Hide Me Among the Graves

Page 52

  McKee wailed softly and pounded a fist on the floor. "And you took it, to save me!"

  Crawford knew what he had to say, but for several seconds he simply couldn't do it.

  "Go," he choked at last, "now. Take the wagon, sell what's on it, but - " To his agonized impatience, Johanna ran out of the room, but she was back in a moment with a towel, which she wrapped tightly around his neck.

  "Don't go to Newhaven," he went on hoarsely, "or Dieppe. I know about those. Go by some other route, to some other country. " His vision blurred, for tears were spilling down his cheeks. "If you ever see me again - God forbid - run. And have garlic and silver bullets ready. "

  "I invited him in!" said McKee. "Why in the name of - my damnation did I invite him in?"

  "I should have told you immediately," Crawford said. "Go, both of you - Polidori can see through me, I'm sure of it. Adelaide, I love you. Johanna, I love you. "

  Johanna was sobbing, and she threw her arms around his neck, rubbing the towel painfully against his cut, but he caught her up in a fierce hug. "Don't get weepy," he whispered.

  "You are," she choked.

  He kissed her and pushed her back, and then McKee was hugging him, not sobbing but grinding her teeth and knotting her fingers in his hair.

  "You're the best man I ever knew," she whispered, "or could ever hope to know. "

  "Likewise," was all he could think to say to her. "Go. Save our daughter. Don't look back. "

  "I - can't," said Johanna, shaking her head. "It's - too much, after everything. "

  "I love you both," Crawford said desperately. "Save the people I love, please. "

  McKee nodded and stood up and jerked Johanna to her feet. "We can do this for him," she told her daughter, and the two sets of footsteps, one dragging, receded down the hall as Crawford resolutely looked away.

  After a few minutes he heard horses being harnessed to the wagon - and faintly heard McKee say "No" sharply - and then the wagon creaked and rumbled away toward the Strand.

  His shoulders shook with nearly silent weeping as he struggled to stand up, and he looked with despair at the gleaming shards of the broken whisky decanter.

  For what might have been several minutes he just leaned against the wall, breathing and pressing the towel to the throbbing wound in his neck.

  Then motion to his left caught his eye, and he was not altogether surprised to see a chair in the previously empty street-side corner, nor to see that a man sat in it, holding out a glass.

  "Drink up," the man said.

  He was older now, appearing to be perhaps thirty, with a golden beard and broad shoulders, but Crawford recognized him.

  "Girard," he said softly. Another chair stood now near the first, and Crawford wearily shambled over to it and sat down, accepting the glass of whisky with his free hand.

  Crawford took a sip and then said, "Is it endurable?"

  His son pursed his lips and rocked his head back and forth. "More endurable than being a plain ghost in the river, I think," he said, "though that does have the advantage of not lasting long. And I'm not much of myself anymore, in any case. " He smiled, and Crawford remembered the smile. "You won't be either. "

  Crawford took a sip of the whisky and relaxed - and he wondered if he had truly relaxed in years, or ever. The wound in his throat didn't pain him now, and he let the towel fall away.

  "I'm sorry I ran away from you, by the river," he said. "All those years ago. "

  Girard nodded judicially. "It would have been better for everyone if you had not," he agreed. "But you're at peace now. "

  "Is there . . . you're my son, still, in some ways . . . is there any way out?"

  "Immediate high amputation has been known to prevent possession," said Girard, "but it's far too late for that, the seeds are all through your bloodstream by now - and in your case it would have involved cutting off your head. " He laughed softly.

  Crawford stared at him. "Your mother, and Richard - they're gone?"

  "Down dead in the river beyond our reach, and certainly dissolved out in the sea long ago. "

  "Do you - can you - miss them?"

  "No. You don't miss them either, do you?"

  Crawford realized that in fact he did not. "If I hadn't run away from you," he said, looking curiously at the glass in his hand, "I'd never have met Adelaide. Johanna would not exist. "

  "Our patron would have got another girl. He will now, if he can't find this - this Johanna. " Girard's nostrils flared as he pronounced the name.

