Tim Powers - Hide Me Among the Graves

Crawford resumed climbing downward, and soon his reaching foot found no lower rung, so he lowered himself joltingly by his hands alone to the bottom-most rung, swung for a moment, and then dropped.

He fell about ten feet into damp sand and managed not to fall over or bang his chin on his knee, and he patted his pocket and was reassured to feel that the bottle was still there. When he straightened up, he could see the faint round-topped vertical glows of at least four arched doorways around him — he had forgotten that there were more than one, and he didn’t have an ave to guide him.

He paced from one arch to another in the near-total gloom, listening carefully for the chirping of birds. At one arch he heard a distant susurrus like rushing water, and at another the remote windy groaning, and so he brushed his hair back from his face with both hands, took a deep breath, and ducked into one of the silent tunnels.

It curved to the left, which was familiar, but soon, instead of the broad glow of Chichuwee’s chamber, he saw a dot of yellow light ahead. It seemed some yards away at first, but quickly dropped in apparent height as he approached it, and when it disappeared in the moment before his groping hands brushed a wall of upright planks — and then his fingers felt down the length of it to a pitted doorknob — he realized that the tiny glow was a keyhole.

He crouched to peer through it and saw, perhaps twenty feet beyond the door, a lamplit row of high desks at which visored young clerks wrote with pens in big ledger books.

Crawford sat back on his heels, frowning. Could this be the deepest sub-basement of some enormous bank? He straightened up and tried to twist the doorknob, but it didn’t move at all.

Crouching again, he put his mouth to the keyhole and called, “Hello! I wonder if any of you could direct me?”

Quickly he put his eye to the keyhole again, and he had to blink — this time the lamplight was much dimmer, and the clerks were bent with age, their beards long and white.

“Still here?” called one of them wearily. “On your way and face your sins, phantom, we can erase no names.”

Crawford recoiled and sat down on the sandy tunnel floor, nearly losing the bottle, then got to his feet and hurried away, back to the central chamber below the well, and he made his way down another of the tunnels.

This one did not bend, but he didn’t remember whether Chichuwee’s did right away or not, so he followed it for a few yards before concluding that it wasn’t the right one either; but ahead of him now he could see a faint vertical streak of emerald light that widened and narrowed, as if it were a gap between a curtain and a wall, and he stole forward to peek at what might lie beyond.

But as he hesitantly touched the curtain, a woman’s voice said, faintly, “Oh, help me, please, brother!”

He froze, and a moment later shook his head and started to turn around, and then was appalled to realize that he could not in good conscience walk away from it; and so he braced himself and pushed the curtain aside.

The room beyond was wide and lit from some undetectable source in flickering green, as if it were under sunlit water. The floor was polished stone. Immediately in front of Crawford stood a glass table with a handful of black gravel and sand on it, and against the far wall was a long couch flanked by two chairs, with shelves above it.

At first he couldn’t see the woman who had spoken. He took two steps forward. “Er … hello?” he said.

Then she spoke, and he saw that she was reclining on the couch amid a tumble of cushions. Her face, turned toward him, was narrow and youthful.

“Save me,” she said, “please.”

“How?” asked Crawford nervously. “From what?”

Then he jumped, for something had moved on one of the high shelves. He peered at it, and his stomach went cold when he realized that the object was a severed hand, pointing.

It was pointing at the table.

“Bless my broken body with some of your living blood,” said the face on the couch.

Crawford’s face was tingling, and he spread his hands and took a long, careful step backward, not looking at her.

Quickly she added, “You are Polidori’s son; that’s why he wants you. In the summer of 1822, in Italy, your mother, Josephine, belonged to him. Come to me, give me yourself.”

He looked at her now — and he saw that there was no body reclining there, just the speaking head. Her eyes were enormous and glittered in the green glow.

With a choked shout, he spun toward the curtain, but a slim severed arm lay in the way now, and it immediately began a furious convulsing like an energetic fish hauled up onto a dock; the knocking of the elbow and the slapping of the hand against the floor were as rapid as a fast drumbeat.

He stepped back in horror, and, as other pieces of a woman’s body stirred to life in various parts of the room, the head on the couch said, “My insect fingers permitted me to show you my one-time power. You would have seen more, been stung many more times, if you had not spoken to the Roman gods. I can save you and all you love. Only give me your blood.”

Crawford had leaped to the side while she was speaking, the bottle swinging wildly in his coat, but the arm flipped over in that direction, blocking him. The fingers on the jumping hand were spasmodically curling and snapping out straight.

“Your blood already remembers the way,” the woman said, speaking more loudly to be heard over the drumming of the arm. “My sweet Swinburne is lost to me, and I hold all the verses he would write — he writes only dead lines now under his unkindly master. Heal me, join my family, kill my enemies.”

Crawford hesitated, trying to place himself for a jump over the flailing arm, when she added, “You know the way back.”

The way back—

And, as he sometimes did very late on sleepless nights in one French city or another, Crawford remembered how he had felt after McKee’s common-law husband had bitten him seven years ago: light and restless, eager to be striding quickly down dark streets. He had had no responsibilities or worries, hardly even any thoughts.

No home waited for him now, up there on the surface. His wife and child were lost.

His relaxing hand brushed the bottle in his pocket, but it was the lively face of Johanna that sprang into his head. And he remembered her clapping her hands when McKee agreed to marry him seven years ago and saying happily, Oh, well done, you two! And on the day they married, she had said, I’ll kill myself before I’ll let him have me again.

He gripped the bottle and told himself, No — you can’t relax yet.

He said, clearly, “No,” and vaulted straight over the flexing arm into the curtain.

He ducked, hoping the fabric would slow his fall, but the green glow winked out while he was in midair and he landed hard on the sandy floor of the tunnel, clanking the bottle alarmingly.

He scrambled to his feet, wincing at new pains in his shoulder and hip, and looked fearfully behind him — but he could see nothing in the darkness, and there was no sound except for his fast breath echoing away in a void, and there was no curtain underfoot.

The creature was lying, he told himself. I am not a vampire’s son. My parents told me that they had wondered about that themselves, and concluded that it was not so.

And even if I am — I will save Johanna from him.

He felt the bottle and exhaled in relief to find that it was not broken.

He limped back to the central chamber and blindly stumbled into the next tunnel; its low ceiling was familiar, as was the deeper sand underfoot, and it curved perceptibly to the left. As he trudged along through the unseen damp sand, the curve became more pronounced.