Hide Me Among the Graves

Hide Me Among the Graves Page 57

"Three months? Not too diminished, then. We'll bank on that, God help us, and I can certainly commit one more mortal sin." He frowned at Christina. "I could not have shot you, Diamonds. I abjectly apologize for pretending that I would."

The couch and chairs creaked as the Crawfords and Rossettis began hesitantly to relax.

Christina closed her eyes and breathed deeply. "You pretend very well," she said; then she opened her eyes and gave him a frail smile. "But I can respect your concern for your grandchild."

She got unsteadily to her feet. "I'll fetch the bottle," she said, and she made her way to the hall; soon they could hear her shoes bumping on stairs. Crawford reflected that she looked much older and gaunter than the intervening seven years could justify.

Johanna nodded. "A drink first would be a splendid idea."

"The bottle contains the ghost," said William, slumped back in his chair and rubbing his face. "Edward," he burst out, "all this will make further literary consultations between us mightily awkward."

"I don't see that as necessarily so," said Trelawny, who seemed shaky now himself. "Friends do have disagreements."

Crawford barely had time to dig out a handkerchief and wipe his forehead, and exchange wide-eyed glances with his wife and daughter, before they heard Christina clumping with painful haste back down the stairs.

"Paper and pencil, William!" she panted as she reappeared in the parlor doorway. She was holding a corked glass bottle full of some pale brown liquid. "I told Mama not to bother with tea, and that we're not to be interrupted."

William stood up from his chair and crossed to an old slant-front desk against the wall. A framed picture hung over it, and he muttered a curse and flipped it around to face the plaster, then grabbed a paper and pencil and hurried back to the others.

Christina had pulled the low table closer to her chair and more squarely under the chandelier, and now she took the pencil and paper from her brother and laid the paper on the tabletop beside the bottle.

She sat down and waved Trelawny into a chair, and then she started to write a series of capital letters on the paper; but her hand shook too violently, and she pursed her lips and gave the pencil to William. He hiked his chair forward and quickly finished the row of letters.

"Silence, now," said Christina, "everyone." Then she lifted the pencil and said, "Maria, are you there?"

Crawford jumped then, and felt Johanna beside him twitch too, for there was some furry little thing in the bottle, and it had moved. The half-dozen gas jets on the chandelier overhead made a fan of the bottle's shadow, and the thing in the bottle glimmered like mother-of-pearl.

But after a few moments, Christina frowned. "Are you there, Maria? We need you."

William was looking uneasy. "No knocks," he whispered.

The room seemed distinctly colder. Crawford exhaled but couldn't see his breath.

"Maria!" Christina went on. "Communicate with us, please! This is your sister and your brother asking!"

The overlapping shadows of the bottle on the table were waving slightly back and forth across the wood surface.

Johanna had shifted around on the sofa, and when Crawford glanced at her, he saw that she was looking toward the hallway arch.

Then she turned to Christina. "Did you lock the door?"

"Shh," said Christina. "Maria, let us know you hear us!"

A loud, wavering buzzing distracted Crawford now; looking up, he saw a wasp looping through the air around the gas flames, and the chandelier was swaying on its chain.

Trelawny saw the wasp and struggled to his feet, pulling the heavy revolver out of his coat again.

"What now?" exclaimed William, shoving himself back from the table in alarm.

"This time," Trelawny wheezed, "I blow off his damned block and tackle!" He took a step to catch his balance, bumping the table.

"Yes," agreed Johanna in a high-pitched voice as she stood up and drew a knife from inside her blouse.

Everybody was leaping up in confusion, and the table went over with a bang - the ghost jar was rolling across the carpet, and the swinging chandelier threw bobbing shadows across the walls.

"He can't actually get in," said Johanna, watching the windows. "He hasn't been invited."

The air in the parlor was now very cold, and drafty, and carried the smoke-and-horse smell of the street. Crawford heard scuffling in the hall and the clattering bang of a framed picture hitting the floor.

He shot a glance at Christina, and her brown old face was a mask of dismay.

