Tim Powers - Hide Me Among the Graves

Then the old man had toppled backward onto the deck, and Crawford was crawling toward him, still not able to breathe.

Trelawny was breathing, though, in great gasps, and each time he exhaled, the air in the cabin rippled like heat waves over noonday pavement.

Several wasps pattered dead to the deck by Crawford’s sliding hands.

The upright figure that was Polidori was flickering in and out of visibility, and his great voice was audible only in chopped fragments: “— Trelawny — him up! — stone must not — bridge —”

Crawford glanced to the side and saw that the spidery figure of the dead boy was appearing and disappearing too — he saw Johanna drive her knife into the thing’s forehead in a moment when it was present, and when it reappeared again two seconds later, it was hunching backward away from her with dust shaking out of a hole above its gaping left eye.

McKee was kneeling on Rose, holding her wrists.

Crawford had reached Trelawny, who rolled his eyes up at him.

“Get it all the way out,” the old man whispered through bloodstained teeth, and his opened throat hissed with his words. “His protection — you see — didn’t protect me — from himself.”

Fresh blood was puddling under Trelawny’s ear and shoulder and soaking into his tumbled white hair, but it wasn’t spurting as if from a major vessel, and Crawford peered at the wound. The gash in the old man’s throat had exposed part of the trachea — air was blowing a narrow bloody spray out of a cut in it as he breathed — and a walnut-sized cyst hung between the thyroid cartilage and the jugular vein. The cyst was partly cut free, flapping back and forth with each breath.

“Johanna!” Crawford managed to gasp, and when his daughter looked up he beckoned.

She scrambled up on the other side of Trelawny, and her eyebrows went up nearly to the sweat-spiky fringe of her hair when she saw the cut.

“Give me your knife, quick.”

He forced out of his mind the otherwise disabling comprehension that this was a man, not an injured horse.

The intermittent figure of Polidori was flashing closer, and before its flickering, groping hands could reach him, he took Johanna’s knife and held his breath — and with the point he carefully cut along the narrow strip of scar tissue between the pulsing jugular vein and the cyst.

The cyst was lying bloodily across his fingers now, and he traced the knifepoint around the far side of it, freeing it from the thyroid cartilage.

The thing fell into his palm, and he could feel the heavy, nearly round stone inside it.

Polidori collapsed in a thumping swirl of dust that did not flicker away. The dead boy squeaked shrilly and then was just a puff of smoke, slowly dissipating as it drifted under the ceiling toward the stale-air vent.

“Not even anything to cremate,” said Johanna in an awed voice.

Crawford pushed the knifepoint into the cyst, and the steel grated against the fired clay.

AND THROUGH THE KNIFE’S tang in his palm, Crawford was drawn into a vision of the woman in fragments in the green-lit chamber, and he saw the separate hands and arm and wide-eyed face collapse as siftings and spillings of black sand, and the green light faded to darkness, and for a moment he saw bare trees shaking in a gust on the distant Cotswold Hills;

He glimpsed the thing that had been Polidori too, moving like a mountain through the sky, retreating east to the snowy airless heights where nothing organic could live;

And in a house in Holmwood forty miles west of London, Algernon Swinburne dropped his glass of brandy and staggered to the window, but when he had fumbled it open and thrust his head out into the cold wind, the fresh air couldn’t provide the sustenance he was now deprived of;

In Chelsea, Gabriel Rossetti stepped back from his dark, cramped painting of Astarte Syricaca and blinked around bewilderedly at the partitions that blocked his view of the garden, and then he sat down and was sobbing because he couldn’t remember why he had ever nailed them up;

William Rossetti looked up from his desk and stared through his office window at the gray walls of King’s College, and, for just one fleeting moment before returning his attention to the petition at hand, he tried in vain to recall any of the verses he had once been shown, verses that he might have written;

In Christina’s bedroom in the house in Torrington Place, the bottle on the bedroom shelf vibrated faintly, and the furry sea mouse slowly sank to the sediment at the bottom;

And across the bridges and rooftops and steeples of London, all the songbirds burst into wild chirping and trilling.

WHEN THE VISIONS ABATED, no time seemed to have elapsed; Crawford was still holding the knifepoint pressed against the stone.

He shook his head and handed the knife back to Johanna, then pulled his handkerchief out of his pocket, folded it, and gently laid it across the hissing gash in the old man’s throat.

“Pressure,” he told Trelawny, whose hand wobbled up to hold the handkerchief in place. “Not too much.”

“Let — me up,” whispered Trelawny. His face was pale under his tan and slicked with sweat.

“No! Your larynx would probably fall out on your chest.” Crawford looked across at McKee, who had wrestled Rose into a sitting position on the deck. The girl was panting and grinding her teeth.

“She’ll be pretty wild for a while yet,” commented Johanna. “As I recall.”

Christina Rossetti was gripping her cut hand. “I think she’d benefit from staying at the Magdalen Penitentiary,” she said.

“It saved me,” agreed McKee.

Rose made a sullen suggestion about what Christina might benefit from.

Christina sighed and looked down at Trelawny. “Someone should tell her parents, soon, that she’s well.”

“I’ll do it myself,” croaked the old man on the floor, but Crawford frowned and shook his head.

“I’ll send Johanna for medical supplies, and I’ll clean out the wound and sew you up. But you’re going to be living right here for a few weeks, if you live at all. And I mean right here, on the deck — I don’t think even a pillow would be a good idea for a few days. Swallowing is likely to be difficult — can your Larks cook soup?”

“My Larks,” gasped Trelawny, “are going to be busy tonight disposing of a body.”

“I can cook soup,” said Johanna. “I can stay here with him.” She looked down at the old man. “Who’s sleeping in the sleigh these days?”

“I’ll turn ’em out,” whispered Trelawny. “It was always yours.”

Crawford got to his feet, wincing at the pains in his knees and hip. He dug some coins out of his pocket and handed them to Johanna. “Alcohol,” he said. “Carbolic acid. There’s a stove here? Good. Water. A sewing kit. Thread. Bandages.” He glanced down at his scowling, sweating patient; the handkerchief Trelawny was pressing to his throat was already completely blotted and gleaming with blood, and the red puddle on the deck seemed wider. “I’d advise a Bible too, and a priest,” Crawford added uneasily.

Christina nodded. “A Catholic priest, I think, when it’s something important.” Then she bit her lip and looked down. “I’ll even — say a rosary.”

“Don’t talk more foolishness — than you need to, Diamonds,” whispered Trelawny. “This is just the … last stage of the assault I survived fifty years ago. I’ll go on surviving it.”

“No priest?” said Christina. Her eyes were anxious.

“No priest,” echoed Trelawny in a hoarsening whisper. “I married my Zela and loved her without a priest’s consent, and when I do die, it will be without one.”

Christina gave him a wan smile and then looked at the scattered dust on the deck by Abbas’s corpse. She sighed, and said, perhaps to herself, “I only loved one man, and it was my misfortune that he died nine years before I was born.”