Hide Me Among the Graves

Page 53

 

  When Crawford could see the moonlit ripples on the river surface above him, Raymond drew back and stared into his eyes for a long moment, and the one eye shone with unforgotten companionship and play, and then he and all the ghost cats swirled away below.

  Crawford found that he was holding his breath, and he kicked and spread his arms out and down. Luckily he seemed to have lost one of his boots in the mud of the river bottom, for the remaining one was a heavy anchor on his foot; but he gave a last powerful kick and then his face was above the water, in the cold air, and he was treading water and coughing violently.

  Within a minute he was able to inhale more air than he coughed out, and he held his breath and ducked his head under the surface, and unbuckled his remaining boot and let it sink away.

  Raising his head, he found that his breath was still hitching and uneven - and he realized that he was weeping for the loss of gallant Raymond and all the other beloved small identities who had remembered him even after death, and saved him. Ancient Egyptians had believed that a cat's lives numbered nine - a trinity of trinities - and perhaps each of the cats who had loved him had saved one of theirs for him, saved its last breath.

  He spread one hand flat on the surging dark water in a frail gesture of thanks and good-bye.

  Finally, after one last racking series of coughs that dizzied him, he took a deep breath and shook his head to clear it and looked around him.

  He couldn't see either shore, but he could see the descending north arches of the moonlit bridge. He forced himself to begin swimming as strongly as he could toward the north shore.

  The mind-flattening attention of Polidori was gone, and he was desperate to find McKee and Johanna.

  He could feel the weight of a handful of silver coins in his trouser pocket, but he didn't dig them out and let them sink - he would probably need it all to convince a cab driver to take a soaking wet passenger anywhere.

  And there was only one destination he could think of.

  CHRISTINA HAD BEEN HELPED to Gabriel's bedroom, and after changing out of her muddy clothes into one of Gabriel's voluminous nightshirts and downing a glass of brandy, she had fallen into a fitful sleep, and Gabriel and William had gone off to the studio.

  When she awoke with a start an hour later, she hadn't known where she was - moonlight slanted in through the one tiny uncurtained window, and she had just been able to make out the crucifix on the far wall.

  Did I fall asleep, she had wondered at first, in my room at the Magdalen Penitentiary? Not in such a grand bed. . .

  Then with a sinking heart she had remembered where she was - and what she had learned at the seance - and she got out of bed and, barefoot, hurried downstairs to the dark kitchen. The stairs were carpeted, and the flagstones of the kitchen were warmed by the stove; and though the wind boomed outside the window overlooking the back garden, she was not at all chilly in the nightshirt over her chemise.

  Without striking a match to the gas jet, she dipped a teacup full of water from a basin by the sink, and she found a saltcellar and salted the water heavily; and then she pulled down one of Gabriel's many hanging braids of garlic and crushed a dozen cloves of it with the flat of a knife and scraped up the pulp with a silver serving spoon.

  She sat down at the cook's table in the darkness and gripped the spoon and the cup. She took a deep breath; the crushed garlic overpowered the usual smells of grease and coffee.

  Finally she whispered, "Are you here?"

  She waited several seconds - and then the table shook once under her elbows. One knock: yes.

  "Is this - am I speaking to - the child I miscarried?"

  Again the table jumped once.

  Her voice was thick: "Come to me, child. "

  Abruptly the walls and ceiling and even the chair she was sitting on disappeared, and she sat down heavily in loose sand. A cold night wind instantly blew all the warm kitchen air out of the folds of her clothing.

  She huddled in the sand, shivering and nearly whimpering but somehow still clutching the spoon and the cup; and after a few snatched breaths of the rushing air, she got her legs under herself and stood up, gripping the sand with her bare toes as she staggered in the leaching wind. Moonlit dunes stretched away under a sky more full of stars than any she'd ever seen, and there was not any compensating spark of light in the landscape.

  "Mother," came a creaking voice from behind her.

