Hide Me Among the Graves

Hide Me Among the Graves Page 35

Over the ringing in his ears he heard the man's creaking voice cry, "It is the bridge man!"

Trelawny swung the gun barrel toward the voice, but a clatter at the window and the rippling, receding flutter of wind in cloth told him he was too late - the creature had flown away out the window, having probably abandoned its vulnerable human form even before the gun had gone off.

Trelawny had been holding his breath and now exhaled, feeling every day of his seventy-seven years, and he realized that he had been strongly hoping that it had been some natural effect that had knocked over the card in the Byron bell jar.

The woman had moved up between Trelawny and the lamp, and he could see well enough to make out her slim form against the glow. He almost thought he could see the lines of her bones through her translucent pink flesh. She shook her head angrily, then stepped past him into the hall.

"Nothing, nothing!" she shouted. "Back to your holes, idiots!"

She shoved Trelawny aside as she came back in, and he had no trouble hearing her slam the door.

"Why didn't he kill you?" she demanded furiously.

"He doesn't dare," said Trelawny, still blinking toward the window. He walked around the couch to it and leaned out over the sill, looking first up into the night sky and then down among the shadows of the street, but he saw no motion at all, and all he could hear over the ringing in his ears was the muted crowd noise from the New Cut Market a street away.

He pulled the window closed and latched it, then turned back toward the room.

Gretchen was sitting at a table near the lamp, and she pointed at a chair on the other side. Trelawny crossed the room and cautiously lowered himself into the chair, still holding the pistol in his burned hand but pointing it now at the floor. He peered at her and saw fresh blood gleaming on her bare throat. In the red light the blood looked black.

"Damn you, Edward," she said, touching the blood and looking at her finger. "He might not be back now for a week, and he needs me now."

Trelawny laid the gun down on the table at last. "Do you have cold water?"

Gretchen scowled at him, but she got up and lifted a basin from a table near the bed and shuffled back to set it heavily in front of him. It was half full of rocking water, and he gratefully sank his hand into its coolness.

"That lad must be new," he remarked, wincing as he flexed his fingers. "He looked like a black chicken."

She was clearly affronted. "Lad? A chicken? There hasn't been time for any to die and come back. That was my very own - " She waved her hand.

"That was Polidori himself?"

"He's been broken for seven years. He's only just back - and he's ill."

Trelawny touched his neck and nodded toward her. "But you're helping to restore him to his old stature."

"I do what I can for him," she agreed, nodding. "He loves me."

Trelawny drummed the fingers of his free hand on the table. He sighed. "No use offering you garlic, or the pistol."

"Give me the pistol and I'll shoot you with it." She stretched sleepily. "What do you mean, he doesn't dare kill you?"

"You heard him say it. I'm the bridge man." He touched his neck again. "If this flesh dies, the bridge between our two species dies. So he wouldn't thank you for shooting me."

Her eyes were half shut, and she cocked an eyebrow. "Really. Edward John Trelawny is the mixer."

"The catalyst." He smiled wearily and got to his feet. "I'm it."

"Well then, you take good care of yourself, Edward," she said, "and I think a visit every seven years is too frequent for our acquaintance - I'd be grateful if you'd simply forget the way to this house."

"Gladly." Trelawny picked up the pistol, and it had cooled enough for him to gingerly tuck it back into his trousers.

He opened the door, walked out to the landing, and began descending the stairs. I won't be able to do anything with Polidori, he thought, at least not here - but I might have another go at Miss B. - I believe I know a close friend of hers.

CHAPTER THREE

One moment thus. Another, and her face

Seemed further off than the last line of sea,

So that I thought, if now she were to speak

I could not hear her.

- Dante Gabriel Rossetti, "A Last Confession"

THE LOG IN the fireplace collapsed in a swirl of sparks at the same moment that the knock sounded at the door, and John Crawford wasn't sure he hadn't imagined it, in the same way that he sometimes imagined voices in the splashing sound of a tub filling, or footsteps in the clatter of leaves blowing across empty pavements.

