Tim Powers - Hide Me Among the Graves

Christina was still leading the way across the frostbitten grass, and Crawford saw her bonneted head nod. “Not the resurrection Christ bought for us.”

“I knew,” began McKee, and Crawford could see that she was speaking carefully, “that Mr. Rossetti here—”

“Call me Gabriel,” said Christina’s brother in a tight voice; and Crawford remembered, with a surprising surge of jealousy, what McKee had said yesterday morning when she had asked Crawford to call her by her first name: I think we can consider ourselves amply introduced. Of course she and this Gabriel fellow with his foolish hat had been similarly … introduced.

McKee went on in a tight voice, “I knew that Gabriel had brought — your uncle’s! — attentions to me, and to my daughter. But do you say you — woke him?”

Christina’s shoulders rose and fell. “I did. I was fourteen.”

“Our father forced it on her,” said Gabriel gruffly, taking his sister’s arm as they all trudged across the grass.

“At first I thought it was our uncle’s ghost,” said Christina. “Well, it was, in a way. I invited him in because I felt sorry for him, and he was family … but it wasn’t really him, not really.”

“Our father,” said Gabriel, “had a little statue that he’d acquired in Italy. No bigger than your thumb. We always, even as children, knew it was alive.”

“It wore the doomed soul of our uncle,” Christina went on, “but it was one of the — a dormant, petrified, condensed member of the — well, you know the term that Gabriel would advise me not to say out loud here. The tribe that troubles us, the giants that were in the earth in those days.”

The Nephilim, thought Crawford with a shudder. They were mentioned in the Old Testament book of Genesis, and the writer of the book of Numbers described encountering them: we became like grasshoppers in our own sight, and so we were in their sight.

The man with the dog had reached the eastern edge of the park, but he had paused in the outer circle road.

“That,” said McKee, “would have been in about 1850?”

“1845,” said Christina, glancing back at her in evident surprise.

“They had been dormant then for twenty or thirty years,” said McKee. “From about 1850 onward, they’ve been active again.” To Gabriel she said, “It was 1855 when you brought your uncle to me.” She shook her head and gave Crawford a wide-eyed look. “Was I right about coming here? We’ve found the monster’s very family! ”

“It’s true,” said Christina mournfully.

Crawford was looking at her, and so he didn’t see why Gabriel had abruptly leaped to one side and drawn a revolver from under his coat and McKee was suddenly crouching and holding a short-bladed knife; both of them were squinting past Crawford to the east.

Crawford spun in that direction, losing his footing and falling to one knee as his left hand tore open his coat so that his right could dive into his waistcoat pocket.

The dog in the shawl was sixty feet away and rushing directly at them, tearing up spurts of snow and dirt — and somehow its lunging head was entirely wrapped in gray cloth—

— Crawford’s vision narrowed in shrill shock when he realized that it wasn’t a dog at all, but a little misshapen human figure, wrapped in cloth like a mummy, its knees and elbows flexing rapidly like spider limbs as it ate up the intervening ground—

A loud bang like a hammer on stone numbed Crawford’s ears, and the rushing figure did a ragged backflip, spasmodically ripping at the ground even as it still slid heavily toward them; Gabriel’s second shot stopped its slide, and his third and fourth shots shook the creature violently. Faint echoes of the shots were batted back from the distant Cumberland Terrace housefronts.

Crawford stared, the wind cold on his wide eyes — the thing’s limbs were retracting; it was shrinking inside its flapping cloth coverings even as it thrashed furiously.

The frozen ground seemed to shiver, and for a moment the ringing in Crawford’s ears seemed to be a remote chorus climbing through impossibly high notes to inaudibility.

Gabriel fired his revolver twice more at the heaving pile of cloth; bits of thread and sprays of black dirt flew away from the ragged holes.

The man who had been walking with the thing was running up now, but he was running a good deal more slowly than the creature had, and he was still twenty yards distant. He was carrying a black angular case, and Crawford wondered if he were a doctor. Far too late, he thought.

Crawford looked back at the women. Both were standing and staring at the subsiding cloth-covered mound. McKee caught his eye and actually grinned, tensely.

Crawford found that he couldn’t smile. His face was stinging with sweat, and his hands were shaking.

Gabriel lowered his pistol, panting hoarsely. He glanced at Crawford beside him and nodded. “Garlic in the bottle?”

Crawford could barely hear him over the ringing in his ears, but he nodded.

“Not useless, if you could have got it open in time.”

“Is it dead?” Crawford asked, sure that he was speaking too loudly but wanting to hear his own voice.

“No,” said Christina, stepping up beside her brother. “It will have burrowed into the earth, I imagine.”

“Injured, though, definitely,” said Gabriel. He wiped his mouth with his free hand.

“Can you reload?” asked Crawford, nodding toward the man who was striding toward them now. It was, Crawford saw, an old man in a black Chesterfield overcoat and a black silk hat, and the object he was carrying was a violin case. All Crawford could make out of his face was a white beard and dark features — but he recognized him.

Apparently McKee did too. “I don’t think you’ll need to shoot him,” she said, though she had not yet put away her knife.

“It takes me half an hour to reload this,” Gabriel muttered. To Christina he added, “I shot that thing, did you see?”

The old man paused on the far side of the now-motionless lump of cloth on the frosty grass, and with the toe of his boot he flipped most of the fabrics aside. Underneath was a mound of fresh-churned dirt.

He looked up at the four people on the other side of the mound, and for a moment his scarred lips seemed to be sneering; then his lean brown face flexed in a wolfish smile.

“She’ll be a thing like a crab now,” he said. “No use digging for her; you won’t catch her and she’ll still weigh upward of two hundred pounds — you’d never lift her.”

“Who the bloody hell are you?” demanded Gabriel, still visibly shaky. “And what was that thing?”

Edward Trelawny shook his head impatiently. “Don’t waste my time. You know what it was, or you wouldn’t have had a gun loaded with silver bullets, now would you? Nothing else could have done that to her. Well, gold may be a better electrical conductor, but I doubt someone like you could afford gold bullets.” He laughed. “As to who I am, it’s better you don’t know, and I don’t want to know who you are. Even a captured mind can’t reveal what it’s never learned, right? If you all have any brains, you don’t know each other’s names either, but I suppose you haven’t any brains, walking around in a damn clump out here like red flags in front of a bull. Are you surprised that you drew the bitter attentions of”—he waved back toward the pile of dirt—“ her? ”

He made a tossing motion toward Crawford and McKee. “You two especially! You killed her Judas Goat last night — you might have had the sense to lay low.”

“By daylight—” began Crawford weakly.

“I knew you were a fool the first time I laid eyes on you, sitting in that ring of failed poets. Daylight. She’s mighty hampered in daylight, but not immobile. She’d have torn your empty heads off.”