"You have invited him in!" he exclaimed incredulously. He could see the steam of his breath now, and wasps were darting back and forth around the rocking chandelier and through the streaks of glowing dust sifting down from new cracks in the ceiling plaster.

"He was my," Christina choked, "his soul was my child, before it was Lizzie's!" She was wringing her gnarled hands and blinking around at her shaking house. "I baptized him!"

"You blinded me!" came a musical voice from the hall, and then the thing stepped into the parlor.

It was tall, and made to seem taller by the silk hat on its narrow black head, but its arms were so long and slack that its white-gloved hands crouched on fingertips on the floor like crabs. Its face was covered with tarry black paint, shiny in the lamplight, and its eyes had been painted over so thickly that there was scarcely any indentation between the eyebrows and the cheekbones. "I have to paint my face to hide the baptism stains!"

The floor was moving back and forth, and bits of plaster were falling from the ceiling now.

"You promised!" shrilled Christina, rushing at the thing. "You promised - "

William caught her around the waist and pulled her back, without taking his wide eyes off the intruder.

"You promised you'd only visit when I was alone!" There was an inarticulate cry from a nearby room, and Christina screamed, "Mama, don't come in here!"

Trelawny had aimed his pistol at the creature, then raised the barrel toward the ceiling when Christina had got in the line of fire, and now he aimed it again.

"I am welcome and assured of no harm in this house," sang the blind thing, its mouth open in a wide smile that bared rows of white teeth against the coal-black lips, "and I have come to claim my proper bride." He moved into the shaking center of the room with one rapid long-legged step.

Christina saw Trelawny's pistol and shouted, "No, I gave him my word - "

But Trelawny fired, the stunning explosion of the shot momentarily compressing the air. The front of the thing's trousers exploded in a spray of what appeared to be sawdust, and the figure bent double, still lunging forward.

"Gave me her word - !" it squealed, as William threw himself against the dining-room door to keep his mother from coming into the room.

Johanna struck one of its hands aside with a convulsive slash of her knife, and a finger, still gloved, flew through the dusty air and leaping shadows, and Trelawny fired again, and then once more, and Crawford thought the windows must break out into the street before the hammering blasts.

Johanna danced back away from the thing's tumbling hat, and with her free hand she juggled a little jar out of her coat pocket and flung it hard onto the floor, and it shattered right under the bent-over creature's face; the long-limbed thing recoiled away, and a moment later Crawford smelled garlic.

Trelawny caught his eye and jerked his head urgently toward the hall; Crawford nodded and grabbed McKee by the elbow and then caught Johanna by the shoulder and shoved them both toward the hallway door. Glancing back, he saw that Trelawny had paused only to bend and pick up the ghost bottle before hurrying after him.

The street door was wide open to the night, and the hall leading to it was a mess - either because of the earthquake or because of the blind thing's blundering passage through it - with furniture overturned and pictures knocked off the walls.

"Down!" Trelawny yelled loudly, and Crawford didn't have to push his wife and daughter to the floor, but simply fell on top of them.

Something rushed over his head, swirling the cold air and leaving a smell of clay and cologne in its wake - looking up cautiously after it had passed, he saw a contained black cloud rush out across the pavement of the street and sweep up out of sight beyond the door lintel.

A tangle of coats and hats and scarves was scattered across the floor. Hastily Crawford grabbed his own things and made sure that McKee and Johanna took somebody's.

Then they were out on the dark street, hurrying away on foot down Tottenham Court Road as they hastily buttoned coats and pulled on scarves in the intensely cold wind.

Trelawny was moving more slowly than the other three, and panting. "Here," he said, thrusting the bottle at Crawford. "Get to Chichuwee - he can boil her out - that pencil-and-paper stuff, table knocking, that's - fine, if the ghost wants to talk to you." He stopped and leaned against a lamppost and bent over and gripped his knees as he blew out quick puffs of steam. "Boiling - forces 'em."

Johanna touched the old man's arm. "We'll get you into a cab," she said.

