Hide Me Among the Graves

Hide Me Among the Graves Page 51

The pause that followed this was so long that Gabriel had opened his mouth to speak again, when the table knocked once in reply. Yes.

"But Lizzie was your mother...?"

Again there was the Yes reply.

"That's two! Both all too human!"

Christina was dizzy, and a high-pitched wail seemed to be keening in her head. "Was there ever," she said, speaking too loudly; she exhaled and went on, "a third parent?" Earlier? she thought.

The table banged once.

"Were you," she asked, "reincarnated, after that, as Lizzie and Gabriel's child?" She sat back and whispered, "Insistent to be born?"

She had half expected it, but the single rap made her jump.

TRELAWNY WAS COUGHING IN the haze of black-powder smoke as the dead boy's right hand reached across him and gripped the pistol, and its lengthening, twining fingers held the hammer down and prevented a second shot.

Blinking and gasping in the dimness, Trelawny could see that a fresh, smoking hole had been punched into the blanket over the boy's torso, but there was no drop of any blood, and the dead boy seemed unconcerned - the big white teeth had clicked again, four distinctly separated times, in the moments since Trelawny had fired the gun.

Trelawny tugged against the snaky fingers that enveloped his right hand, but the dead boy was strong.

"No, you don't leave here," the thing said, and Trelawny could hear air escaping from a hole in its ribs as it spoke, "until he congeals again and comes here, and takes you - your soul, with his teeth - from the other side of your neck, away from the stone."

I HAVE TO KNOW, thought Christina, though her forehead was already cold with perspiration. She looked at the dimly visible faces of her brothers, then looked away, toward the curtained windows. "Are you," she asked hoarsely, "the child I miscarried when I was fifteen?"

TRELAWNY WAS STARTLED WHEN, after a pause, the dead boy again clicked his teeth once. "That's it, my never-mother," it said. "I needed to be born, so my dead soul crawled among the sea worms on the dark river bottom until the other patron found me, and she found another womb for me."

His eel-like fingers tightened on Trelawny's right hand.

AFTER THE LAST KNOCK, Gabriel and William leaped up, for Christina had fainted and fallen out of her chair onto the carpet.

TRELAWNY SPREAD HIS CONFINED fingers to release the revolver, and the boy's fingers stretched out - each a full foot long now - and took the gun away from him.

"What," said Trelawny, "if I don't care to be bitten? She," he added, nodding toward the box the dead boy held, "never bit me."

"And look at her now! Your gratitude has near killed her. She was slow - you should have died and come back long ago. He will be here soon."

"I'm sure I'll be able to reason with him," said Trelawny with every appearance of relaxed confidence. Inwardly, though, he was bracing himself for a desperate move. Slowly enough not to seem threatening, he reached into his coat and drew out his pewter flask.

"I daresay you don't drink," he remarked to his cadaverous companion as he unscrewed the cap.

"What I drink is not in that container," the thing said.

It turned its bald granite-colored gourd of a head to the left as it tucked the revolver away beside the box on its side of the seat, and Trelawny gritted his teeth and reached into his side pocket for a box of matches.

In one motion he pulled out the box, slid it open, flipped out a match and struck it, and as it flared he whirled the flask in a circle, splashing warm brandy in every direction; he dropped the lit match and the flask as the cab's interior flared in a bright inferno.

The dead boy burst out in a loud wailing, thrashing on the seat and beating at the flaming blanket it wore, and Trelawny sprang forward; he swept the leather flap aside and put one boot on the low front partition and grabbed the reins, and then vaulted out onto the mare's back.

She lurched in surprise at the sudden weight, and then neighed shrilly and tugged forward, her flanks apparently stung by his flaming trousers. He fumbled his pocketknife free and leaned down to saw through the leather trace and the tug strap that held the shaft on the right side - the mare had helpfully drawn them out taut - and then switched hands and bent to do the same on the left side, and then the mare and her smoking rider were galloping down the alley, Trelawny desperately gripping the long, trailing reins right above their rings in the little harness saddle.