But he put down his glass and stood up unsteadily and weaved his way to the hallway and the street door.

He pulled his dressing gown more tightly across his shoulders before unlatching the door and pulling it open, and he winced when the chilly night air swept inside - but there was no one on the doorstep.

He pushed his lanky hair out of his eyes and peered up and down the street, but he could make out no distinct figures in the close-pressing shadows of Wych Street.

He was about to close the door again when he looked down and saw a rounded metal disk on the top step, and he bent carefully to pick it up.

It was a gold watch, and it was warm.

The watch had been holding down a scrap of paper, and he managed to slap his palm onto it before it could blow away; holding the watch and the paper, he straightened and stepped back into the house and closed the door.

He shuffled back to his chair and picked up his reading glasses from the table beside it - and his chest went cold when he fitted them on and looked more closely at the watch.

It was his own watch, one that he had lost. He pried up the back cover and looked at the engraving on the inside of the cover: John Crawford, 7 Wych Street, February 12, 1862.

But, he thought, I smashed this watch against a wall in the sewers seven years ago, to repel the ghosts of my wife and son! He looked hopefully back toward the entry hall - could they have put it together again somehow, and brought it back? Were they even now outside, waiting?

But no - I bought another watch a few days later, and had this engraving done in it. Yes, that was February of '62. What became of it?

As if it were a belated effect of the cold air he had inhaled at the door, memory blew the alcohol fumes and maudlin fantasies out of his mind.

He had dropped it in the tunnels below Highgate Cemetery to gauge the depth of the well he and Adelaide McKee had climbed down.

And he remembered a little girl's voice calling from the darkness below them: I caught it before it could fly away. And you must fall too.

It had been McKee's daughter - his daughter - Johanna; and later he had seen her cradled in the inhuman arms of John Polidori, swinging this watch by its chain.

He laid the watch down on the table and quickly spread the scrap of paper out flat beside it.

Scrawled on it, in awkwardly penciled letters, were the words HELP ME JOHANNA.

Crawford's face was suddenly cold.

Perhaps she had not died in that cave-in.

But - the last time he had seen Johanna, she had been with the Rossettis' monstrous uncle, Polidori; and pretty clearly she had been bitten by him. Christina Rossetti's trick that day, whatever it had been, had apparently killed Polidori, but would it have freed Johanna?

All the warnings his parents had given him, and which Adelaide McKee had reinforced, about carelessly inviting entities into his house, flooded back into his mind now. He should run upstairs and fetch his neglected old garlic jar - he was pretty sure he knew where it was - and smear the stuff around the door and window frames, and then go to bed with the obliterating whisky bottle.

But he had run away from Girard, nine years ago ... and Johanna had written "help me."

Sweat dripped onto the note.

How long had it been since he had taken the watch and note inside and shut the door? Would she leave? He took a deep breath and let it out, and then he strode quickly back to the front door and pulled it open, and he had scuffed down the steps to the pavement before noticing that he was wearing his slippers.

But he peered up and down the street, puffing steam in the cold air and straining to see into the shadows below the overhanging upper floors of the old houses.

"Johanna?" he called.

There was no reply, and he couldn't see anything in the deep shadows all around.

The cold breeze corkscrewing down the narrow street got up his pants legs and into his collar, and he was about to run back inside for at least a coat and boots, when at last he saw movement on the far side of the street, in the recessed doorway of a house to his left.

He forced his eyes to focus - it was a small person, he could see that much - and then the figure stepped forward, and by the light that slanted down from the Strand he saw that it was a young person with long hair trailing from under a hat.

"Johanna!" he called again, starting forward across the crushed gravel of the street, but she stepped back into the shadows and he lost sight of her.

"Damn it," Crawford muttered, shivering. "Come in," he said loudly. "I'll help you!"

"Shut up!" yelled someone from a window overhead.

