Hide Me Among the Graves

Hide Me Among the Graves Page 17

"Poor Charles," said Christina.

"The man's an idiot," said Gabriel. He glanced at the clock on the mantel. "Is that right? Half past noon?"

"I wouldn't know," said Crawford sourly. "My watch is in fragments down a well."

Gabriel nodded. "That's the spirit. It's damnably sunny out, but I think we should take this conference to the park, so as not to disturb Lillibet with talk of devils."

"Lucky thing for you that you had that watch," McKee told Crawford as she got to her feet. "Or the devils would be digesting you right now."

Crawford shrugged and nodded. "Both of us," he said.

Christina sighed. "Let me get my coat and a bonnet."

"And a parasol," advised Gabriel, picking up his scarf and hat. "The sun is like a lion."

REGENT'S PARK, TWO STREETS away to the west, was a landscape of black trees and iron fences standing up in a carpet of old snow under a deep blue sky. The road linking the inner and outer circles was marked by a few tracks of hooves and boot prints, but aside from Crawford and McKee and the two Rossettis, the only figure in the landscape was a man walking an ungainly dog a hundred yards away.

As if the dark old houses they had passed had been huge, blank-eyed brickwork heads poked up out of the pavements to spy on them, they had not spoken until they were past even the tall white Cumberland Terrace houses on the park's eastern boundary and had crossed the outer circle and were well out onto the park grounds.

Crawford couldn't even see any birds, and McKee's linnet was silent - the only sounds were the wind in the bare branches and the crunch and slither of boot soles on the snow-drifted gravel.

Finally Christina's brother Gabriel spoke. "It's my wife - she seems to be dying, and I don't want - " He waved helplessly.

"You don't want her to come back," suggested McKee, staring down at the path as she walked. "If she does die."

"What I want is for her not to die," Gabriel said angrily. "This isn't a - a game, you know - we're talking about a woman's life. And an unborn child's too - she's apparently - "

"Believe me," interrupted McKee in a flat voice as cold as the wind, "I know it's not a game. You brought this to me, like a disease, and now my daughter is likely to die of it. I want her not to die too - but if she does, I want to see that she stays dead."

"You said," intervened Christina, blinking anxiously in the shadow of her parasol, "that your daughter might be living in Highgate."

McKee nodded. "That's what old Carpace's ghost said. She said she had seen the girl in the cemetery - that the girl's father was buried there."

"Swallowed there," Crawford corrected.

"Swallowed, buried," said McKee impatiently. "And she brings him flowers."

"Her father," said Christina. "But I thought you, sir, were the child's father?"

Crawford opened his mouth, intending to say allegedly, but instead simply said, "Yes."

"Ghosts don't lie," said Christina thoughtfully, at which Gabriel snorted.

"Adoptive father, I imagine," said McKee. "The ... the vampire."

"Oh," said Christina. "Of course."

"Our father is buried at Highgate," said Gabriel.

"He's safe," said Christina. "He died clean, with God's name on his lips and in the midst of garlic and cold iron."

Crawford glanced at Christina Rossetti - Sister Christina! - and wondered if this serious and respectable young lady might know even more about the occult world than McKee did.

"And we know," said Gabriel, "who the vampire father is." His eyes glittered under the broad brim of his hat.

Christina sighed, blowing away a plume of steamy breath, and Gabriel gave her a look that seemed almost reproachful.

"Over there," said Christina, pointing with her free hand away across the white-dusted dead grass plain to the right, "are the zoo cages."

She stepped off the path and onto the faintly crunching grass. The skirts of her coat flapped around her boots.

"We've got more privacy out here," said Gabriel impatiently, following her.

"There are cages outside the wall," Christina said, "on the west side. They're empty in the winter, nobody'd be out there on a day like this."

McKee and Crawford looked at each other and shrugged, then trudged after the Rossettis.

"Sister Christina," called McKee, "who is the vampire father?"

Christina swung her parasol aside and looked back over her shoulder, still walking. "You deserve to know, since one of us woke him and the other brought him to you. It's our uncle, my mother's brother. His name is - "

"Best left unsaid!" interrupted Gabriel. "Even in daylight."

"Your uncle?" exclaimed McKee, stopping on the grass.

"Yes." Christina halted too, and she tucked the parasol handle under her arm to take hold of McKee's hand; and with the forefinger of her gloved right hand she began stroking McKee's palm. After a moment Crawford realized that Christina was drawing a series of letters.

"I know you can read, Adelaide," said Christina. "Can you remember that name?"

"Yes," said McKee, frowning down at Christina's scrawling finger, "yes, but if it's - "

"He killed himself in 1821." Christina released McKee's hand and resumed walking, gripping the parasol handle again. "He had tried to enter a monastery, but they wouldn't have him - I can't blame them, since by that time he was - " She waved vaguely.

"Pledged to death and eventual resurrection," suggested McKee with a brittle smile as she stepped after her.

Gabriel was striding along beside Christina, but Crawford took a moment to look around at the desolate park grounds before rejoining his peculiar companions. The man with the dog had passed them, well to the north - Crawford noticed that the dog appeared to be tied up in some sort of flapping shawl against the cold.

Christina was still leading the way across the frostbitten grass, and Crawford saw her bonneted head nod. "Not the resurrection Christ bought for us."

"I knew," began McKee, and Crawford could see that she was speaking carefully, "that Mr. Rossetti here - "

"Call me Gabriel," said Christina's brother in a tight voice; and Crawford remembered, with a surprising surge of jealousy, what McKee had said yesterday morning when she had asked Crawford to call her by her first name: I think we can consider ourselves amply introduced. Of course she and this Gabriel fellow with his foolish hat had been similarly ... introduced.

McKee went on in a tight voice, "I knew that Gabriel had brought - your uncle's! - attentions to me, and to my daughter. But do you say you - woke him?"

Christina's shoulders rose and fell. "I did. I was fourteen."

"Our father forced it on her," said Gabriel gruffly, taking his sister's arm as they all trudged across the grass.

"At first I thought it was our uncle's ghost," said Christina. "Well, it was, in a way. I invited him in because I felt sorry for him, and he was family ... but it wasn't really him, not really."

"Our father," said Gabriel, "had a little statue that he'd acquired in Italy. No bigger than your thumb. We always, even as children, knew it was alive."

"It wore the doomed soul of our uncle," Christina went on, "but it was one of the - a dormant, petrified, condensed member of the - well, you know the term that Gabriel would advise me not to say out loud here. The tribe that troubles us, the giants that were in the earth in those days."

The Nephilim, thought Crawford with a shudder. They were mentioned in the Old Testament book of Genesis, and the writer of the book of Numbers described encountering them: we became like grasshoppers in our own sight, and so we were in their sight.

The man with the dog had reached the eastern edge of the park, but he had paused in the outer circle road.

"That," said McKee, "would have been in about 1850?"

"1845," said Christina, glancing back at her in evident surprise.

"They had been dormant then for twenty or thirty years," said McKee. "From about 1850 onward, they've been active again." To Gabriel she said, "It was 1855 when you brought your uncle to me." She shook her head and gave Crawford a wide-eyed look. "Was I right about coming here? We've found the monster's very family!"

"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."