  She turned and then flinched at the sight of a towering black colossus starkly silhouetted by the star fields it eclipsed. It must have stood a good hundred yards away, but it dominated the view like a medieval cathedral. With its remote high shoulders and lowered head it might have been a primordial idol of a great bird, or a wolf, or a dragon; and Christina took a step backward in the sand, viscerally sure for a moment that the mountainous thing was tipping toward her.

  But it stood motionless; and closer, much closer, only a dozen yards from her across the sand, was a figure she recognized.

  The skeletal dead boy was naked now, and in the moonlight she could see several rents and holes in its taut hide.

  "You," it said, "you and my bride, disappeared today, in the City. You came back into view, but she did not. Has not yet. "

  "William!" Christina screamed. "Gabriel! I'm in the kitchen, help me!"

  But as soon as her words were flung away by the freezing wind across the limitless desert, she knew that she was somewhere fundamentally removed from Gabriel's kitchen, or Chelsea, or even the terrestrial world.

  "Jesus help me," she moaned, hunching her shoulders against the cold.

  "He knows nothing of this place," said the dead boy.

  Christina bared her teeth as her hair flew wildly around her face. "Then let's bring Him here," she cried. The wind was at her back, and she flung the cupful of salted water straight at the boy's face.

  The bony gray figure twisted away, making a sound like a bedsheet ripped in two.

  "I baptize thee in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost," she shouted after it. "God help you, child!"

  Then she looked up - and her knees gave way and she sat down and began frantically pushing herself backward through the mounding sand, for, with a cavernous rumble that rolled away across the sterile land, the colossus moved, and she knew who it was.

  A black head like a castle lifted against the moon, and storm cloud wings churned the wind as they unfolded and hid the horizon.

  Christina had intended to throw the spoonful of garlic at Polidori, but it was ludicrously inadequate against this, the antediluvian thing that had for a mere billion human heartbeats worn her uncle's animate ghost.

  She scooped up the crushed garlic and rubbed it over her face and throat, then sucked the spoon clean.

  The night recoiled from her.

  Into her head sprang a projected image of the water colliding with the face of the dead boy, and the boy shaking it off with impunity and staring back at her.

  But that desperately advanced image blinked away. In actual fact, the skeletal gray figure was now convulsing in the sand; at one point its skull-like face was turned up toward the moon, and Christina saw black stains mottling the cheeks and covering the eyes.

  She shivered and almost lost consciousness then as a wave of wordless rage scorched across the field of her thoughts and perceptions.

  A black ripple like a blowing curtain to her left caught the fragments of her attention, and when she had somewhat mustered her thoughts again, she was able to recognize a sort of caricature of her uncle, its arms waving helplessly in the turbulent wind.

  "Tell speak at the boy it no effect!" squawked the fluttering, nearly faceless figure. "Say him water only!"

  "It is just water," screamed Christina. "It's baptism! I've saved his soul!"

  The sketchy Polidori caricature wailed, "No soul!" and blew into scattering shreds -

  And Christin
a slammed her hands against the kitchen table and slapped her feet against the tinglingly warm flagstones.

  She was panting in the humid air of Gabriel's kitchen, clutching the edges of the table now as if to force it to stay, and her eyes darted around to gratefully take in the stove and the window and the hallway arch. The spoon and the cup were nowhere to be seen.

  For nearly a minute she simply concentrated on breathing in and out, though the smell and taste of garlic was overpowering.

  But that's right of course, she thought at last - a dead child has no soul in it to save. Still, the baptism clearly had some effect on his ghost. And it was all I could do.

  She could still feel Polidori's rage in her head, muted down to the usual pressure of his attention, and it carried now a flavor of wrathful promise - dead children, disease, despair.

  MCKEE HAD ROUSED FATHER Cyprian from his room by pounding on the rectory door, and eventually he had opened an upstairs window; and after she and Johanna had conveyed something of the urgency of their situation, he had come downstairs with a candle and unlocked the church and led them inside. There was only one window, high on the wall above the altar, and the moonlight through the stained glass shone with various brightnesses of gray. The pews below were in darkness except for the priest's bobbing candle and the candle in a red glass chimney burning beside the altar. The two banks of tiny votive candles that had been lit during the day had long since burned out.