"No," snarled Trelawny weakly, "there's no time. The three of you - separate, now! Meet at dawn. All of us. At" - he glanced apprehensively into the sky before going on - "at the place where you were married." He straightened up and pushed away from the lamppost and began shuffling carefully away. "Don't die in the meantime," he added over his shoulder, "or I'll - have your ghosts for breakfast."

Two horses harnessed to an old four-wheeled clarence cab were clopping down the street in their direction, and Trelawny waved the driver toward the Crawfords.

"It's got a roof - and four walls!" the old man yelled.

"Right," snapped McKee, stepping into a patch of yellow streetlamp radiance in the cab's path and waving her arms. "We cannot be together under a night sky. In, quick."

The cab swerved to a halt, and McKee had opened the door before the old vehicle had stopped rocking on its springs, and she boosted Johanna inside and scrambled in herself and reached out a hand for Crawford.

Crawford was two steps away and hurrying forward when the thing struck.

CHAPTER THREE

Unripe harvest there hath none to reap it

From the watery, misty place;

Unripe vineyard there hath none to keep it

In unprofitable space.

- Christina Rossetti, "A Coast-Nightmare"

THE ABRUPT ROAR of it was like mountains crashing together at the end of the world, and the sheer sudden air pressure of the sound blew Crawford's hat away and drove him to his knees.

The cab slid away sideways across the shaking pavement, and the cab horses bolted, pulling the slewing cab after them in terrified acceleration down Tottenham Court Road.

Crawford rolled through the snow to the gutter, and he found himself staring straight up into the sky.

The stars were perceptibly moving outward from around a dark shape that was leaning down toward him; a number of wings or limbs radiated out from the central blackness of it, and it was rushing toward him at astronomical speed.

Instinctively he raised his arms to block it, and then he was seeing the thing over the top of the bottle that he still gripped in his hand.

The terrible roaring stopped so suddenly that Crawford almost felt weightless, and the bottle in his upraised hand was glowing now, blue and green and gold. He blinked against the dazzling light, but his view of the sky was now blocked by a broad figure in a black robe and a wide hood, facing away from him.

"I'm Clubs," said the figure in a clear, resonant voice, and Crawford dazedly realized that it was a woman - a nun, in fact.

Beyond her he saw a flickering in the sky, and the air seemed to shiver and surge.

"I belong to your family," the nun went on, "but not to you."

For a moment the air was still - and then a gust of wind whipped down the street, so strongly that it rolled Crawford over onto his face.

He hugged the bottle and scrambled to his hands and knees and scuttled across the pavement to an iron fence, and when he dimly realized that he was trying to crawl between the close-set iron bars he sat back, coughing and shivering violently, and quickly swung his gaze in every direction.

The sky was empty except for stars. More lights were on in nearby windows, but nobody had yet burst out into the street to see what the terrible noise had been, and though it should have frightened all the horses in this dozen streets, several cabs were wheeling along the street sedately enough. By the dimming glow of the bottle he still held, Crawford saw the round-faced nun standing near him in the street, and she smiled.

"Poor man," she said, and then as she sighed, he was able to see windows and walls across the street through the space where she had been.

Crawford got weakly to his feet, gasping and still shivering, for the cold wind had found his sweat-damp shirt and hair. Cabs and carriages whirred past, the horses' hooves clattering on the icy road, and the drivers were all too bundled up in hats and scarves to even glance at where Crawford stood.

The bottle had stopped glowing. He raised it against the glare of a streetlamp, and the furry little thing still bobbed inside.

He lowered the bottle and peered away through the traffic down Tottenham Court Road. The coach with his wife and daughter in it had at least apparently not capsized; and McKee knew where he would be going next.

Looking the other way, Crawford saw the high wheels of a hansom cab rolling in his direction.

He stepped out and waved, and the driver reined to the curb, but the man frowned at the sight of Crawford's disheveled clothes and bottle.

"It's not - liquor," Crawford managed to say. "Oh hell - five shillings if you'll take me to the - to the Spotted Dog in Holywell Street."