  "You hate her," Crawford noted. The glass in his hand was more transparent than it should have been, and it occurred to him that the taste of the whisky was more a memory of whisky than an immediate sensation.

  The glass had no weight either. He opened his hand, and the glass dissolved in place, like a puff of smoke.

  "You'll soon find better drink than whisky," said the figure in the other chair. It still had the appearance of a young man, but the likeness to Crawford's son had faded in a nondescript blandness. "When a son of mine, an extension of me, squanders his love on a mayfly, I hate the mayfly, and I would kill it. But she may yet become an extension of me. " The figure smiled again, but it was no longer the smile Crawford remembered. "You can help us find her. She would be vulnerable to you - her emotions are stronger than her reason. "

  Crawford nodded. That was probably true.

  He was aware of a springy lightness in his chest, a restlessness that had begun faintly to disperse the relaxation he'd been feeling moments ago. He wanted to be outdoors, in the streets, in the dark.

  "Night is your time now," said the thing that was now simply Polidori, with the remembered dark hair and mustache and deep-set eyes. "You'll come to hate daylight. Your place by day will be among the tombs, and the regions under the tombs, but by night you will be a citizen of every place under the moon. "

  Crawford stood up, and when he looked around his chair was gone; and when he looked back, there was no chair or person in the corner.

  He found that he was walking to the hall, and then that he was opening the door and descending to the street.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  For he keeps the Lord's watch in the night against the adversary.

  For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his

  electrical skin and glaring eyes. . .

  For he can tread to all the measures upon the music.

  For he can swim for life. . .

  - Christopher Smart, "For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry"

  THE FULL MOON was visible to Crawford's left, just clearing the sawtooth rooftops and transfixed by the black spire of St. Clement's, but he walked the other way, into the shadows to Newcastle Street, and then he dodged cabs and carriages across the lamplit Strand to skirt the austere pillars and arches of Somerset House and turn left at Wellington Street, which led out onto Waterloo Bridge.

  Polidori's attention was as constant as a faint smell or a distant noise, but Crawford was already able to ignore it most of the time.

  It wasn't raining tonight, but when he had paid his ha'penny at the turnstile and walked out as far as the recessed stone seat above the third of the bridge's arches over the river, he stopped with such deliberateness that he roused himself from the acquiescent daze that had been almost pleasantly dispersing all connected thoughts.

  It seemed to him that it had been raining, here, on some night long ago. Why had he come here tonight?

  In his momentary alertness, he noted that he had come out without a coat, and his shirtsleeves were rippling in what must have been a chilling wind - but he felt nothing, warm or cold.

  There were no lamps on the bridge, and by the slanting moonlight he could clearly see the dome of St. Paul's a mile away to the east.

  He shivered as the nearly lost memory came back to him. It had been raining when he had walked out here fourteen years ago and seen Adelaide McKee for the first time
- and a thing that must have been the Polidori demon had come rushing at them out of the sky, and Crawford had thrown McKee into the river and jumped in after her.

  That had been the night on which Johanna was conceived.

  He remembered now that Johanna and McKee were gone - Don't go to Newhaven, he had told them not an hour ago, or Dieppe. I know about those. Go by some other route, to some other country. If you ever see me again - God forbid - run.

  And Polidori had said, She would be vulnerable to you - her emotions are stronger than her reason.

  Fourteen years ago he had wondered why he had walked out onto the bridge, and he had speculated that his unexamined purpose might have been to jump off the bridge - to commit suicide.

  In fact, he had wound up jumping off the bridge that night, though it had not been to kill himself.

  But now he remembered what McKee had said to Gabriel Rossetti, in Regent's Park seven years ago, about Johanna: If she does die. . . I want to see that she stays dead.

  The vampires' awareness, their power, didn't seem to work under the surface of the river. McKee had noted with approval that Crawford's instinctive reaction on the bridge that night had been to get them both into the river. At the time he had remembered his parents advising that course of action, though he couldn't remember anything about them now.

