Hide Me Among the Graves

Hide Me Among the Graves Page 27

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.

CHAPTER TWELVE

What be her cards, you ask? Even these: -

The heart, that doth but crave

More, having fed; the diamond,

Skill'd to make base seem brave;

The club, for smiting in the dark;

The spade, to dig a grave.

- Dante Gabriel Rossetti, "The Card-Dealer"

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?"

"Good thought."

He heard her dress rustling and tearing, and her shoes knocked and scuffed in front of his face. He reached out and lightly touched the soles of them, and he realized that she had managed to roll over onto her back in the tight tunnel.

She shifted farther ahead, and then exclaimed, "Yes! Solid! Thank God one of us is thinking - I believe I would have killed myself going down headfirst."

Crawford nodded in agreement, though there was no way she could see it. Sweat rolled down into his eyes.

He heard her shift forward in stages, and then it was just her heels skidding on stone and he heard her panting outside the narrow tunnel; after a few moments he heard her boots clunking on iron - they ascended a few rungs, and then descended, echoing in some bigger space.

"I'm below you now," came her voice. "Roll over and slide out."

Crawford was bigger around than she was, but he managed to get onto his side and push his way forward until his head and arms were projecting out of the tunnel, though there was still no light at all.

The wet-clay draft was now palpably coming from below him, chilling his wet shirt, and the noise of his breathing echoed away in a big volume of air. He could hear McKee's boots scraping on metal some yards below him, and beyond that he now heard a low, many-toned humming - and he remembered McKee's description of the vox cloacarum, the sound caused by pressure differences in the infinite old sewers. This seemed different.

He groped upward with one hand and found a metal rod - he tugged it, and it didn't give, so he pulled himself farther out and was able to roll more and get his other hand on it too.

He pulled himself farther out into the black abyss and had to push with his heels to get his shins out past the top edge of the tunnel, but at last he was able to set his feet on the bottom edge of it, and then up onto the rungs.

Then he was following McKee in her audibly slow descent, past the tunnel mouth and farther down into the well.

After climbing down a few more rungs, he said, "That wasn't 'oranges and lemons.'"

"It was Latin for 'I know thee as the god of the temple,'" she said. "Now hush."

Crawford was too sore and tired to do more than twitch at the first touch of the insect wings, and after the surprise of the first flutter at his cheek, he ignored their feather touches on his face and hands. The work of moving one hand and one foot, and then the other hand and the other foot, and the rhythmic chuff of his breath against the stone wall in front of his ever-flexing knuckles, became nearly automatic, and he tried to imagine the long-lost people who must have built this well. Into his mind swam images of Roman soldiers battling men who fought naked with crude black-iron swords.

"Again there's a drop," came McKee's voice from below him, jarring him out of the insistent daydreams. "I can't see a thing below, but - Johanna did it, so we can."

Crawford's first thought was that if he heard McKee fall a long way he could climb up the ladder and make his way back through the tunnel to the open air - but he couldn't permit that.

"I've," he said, "got a new watch. Let me drop it and we can listen and see how long it takes to hit something."

"A capital notion, my dear," she said, and he heard a shiver of exhaustion and relief in her voice. "I owe you a lot of time."

He pulled his watch out of his waistcoat pocket and fumbled one-handed at the little bar on the end of the chain; it was tucked through a waistcoat buttonhole, and when he finally poked it free, he lost his grip on the watch.

"There it goes," he said hastily.

He waited several seconds, but heard nothing.

His belly was suddenly icy and tingling at the thought of a vast drop below them, and he gripped the rung he was holding on to tightly and tried to flatten himself against the wall.

"Climb ... back ... up," he said distinctly through clenched teeth.

McKee's quavering voice said, "But - she must have come this way - "

And then another voice, a little girl's, spoke hesitantly from not far below them: "I caught it before it could fly away. And you must fall too."

Crawford didn't like the sound of must fall, but he said to McKee, "I'll climb down and drop as soon as I hear you land and step aside."

THE FOUR BURLY GRAVEDIGGERS in their rough corduroy trousers and jackets had slung a pair of ropes under the gleaming black coffin, and now they came forward out of the tree shadows and lifted it off the bier and plodded across the grass toward Christina, with the coffin swinging between them. She stepped back hastily, and two of them moved to each side of the grave and then began lowering the coffin into the hole.

The mourners shuffled closer, with the white-haired old priest leading the way; Christina wondered what the old cleric would do if he knew what was in the grave. And Gabriel looked ready, Christina thought with sudden agonized sympathy, to jump into the grave himself. And this is all my fault, she thought; and Papa's too, and Papa's too, for bringing the hellish thing back from Italy and then giving it to me.

The ropes went slack, and two of the gravediggers rapidly drew them up and coiled them, and then all four stepped back.

Christina's face went icy cold - for her uncle's attention was still a quivering shadow on her mind; desperately she steered her thoughts toward her father's old headstone and away from the panicky realization that her uncle's identity was not fragmented now that Lizzie's doctored coffin sat on top of her father's.

The priest shook more holy water down into the grave and said, "'We therefore commit her body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in the sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life.'"

Christina made the sign of the cross, though she wasn't Catholic. He is paying such exclusive attention to me, she thought, because I'm still physically close to his petrified body. The terrible attention will wane as I drive away.