His hat and coat and beard flickered with hot blue flames, and as soon as the mare had rounded the next corner, he managed to rein her in and then slid off her back, and as she raced away in the direction of the King's Road, he found a broad puddle of icy mud to roll in.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Let all dead things lie dead; none such

Are soft to touch.

- Algernon Swinburne, "Felise"

THE AFTERGLOW OF sunset still shone pink on the steeple of St. Clement Dane's in the Strand, but Wych Street was in evening shadow. Lights shone in the windows of the pub on the corner, and Crawford had lit his porch lamp an hour ago.

Standing in the street, he reached up now to slide the latest box - scalpels, forceps, ropes, and muzzles - onto the back of the wagon stopped in front of his door, and then he leaned on the rear wheel to catch his breath.

This lot, which included a few good pieces of furniture, was going into storage, to be sent for when he had found a location for a veterinary surgery in France. His personal luggage was in a trunk in the parlor - Johanna didn't have anything to pack but a few clothes Crawford and Christina Rossetti had bought for her, and McKee had even less, and both of them kept their knives on their persons.

Johanna faced tomorrow's departure from England eagerly; her impression of France was derived from a translation of Charles Perrault's fairy tales that she'd bought while she'd been a coster girl - and she had been wearing the filthy translator shoes for six hours now, and would have to sleep in them tonight, and she was volubly looking forward to taking them off on the dock at Dieppe and pitching them into the sea.

Crawford was a bit disconcerted at his own readiness to abandon the country of his birth; but his first wife and family were lost to him, and he now realized that the city of London had for these last sixteen years been a constant, enervating reminder of them. And he thanked God that he had happened to wander out onto Waterloo Bridge, on that February evening in 1862, and jumped into the river with McKee.

McKee, though, had been moody and quiet as she had made ham and chutney sandwiches and then helped carry boxes down the stairs. Crawford supposed that she was remembering whatever attractions her renounced common-law husband had presumably once had.

Crawford fetched a cigar out of his pocket and cupped his hands against the autumn breeze to strike a match to it. He stepped away from the wagon and leaned against the area railing.

Tomorrow night they would be in France, at first among British tourists in Dieppe and then, as soon as it was feasible, somewhere farther from the sea - ideally in some place where a British veterinary surgeon with a limited command of the French language might hope to establish a practice.

Fast footsteps crunching on the street made him look up, and at first his chest went cold to see the silhouette of a boy running toward him; then the boy was closer to the porch lamp, and Crawford saw that it was not the cadaverous figure he had briefly seen in Gabriel Rossetti's bedroom this morning.

"Message for Johanna," the boy gasped. He wore a velvet skullcap, and his hair was long in front and twisted into curls, and he appeared to be about Johanna's age.

"I'm her father," said Crawford. "I can deliver it."

The boy shook his head. "She paid me to hear it herself."

Crawford was about to insist when Johanna came tapping down the stairs.

"Hullo, Ollie," she said. "Is he dead drunk somewhere, I hope?"

"Dead somewhere, is the fact," said Ollie. "Hanged hisself three nights ago, buried on Wednesday. Driven to the deed by grief, they say, being as his woman left him."

"Thanks, Ollie," Johanna said, and Ollie touched his cap and ran away back the way he'd come.

Johanna leaned on the railing beside Crawford. After a moment, she said, "I stole a shilling from you."

"You're welcome to my shillings," he said. His first reaction had been relief, but now he was wondering how McKee would react to the news.

"That was Ollie."

Crawford nodded and puffed on his cigar.

"I know him a bit from my coster time." She sighed. "I paid him the shilling to find out where that Tom fellow was - 'spoon seller, common-law husband of Hail Mary McKee who does business mainly in Hare Street.'" She looked up at Crawford. "I wouldn't tell her till we're across the Channel."

He shook his head firmly. "No, I've got to tell her."

"She won't ... change her mind about going, then, out of remorse, or something? Or get all weepy?"

Crawford sighed, blowing out a plume of smoke. "I suppose she might get weepy. Don't you, sometimes?"