  He walked past the remembered stone seat, slowly to the middle of the bridge. There was an inset seat here too, and he stepped up onto it.

  The moon behind him was well clear of the skyline now, and the towers and chimneys of London were spread out in a vast receding mosaic of black and white on either hand, with the dark river moving wide between them.

  Polidori's attention became more palpably intrusive, and it was increasing by the moment.

  Crawford set one booted foot firmly on the broad rail, and then with the other he stepped right out beyond it, into empty air.

  Without the sensation of air rushing past him, he seemed for a couple of long seconds to be floating in the sky.

  Then he struck the surface feet first and plunged deep, and he could feel temperature again - the water was so shockingly cold that he expelled his breath in a muffled yell that blew a gout of bubbles past his face; and he had to summon up a flickering memory of Johanna and McKee to let himself keep on emptying his lungs, deliberately now, and holding his arms down at his sides.

  They live if I do this, his mind shouted at his rigidly restrained reflexes. They live if I do this!

  The silvery ripples of moonlight on the surface were quickly lost in darkness, and his ears seemed to be imploding with the pressure - the withering chill of the black water grew worse as he continued to sink, and irretrievable bubbles of air escaped from his lungs as hitching sobs - and finally his boots actually sank into mud, up to the ankles.

  Knowing that he would soon begin involuntarily to struggle back up toward the distant surface in spite of his quaking determination, he forced the last tiny volumes of air out of his throat and mouth, and let himself sink toward a sitting position. He was shivering and clenching his teeth in a mouthful of salty river water.

  In his head were ringing Trelawny's remembered words: When I really thought I was drowning, I could feel the devil claws pulling out of me, reluctantly! I was as clean as a newborn babe. . .

  And Crawford felt something like a cold worm in his mind convulse and withdraw. He was all alone now in the dark and cold at the very bottom of the world.

  By the time his spine overcame his brain and set his hands to flailing in the lightless water, his lungs were aching and heaving against his closed throat, and he had struggled only a few yards up from the bottom when his tugging lungs forced him to inhale, and then he was choking, his nose and throat full of water and his chest spasming uselessly.

  THERE WAS NO LIGHT, but he could sense his own limp body drifting below him; and it seemed to him that the river floor was like the upthrust hands of a dense crowd, as a multitude of unseen fishes and worms hungrily groped and corkscrewed up toward him, toward his disembodied identity - but his identity was diminished and no longer able to feel any anxiety. The river was the world, flickering and agitated at its finite surface but eternally unchanging in the endless volume below.

  Crawford directed his dimming consciousness downward, toward the approaching fins and tentacles.

  But a shiver of something like a remembered melody or scent buoyed his awareness - and he sensed the approach of old companions who didn't quite forget, and a graciousness that was not wholly erased by death.

  His eyes registered a dim phosphorescence, and his hands reached out - he was back in his body! - and he felt rippling fur against his palms.

  Tails and arching backs moved in his vision, and paddling paws; and then in front of him hung the face of a cat - only one eye stared into his eyes, for where the cat's other eye should have been was an empty socket.

  And he dazedly recognized the tufted cheeks and one crumpled ear - this was Raymond, one of his distressed cats who had died in his arms years ago.

  Crawford was gratefully ready to expire in the ghost company of Raymond and all the other cats he had loved. . .

  But Raymond poked his muzzle into Crawford's mouth, as he had often done when he was a kitten, and Crawford had to struggle not to push the animal away, for it felt as if the cat were sucking the remaining wisps of life out of him. But Crawford knew he was surely dying in any case, and he surrendered to his old friend.

  Shifting forms gathered under Crawford's body, pushing him upward - when he groped below him, he felt tails, and velvet paws, and muscles under fur.

  Now Raymond was exhaling, blowing lion's breath into Crawford's lungs, and inhaling, and exhaling again. The cat's breath drummed with a well-remembered purring, and Crawford could sense two paws against his chest alternately clenching and relaxing. And the backs of what must have been dozens of cats were pressing him upward through the shifting cold water.