Hide Me Among the Graves (71 page)

The flare and hard bang of the pistol shot flung Trelawny and Crawford apart; Crawford slammed against the port bulkhead, and Trelawny tumbled limp to the starboard-side deck.

Above and behind Crawford the hatch cracked and blew in splinters down the ladder, and a moment later a cloud of wasps swept buzzing and looping into the cabin, followed by two huge gray hands and a gleaming black head that bobbed in the air. One of the hands was missing a finger.

“Where where where?” sang the thing, twisting the eyeless face back and forth on its snakelike neck and sniffing loudly.

The bullet from Trelawny's deflected gunshot had apparently still whistled very closely past Abbas's head, and now the man had drawn a revolver of his own.

“Call me here to
kill
me?” he screamed, and, still screaming but without words now, he rushed forward and began firing indiscriminately as wasps fastened on his face and hands.

The noise of the shots was stunning in the close cabin, and Crawford's eyes were dazzled by the fast muzzle flashes. But through the smoke and wasps he saw Johanna step into the man's path, crouching, her knife held low for an upward thrust; Abbas saw her too, and he swung the barrel of his revolver toward her.

Crawford lunged forward, spun her aside with his left hand, and with his right he drove the rapier blade into the man's belly.

He was face-to-face with Abbas now and their eyes met, both squinting with nearly impersonal exertion; Abbas tilted the gun barrel up, and Crawford caught the wrist with his left hand, then shuffled forward to drive the blade farther in.
Liver,
he thought crazily,
peritoneum, superior mesenteric artery, spinal column.

The gun fired into the ceiling, and Abbas folded, his knees knocking on the deck.

Crawford had to brace his boot against Abbas's chest to tug the blade free; he spun to face the others, and immediately he slashed at one of the snakelike gray hands that was groping toward Johanna. It contracted back, and the shiny black head twisted toward him. Suddenly wasps were clinging to Crawford's face, and points of sharp pain flared in his cheek and forehead.

“I take my bride, oh yes, sir!” sang the wide mouth in the coal-black face.

McKee chopped with her own sword at the long gray neck, and the head whipped around toward her. A girl's voice was screaming back by the hatch.

Christina Rossetti pushed past Crawford toward the ladder, and as he slapped at the stinging insects on his face, he glimpsed a young girl standing at the base of the ladder, backlit in the gray daylight slanting down the hatch.

Crawford's sword blocked Christina's path, and he twisted the blade so that she hit the edge with her hand. She gasped and paused, looking down at the blood that was already dripping from her fingers.

Crawford caught her shoulder and turned her around to face him. There were no wasps on her.

“I cut you!” he shouted. “Summon him now!” He pulled her back across the deck with him to Abbas's sprawled body, and he crouched to lift the man's limp hand and then wrap Christina's bloody fingers around it.

“Catch this man's ghost, catch his strength, and call Polidori!”

With her free hand she brushed at the wasps that still clung to his face, and tears were running down her cheeks, but she nodded. For a moment she squeezed the dead man's hand, and then she let it fall and took a deep breath.

The girl, Rose, was rushing across the deck now at Johanna, who raised her knife.

“Uncle John!” Christina called softly.

And the air seemed to twang.

There was another man standing in the bow end of the cabin now, beyond Abbas's body, and Crawford recognized the curly dark hair, and the mustache, and the deep alien eyes; McKee knew him too, and sprang at Polidori, driving her sword toward his chest—

But the blade flexed as it met a barrier a few inches away from Polidori's white shirt, and the torqued blade was twisted out of McKee's hand.

It clattered to the deck as McKee retreated a step, and Polidori stepped back and stood up straight—then paused, flexing his white-gloved hands in front of his face.

He looked at Christina. “Let go of me,” he said in a voice like rocks shifting at the bottom of a well.

“Hold him!” said Crawford. He glanced anxiously back at Johanna—she had wrestled the thrashing Rose to the deck and was fending off the gray hands and the black face with kicks and swipes of her knife.

“I will!” wailed Christina. Her fists were clenched and her eyes were shut.

“Et tu, Brute?”
said Polidori to her, and then his human body crouched and picked up McKee's dropped sword.

With no more now than a desperate hope to distract him, Crawford sprang forward in a lunge, and Polidori straightened and parried the thrust away.

“My son!” he said in his rumbling voice.

Thumps and curses and musical hooting from behind Crawford let him know that McKee had joined Johanna's fight.

“I'm not,” panted Crawford. “I'm Michael Crawford's son.” And he lunged again, this time disengaging his blade around Polidori's parry.

But Polidori easily countered and parried it again and drove his left fist hard into Crawford's chest.

The force of the blow punched the air out of Crawford's lungs and flung him backward across the cabin; he hit the deck and slid on his back until his head collided with the aft bulkhead.

Colors spun in his vision, but he dimly saw Trelawny snatch up his hat, and then the old man had rolled him over and yanked the Inverness cape off his shoulders.

Struggling to pull air into his stunned lungs, Crawford managed to get to his hands and knees. And he saw Trelawny, wearing the beaver hat and the cape now, snatch up Crawford's sword and advance quickly on Polidori.

The light from the porthole and the lantern were at Trelawny's back—Polidori would see only Trelawny's backlit silhouette in the hat and cape and must suppose it was Crawford.

“I threw you aside,” said Polidori, crouching again into an en garde, “to live, if you cared to.”

Crawford saw Trelawny lunge.

Polidori parried the thrust and riposted with a lunge of his own—

—and Trelawny caught the vampire's darting blade on his, but instead of parrying it away, he simply nudged it upward and canted his head to the side.

And Trelawny's head jerked as the vampire's blade tip snagged his throat.

