Tim Powers - Hide Me Among the Graves

None of the four moved their booted feet on the sandy cage floor, but their heads slowly turned to watch the thing’s hunched back and flopping hat recede in the direction Trelawny had taken.

Several minutes passed before the shambling figure disappeared among the elms to the west, but none of the people in the cage spoke until it was out of sight, though Christina began panting.

“That was your damned—” said Gabriel to Christina, “your — what did you call him?”

“Mouth Boy,” said Christina breathlessly. “But it was Uncle Polidori, wearing the form of my childhood nightmare.” She rubbed her eyes with trembling hands.

“Yes.” Gabriel gave her an angry glance. “I don’t know what you see in him.”

She squinted at him. “Yes, you do.”

“I’d have shot him if I’d had a seventh bullet.”

Christina didn’t reply. She stretched and retrieved her parasol and stepped to the cage gate. “We should separate, all be indoors by sunset.” To McKee she said, “When can we meet at Highgate Cemetery?”

“You can’t!” said Gabriel. “You’re not strong—”

“Tomorrow,” said McKee.

“I will,” Christina insisted to Gabriel. “It’s because I woke our uncle — and because you … brought him to Adelaide — that her daughter’s soul is in danger. It may be that we can find his statue, and—”

Gabriel gave her a look that seemed both cynical and pleading.

“ —and destroy it, and him,” Christina went on firmly, “and free Adelaide’s little girl. And you and me.” She clasped both hands on the parasol handle, possibly to keep them from shaking. “It doesn’t matter if I — what my natural feelings for him still are.”

After a grudging pause, Gabriel said, “You don’t mention Lizzie.”

Christina touched his arm. “And go some way toward saving Lizzie too,” she said gently. “You believe she’s shared by these two devils?”

“I — damn it, yes. And either one could have assumed my form and … potency. I can’t know which of them it was who—”

Crawford thought about his practice and his rent, then sighed and quietly said to McKee, “After noon, please.”

McKee nodded.

Christina turned to Gabriel. “I think you’ll come too.”

Gabriel almost seemed ready to spit; but, “You’re my sister,” he said, “and their child might just as easily have been my daughter. And it is conceivable we might be able to do something to help Lizzie.” He heaved a windy sigh. “Yes, I’ll go along.”

Crawford forced himself not to scowl. Damn the man, he thought. Might just as easily have been his daughter indeed!

“Get your gun loaded again,” McKee told Gabriel. “Load two, if you have them.”

THE DINNER AT La Sablonniere in Leicester Square was, Gabriel thought cautiously, going as well as could be expected. He was more comfortable with the informal dinners he served for friends at home—“nothing but oysters and of course the seediest of clothes,” as he often specified in his invitations — but this dressing up for an elegant restaurant was what Lizzie had apparently wanted.

It helped that the young poet Swinburne was there. Swinburne was twenty-five but looked a malnourished sixteen, and his wild mane of kinky hair was the same carroty color as Lizzie’s, and his twitchy cheerfulness often sparked a like response in Lizzie.

Lizzie had in fact vacillated all evening between giddy hilarity and a wooden silence, and she had drunk several glasses of Haut-Brion Blanc but had eaten only a few bites of her supreme de volaille, a chicken breast in a white sauce; Gabriel recognized all this as the effects of her damned laudanum.

Their table for three was beside a window overlooking the streetlamp-dotted darkness of Leicester Square, and now Lizzie had pulled off her shawl to polish the glass, and her bare shoulders glowed too pale in the glare of the restaurant’s wall-mounted gas jets.

“There’s a … new building there,” she said. “In the middle of the square.”

Swinburne, not entirely sober himself, goggled at the glass but apparently couldn’t see beyond his own reflection and the steam of his breath.

Gabriel leaned forward and squinted. The high dome and pillared entrance to the Wyld’s Globe exhibit was the only building visible out there in the dark. “Nothing new that I can see,” he said.

“That dome,” Lizzie said. “Wasn’t it grass there…?”

“That’s been there for eleven years, Guggums. Ever since the Great Exhibition.”

“Is it a church?”

“My sort of church,” said Swinburne, slouching back in his upholstered chair and reaching for the decanter of claret. “The world, introverted.”

“It’s a giant globe,” said Gabriel patiently, “turned inside out. You go in and you can see all the seas and continents around you.”

“Turned inside out,” echoed Lizzie. “I’m turned inside out. Everything around me is my own grief and loss, and inside I’m just an empty street, an empty building.”

Gabriel wished she weren’t so devoted to poetry; she wrote a lot of it, and it was, frankly, pedestrian stuff, though Swinburne loyally claimed to admire her verses.

“Nonsense, Gug,” Gabriel said. “You’re ill, it colors your mood. I think a crème brûlée and a glass of sauternes—”

Lizzie was frowning and shaking her head. “If the globe is inside out, where’s God? Rise up from one place and soon you’d only bump your head against another! And Hell — under the surface — is infinite! Don’t bury me!”

“For God’s sake, Gug, pipe down! Nobody’s going to bury you, you’re not dying. Algy, she listens to you, tell her she’s not dying.”

Swinburne was a frequent visitor at Chatham Place, and he and Lizzie were forever reading to each other, or playing with the cats, or jointly composing nonsense verses and wrestling for possession of the pen as inspiration struck one or the other of them.

Swinburne blinked at her now over the rim of his wine glass. He lowered it and said, “Don’t die, Lizzie darling. Who else could I find who doesn’t despise me?”

She sniffed and shook her head. “It’s the ones who love us that are the peril. ‘And well though love reposes, in the end it is not well.’”

Now she was quoting an unpublished poem of Swinburne’s. The young man, whose red hair was now sticking out in all directions, pursed his lips in wry acknowledgment. “But Gabriel and I love you. We’re no peril.”

“You don’t love me as much as two others do,” she whispered.

Gabriel shivered. Two, he thought; and he remembered Trelawny’s words this afternoon: … if the person were so unwise as to welcome one of them and then welcome the other one as well.

Lizzie looked back out the window, and tears stood on her eyelashes as she kissed one finger and then stroked it down the glass. “Oh, do you see her? She followed us, but she won’t come in where it’s warm.”

“Who?” asked Swinburne, to Gabriel’s alarm.

“Don’t let her get started on—” he began, but it was too late.

Lizzie was sobbing, and Gabriel pushed his chair back and stood up, waving to the waiter.