Tim Powers - Hide Me Among the Graves

“And it was cold.” Maria shook her head. “Poor Papa.” Then she squinted at her sister. “How did you happen to be down by the river last night?”

“He told me to meet him there.”

“Told you how?”

“I was — it doesn’t matter. He said—”

“You used that pencil thing that Gabriel took from Lizzie, didn’t you?”

“Somewhat. Slightly. I wasn’t trying to talk to him, but he—”

“Consulting the dead! That’s a sin, ’Stina! Who were you trying to talk to?” Then she nodded. “Uncle John.”

“Not talk to, I simply hoped to get more of the ‘Folio Q ’story. But Moony! Will you listen? The statue is apparently in Papa’s throat. When his heart failed, he put it in his mouth, hoping Uncle John might save him, and in his travail he apparently inhaled it — and choked.” Christina was horrified to realize that she was close to giggling, and she bit her tongue.

Maria’s wide face was blank. “Evidently burial in sanctified ground doesn’t stop him,” she said slowly.

“No,” agreed Christina.

“And our little ritual, at the Read estate seventeen years ago—” “It kept him away for a while. It let my body expel—” She caught herself and hurried on, “I didn’t see him for … months, afterward, and I had time to get stronger. I might have died, otherwise.”

Maria hadn’t been listening closely. “But what can we do? ” she said. “We can’t dig up Papa and — and cut his throat open!”

“He said you would know how to choke him, choke Uncle John.”

“Choke him? Choke the statue? What would that mean?”

“Well, he didn’t say. Ghosts are never lucid, Moony! They’re shy — ashamed. And not very intelligent. But I think they are more honest, with their souls gone. They’ve lost all their…”

“Scruples.”

“Yes. I don’t think they remember why they ever kept secrets.”

“In his last year,” said Maria slowly, “Papa was writing a treatise on transmigration of souls. Mama burned it after he died, but he had me find and translate some Hebrew sources for him, in one of the manuscript collections in the British Museum. I could easily get permission to see those manuscripts again. There was a passage… I remember thinking at the time that it would have been helpful if I had read it before you and I did our… Grecian burial, seventeen years ago.”

“It wouldn’t … compromise you? Us, I mean? Spiritually?”

“No, as I recall, it didn’t involve summoning or confronting anything. I believe it involved mirrors — and, well, blood — but it was like a trap, or a fence; it would stop spirits, but you didn’t have to be present.”

“How would we arrange it?”

“I–I’d need to reread the old manuscript.”

Christina stood up. “When is the funeral to be? Lizzie’s, I mean.”

Maria shook her head and tried to speak; she cuffed tears from her eyes and hiccuped, then managed to say, “God knows. Apparently Gabriel is not nearly ready to admit that she has actually died.”

Christina shivered. “I hope she has. Died for good, that is to say, with no … earthly return from it.”

“I do too,” whispered Maria. “I pray to God that she has.”

Christina crossed to the pegs on which her clothes were hung. “I must go to Gabriel. And I need to get a letter to a veterinarian in Wych Street — I’ve got to cancel an appointment I made for today.”

SHEERNESS WAS AN old garrison town on the coast, at the mouths of the Thames and the river Medway. It was forty-six miles east of London on the London, Chatham and Dover Railway line, and Swinburne had spent two hours and nine shillings to get there in a drafty second-class railway carriage that he had shared with half a dozen women, apparently the wives of laborers in the dockyard. Swinburne had reflected that any one of the women looked capable of throwing him bodily off the train, and he had left his copy of Baudelaire’s scandalous Les Fleurs du mal in his overcoat pocket and had instead contented himself with reading Dickens’s David Copperfield. He had even pulled his ridiculous sou’wester hat down at the sides to somewhat conceal his possibly affronting hedge of coppery hair.

He was out in this Godforsaken corner of England because Lizzie had died two days earlier, apparently by her own hand.

A five-minute walk from the Sheerness station had taken him to a railed lane overlooking the shore, and since the sun had only a few minutes ago gone down over the Gravesend hills behind him, and the sky was still pale, he had stood there for a few minutes with the cold sea wind flapping the long back brim of his rubberized hat. A couple of distant figures trudged along the darkening expanse of sand below him, carrying a pole that might have been a mast or some fishing apparatus, and a man on horseback a hundred yards farther away was trotting north along the band of darker damp sand by the gray fringe of surf. Off to his right, near the empty steamboat pier, Swinburne saw a long open shed with what looked like a row of a dozen gypsy wagons in it — and then he recognized these as bathing machines stowed away for the winter. Come June they would be wheeled out, and ladies in street clothes would climb in and pull the doors closed, and then the vehicles would be drawn by horses down the slope and a few yards out into the shallows, where the ladies, having changed into bathing suits, could open the seaside doors and step down to splash about in the water, unobserved from the shore. In spite of the purpose of his quest tonight, Swinburne had forlornly wished that one hardy lady or two might have braved the cold sea this evening; and that, if any had done it, he had brought a telescope.

He had sighed and walked on to the brightly gas-lit Grand Hotel, where he had moodily drunk three brandies before strolling southeast down Broadway, away from the lights of the town. The slow crash of surf against the seawall a mile out to his right was the only punctuation to the steady wind, and the coming night looked likely to be far darker out here than any ever were in London.

Soon the lantern on the pier Chichuwee had told him to watch for stood out clearly ahead of him, and Swinburne trudged up to within a few yards of the foot of the short pier and stood there for a full minute, nerving himself to take the last few steps of this long day’s journey. Someone must have lit the lantern and hung it on its pole at the end of the pier, but Swinburne couldn’t see anyone.

He took a deep breath now and squeezed Baudelaire in his pocket for luck, then tramped down the booming planks of the pier, threading his way delicately around buckets and lengths of rusty chain.

Several moored boats rocked gently on the black water in the lantern light, but only one seemed occupied. If it were the one Chichuwee had directed him to, it was a fishing boat, and Swinburne couldn’t imagine this vessel being anything much else. The grimy, battered vessel was no pleasure craft, certainly.

The boat was about twenty-five feet long. The short mast was bare, and the sail on its tethered boom was furled, but smoke was fluttering up out of a short tin pipe on the deck forward of two wide rectangular holes; stepping closer and peering over the gunwale, Swinburne saw that the rearward hole was partly filled with what appeared to be wet gravel. Perhaps it was some unattractive sort of shellfish. The chilly onshore wind was metallic and sulfurous, with a taint of coal smoke from the little chimney.