead only streaks of familiar blood in grooves cut into a cluster of mirrors…

And the wave-form that was the Polidori thing's identity was reflected back onto itself and instantly fragmented into a turbulence of nullifying contradictions and meaningless emphases.

A BOOMING CRASH OF
collapsing masonry and the thudding of tons of dirt jarred Crawford, and he rolled over painfully on a wet floor, blinking at shadowed stone walls and coughing grit out of his throat. He could feel hot blood running from his nose and clotting in his mustache and beard, and he peered around him in the darkness, assuming that he was in a building that had partially collapsed.

He knew vaguely that there were a number of ages he might be, but he had no idea which of them might include this experience, whatever it was.

He could hear water rushing in a roofed channel very close by, and now he could dimly see that someone was lying on the stone floor near him—a woman. Had she been injured in the collapse? Had he? He tried to stop coughing and think.

Memories prickled in his consciousness, opening one clear area after another. He was older than he would have guessed, and he was wearing the torn ruins of a linen shirt and creased woolen trousers—he had been at a funeral!—and the dim radiance filtering down the shaft overhead was probably the light of a far-off overcast sky; the woman lying beside him was … was the mother of his daughter!

Then with a mental expansion that felt like his ears popping, he remembered it all, and he quickly rolled over to peer across the rushing stream; but through a haze of dust he saw that the stone platform and bridge-end that had been on that far side were gone now, buried under a new slope of jagged rock and freshly turned earth.