Tim Powers - Hide Me Among the Graves

The dragging sounds from behind were louder. Crawford’s legs were beginning to ache.

McKee said — no whispering now—“Do you have any iron, steel?”

Crawford thought about it as they jogged on upward through the darkness. “My watch,” he panted. “The clockwork in it.”

“A timepiece! Perfect. Quickly, stop and bash it to pieces against the wall. Don’t drop any of the pieces!”

Crawford fished his watch from his waistcoat pocket, then slid to a halt and broke a fingernail prying the back cover open; holding the watch cupped in his hand, he slammed it against the brick wall while pressing the open palm of his other hand against the bricks below it to catch any falling pieces.

“Drop the watch, John,” echoed the approaching voices of his wife and son, “time doesn’t matter here.” He could hear wet sand shifting only yards away, and the mimosa perfume was failing to cover a smell of fermented decay.

After two more rapid spasmodic blows, he had a scant, bristly handful of what felt like tiny gears.

Something webby and wet brushed his face and he convulsively lashed out, flinging the bits of metal in a wide arc behind him.

The clinging membrane was snatched away, and he spun his wrecked watch on its chain and slung that toward the voices too. The air shook with a sound like dozens of castanets.

McKee yanked him back by the collar, and then the two of them were running.

“That’s stopped them for now,” she panted, “and we’re nearly out.”

Crawford forced himself to look only forward. I’m sorry, Veronica! he thought.

And now he could see a tall, dim, round-topped shape — it was a volume of dimly lit space on the far side of a dark archway, and in moments they had skidded around the left-hand side of the arch; a wide knobby surface slanted up in front of them, and when McKee let go of his hand to begin scrambling up the incline, he followed her and realized that he was climbing up, or rather across, the face of a toppled building. A rounded stone bar across his path was an attached column, and he followed McKee as she skirted a semicircular hole that was the top of an arched doorway.

The faint illumination was coming from above them, and when they had climbed around a wide balcony and were scrambling between the holes of windows, he recognized the white glow as moonlight.

“What— is this?” Crawford gasped.

“A first-century Roman building,” came McKee’s reply, “wrecked when Boadicea destroyed London.”

Knocked right over sideways, thought Crawford with some awe as he continued climbing.

At last they came to the highest corner of the building — it was a rounded berm of masonry in front of them, probably the middle of a now-diagonal turret — and the moonlight was slanting in through a rectangular hole some twenty feet overhead.

“It’s an easy climb now,” said McKee, pausing, “and we should leave separately. We’ll come up in a yard off Portugal Street, only a few streets from your house.”

“Why didn’t we come down this way?” panted Crawford. “It looks easier than that well.”

“For getting out, it is. Entering requires protocol, though — those ghost-moths would have been … different, if we had tried to avoid the well and the incantation.” There was enough moonlight for him to see her brush her dark hair back from her forehead. “Tomorrow we need to visit somebody.”

“I’ve got business, horses to see,” said Crawford, standing on the gritty curved surface of the ancient turret wall and staring longingly up at the patch of moonlight. “I’m afraid I won’t be—”

“This woman can help us save Johanna,” McKee interrupted, “if anybody can. She knows about these things.”

“Another of your — your Hail Mary artists?”

“No — she’s a poet, actually — though not the sort to have been at that salon tonight. And she’s a sister at the Magdalen Penitentiary for Fallen Women … which happens to be right near Highgate Cemetery. Her name is Christina Rossetti.”

Crawford had never heard of her.

“After my surgery hours, then,” he said. “Noon, say.” He was still staring up at the moonlight. “Portugal Street? Near St. Clement’s?”

“Near enough. Within the origo lemurum incantation.”

“What’s that mean?” he asked. He was squinting at the slope ahead and bracing himself for the last bit of climbing. “You said it, earlier.”

“You’ve got to placate the old … gods or devils or whatever they are, who are confined down here. Protocol. Origo lemurum is Latin for something like ‘maker of ghosts,’ I’m told. You remember it by ‘oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement’s.’ The old rhyme gives invocations for other ways down too, near other churches.”

Churches, thought Crawford bitterly. No wonder I stay away from them.

McKee waved at the muddy slope that led up to the street. “You go first; I’ll follow in a couple of minutes. And I’ll be at your door at noon tomorrow.”

Crawford was already wondering when he might conveniently get his coat and hat back from the Spotted Dog, but he asked, “You’ll be safe here? By yourself?”

He saw her exhausted smile. “Quite safe, thank you for asking.”

He hesitated, suddenly reluctant to leave her. “That watch was seven years old,” he remarked. “I bought it after ruining my last one when we dove into the river.”

She shrugged. “I owe you a lot of time.”

He smiled, then turned away and plodded to the embankment; it was in shadow, but it wasn’t steep, and the timbers and masonry of buried and long-forgotten buildings made climbing easy enough. Within minutes he had clambered up out of a coal chute in a street he didn’t recognize — men were smoking clay pipes on a set of steps nearby, but none of them appeared to see anything odd about Crawford’s entrance into the scene — and after he had walked randomly through several sharply turning streets, he found himself at the broad lanes of the Strand, facing the spire of St. Clement Danes.

And this is where you started this morning, he thought bewilderedly, turning his weary steps toward home.

CHRISTINA LOOKED AWAY from her gentleman caller, who sat on the sofa a few yards away across the carpet, but her wandering gaze happened to fall on her mother’s treasured portrait of Uncle John Polidori on the wall over the slant-front desk, and so she reluctantly looked back at Charles Cayley, who was leaning forward earnestly.

“They’re so…” he began.

Seconds ticked by on the old clock on the mantel. Christina remembered her father winding that clock every Sunday, in their old house in Charlotte Street.

She sighed, catching a whiff of Cayley’s liberally applied cologne. The tea was getting cold in the pot, and Cayley had eaten all the digestive biscuits. Perhaps his stomach was out of order.

She recalled that she and Cayley had been talking about his recent translation of the Psalms. He had published it at his own expense, and the Rossetti family had charitably subscribed for a dozen copies.

“… savage!” he finished at last.

“True,” she agreed. “God was raising the Jews by steps from barbarism to a state in which they could receive His son, and they were still genuine barbarians, in those early steps.”

“But to ask a blessing! — in the otherwise sublime 137th Psalm — on anyone who would knock the brains out of a Babylonian infant! I don’t—”