Tim Powers - Hide Me Among the Graves

Crawford noticed the hilts of two slim rapiers standing in an elephant-foot umbrella stand by the ladder, and he snatched one of them up and held the hilt of the other out toward McKee. She took it with a quick nod.

“Shut up, Abbas,” said Trelawny tightly, striking a match to a lantern bolted to the wall by the ladder. “I’ll — explain.”

Crawford reached up to take off his ludicrous beaver hat, but he saw Trelawny draw a pistol from under his coat — and he realized that this man Abbas was the person the old man intended to kill, to fulfill the conditions Maria’s ghost had described.

Thumping and sliding sounded from the deck overhead, and then someone was pounding at the hatch and a girl’s voice was screaming words Crawford couldn’t catch.

“That’s Rose!” whispered Johanna. “I know her voice!”

Trelawny took an uncertain step toward the ladder. “She follows that thing,” he said; then he shook his head and spat out an obscene monosyllable and turned toward the others, raising the pistol. “Abbas,” he said.

Crawford leaped at him, striking the pistol aside with his free left hand and aiming a punch at Trelawny’s chest with the sword’s basket hilt; but Trelawny tried to block the blow, and the hilt was deflected upward and rebounded at the old man’s face.

The flare and hard bang of the pistol shot flung Trelawny and Crawford apart; Crawford slammed against the port bulkhead, and Trelawny tumbled limp to the starboard-side deck.

Above and behind Crawford the hatch cracked and blew in splinters down the ladder, and a moment later a cloud of wasps swept buzzing and looping into the cabin, followed by two huge gray hands and a gleaming black head that bobbed in the air. One of the hands was missing a finger.

“Where where where?” sang the thing, twisting the eyeless face back and forth on its snakelike neck and sniffing loudly.

The bullet from Trelawny’s deflected gunshot had apparently still whistled very closely past Abbas’s head, and now the man had drawn a revolver of his own.

“Call me here to kill me?” he screamed, and, still screaming but without words now, he rushed forward and began firing indiscriminately as wasps fastened on his face and hands.

The noise of the shots was stunning in the close cabin, and Crawford’s eyes were dazzled by the fast muzzle flashes. But through the smoke and wasps he saw Johanna step into the man’s path, crouching, her knife held low for an upward thrust; Abbas saw her too, and he swung the barrel of his revolver toward her.

Crawford lunged forward, spun her aside with his left hand, and with his right he drove the rapier blade into the man’s belly.

He was face-to-face with Abbas now and their eyes met, both squinting with nearly impersonal exertion; Abbas tilted the gun barrel up, and Crawford caught the wrist with his left hand, then shuffled forward to drive the blade farther in. Liver, he thought crazily, peritoneum, superior mesenteric artery, spinal column.

The gun fired into the ceiling, and Abbas folded, his knees knocking on the deck.

Crawford had to brace his boot against Abbas’s chest to tug the blade free; he spun to face the others, and immediately he slashed at one of the snakelike gray hands that was groping toward Johanna. It contracted back, and the shiny black head twisted toward him. Suddenly wasps were clinging to Crawford’s face, and points of sharp pain flared in his cheek and forehead.

“I take my bride, oh yes, sir!” sang the wide mouth in the coal-black face.

McKee chopped with her own sword at the long gray neck, and the head whipped around toward her. A girl’s voice was screaming back by the hatch.

Christina Rossetti pushed past Crawford toward the ladder, and as he slapped at the stinging insects on his face, he glimpsed a young girl standing at the base of the ladder, backlit in the gray daylight slanting down the hatch.

Crawford’s sword blocked Christina’s path, and he twisted the blade so that she hit the edge with her hand. She gasped and paused, looking down at the blood that was already dripping from her fingers.

Crawford caught her shoulder and turned her around to face him. There were no wasps on her.

“I cut you!” he shouted. “Summon him now!” He pulled her back across the deck with him to Abbas’s sprawled body, and he crouched to lift the man’s limp hand and then wrap Christina’s bloody fingers around it.

“Catch this man’s ghost, catch his strength, and call Polidori!”

With her free hand she brushed at the wasps that still clung to his face, and tears were running down her cheeks, but she nodded. For a moment she squeezed the dead man’s hand, and then she let it fall and took a deep breath.

The girl, Rose, was rushing across the deck now at Johanna, who raised her knife.

“Uncle John!” Christina called softly.

And the air seemed to twang.

There was another man standing in the bow end of the cabin now, beyond Abbas’s body, and Crawford recognized the curly dark hair, and the mustache, and the deep alien eyes; McKee knew him too, and sprang at Polidori, driving her sword toward his chest—

But the blade flexed as it met a barrier a few inches away from Polidori’s white shirt, and the torqued blade was twisted out of McKee’s hand.

It clattered to the deck as McKee retreated a step, and Polidori stepped back and stood up straight — then paused, flexing his white-gloved hands in front of his face.

He looked at Christina. “Let go of me,” he said in a voice like rocks shifting at the bottom of a well.

“Hold him!” said Crawford. He glanced anxiously back at Johanna — she had wrestled the thrashing Rose to the deck and was fending off the gray hands and the black face with kicks and swipes of her knife.

“I will!” wailed Christina. Her fists were clenched and her eyes were shut.

“Et tu, Brute?” said Polidori to her, and then his human body crouched and picked up McKee’s dropped sword.

With no more now than a desperate hope to distract him, Crawford sprang forward in a lunge, and Polidori straightened and parried the thrust away.

“My son!” he said in his rumbling voice.

Thumps and curses and musical hooting from behind Crawford let him know that McKee had joined Johanna’s fight.

“I’m not,” panted Crawford. “I’m Michael Crawford’s son.” And he lunged again, this time disengaging his blade around Polidori’s parry.

But Polidori easily countered and parried it again and drove his left fist hard into Crawford’s chest.

The force of the blow punched the air out of Crawford’s lungs and flung him backward across the cabin; he hit the deck and slid on his back until his head collided with the aft bulkhead.

Colors spun in his vision, but he dimly saw Trelawny snatch up his hat, and then the old man had rolled him over and yanked the Inverness cape off his shoulders.

Struggling to pull air into his stunned lungs, Crawford managed to get to his hands and knees. And he saw Trelawny, wearing the beaver hat and the cape now, snatch up Crawford’s sword and advance quickly on Polidori.

The light from the porthole and the lantern were at Trelawny’s back — Polidori would see only Trelawny’s backlit silhouette in the hat and cape and must suppose it was Crawford.

“I threw you aside,” said Polidori, crouching again into an en garde, “to live, if you cared to.”

Crawford saw Trelawny lunge.

Polidori parried the thrust and riposted with a lunge of his own—

— and Trelawny caught the vampire’s darting blade on his, but instead of parrying it away, he simply nudged it upward and canted his head to the side.

And Trelawny’s head jerked as the vampire’s blade tip snagged his throat.