Tim Powers - Hide Me Among the Graves

“If we’d see you in church occasionally—” began Maria, but Christina interrupted her.

“We could be sure it was you,” she said, “since I don’t believe Uncle John would venture into a church. You remember the drawing you did when you and poor Lizzie were in Paris on your honeymoon? The two couples in the forest?”

Gabriel did indeed remember it. It was a pen-and-ink drawing of a man and a woman in medieval clothing, visibly astonished at coming face-to-face with exact duplicates of themselves.

“I called it How They Met Themselves ,” he said cautiously. “It was a study in—”

“It was a prophecy,” said Christina. “Forgive me, Gabriel, but I wonder if Lizzie would agree that the two of you have been celibate since May.”

Gabriel stepped back toward the window, perhaps to keep from raising his hand to his sister.

“I,” he said hoarsely, “know you’ve never approved of her — but she would not ever—”

“She would have thought it was you ,” wailed Maria, raising her hands halfway to her face as if she meant to cover her eyes. “You knew — when you drew that picture! — that creatures of our uncle’s sort can take on the appearance of their hosts.”

Gabriel was shaking his head and had started to speak, when the window glass rattled and the timbers creaked as a reverberating boom rolled over the house.

His sisters had both stood up and were staring past him out the window, so he spun around — a plume of black smoke was churning and swelling over the water of the Thames a hundred yards out from the shore, and pieces of debris were spinning upward across the view of the buildings on the opposite shore.

“Was that a boat?” asked Maria breathlessly.

Gabriel shrugged. “What else?” He wondered if it had been the heavy-laden sloop he had noticed a couple of minutes earlier. “Nobody on board will have survived that.”

Down the hall they could hear Lizzie weeping now.

Gabriel turned toward the doorway and hesitated, his teeth bared in indecision. At last, “Help me with her,” he said to his sisters.

Maria nodded and hurried past him, her long black sleeves flapping.

Christina took Gabriel’s arm as they strode behind her, and Christina whispered, “At the Lord Mayor’s Show that time—”

“Hush. You’ll upset them both.”

He should never have told Christina what Lizzie had said then — it had been a little more than nine years ago, in November of ’52, shortly after he and Lizzie had become lovers. They had gone to see the Lord Mayor’s parade in New Oxford Street, and a deformed dwarf beggar had been lurching alongside the parade, pacing the traditional giant wicker figures of Gog and Magog that were being ceremoniously carried down the street, and when the dwarf stumbled and fell near where Lizzie stood, she had run to the little figure and in pity taken it right into her arms — invited it into her bosom! — and even though its face was entirely wrapped in a scarf, the dwarf had somehow managed to bite Lizzie. When Gabriel had pushed the malignant thing away and pulled Lizzie to her feet and said, “Let’s get that bite attended to, Lizzie,” she had shuddered and said to him hoarsely, “Call me Gogmagog.” A moment later she had claimed not to remember having said it — and when he asked her if she knew of the sinister “Goemagot” giant in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regnum Britanniae, who was called Goemagog in Milton’s History of Britain and Gogmagog in Midlands devil legends, she had responded with genuine bafflement — but he had called her Gogmagog for the rest of that day, and the name had soon become the affectionate nickname Guggums.

And now, for the first time, it occurred to Gabriel that Lizzie might have acquired a second vampiric patron, on that day, in addition to his uncle. Her unspecific infirmities had started around then. Could two of the damnable things be sharing her? Uncle John and this Gogmagog thing?

Which of the two might it have been who, in his sisters’ repellent speculation, had congress with Lizzie in Gabriel’s form?

He shuddered and forcefully dismissed the thought and took Christina’s arm to hurry her along.

When Gabriel and Christina arrived at the bedroom doorway, Lizzie and Maria were huddled in the far corner over the crib Gabriel had bought last year in anticipation of the baby who had been stillborn. Lizzie had never let him get rid of it. Maria had one arm around Lizzie and was murmuring.

Lizzie was sobbing and shaking her head. “Did you shoot at him, Gabriel?” she whined. “Look, you woke the baby!”

And for just a flickering split second, Gabriel thought he saw a tiny figure in the crib, a dark little thing with long fingers and enormous eyes; then, even before he could shake his head or blink, it was gone.

Maria didn’t move, but she had gone quiet; and beside Gabriel, Christina had audibly caught her breath.

Gabriel swallowed, then managed to say, “The baby’s quiet, now, G — darling. See? Take some more medicine, if you need to, and you should be back in bed.”

Lizzie’s urgency seemed to have evaporated — she stared at the empty crib and then nodded and let Maria help her back to the bed. She sighed and lay back across it, and Gabriel stepped forward and pulled the sheet up to her shoulders, and she closed her eyes. Her eyelids looked like an old man’s knuckles.

Gabriel jerked his head toward the hallway, and his sisters followed him back to the studio. Maria was visibly shaking.

The cloud of black smoke over the river had thinned and drifted west almost out of sight beyond the brick wall of the next house, and several rowboats and a steam launch were arrowing toward the arches of the bridge, no doubt heading for whatever floating debris the river had carried to the east side of it.

Gabriel crossed to a cabinet and reached down a bottle. He waved it at his sisters — Christina nodded energetically and Maria shook her head.

As he carried two filled glasses back to where the women had resumed their seats, he handed one to Christina and asked in a defeated tone, “Very well, who did she imagine I was shooting at?”

Christina gulped the brandy to avoid replying and Maria just stared out the window, but Gabriel knew what the answer was: their uncle. Or conceivably the Gogmagog thing. Lizzie might have mistaken the apparition for her husband the first time — or two — but had apparently not been fooled forever.

Jealous husband, he thought bitterly, shoots at immortal vampire rival.

And then he drained his glass in several eye-watering swallows and went back to refill it, for the thought had occurred to him that the apparition might have taken the form of Walter Deverell.

Christina finished her own glass and, staring out the window, seemed to brace herself. “Soon,” she said levelly, “there may be two phantom infants in that crib.”

For a moment Gabriel wasn’t able to take a deep breath, and then he was panting. “Yes, probably!” he burst out. “But I will shoot him, if I get the chance. I’ve got silver bullets.”

“I wish you didn’t carry that firearm about,” said Maria.

He drew his hand back as if to throw his refilled glass, then just set it down carefully beside the bottle. “William will marry eventually,” he said in a quieter tone. “He’ll try to have children — he doesn’t believe any of this.”

“Not even in God,” said Maria sadly, shaking her head, “who is our only hope.”

“And an unhelpfully remote and theoretical hope, at that,” Gabriel snapped. “He was shot once, though, wasn’t he? Our monstrous uncle, not God. In your story, Christina, your ‘Folio Q.’”