Tim Powers - Hide Me Among the Graves

“My daughter,” wailed Lizzie, “dead but weeping, immortal but starving!” Gabriel had strode around to her side of the table and was pulling her shawl across her shoulders and shushing her, but she went on, “Is my second child to join her out there?”

Gabriel was peripherally aware of eyeglasses and red lips and mustaches turned toward them from the tables nearby, and for a moment a smell of wet clay seemed to eclipse the aromas of beef and cigar smoke and wine sauces, but he had got Lizzie to her feet and was concentrating on guiding her toward the dining room door; he could hear Swinburne’s boots rapping on the polished wood floor behind him.

Gabriel dug a five-pound note out of his pocket and thrust it at the wide-eyed waiter, who hurried to fetch their hats and coats; and after what seemed like an infernal eternity of tugging at sleeves and scarves and glove cuffs, they were at last stepping across the foyer and he was pushing open the heavy front door. Wintry air numbed his cheeks and stung his teeth as he whistled to a cab standing at the curb a dozen yards away, and when the driver shed his blanket and shook the reins, Gabriel turned to Swinburne over Lizzie’s shaking shoulder.

“Sorry, Algy,” he said, “she’s—”

“Take care of her,” said Swinburne, shivering in his too-large coat. “And thank you for dinner.” Then he nodded and set off walking away down Panton Street.

It was difficult to get Lizzie into the cab, as she kept looking yearningly back at the restaurant. Probably wanting us to wait for our dead daughter, thought Gabriel grimly as he pushed her up the step; either that or she’s reconsidering the crème brûlée.

“WHAT ARE YOU WRITING, Christina?”

“Nothing,” snapped Christina crossly, rolling the pen between her fingers. “Nothing!”

The room was too warm and reeked of William’s tarry latakia tobacco. The tassels that dangled from the runner on the fireplace mantel were throwing their usual shadow pattern on the high ceiling, and to Christina, as she looked up in frustration, the little wavering Y-shaped figures looked like tiny men clinging to a cliff edge over an inferno.

Like Catholic souls clutching the last edge of Purgatory, she thought. Filthy Romish superstition!

Her bearded, bald-headed brother blinked at her in surprise but took no offense. He never did. He had only been home for half an hour, his job at the Inland Revenue offices in Somerset House having kept him late, and he had been scribbling busily in a notebook before he had noticed her scowling over her papers at the slant-front desk below the old portrait of their uncle.

“I’m sorry,” Christina said. William was the only one of the four siblings who provided any substantial household money — Maria’s Bible classes hardly brought in a hundred pounds a year, and Gabriel’s income from his paintings was erratic and carelessly spent — and William never complained about the fact that the whole family lived off his salary. He wrote poetry too — he had probably been writing verses just now — though it was all hopelessly pedantic and uninspired.

Christina absentmindedly blew a strand of hair out of her face. “I’m trying to continue the story I burned last year.”

“‘Folio Q,’” said William, putting down his notebook and taking off his spectacles. “Continue it? Have you written it out again? I thought it was very good.”

“I know you did. But I didn’t write it.” She took a deep breath. “He did,” she said, pointing her pen up at the portrait above the desk. “Through me, through my passive hand.”

He frowned. “Do you mean you were inspired—”

“I mean he — wrote — it. His ghost did. I was in a sort of trance, and I didn’t know what I’d written — what my hand had written — until I read it.”

“Ah, you mean automatic writing,” William said, nodding in sudden comprehension. “Really! That’s why you burned it. But that’s fascinating! Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You? You’re so skeptical—”

“Only about obvious superstitions,” he protested. Like Christianity, Christina thought sourly. “But,” he went on, “never about possibly valid scientific phenomena. Some intriguing work is being done these days in spiritualism.”

“Well, he’s giving me nothing tonight.” She tossed the pen onto the paper and glanced irritably up at the portrait. John Polidori, with his antique collar and his curly black hair and his dark eyes peering off to the side, for once just looked stupid and cunning.

“Was it — important? That he do?”

“Yesterday he was writing about Lizzie, through me. He knew, or said, that she’s … expecting again. I need to know, from him, what her prognosis is.”

William tamped the smoldering tobacco in his pipe. “I hope she recovers from this … nervous prostration of hers,” he said, puffing smoke. “Gabriel loves her.”

“So should we all. She’s family now.”

“Why don’t you just visit her? And why would our departed uncle be particularly informed about her condition?”

“He’d know better than anyone,” said Christina. “He’s what’s making her sick.” With, she thought, perhaps some assistance from the historical Boadicea, God help us.

William pursed his lips and stroked his beard. “Ghosts, if indeed they exist, aren’t supposed to be able to hurt people. All the evidence indicates—”

“There’s fresh evidence. Firsthand evidence.”

William blinked. “What’s — going on?”

“She — he — oh, hang on a moment.” Christnia stood up and crossed to the mantel, where she had left the rolling pencil disk Gabriel had tossed to her yesterday. She picked it up and hurried back to the desk.

“I forgot about this — Gabriel told me to use it.”

“It looks like one of those children’s toys that spin,” said William.

“Lizzie was using it to communicate with a dead friend,” she said without looking up from her paper. “I saw the sheet she used — apparently you write out a question first — I could ask Uncle John to continue—”

But as soon as she set the disk on the paper and laid two fingers on it, it started moving; a tingle passed through her chest, and the fingers of her free hand stretched out and then clenched in a fist. She heard William stand up from his chair, but she didn’t look away from the pencil line already being traced.

When the disk paused, it had written,

get it out

“Get it out?” said William, standing now behind her shoulder. “That’s not clear.”

“Shh.” Christina began awkwardly trying to write a question with the upright pencil, but the thing was moving again.

river closest meet tell you

The writing was faint and loopy, and William squinted at it. “Riven closet?” he asked.

“‘River closest.’ I think he wants me to meet him by the river,” said Christina in a quavering voice. “I won’t go. I won’t .”

William straightened up. “You believe he would hurt you?”

“Well, no. Not me. I believe he loves me .”

She started to say something else, but the disk was moving again:

need you always

She inhaled sharply, then leaned down and said to the pencil, “Where by the river?”

find you I will

Christina let her gaze fall from the paper on the desk to her shoes. She would need to put on boots, and a coat and hat and gloves — at least the hateful sun had set — and find a cab; Gabriel lived right on the river, perhaps he would not mind letting her spend the night there, save her the cold trip home — of course she would want to come home—

The disk jiggled under her fingers and wrote,