Tim Powers - Hide Me Among the Graves

A couple of flaring kerosene torches mounted at the bow and stern threw a white glare over the dark water, and the nearer waves glittered as they rolled past, like living, diamond-dusted obsidian.

Chess was braced up by the bow, and Swinburne staggered forward against the force of the wind to join him, both to see better ahead and to be nearer to the flame.

Chess was holding the unstoppered bottle of holy water, and Swinburne could see that half of its contents were gone.

Swinburne’s face was already numb with cold, but the chill shivered through his belly too when he looked ahead and saw … white figures standing out there over the waves in the night.

They moved bonelessly like splashes of milk in oil, and the holes that were their eyes and mouths appeared and disappeared as randomly as spots of moonlight on pavement below windblown trees; their arms waved above their shapeless heads.

And over the wind in the rigging he could hear their voices, a shaking cacophony like wind chimes. Men and women, and children, their frail cries rang away across the infinite dark face of the sea in weird atonal harmony.

Swinburne clung dizzily to the bow gunwale. Flying sea spray stung his eyes.

Then one voice out there was clear: “Hadji!” it called. “Save me with your blood!” Swinburne saw the figure now, only a dozen yards away and clearer than the rest. And even out here, even without an organic throat to propel it, the voice was one Swinburne recognized.

Chess leaned toward Swinburne. “You need to throw some of your blood into the sea,” the old man said, speaking loudly to be heard over the ghost chorus and the wind. “The bird man told you that, right?”

“No,” said Swinburne, his gloved hands gripping the slick gunwale. He shook his head.

“Well, it needn’t be gallons — just a few drops will do.” With a sharp click Chess opened a clasp knife and pressed the grip into Swinburne’s palm. “Finger’s fine. That’s your fugitive, is it?”

Tears were blowing back along Swinburne’s cheeks, mingling with the sea spray.

“No,” he said.

Hadji had been Swinburne’s childhood nickname. This was the ghost of his grandfather, who had died two years ago; Swinburne had written about him, “the two maddest things in the north country were his horse and himself” —old Sir John Swinburne had been a free-thinking follower of Voltaire who was once sent to prison for insulting the Prince Regent, and young Algernon had loved and admired him.

“Hadji!” came the cry again across the water, distinct over the wailing of the other ghosts. “Some of your living blood!”

“You have to answer,” said Chess, leaning in close to be heard, “or he’ll hang about and drown out any others.” He grinned. “Huh. Drown out.”

“It’s my grandfather ,” said Swinburne, near sobbing. “I can’t bear it that he’s dead — out here.”

Chess laughed harshly. “My grandfather is dead too, and out here. At least yours doesn’t have to work a Purgatorial fishing boat.”

That made Swinburne look directly at the old man beside him, and then he hunched around to look aft at the two figures standing halfway back along the deck, black silhouettes backlit by the stern torch.

Swinburne suddenly felt cold all through, colder than the wind-borne spray. Very aware of the multitude of ghosts and the vast night sea around them, he turned back to face Chess. “Am I,” he quavered, “dead myself?”

“I think you hope to die,” said Chess, shouting into Swinburne’s ear, “but haven’t the industry to kill yourself in a straightforward fashion.” He laughed. “No, lad, you’re not dead — nor am I. But it seems we both have grandfathers wanting such care as dead men can receive.”

With his gloved right hand he pulled back the bunched left sleeves of his coverall, coat, and sweater, and then quickly tucked it all back into the glove gauntlet, but not before Swinburne had glimpsed a raw cut on the man’s wrist.

Swinburne squinted ahead at the curling wisp that was his own grandfather’s ghost. “But this isn’t them .” He pounded one fist on the gunwale. “I mean— is it?”

Chess said loudly, “They break up, when they die. The core goes away, but the shell sometimes stays. And even the shell is part of what they were.” He nodded out over the bow. “And there’s your grandfather’s.”

“No,” said Swinburne. And then he shouted, “No!” at the white figure curling in the darkness.

“What for me?” piped his grandfather’s ghost.

“Nothing from me,” said Swinburne into his clenched hands on the gunwale; he had spoken almost too quietly for even Chess to hear him over the thrashing wind, but the ghost sprang to fading mist.

Swinburne raised his head, glaring into the infinite night.

“Lizzie!” he called now. “Lizzie Siddal!”

The ghosts all just stood out there, like a million bleached banners of a long-ago defeated army.

“Lizzie!” he called again.

And another ghost came into sharper focus where his grandfather’s had been, and this one managed to look vaguely feminine in its shifting outlines.

“Algy, who are your friends?” it said, and its voice was like notes violined out of glass and sharp edges of bone.

Swinburne’s spray-stung eyes strained with the effort of getting her into focus. “Sailors,” he shouted. “Lizzie, I—”

“The dead leading the blind,” said her ghost. “Algy, it’s always cold here.”

“I’ve come to take you back,” Swinburne called, cupping his hands around his mouth.

“Back! How?”

Swinburne’s teeth stung as he took a deep breath. “Marry me! I love you! With Gabriel it was just ‘till death did you part,’ and that’s — done. Marry me and live in me, in this body, this warm body. ‘One flesh.’” He was still holding Chess’s opened knife, and now he stabbed his finger right through the leather glove and shook drops of blood out into the wind. “With this blood I thee wed!”

But the white figure was now smaller and less distinct. “I’m naked,” came its fainter voice. “You mustn’t look at me.”

“Clothe yourself in me! I love you! We can — travel, read, eat, drink, together!”

“I don’t have that anymore.”

“Have it all again, in me! Marry me! Here’s a ship’s captain, we can be together, a hermaphrodite—”

“No,” came her voice; then, much louder, “ No. ” And she was gone. The other ghosts, filling the night apparently to the invisible horizon, crowded closer, their arms waving like a moonlit kelp forest on the sea floor.

Swinburne gaped at the space where Lizzie’s ghost had been.

Chess pushed away from the bow. “Shouldn’t have spilled your blood till she agreed to take it,” he said before striding back along the rocking deck.

The old man shouted to his two dead crewmen, and they shambled to the tiller and rigging, and in moments the boat was heeling around in the wind.

Ghost limbs flailed at the taut shrouds and were whisked into vanishing fragments, and for a few tense moments as Swinburne clung to the bow their voices were a buzzing, clattering racket in his freezing ears.

“Don’t listen to them!” shouted Chess from behind him.

But Swinburne couldn’t ignore their voices, the things they were saying: “Here, where the world is quiet; / Here, where all trouble seems / Dead winds’ and spent waves’ riot / In doubtful dreams of dreams…” These were lines he had written himself, and so they were convincing. “Even the weariest river / Winds somewhere safe to sea…”

He had already got one knee up on the gunwale when Chess tugged him back to sprawl painfully on the deck.