Tim Powers - Hide Me Among the Graves

For the moment she forgot about her foot and her lonely and gloomy surroundings. “You choked on it?”

“Choke him. Moony knows how.” The thing thrashed clumsily, rolling out toward deeper water. Its wide ragged mouth was toward the foggy sky, and it wheezed, “Ugly, crushed, blind — I know — sorry — this waits for you all too, remember.”

Then it seemed to suffer some sort of fit, and went spasming and splashing out of sight into the fog; and it must have sunk, for the scratching breath and the splashing ceased.

“Papa…!” whispered Christina, all alone in the cold on the narrow dark shore.

Then she reminded herself that she was thirty-one now, not fourteen anymore; and she was likely to catch pneumonia if she didn’t get into dry slippers soon.

Tears were cold on her cheeks. She turned and began plodding back toward the lights of the watermen.

IT WAS ELEVEN THIRTY when Gabriel unlocked the street door at 14 Chatham Place and began groping and clumping his way up the unlit stairs. He heard furtive rustling and whispering from the floor above, and hoped Lizzie wasn’t in communication with dead Walter Deverell again; Gabriel had taken away her pencil planchette, but she could have improvised one with a bent fork or something.

The sitting room above him was unlit, but he could see faint changes in the dimness up there, as if figures were quickly but silently darting about.

“Who’s there?” he whispered, not wanting to wake Lizzie if it was someone else. Could Swinburne have come back here?

A draft of chilly air swept down the stairs, and Gabriel’s nostrils twitched at the scent of the sea. Christ, she had opened the French doors over the river!

Gabriel took the last steps two at a time, but the sitting room was empty when he stood panting in the dark doorway. Reflections and echoes from the river, he told himself, not intruders. He stepped to the French doors, but before pulling them closed, he looked out at the infinity of fog. A bell sounded out there somewhere, and then after a few seconds another; who would be out on the river tonight? He thought of going out onto the balcony and peering down at the dark shore below — but the sudden, irrational thought that he might see his dead father down there on the sand, blindly gaping upward, made him close the doors with enough force to rattle the glass panes.

He was sweating — because he was still wearing his overcoat. He wrestled it off and threw it, along with his scarf and gloves, onto the couch. And finally he walked across to the hall and the bedroom door.

The door was ajar, and Lizzie was asleep on the bed, lying on top of the blankets and still in the dress she’d worn at dinner. She was snoring deeply.

Gabriel sighed in qualified relief and decided to pour himself a brandy before going to bed.

Then he noticed the piece of paper on the front of her dress. Stepping closer, he saw that it was folded and pinned to the fabric.

Not letting himself think or breathe, he crossed to the bed and tore the note free and opened it.

He read: This is the only way out that will save us. Preserve my family by avoiding them, especially poor Harry.

The laudanum bottle was on the bedside table, empty now. She had always been protective of her family, especially her half-wit brother Harry.

“Lizzie!” He took hold of her bare shoulders and shook her, but her head just rolled limply. “Lizzie!” he shouted into her face.

She showed no response. He noticed that she was paler than usual, and with a trembling hand he took hold of her wrist. Her pulse, when he found it, was slow and weak.

Take the lot, he had told her when he had thrust the laudanum bottle into her hand. His chest was suddenly empty and cold.

He dropped her hand and for a long moment just stood shaking over her, his hands spread helplessly; then he cried, “I’m sorry, Guggums! Wait for me!” and hurried out of the room and down the stairs and out the street door, straight across the damp pavement of Chatham Place square to the fog-veiled lanes of Bridge Street and the house of a doctor.

CHRISTINA WAS ALREADY AWAKE when Maria came hurrying heavily up the stairs to rap at her door.

Christina had awakened at dawn, splashed her face in the water in the basin on the old birchwood washstand, and then padded barefoot across the rug — it had been the parlor rug in the house back on Charlotte Street, cut up for bedroom rugs now — and stared out through the frosted windowpanes at the bundled-up people who were already out and walking along the pavements this morning. Some were clearly peddlers, and some were probably clerks; but after a few minutes of steaming the glass with her breath, she had had to force down the suspicion that some of them were only pretending not to be scrutinizing this house, perhaps peering right up at her window from under their hat brims. She stood and looked for a while, anxiously watching for a particularly clumsy figure under a very wide hat brim.

But she had stepped back, and then heard Maria on the stairs, and she opened the door at Maria’s first knock.

Maria had pulled a robe over her nightdress, and her hair had been hastily brushed. Smells of coffee and bacon from downstairs followed her into the room.

“Lizzie,” Maria panted, “has died. I’m sorry to just — I only now heard.”

Christina sat down on the bed. “Died? Died how?”

“Laudanum — poisoning. Gabriel is ready to go mad. He had half a dozen doctors there, since midnight — Lucy Brown was at the door just now — of course it was William who spoke to her — I gather Lizzie was pronounced dead only a few minutes ago.”

Christina couldn’t see in her sister’s tear-streaked face any of the relief Christina herself felt — but if this death were a suicide, Lizzie might very well have escaped the gross, physical immortality that Christina’s uncle would force on her, and been free to take instead the spiritual immortality offered by Christ. Suicide was a deadly sin, of course, but perhaps Lizzie had done it to save herself and her unborn child from a surer exclusion from Heaven.

And Christina was honest enough to concede, though only ever to herself, that she would be jealous if Lizzie were to become one of her monstrous uncle’s vampiric brides.

“Was it,” began Christina. She paused, then went on, “Was it, does it seem to have been — an accident?”

“’Stina! Of course it was an accident. Don’t be ridiculous!” Maria sat down on the bed beside Christina. She took Christina’s hand and said, “Probably it wasn’t an accident. Oh, it might have been, you know!”

“I don’t think it would damn her soul,” said Christina, “under the circumstances?”

“True, she was saving her child, and herself — if — if she did it in time.”

Christina took a deep breath and squeezed her sister’s hand. “Listen, Moony, I know where the statue is. Papa’s little black statue.”

Maria frowned and shook her head. “What? You know where it is? How long have you—?”

“I only learned last night.”

“Oh, ’Stina, if only we had got it and destroyed it as soon as you knew! It might have saved Lizzie. But, but! — if she was too late, if she didn’t die … clean! — we can probably still save her from…”

“Premature resurrection.”

“Yes, by destroying it! With Uncle John gone, I doubt she’d be sustained. Where is it?”

“It’s — awkward. I spoke to Papa last night — his ghost, down by the river.”

“Christina, you can’t — that’s not good. That’s witchcraft.”

“It’s spiritualism, science! I didn’t … draw a pentagram, or light candles! He was just there in the shallow water, like — like some sick fish.”