Hide Me Among the Graves (67 page)

After listening, for a longer time than he would have expected, to the boots descending the rungs, he heard the hard chuff of someone dropping to the sand in the central chamber, and then he heard McKee say, hoarsely, “John? Are you down here?”

“Yes!” he said, aloud so that she would know it really was him, and not some lonely whispering ghost. He shuffled carefully back down the unseen slope to the dimly visible chamber of arches.

His groping hand found hers in the darkness, and a moment later another pair of boots impacted the sand and then Johanna had found him and was hugging him.

D
IRECTLY BEHIND ME,”
he whispered, “is the tunnel that leads up to the surface. I just came back out of it.”

“I heard you,” McKee whispered back. “I can walk to it from right here. But you were leaving? What happened with Chichuwee?”

“Dead and gone—floor, wagon, and everything. But I've got his invisible boiling pot.”

He felt her hand brush the thing and then jiggle the bottle in his coat pocket. “How—? No, later. Quiet now.”

She started forward, taking his left hand—and Johanna's right hand, he gathered, for he could hear her footsteps now too—and soon the three of them were trudging up the inclined sand slope.

The sand underfoot was wetter than he remembered, and his right hip and both knees were soon aching at each labored uphill step. He was about to whisper a suggestion that they rest, when he gasped and involuntarily squeezed McKee's hand.

Someone else was stepping along, very lightly, a few yards to his right. And then he could hear the faint crunch and slither of other footsteps beyond those. None seemed to impose much weight on the sand.

McKee gripped his hand more tightly, clearly conveying
Don't pause or speak.

He remembered encountering the ghosts of his first wife and his son Richard down here, last time, and, as sweat chilled his face and he forced himself to inhale and exhale evenly, he wondered if they were among the things pacing them here.

He could hear footsteps now on the far side of Johanna too; and ahead of them, and behind them. The windy
vox cloacarum
moaning started up, and it was faint only because the voices were very soft this time, not because its source was far away at all. Crawford could almost feel the mingled breaths from the cold throats on his right hand.

Pressure
—
differences!
he thought furiously as his aching legs kept pushing him up the slope.

And then he was aware of weak plucking at his sleeve, and fragments of whispers: “whatcha got … lemme just … ye spare a bit of…”

These seemed to be a frailer sort of ghost than those of Veronica and Richard had been, perhaps because they didn't have any intrinsic psychic power over him from which to draw virtual substance, but there seemed to be hundreds of them.

And McKee was pulling him strongly ahead and up, and her grip on his hand was still tight.

Crawford's sleeve was snagged, and when he shook off the thing that clung to it, he felt a tug and heard cloth tear; then his boots were tangled in something that audibly gnawed at his boot before he could kick it away. He heard sharp breaths and scuffles from McKee and Johanna too.

We don't dare fall, he thought as the three of them kept plodding uphill, all of them panting audibly. How much farther?

Little cold hands were tugging at the bottle in his pocket, and the whispered voices were now saying, “Give us the nun, we need a nun … she's in brandy, we need that too … and your blood, your blood…”

McKee had just whispered, “If any of us falls—throw the bottle—” when a new sound intruded from behind them.

The sound struck Crawford as a very familiar one in a different context, and a moment later he recognized it as hoofbeats—striking more lightly than was natural in the wet sand, but unmistakable, and he heard the whicker of breath blown through a horse's lips.

The hoofbeats drew alongside, apparently trampling the human ghosts, to judge by the crackling and faint wails.

Crawford leaned to the right and reached out with the hand that held the pot, but encountered nothing, though the sound of hooves striking the sand came from no more than a yard away from his boots. He drew his arm back and found that he was only reassured by this new spectral escort. McKee seemed to feel the same thing and let their desperate pace slow to a fast walk.

In his exhaustion, Crawford almost imagined he could see the graceful creatures pacing on either side of his party—the rippling flanks and tossing manes and bright intelligent eyes.

The ghost horses paced alongside until the slope leveled out and the faint high arch showed in front of them; then the hoofbeats seemed to break into a barely audible gallop and diminish to silence ahead, where a mist briefly blurred the glow that Crawford remembered was reflected moonlight.

McKee led Crawford and Johanna around the left-side edge of the tall arch. Ahead of them, clearly visible in the diffuse white radiance after so much time in total darkness, the stonework wall of the fallen Roman building stretched up like a ramp.

“The light is coming in through a hole in Portugal Street,” McKee whispered to Johanna as she started walking up the side of the building, skirting the long box that was a tilted balcony. “It's an easy climb up from here.”

The three of them trudged up the slanted wall, sometimes using hands as well as feet in traversing buckled sections, and soon they were all seated on the rounded ridge that was a fallen turret. Wavering moonlight slanted in through the rectangular hole twenty feet overhead.

“Horses?” said McKee once they had all caught their breaths. “Horse ghosts?”

“Like the cats?” ventured Johanna. “Old friends?”

Crawford was surprised by the thought, and he hoped it was so.