  McKee and Johanna sat down in the front pew, and the priest stood between it and the communion rail.

  "Annulled?" he said finally. "Why? I don't think you've been married twelve hours yet. "

  "Because," said McKee in a tightly controlled voice, "my husband has - unmerciful God! - had the misfortune to fall prey - to the devils we mentioned yesterday. " She inhaled and went on speaking. "My daughter - our daughter, and I, have to hide from him now, and I'm afraid the sacramental bond of marriage might be a thread he and his new master could follow. "

  Wind sighed against the stained-glass window, and the doors through which they'd entered, facing Bozier's Court, rattled on their hinges, making both McKee and Johanna jump.

  The priest glanced toward the rear of the church and then looked again at McKee.

  "The marriage has not been consummated?" he asked, and McKee turned her face away from the candle's dim amber glow.

  "No," she said. "We've - been busy. "

  "An annulment would take time. "

  "We don't have time," said McKee, her voice cracking. "We've wasted more than an hour selling things in the New Cut Market, and we need to be on a boat bound somewhere tomorrow morning. "

  "I'm sorry, Adelaide - I could destroy the record and you could destroy the certificate, but - "

  "That would only erase it in legal terms," said McKee, nodding hopelessly.

  "An annulment," said Father Cyprian, "even a simple and uncontested one on the basis of non-consummation, would still have to come through the bishop. " He spread his hands. "But it may be that the - the spiritual bond between you and him has not yet been forged. "

  "It's forged," said Johanna. "I'm the forgery. " She sniffed. "The marriage was consummated - in advance, thirteen or fourteen years ago. "

  "That may be true," McKee whispered; and in the same moment, from the darkness at the back of the church, came Crawford's voice: "That's true. "

  McKee uttered a short scream and whirled around in the pew, her hand darting under her coat; Johanna scrambled to stand on the pew, facing backward; and the priest raised his voice:

  "You have no power here. "

  "I have no p-power anywhere," said Crawford hoarsely, shambling forward. "Adelaide, Johanna - I've escaped him, the way Trelawny did in America, by drowning myself. Throw - " He was interrupted by a fit of harsh coughing, and his hands slapped one of the middle pew backs. "Throw garlic at me. Or roll your j-jar down here and I'll eat it. " He gave a shaky laugh. "Wait till dawn and I'll - dance naked in direct sunlight. "

  Johanna took the candle from the priest and began walking down the aisle toward Crawford.

  McKee shouted, "Johanna, don't!" She drew her knife and ran after her, but Johanna began running too, and the candle went out; and when McKee caught up with her daughter, the girl was already in Crawford's arms.

  "Don't stab him!" yelled Johanna. "He's right! I'd know!"

  "Get away from him," said McKee through clenched teeth.

  "No! I say he's clean, and I was a Lark!"

  "Was. " Holding her knife half extended for a stab, McKee reached out tensely with her free hand to pull Johanna out of the way; and she touched Crawford's sleeve. Then she let her fingers tap across his waistcoat.

  "You're soaked," she said. "And shivering. "

  "I j-jumped into the river," he said. "Again. This time I went all the way to the bottom, and - and I very nearly died, but - ghosts found me and revived me. "

  "Ghosts did?" said McKee. "What ghosts?"

  Crawford exhaled, and McKee got the impression that it was so that his voice wouldn't crack when he spoke. "Old friends," he said. "I - I look forward to seeing them again, when my time comes. "

  McKee didn't move for several seconds, then swore and tucked her knife back into its sheath.

  "Father," she said, turning back toward the dimly visible altar, "never mind the annulment, but could we buy some dry clothes from you?"

  THE DOVER-TO-DUNKIRK STEAMSHIP WAS a 180-foot side-wheeler, and though its funnel was puffing black smoke into the blue morning sky and the pistons drummed under the deck, two sails on its foremast appeared to be doing most of the work. Beyond the white sails, the remote blue sky met the sea in every direction.