Tim Powers - Hide Me Among the Graves

Christina rocked her head back and stared at the high plaster ceiling. “The story took place in Italy, and it concerned a man who didn’t dare look in a mirror. He was threatened by a rival in love, but he let down his guard, and his rival shot him, in the mouth, and yes, it was with a silver bullet; he never really recovered. He died not long afterward, in Venice.” She lowered her head and looked at her siblings. “Papa told me once that he got the little petrified statue in Venice, before he came to England — he said it showed him visions of Mama. And he implied … that the acquiring of it put his soul in peril.”

Maria muttered something doleful in Italian.

Christina went on, “I seem to be — our uncle seems to be — writing a sequel now, in which he’s alive again, in London.”

“We need to read this sequel,” said Gabriel. “I wish you hadn’t burned ‘Folio Q.’”

Christina gave him a stricken look. “I’m sorry, I–I’ve destroyed the new page too! I didn’t think—”

For several long seconds none of them spoke.

At last Gabriel said, gently, “You remember it, though.”

“Yes — yes.”

“And if you write more — if he does, that is — you can save it.” When Christina nodded, he fished Lizzie’s automatic-writing pencil disk out of his pocket and tossed it to her. She caught it deftly. “Use this,” he said, “if it will help. I don’t want it in the house.”

Maria frowned, but Christina nodded and gingerly put the thing into the side pocket of her habit.

“And,” Gabriel went on, though it actually made his forehead sweat to say it, “he claims that my wife is with child by … by a vampire wearing my appearance, is that right? Does he actually … mention Lizzie by name?”

Christina sighed and nodded. “Lizzie Siddal.”

“Damn him, her name is Rossetti now, Elizabeth Rossetti .” Gabriel jammed his fists in his coat pockets and paced to the far wall and back, staring around at all the portraits of his wife.

“If she is with child,” he asked finally, “as the ghosts and devils claim — who is the father?”

“You are,” said Christina. She too was pointedly looking at the pictures, not at him. “There’s no other human, no other male, really, in the picture. He took your — when you invited him in, in whatever form he was wearing — along with your blood—” She was blushing, and Maria had turned to face the wall. “‘The expense of spirit in a waste of shame,’” Christina finished quickly, quoting Shakespeare’s sonnet about the effects of lust.

“Er, yes.” Gabriel was blushing himself. “Quite so. Well! In that case we need to catch him and kill him, don’t we? Shoot him with a silver bullet again.” He patted the bulk of the revolver under his waistcoat.

“Catch him?” cried Maria. “You’ll damn your soul simply doing that! And silver bullets will only injure him — you need to find the statue too and destroy that. At least .”

Gabriel flinched at damn your soul, for he had not entirely shed the Catholic beliefs of his youth; but he nodded grimly and went on, “If we — if I — can catch him, injure him, bind him somehow — he’s weak in daylight, according to what I recall of your story, Christina! — we can make him tell us where the statue is.”

He looked squarely at Maria. “How do we catch him, Moony?” he asked, using the nickname she had been given in childhood because of her round face.

“Why do you imagine I would know?”

“You seem to know the cost of it. And you read all of Papa’s manuscripts, burned now, even the ones in Greek and Hebrew — all his occult interpretations of Dante and Pythagoras and the Jewish mystics.”

“It’s ridiculous to think that—”

“Do you know a way, Moony?”

Maria got to her feet and smoothed out the apron of her black habit. “Consider it, Gabriel,” she said earnestly as she moved to step past him. “If Papa knew anything about—”

He stepped in front of her. “But do you know a way?”

Her round face looked up at him from under her folded-back veil. “Gabriel,” she said, “I am a lay member of the All Saints Sisters of the Poor, soon to be undertaking my novitiate. I love you, and through you I love Lizzie and any children you have. But if I know a way to catch him, it would be a mortal sin, for all of us, to use it, and therefore I would not reveal it. You know me.” After staring into his eyes for another couple of seconds, she said, “I’ll just go look in on Lizzie,” and again stepped around him.

This time he didn’t block her.

As Maria clumped away down the hall, Gabriel said to Christina, “A clear yes.”

“And a clear no.” She shivered, but Gabriel couldn’t tell what emotion it sprang from. “I believe I could summon him,” she said. “I don’t know about restraining him.”

Gabriel nodded. I imagine I could summon him too, he thought — but in my case it would be the form of a woman who answered the summons.

As before, it would be the image of Lizzie. I wonder if I could shoot a creature wearing that image.

BY NOON THE unseasonal east wind had died. With sunset came clouds from the west that hid the rising full moon, and the streetlamps of London were lit early because of a heavy fog that was as much coal smoke as dampness.

Cabs and coaches moved slowly down the streets from one patch of lamplight to the next, the creak and clatter of their passage seeming to echo back more clearly from the housefronts in the opaque night air than they did by daylight.

A slow-moving clarence cab made a wide right turn from Charing Cross Road into New Oxford Street, its two lanterns lighting the driver’s hat and turned-up coat collar and the horse’s flexing back and not much else. A hansom cab would have been faster, but McKee had said that if they were to travel together at night, they must have a vehicle with four walls as well as a roof, and hansom cabs didn’t have a partition in front. Crawford had been happy with the choice, for it let him sit across from her with his silk hat beside him — and he was facing the rear, this time, as good manners dictated.

“I believe the British Museum is ahead of us,” McKee remarked now, peering out at the vague shapes of the buildings looming past on either side. Windows of houses were luminous yellow smears in the angular black silhouettes.

The cab’s windows rattled and the wheels made a loud grinding sound on the crushed stone of the street surface, and Crawford had to lean forward in the dimness of the interior to hear her.

“I don’t know where we are,” he said, trying to remember precisely why he had agreed to this. “Talk louder.”

“My father took me to the British Museum when I was eleven,” she said. He cupped a hand to his ear, and she added, “Oh, for God’s sake, sit over here beside me so I won’t have to shout.”

It seemed, on the whole, ridiculous not to. He nodded and stood up in a crouch and sat down on the forward-facing seat, of which McKee’s crinoline dress occupied more than half. He smelled lavender with the faintest undertone of garlic.

“The, uh, British Museum,” he said.

“Yes. I mainly remember being scared by the Egyptian mummies — I was afraid we might happen to be in there in the moment when the General Resurrection took place, and they’d start to come to life all around us.”