Then his smile relaxed into a frown. “I met Trelawny's Miss B.,” he said hesitantly, “in one of the other tunnels. She—”

“You went into another tunnel?” exclaimed McKee. It seemed to require an effort on her part not to draw away from him. “And you met
her
?“

“She was all—in pieces, and there were broken bits of black stone and sand on a table. Corresponding.” His heart was thumping again just recalling it, and he peered nervously back the way they'd come. “You remember Christina said that Trelawny had shrunk and hardened her and put her in a box. I believe he broke her up with a hammer too. She wanted my blood, and I ran out.”

“She must have been pretty sure she could talk you into it,” said Johanna thoughtfully. “She wouldn't spend herself so much to become visible just on an off chance.”

Crawford heard unvoiced insight in his daughter's remark, and he reminded himself that she too had experienced the dark elation of being severed from human concerns.

“She told me I'm Polidori's son,” he said. “She said that in the summer of '22, my mother—”

“Josephine,” said Johanna.

“Yes. I didn't believe her.”

“Oh, why didn't you wait for us at the Spotted Dog?” asked McKee.

“I did, I even napped for a bit, but the tough lads started to want the bottle.” He braced his feet on a window lintel and sighed. He thought of putting the pot down in some secure niche, then decided they'd have trouble finding it again. “I've never been so glad in my life as I was when you two dropped down the well back there.”

“We were glad to find you,” said Johanna. “Very.”

“We caught another cab,” said McKee, “right after that big boom, and went back to Tottenham Court Road, to—to see—” She paused and exhaled, shaking her head.

“We were sure we'd find you dead in the street,” said Johanna in a small voice. “Smashed flat.”

“Maria saved me,” he said, touching the bottle that was still in his coat pocket. Nuns and horses, he thought.

McKee pushed her hair back with both hands. “We looked,” she began, but her voice cracked; she took a deep breath and went on, “We
looked
around the area, but there was no sign of you.”

“Nor of the tall black-painted thing,” said Johanna with a shiver. “We kept our eyes out for it.”

“Sister Christina was probably giving it soup,” said McKee bitterly.

“But we—
met
—
Rose
,” said Johanna. “She had followed that thing, and she jumped at us from out of an alley.”

“Rose? Good God, Trelawny's granddaughter? Was she—alive, still?”

“Yes—same as I was, when you saw me at Highgate Cemetery,” said Johanna. “Not dead and resurrected. And she—knows me, hates me. Tried to kill me.”

McKee took her daughter's hand and said to Crawford, “She had a knife, but I blocked her first stab, and then we held her off with our own.” She barked out two syllables of a strained laugh. “We didn't want to hurt her, but she surely wanted to hurt us.”

Crawford anxiously tried to see the faces and hands of his wife and daughter. “Were either of you cut?”

“No,” said Johanna, “nor her either. Well, maybe her hand. It was hard to see. There was no way to talk to her at all, much less
grab
her. We outran her—she's not very strong now. I remember how that is.”

“Rose is,” said McKee, “furiously jealous that… Christina's uncle … would apparently rather have Johanna. We really couldn't hope to capture her—so we just—left her there.”

“And then we went off separately,” Johanna added, “to meet up at the Spotted Dog. By the time we both got there, you had already gone below.”

“Can I see the pot?” asked McKee.

“No, actually,” said Crawford, carefully handing it across, “but you can hold it. His boy tossed it to me, across the pit where Chichuwee's place used to be. The boy said ‘the big vampire' wiped out all the Hail Mary artists Wednesday night.”

“The same night the Mud Lark man came to me in my dream,” said Johanna.

“And William Rossetti's son was born on Wednesday,” recalled McKee.

The glow from above was fading.

“Moon's moving on,” said Crawford. “It'll get pretty dark down here.”

“I think we're better off down here than out under the night sky,” said Johanna.

“Too right,” agreed McKee. “We'll climb out when we can see daylight. Here's the pot back,” she added, handing the thing to Crawford and not letting go of it till he had both hands on it.
“Don't
lose that.”

“I'm keeping my knife in my hand till dawn,” said Johanna.

THEY HAD TO KNOCK
so much snow aside to crawl out of the hole in Portugal Street next morning, and the sky was so heavily overcast, that McKee said they were lucky to have seen the daylight at all.

All three of them had lost their hats during the night's confusions, and McKee and Johanna had left their overcoats at the Spotted Dog, so Crawford gave Johanna his coat, and they were all shivering when a cab let them out at the corner of Bozier's Court.

“Good Lord, it's after seven o'clock!” said Crawford, peering down the street at the clock over the Oxford Music Hall.

“Hold your cab,” came Trelawny's voice from the shadows under the pub awning. As Crawford waved at the driver, the old man hobbled out into the gray daylight and added, “It's nearly half past seven. I had to sit through dawn Mass.” He wore no hat, and his collar was open.

“I wish we had,” said Johanna.

“Did
the ghost speak?” asked Trelawny, holding the cab door for McKee and Johanna as they climbed back in, and then he called an address in Pelham Crescent to the driver and got in himself.

“Not yet,” said Crawford after he had stepped up last and sat down inside the cab next to Trelawny. The vehicle jolted into motion. “But we can boil it at your house. I've still got the ghost, and this,” he said, holding up his two spread hands, “is Chichuwee's boiling pot.”