Tim Powers - Hide Me Among the Graves

He got to his feet and walked down the hall to his studio, stepping around stacks of books along the way. When he had married Lizzie almost two years ago — after so long an engagement that everyone, including her, had assumed he didn’t mean to go through with it — he had got the landlord to cut a door through to the next house in the row, connecting Gabriel’s old bachelor rooms on the first floor of Number 13 Chatham Place to the corresponding floor of Number 14. He had moved his bed — the bed he had been born in — to the newly acquired bedroom where Lizzie now sat, but he hadn’t shifted his studio.

Stepping now into the wide, high-ceilinged room, he let his eyes play over the canvases leaning in stacks and the sketches tacked to the walls.

He owed three paintings to the estate of a deceased patron — three paintings or the return of the 714 pounds the patron had advanced to him — but all he had been doing was portraits of Lizzie. It was Lizzie’s sad face in every picture, looking in every direction but straight at the viewer.

How could she still be in love with a man who was dead, and who furthermore could no longer frame a coherent sentence? But Deverell was fixed forever in her memory as he had been in 1854, young and almost ridiculously handsome — while Gabriel’s hair, though still curly and black, had begun to recede, and he wasn’t as slim as he had been in 1854, and he believed his trim goatee gave him dignity, but his youthful Byronic looks were gone.

He inhaled the smells of linseed oil and turpentine and crossed the bare wood floor to the window wall, where he stared out at a string of barges moving downstream, and a low-in-the-water sloop with filled sails moving slowly the opposite way, and the smokestacks of the iron foundry on the river’s south shore. At least, he thought with a wry smile, I have the advantage of being alive.

But if she had married Deverell, came a sudden and unwelcome thought, while she was still a virgin, Deverell would still be alive, and she wouldn’t be dying.

The doorbell in the hall clanged then, and he was grateful for the interruption as he hurried to the stairs; already he could hear Christina’s voice below, and he pulled out his handkerchief and wiped the sweat from his forehead.

Now both of his sisters were clumping up the stairs, stout Maria in the rear — and he frowned in irritation and mild alarm to see that they were somehow both dressed as nuns.

“Sisters!” he called down in greeting — adding, with somewhat forced cheer, “Have you come to save our souls?”

“Not primarily yours,” said Christina.

In the shadows of the stairwell she was backlit from below, and not for the first time he noted the planes of her narrow face, framed by the dark hair parted in the middle and swept back. He had twice used her as a model for the Virgin Mary, and her present expression made him wish he could stop her right now and sketch her for a painting of Mary ascending to the upper room in Jerusalem to meet with the apostles after the Crucifixion.

“Where is Lizzie?” asked Christina quietly when she had stepped up beside him.

“In the bedroom,” said Gabriel, “sleeping at last, I hope — she had a fit at dawn, then threw a dozen of my drawings into the river. We can talk in the studio without … disturbing her.”

Maria had made it to the top of the stairs, puffing, and now sidled around the couch to pick up the sheet Gabriel had tossed down.

“Automatic writing?” she asked.

“Ah — she does it with a sort of sliding pencil device—”

“Bring it along,” said Christina, starting down the hall.

GABRIEL CLEARED BOXES AND brushes off a couple of stools for his sisters, but he remained standing, hoping the light from the glass window-wall at his back would make any facial expressions harder to see.

Both women were studying the pencil lines on the sheet.

“Walter Deverell said you’d be dropping by,” Gabriel remarked lightly, waving at the paper. “Why are you two dressed for the convent?”

“I came straight home from the Magdalen Penitentiary,” said Christina, “and Maria was on her way to All Saints. I suppose you understood Walter to be referring to you and Lizzie, here, where he writes, ‘worse for both you if you stay.’”

“I suppose I did, if indeed that’s Walter, and not just Lizzie’s imagination. I thought you were scheduled at Magdalen for another … two days, was it?”

“Yes.” Christina took a deep breath and exhaled. “But I seem to have done a bit of automatic writing myself. ‘Folio Q’ won’t stop writing itself.”

Maria closed her eyes and shook her head.

Gabriel raised his eyebrows at Christina and made a beckoning motion with his hand.

There were tears in Christina’s eyes. “It’s Uncle John who’s writing it, I’m nearly sure, and I don’t think it’s voluntary on his part. I think it’s his — his dreams, if such creatures dream. And he says—” Her voice faltered.

Maria spoke up. “Sembra che Lizzie sia di nuovo in dolce attesa ,” which was Italian for Apparently Lizzie is expecting again.

Gabriel was glad that he had chosen to stand against the light, for he could feel his face chill and he assumed he had gone pale.

“That’s not possible,” he said. “Do you think I didn’t learn, from the first one? I’ve admitted you were right, and — since May, we haven’t—”

Christina started to say something, but Maria interrupted: “Why did she throw your pictures into the river?”

Gabriel was still frowning. “Jealousy. Baseless. Old pictures of models I don’t use anymore.”

“Stunners,” said Maria with a wan smile, using Gabriel’s term for beautiful women.

Gabriel nodded in dismissal of the brief diversion and turned to Christina. “Uncle John,” he said clearly, “and poor old Walter too, if that’s what he meant there, are wrong. The dead chaps are, in this, unreliable.”

Lizzie’s recent words came back to him— Who can I trust besides dead people?

“I’m sorry,” whispered Christina, staring at the paint-dappled wooden floor.

Gabriel understood that she wasn’t apologizing for anything she’d said or done today.

So did Maria. “You were only fourteen,” she said. “And Papa, God rest his soul, deliberately led you into it.”

Gabriel wavered, then stepped forward and briefly gripped Christina’s shoulder. “I would have done the same,” he said. “I did, eventually.”

And so did my poor Lizzie, he thought.

“If we could find it,” said Christina, without looking up, “and destroy it — I promised him I would grind it to powder and sift it into the sea—”

Gabriel stared at his sister with mingled sympathy and cynicism — after their father’s death, the three of them had searched every corner of the old house in Charlotte Street, but they had not found the tiny black statue; and Gabriel wondered if Christina would be so resolute to destroy the thing if she were actually to have it again.

“Prayer,” said Maria, “is our only hope now.”

“And the temporal measures,” said Christina with a sigh. “Garlic, mirrors, and celibacy.”

Gabriel was still angry that his resolve — his selfless resolve! — had been called into question, and by dead men. “Well, if Uncle John thinks—”

“He isn’t really our mother’s brother,” said Maria. “Poor damned John Polidori is just the latest mask — a suffering, half-alive mask! — that this thing is currently wearing. It’s Gog and Magog, the eternal enemy of God’s kingdom, from the prophecies in the books of Ezekiel and Revelation.”

Gabriel saw Christina’s face go blank, and he quickly said, “No doubt, no doubt! Or something of that general description, I’m sure.” Maria looked away, so he was able to send a warning frown to Christina.