Then the old man had toppled backward onto the deck, and Crawford was crawling toward him, still not able to breathe.

Trelawny was breathing, though, in great gasps, and each time he exhaled, the air in the cabin rippled like heat waves over noonday pavement.

Several wasps pattered dead to the deck by Crawford's sliding hands.

The upright figure that was Polidori was flickering in and out of visibility, and his great voice was audible only in chopped fragments: “—
Trelawny
—
him up!
—
stone must not
—
bridge
—”

Crawford glanced to the side and saw that the spidery figure of the dead boy was appearing and disappearing too—he saw Johanna drive her knife into the thing's forehead in a moment when it was present, and when it reappeared again two seconds later, it was hunching backward away from her with dust shaking out of a hole above its gaping left eye.

McKee was kneeling on Rose, holding her wrists.

Crawford had reached Trelawny, who rolled his eyes up at him.

“Get it all the way out,” the old man whispered through bloodstained teeth, and his opened throat hissed with his words. “His protection—you see—didn't protect me—from himself.”

Fresh blood was puddling under Trelawny's ear and shoulder and soaking into his tumbled white hair, but it wasn't spurting as if from a major vessel, and Crawford peered at the wound. The gash in the old man's throat had exposed part of the trachea—air was blowing a narrow bloody spray out of a cut in it as he breathed—and a walnut-sized cyst hung between the thyroid cartilage and the jugular vein. The cyst was partly cut free, flapping back and forth with each breath.

“Johanna!” Crawford managed to gasp, and when his daughter looked up he beckoned.

She scrambled up on the other side of Trelawny, and her eyebrows went up nearly to the sweat-spiky fringe of her hair when she saw the cut.

“Give me your knife, quick.”

He forced out of his mind the otherwise disabling comprehension that this was a man, not an injured horse.

The intermittent figure of Polidori was flashing closer, and before its flickering, groping hands could reach him, he took Johanna's knife and held his breath—and with the point he carefully cut along the narrow strip of scar tissue between the pulsing jugular vein and the cyst.

The cyst was lying bloodily across his fingers now, and he traced the knifepoint around the far side of it, freeing it from the thyroid cartilage.

The thing fell into his palm, and he could feel the heavy, nearly round stone inside it.

Polidori collapsed in a thumping swirl of dust that did not flicker away. The dead boy squeaked shrilly and then was just a puff of smoke, slowly dissipating as it drifted under the ceiling toward the stale-air vent.

“Not even anything to cremate,” said Johanna in an awed voice.

Crawford pushed the knifepoint into the cyst, and the steel grated against the fired clay.

AND THROUGH THE KNIFE'S
tang in his palm, Crawford was drawn into a vision of the woman in fragments in the green-lit chamber, and he saw the separate hands and arm and wide-eyed face collapse as siftings and spillings of black sand, and the green light faded to darkness, and for a moment he saw bare trees shaking in a gust on the distant Cotswold Hills;

He glimpsed the thing that had been Polidori too, moving like a mountain through the sky, retreating east to the snowy airless heights where nothing organic could live;

And in a house in Holmwood forty miles west of London, Algernon Swinburne dropped his glass of brandy and staggered to the window, but when he had fumbled it open and thrust his head out into the cold wind, the fresh air couldn't provide the sustenance he was now deprived of;

In Chelsea, Gabriel Rossetti stepped back from his dark, cramped painting of
Astarte Syricaca
and blinked around bewilderedly at the partitions that blocked his view of the garden, and then he sat down and was sobbing because he couldn't remember why he had ever nailed them up;

William Rossetti looked up from his desk and stared through his office window at the gray walls of King's College, and, for just one fleeting moment before returning his attention to the petition at hand, he tried in vain to recall any of the verses he had once been shown, verses that he might have written;

In Christina's bedroom in the house in Torrington Place, the bottle on the bedroom shelf vibrated faintly, and the furry sea mouse slowly sank to the sediment at the bottom;

And across the bridges and rooftops and steeples of London, all the songbirds burst into wild chirping and trilling.

WHEN THE VISIONS ABATED,
no time seemed to have elapsed; Crawford was still holding the knifepoint pressed against the stone.

He shook his head and handed the knife back to Johanna, then pulled his handkerchief out of his pocket, folded it, and gently laid it across the hissing gash in the old man's throat.

“Pressure,” he told Trelawny, whose hand wobbled up to hold the handkerchief in place. “Not too much.”

“Let—me up,” whispered Trelawny. His face was pale under his tan and slicked with sweat.

“No! Your larynx would probably fall out on your chest.” Crawford looked across at McKee, who had wrestled Rose into a sitting position on the deck. The girl was panting and grinding her teeth.

“She'll be pretty wild for a while yet,” commented Johanna. “As I recall.”

Christina Rossetti was gripping her cut hand. “I think she'd benefit from staying at the Magdalen Penitentiary,” she said.

“It saved me,” agreed McKee.

Rose made a sullen suggestion about what Christina might benefit from.

Christina sighed and looked down at Trelawny. “Someone should tell her parents, soon, that she's well.”

“I'll do it myself,” croaked the old man on the floor, but Crawford frowned and shook his head.

“I'll send Johanna for medical supplies, and I'll clean out the wound and sew you up. But you're going to be living right here for a few weeks, if you live at all. And I mean
right
here, on the deck—I don't think even a pillow would be a good idea for a few days. Swallowing is likely to be difficult—can your Larks cook soup?”

“My Larks,” gasped Trelawny, “are going to be busy tonight disposing of a body.”

“I can cook soup,” said Johanna. “I can stay here with him.” She looked down at the old man. “Who's sleeping in the sleigh these days?”