Tim Powers - Hide Me Among the Graves

Trelawny knelt by the stove and opened the firebox door, and after dumping one small shovelful of coal onto the fire, he got to his feet with resolute ease and no grunt of effort. He retrieved the invisible pot from the kitchen table and placed it with a clank squarely on the front iron cook-lid.

He gestured toward the four wooden chairs around the table, and McKee and Johanna sat down.

“Give up the ghost,” Trelawny said with a kinked grin as he held out his hand, and Crawford fetched the bottle out of the pocket of his coat.

Trelawny held it up to the window light judiciously. “Well, you’ve got the sediment roiled up — probably a good thing. I should remember her name.”

“Maria,” said Crawford, remembering that Christina’s sister had been unfailingly kind to him when he had been so often imposing himself on the Rossettis in the spring of 1862, after McKee had disappeared; and last night her ghost had shielded him from Polidori.

The brown river water was already boiling and steaming, and Crawford remembered Chichuwee’s claim that the pot was actually up in the Alps, where the air pressure was lower. Trelawny twisted the cork out of the bottle’s neck.

“Intelligent woman, as I recall,” he said, “and dead only three months — let’s hope for the best.”

Crawford stood beside him at the stove. “Let me talk to her,” he said.

“As you please.” The old man poured several splashes of the clouded brandy into the boiling water — and the steam immediately gathered itself in to form an oval.

“Maria,” said Crawford to the steam. He glanced nervously at McKee, who nodded.

“Maria,” he said again, more loudly. The kitchen smelled now of brandy and fish.

The bubbling of the water produced a whisper: “Where is Christina? She was reading ‘The Lady of Shallot’ to me.”

“Christina is at home, and thriving,” Crawford said, wondering how true that might be. “We need to know how to banish your uncle, John Polidori.”

“We … stopped him with mirrors,” said the bubbles slowly as the face in the steam bobbed. “I learned it from the … the old Jewish books. I can’t remember their titles.”

“That was good,” said Crawford. Sweat and condensed steam beaded his face and tickled in his gray beard. “But that didn’t work forever. We need to know how to stop him forever.”

“Cut the stone out of Edward John Trelawny’s neck,” said the steam.

“Barring that,” put in Trelawny.

“I gathered you know of another way,” pursued Crawford.

“I might,” spoke the slow bubbles. “‘The mirror cracked from side to side; / “The curse is come upon me,” cried / The Lady of Shallott.’” The bubbles seemed to sigh. “It would damn souls.”

“How would it be done?” asked Johanna.

“I never would say, while I lived.”

“But you’re not living now,” said Crawford gently. “You can say, now.”

“I was in the river Purgatory for long cold days and nights. Catholics knew about that. Now I … live with Christina? An indulgence?”

“Yes,” said Crawford. “We’ll return you to her as soon as you’ve told us.”

He hadn’t anticipated being ashamed of questioning this ghost, but he found that he was. Maria had been a deeply devout Christian, and more intelligent than him, and nevertheless kind to him; and he was taking advantage of the limitations of this poor malodorous little fragment of her … which had stepped out to save him last night.

“I told you — I was in the infinite dark river, with the worms.”

“No, when you’ve told us the other way to banish your uncle.”

The steam said, “Oh — someone would have to cut Christina, so that she bled — she couldn’t do it herself. She would have to appear to be threatened. And then she would have to call for him, our uncle, as if for rescue. She would have to invite him back to herself. She would not want to do that, because she has always wanted to do that.”

The bubbles popped and the steam oval nodded.

“That — would not stop him,” put in McKee.

“No,” agreed the evanescent bubbles. “But he would come to her, in his human body — vulnerable, by daylight, not the … monster in the sky. And then there would have to be a death.”

For several seconds no more words came out of the bubbling brandy and river water, and Crawford cast a worried glance at McKee and opened his mouth, but the steam spoke again.

“I don’t want Christina to die,” it said.

“Well — no,” agreed Crawford.

“If she died there, and he were confined in the right sort of pentagram in daylight, I believe he would die too. Blood relatives, and the diabolical link. But for this, if she is to be able to keep me, and read to me—”

Again there was silence, and Crawford waited it out.

“I believe there would have to be a murder,” said the bubbles, and the emotionless monotone voice seemed grotesque now, “and Christina could catch the new ghost and use its agitated mental strength to double her own — and, still linked with our uncle by blood relation and her will, she could then stop our uncle, hold him in his human form. Forcibly. For a little while. He wouldn’t be able to fly away, as long as she was able to keep imposing his human form on him. He could still run — but I think he could be killed then, and stopped forever with silver and wood and cremation.”

Crawford was feeling nauseated, and he realized that it was a reaction to having made this frail phantom violate Maria’s principles by divulging this. But he remembered something McKee had said fourteen years ago: People who have let themselves be bitten by these devils can sometimes catch a very fresh ghost, ingest it, and it supposedly gives them extra psychic strength — lets them control the people around them for a minute or so.

“If it didn’t work,” said Johanna nervously, “we would — everybody present would be in big trouble.” She blinked. “Even if it did work.”

“‘Who is this?’” whispered the steam, and before anyone could answer, it went on, clearly quoting again, “‘and what is here? / And in the lighted palace near, / Died the sound of royal cheer; / And they crossed themselves for fear…’”

The steam oval dissolved in the air, and at the same moment Trelawny fumbled the bottle and got a fresh grip on it, as if it had moved in his hand. Crawford took it from him and shoved the cork back in the neck and set it on the table.

“We’ll return that to Christina,” he said.

“Yes,” McKee agreed weakly.

Crawford and Trelawny sat down at the table, both of them staring at the bottle.

After a while, “How can we … kill a person, to do this?” asked Johanna. “Plain murder.”

“I could do it,” said McKee in an unsteady voice. “If it was a stranger, and — and if I was drunk again.”

Crawford said quickly, “No, you couldn’t, Adelaide.”

Trelawny smiled at her, his eyes half closed. “I named you Rahab, not Jael.”

Crawford recalled that Jael had been the woman who, in the Book of Judges, had saved Israel by pounding a tent stake through the head of a Canaanite general.

“I could — to save Johanna,” McKee insisted. Her face was pale.

“And my granddaughter.” Trelawny sat back and looked around at the cupboards and the boiler and the racked knives as if he couldn’t recall how he had got here.

Johanna touched her mother’s hand. “I’ll do it. It won’t,” she added, staring at the bottle, “be the first time I’ve killed a person.”

“Is it not a couple of wild Bacchantes!” said Trelawny, smiling crookedly. “Ready to tear the head off a stranger! But no, children — I’m — eighty-four years old, as of last November.”