"No. Not for years."

Crawford glanced up at the darkening sky. "We should be inside, even with your magical shoes."

"Filthy things," she said, pushing away from the railing and hurrying up the steps into the house.

Crawford followed more slowly, and he paused at the top of the steps to have a few more puffs of the cigar.

Perhaps he didn't have to tell her. How reliable was Ollie? An unfounded rumor...

Still, Crawford would have to tell her what Ollie had said. He sighed, pitched the cigar butt into the street, and went inside.

The parlor to his left was an empty room now, with pale rectangles on the walls where the pictures had hung, and most of the floor was bright clean wood, protected for years by the now-removed carpet. He could hear clatter in the dining room and pushed open the door.

Johanna had resumed wrapping glass jars in flannel scraps and packing them into a crate in the middle of the floor where the table had stood, and Crawford wondered if they would be unpacked again in his lifetime, or ever.

"Your mother?" he asked.

"Upstairs, I believe," said Johanna.

It was as if - in fact it was nearly literally the case that - his whole life was being disassembled from around and under him, and he had to let go of it and jump, as he had let go of the bottom-most rung in that well under Highgate Cemetery, with McKee and Johanna waiting below.

And they were with him now, and they were all he still had.

The whisky decanter sat on the floor near where Johanna was working, and he bent to pick it up and move it away from her, but he paused to take a mouthful from the neck of it.

He heard McKee's voice in the hallway now, and a man's voice.

Clearly he heard her say, "Oh, very well, come in then."

He exchanged one horrified glance with his daughter, and then he had dropped the decanter and both of them burst through the dining-room door into the parlor.

McKee was just stepping into the room, and right behind her, still in the hall shadows, came a tall, burly figure.

Not caring if he was wrong, hoping he was, Crawford took two running steps and launched himself at McKee - he had one second in which to see her startled face, with another face looming behind her with its mouth opening - and then Crawford had grabbed McKee around the waist and flung her back toward Johanna.

Crawford's momentum sent him plunging into the man behind McKee, and the man's arm whipped around Crawford's shoulders and yanked him into a tighter embrace - the man's coat was damp and smelled of clay - and then sharp teeth punctured Crawford's throat.

HIS VIEW OF HIS own house was odd - he could see the exterior and the hallway and the parlor all at once, and the figure of McKee was a wavy ribbon bending from the door around the interior corner and into the parlor. He could see himself too, a blurred streak from the dining room, and Johanna, whose streak extended to where the McKee ribbon met it.

The ribbon people - he knew the trails of their motions were threaded all through the City, if he cared to trace them backward - had detectable personalities, and he was one of them himself, but Crawford could feel an immensely bigger, older, fuller identity overshadowing him. It communicated simply by existing, and it promised him relief from the crushing disparity of their stations, and immortality, soon.

THEN SOUNDS CRASHED BACK on him as he hit the bare wooden floor with his knee and elbow, and the smell of garlic burned in his nose, and bright red drops of his blood were pattering onto the boards.

One of Johanna's awful old shoes was directly in front of his face, grinding backward as she straddled him and lunged. He rolled over onto his back and saw that she had plunged her knife to the hilt into Tom's throat. Yellow fragments of garlic were spattered across Tom's shirt and unshaven face, and in Johanna's left hand was an empty jar.

Tom's eyes were rolled back in his head, showing only whites, and he convulsively jerked backward, off the knife, and he turned and clumped into the hall and away down the front steps. He seemed shorter than he had a moment ago when he had loomed over McKee's shoulder.

Johanna ran after him and slammed the door, and as Crawford struggled up to a sitting position, he heard her shoot the bolt. He clasped a trembling hand to his throat and then lifted it away, and the palm was bright and shiny with fresh red blood - but the blood wasn't spurting. No vein or artery had been punctured.

McKee was crouched in front of him, her face white as sea foam. A moment later Johanna was beside her, her eyes wide.

"He - killed himself," Crawford gasped, "died, at least - " He waved at Johanna, who tersely told McKee what Ollie had said minutes earlier.