Tim Powers - Hide Me Among the Graves

She straightened her shoulders and began resolutely walking down the street in that direction, away from the lights and the noise.

On clear nights, visitors from the country might be waiting at the stairs by the seventeenth-century water gate, which was all that remained of the old York House, to hire a boat and see the sights along the river, but when Christina walked between the pillars and reached the top of the stairs, she saw only four or five watermen sitting in a half-walled shed down to her left, huddled around a couple of lanterns. Along the narrow, fading pier, their boats sat in the water like sleeping gulls.

The stone steps below the arches of the water gate were wet, and Christina gripped the marble rail with her gloved right hand as she cautiously descended. The night was suddenly quiet down here in the dimness — she could hear a bell ringing faintly out on the river, and she thought she could hear frogs croaking not far away. The fleeting scent of tobacco smoke made the air seem warmer.

“Be you wanting to cross, miss?” called one of the gray-bearded men in the shed. “It’s no night for it, even with the purl men still out, mad fools.”

Now that she had reached the desolate river shore below the steeply slanted masonry of the City’s edge, Christina was not anxious to look for a ghost, even or especially her father’s, and the phrase that sounded like “pearl men” had an unwelcomely macabre sound. She imagined pearl-eyed drowned mariners rowing boats out there in the dark, not needing sight on the infinite river.

“Pearl men?” she asked, shivering as she picked her way over half-seen gravel and sand toward the yellow light of the kerosene lanterns. The fog moving in off the river smelled of the sea, though the tide didn’t appear to be high.

“Purl men is beer sellers,” the man said, to Christina’s instant relief. “It’s their bells you hear out there, looking to be hailed by sailors on moored ships. Used to be they’d mix wormwood in the beer, called it purl, and the name’s stuck.” The man stood up from the wooden box he’d been sitting on, took a short clay pipe out of his mouth, and said, “I’m called Hake. Who be you lookin’ for, miss?”

She was standing now only a couple of yards from the open side of the shed, and the air on her cheeks was perceptibly warmer there, but the faces of the other watermen, all middle-aged or older, were still just noses and gray beards and wrinkled foreheads picked out against the darkness by the lantern glare.

“My name is… Christina.” She could see the cloud of her breath now. “Must I be looking for someone?”

“Oh, aye. Your dress and manner are modest, and you’re alone. You hear ’em all yonder,” he added, waving at the nighted river behind her.

Christina turned to peer uneasily down the invisible shoreline.

“All I hear is frogs.”

One of the other men laughed or coughed. “Ain’t frogs,” he said.

“Nights like this,” said old Hake kindly, “fine folk sometimes come down here, not to hire a boat.”

“Nobody comes to hire a boat,” growled another bony old fellow. “Not since the new London Bridge.”

“Sure enough,” agreed Hake. “We’re well after being ghosts ourselves. The old bridge, gone these thirty years, had nineteen arches, and you needed a licensed waterman to shoot any one of them, but this new bridge has got only five arches, all very wide — a child could row you through ’em.”

“Almost ghosts yourselves,” echoed Christina cautiously.

“Aye,” said Hake with a nod, “there’s no apprentices to speak of anymore. Soon enough we’ll be out there in the dark on the other side of the stairs, with none anymore manning this pier to listen to us.” He smiled at her through his gray beard. “Who were you looking for?”

Feeling dizzy at doing it, Christina answered him honestly. “My father — he—”

“I’m sorry to hear about it, miss.” He stepped past her, his boots crunching in wet gravel, and beckoned her to follow. “When did he pass on?”

Christina fell into step beside him as they plodded away from the lantern light.

“Eight years ago.”

Hake stopped. “Did you say eight years? I’m sorry, but it’s not likely that he’d be still—”

“He contacted me, tonight. He asked me to meet him by the river.”

Hake shrugged. “Fair enough. I’ll stop here, miss, and let you go farther. Not more than twenty paces past the stairs, mind, or you’ll be in grievous mud.”

“In grievous mud,” echoed Christina, stepping forward away from him across the wet sand and gravel, into the dark mist. The light from the lanterns behind her glittered faintly on the tops of the closest sand ripples, and she tried to step on those.

When her eyes adjusted to the faint gray luminescence of the fog, she became aware of several sets of abandoned-looking stairs fretting the patchwork stone wall to her right, and the river on her left was nothing but remote bells and vague splashing sounds at indeterminate distances; she believed she was somewhere between the Scotland Yard coal wharf and the Adelphi terrace houses, but the real world seemed to lie very far away behind her.

Never mind ghosts, she thought — there are probably thieves and footpads along this Godforsaken strip of the bottom of nowhere. I should go back to Hake and his companions, back to the sleepy cabbie, back to poor William with his wretched poetry in the warm parlor at home.

Damn you, Papa, for — but she cut the thought short.

And then she heard a whisper to her left: “Christina!”

She halted, and then gingerly stepped out into the river shallows, hoping her boots were waterproof. “Papa?”

Through the blurring mist she could see that there was something like a small dolphin or huge catfish lying in the shallows, panting visibly. Tentacles growing out of its face curled and splashed.

She heard water trickling, and then saw that the thing had a bony hinged arm too, with wet fingers on the end of it.

“Take my hand,” it wheezed.

Christina forced herself not to step back; but in a tight voice she said, “No.”

“My fault,” whispered the creature that was her father’s ghost. The arm fell back into the water with a splash. “Gabriel’s daughter — your lives — your soul. Looking at me? Don’t look. I stay on the bottom most days — all fear one another — river worms now.”

“William,” she said helplessly, “said to tell you he loves you.”

The creature groaned softly.

It occurred to Christina that she would be able to bear this for only a few more seconds.

“What did you want to tell me?” Her mouth was full of saliva, and she swallowed and gagged. “You asked me to meet you here.”

“Cut yourself?” said the fish-thing on a rising, whistling note. “On a rock? You could. Give your poor father a few drops of your living blood?”

This time she did step back. “No. Was that all you wanted to say to me?”

“No, no, I’m sorry, forgive me: don’t look at me. No, I wanted to say — choke it. It choked me.”

Icy water abruptly invaded the toe of Christina’s left boot, and her whole body shuddered at the shock. She gasped, “Choke what, Papa?”

“Statue, the uncle, of yours, my Francesca’s brother! Moony knows how. Save your souls; undo it all, then I can save mine.”

The freezing water quickly spread under the sole of her foot; her toes were already numb. “Papa, where is it?”

The fish-thing blew out spray, though its breath didn’t steam. “Here,” it rasped, “damn you, here! No, not here — in my throat. My heart clenched, I was dying — I thought Polidori would save me, immortal — I meant to swallow it — but — just gasping, choking.”