Oh, for - "I'll leave the door unlocked!" Crawford called, and then hurried back into the house.

He even left the door an inch ajar as he hurried up the stairs to find boots and a coat and a scarf, in case he might have to go out to talk to her - but when he got back downstairs, carrying his outdoor gear, the front door was shut, and he heard the couch creak in the parlor.

He froze in the hall. What had he just invited into his house - thoughtlessly invited into his house?

Trembling, remembering the creatures he had seen on Waterloo Bridge and at Carpace's salon and under Highgate Cemetery, he laid the coat and boots on the floor and then peeked fearfully around the doorway jamb into the parlor.

But the young girl sitting on the couch did not seem to be any sort of vampire. Her face, framed by a slouch hat and disordered locks of brown hair and the pushed-up collar of an oversized wool coat, was pink with the evening's chill, and her bright blue eyes held only cautious curiosity. One of his distressed cats, a Manx with only one eye, was sitting on her lap, audibly purring.

"I'm pure human," she said in a light voice. "But you shouldn't ask things in so quick. But - I'm glad you did tonight."

"You're... Johanna."

"You look older, your beard is gray. Yes, I'm Johanna. I do too, I'm sure - people say I'm probably fourteen now." She yawned. "You said that time that you're my father."

She really did seem to be fully and only human. He let his legs and shoulders relax. "Yes. And your mother said you were born in March of '56, so you're..."

"Thirteen." She shrugged, then looked directly at him. "Is my mother still alive?"

"She was when I last saw her," he said. "That was on that day we saw you." He felt his face reddening. "You, uh, didn't die when that tunnel collapsed."

"No," she agreed. "I crawled up a side tunnel before it all fell in."

"I'm sorry - we assumed - "

She shrugged again, apparently with no resentment.

After a few moments of silence in which his breathing and heartbeat slowed to their normal paces, he sighed and asked, "Are you hungry?"

She nodded solemnly.

There were no servants in the house; Mrs. Middleditch had died peacefully in her attic room three years ago, and since then Crawford had got by with a maidservant and a charwoman, both of whom came in three times a week.

"You can bring the cat into the dining room," he said, pushing open the door on the far side of the room from the curtained windows. He looked back - the cat had jumped away, and the girl paused to pick up the watch and thrust it inside her coat.

In the narrow dining room, he turned up the gas jets and waved her toward a chair at the table, but she came tapping after him in her narrow boots to the stairs that led down to the kitchen and scullery.

He paused at the stairway door. "I'll bring some things up."

"I'll come along down." She reached into her voluminous coat and pulled up the grip of a knife, then slid it back, apparently into a concealed sheath. "Cold iron," she said. "And I've got garlic too. I don't smell any of that in this house."

"It's been seven years since I've needed it," he told her. Then, after looking directly into her eyes, he laughed in surprise and added, "I'm - how did you put it? - pure human!"

She peered at his face, then nodded. "I suppose you are."

"Wouldn't you rather wait up here?"

"No."

"Very well. You can bring those things along if you like, but I'd advise leaving your coat and hat up here."

She nodded and shrugged out of the coat - under it she was wearing shiny brown corduroy trousers and at least two plaid flannel shirts - and threw it and her hat into a corner. The sheathed knife was on a leather strap around her neck, and she tucked it into the shirts.

He led the way down the stairs, each step of which was more damp than the one above it.

The steamy kitchen was a tiny dark room with three soot-blackened windows just under the low, beamed ceiling, and when Crawford struck a match to the kerosene lamp over the stove, he winced at the look and smell of the place.

The boiler over the stove gurgled like a colicky cow's stomach. Shirts and stockings, still visibly damp two days after washing, hung from a clotheshorse attached to one of the ceiling beams, and he had to duck around them to step to the larder. He tried to carry the lamp so that his small guest would not see through the doorway on the left, into the scullery, where he saw dirty dishes still piled in the sink over the wet stone floor.