Tim Powers - Hide Me Among the Graves

“Not your style,” Chess called to him.

Then the boat had come around and was surging northwest before the wind, and the ghost multitude quickly receded into the remote blackness.

Swinburne got wearily to his feet and gripped the rail, lowering his head and taking deep breaths of the cold sea air.

“You’ll be among ’em soon enough,” said Chess, not unkindly. “Why don’t you get in out of the wind now.”

Swinburne climbed back down to the belowdecks cabin, stunned and despairing, for he had thought his main challenge would be finding Lizzie’s ghost — it had not occurred to him that she might refuse his proposal.

WHEN THE BOAT’S PITCHING fell to a gentle rise and fall, he knew they had passed the Sheerness breakwater, and he pulled himself back up onto the deck. The kerosene torches had been extinguished, and the old lantern was again glowing on the mast.

The lights on the Kentish hills were bright yellow dots in the night. Out in the cold air again, Swinburne was shivering violently, and he had to ask Chess, who shambled up to him, to repeat something he had just said.

“It don’t work with fishing-boat captains,” the old man said more loudly.

“Wh-what doesn’t?”

“Shipboard marriages.” He shook his head. “But did you truly expect me to marry you to a ghost?”

“Oh, what d-does it matter now?”

Chess grinned, without cheer. “Just so you know in future — they couldn’t say ‘I do.’ There’s no I, and they haven’t the wherewithal to choose to do anything.”

“She chose to reject me!”

“That wasn’t a choice, lad — that was an empty gun saying click .”

“She chose to reject me,” said Swinburne again, and Chess shook his head and shambled back to rejoin his laboring dead ancestors.

After a few minutes, the mariners let the sail go slack and one of them leaned on the tiller, and Swinburne saw the pier only moments before Chess threw a line over a bollard on it and began pulling the bow in.

And the figure standing at the foot of the pier wasn’t visible until a match flared in the darkness and lit what must have been the end of a cigar.

Chess and his ancestors finished mooring the boat and tying up the lowered sail, and then Chess plodded wearily across the deck to the mast and extinguished the lantern; the darkness was total. A minute later Swinburne heard the hatch cover clatter down.

His business here seemed to be ended.

Swinburne shrugged and stepped up onto the pier.

“And how do you do, sir?” he called toward the tiny orange-glowing coal of the cigar.

“Stupidest question I’ve ever heard,” came the gruff answer.

Swinburne clenched his teeth and made himself step forward, but the cigar coal bobbed in quick retreat.

“Stay back, you fool!” came the unseen man’s voice. “Don’t you know anything? I can survive their notice, but I doubt you could.”

Swinburne forced his voice to be steady. “Whose notice?”

“Not at night, under an open sky. Noon tomorrow — in the Whispering Gallery in the dome of St. Paul’s. Stand at the southernmost point, by the stairs. Don’t fail to be there, if you hope to save your life or your soul.”

Then the cigar coal fell to the ground and went out, probably under a heel. After Swinburne had called hello a few times, he slowly but resolutely began walking forward, but his measured trudging took him all the way up to the road without hearing a sound from the man who had spoken to him; and he exhaled and relaxed and began trudging back toward Sheerness to get a room at the hotel for the remainder of the night.

ST. PAUL’S CATHEDRAL WAS a particularly daunting white splendor in the cold noonday sun. It stood blocking out most of the blue sky on a wide railed square at the crest of Ludgate Hill, the highest point in the City, and though he couldn’t see the dome from the foot of the broad marble stairs out front, the two widely separated towers and the two lofty rows of paired columns between them made Swinburne feel as insignificant as the limitless dark ocean had done last night. The bottom third of the enormous building, the hundred-foot extent from the projecting entablature between the two galleries of columns down to the pavement, seemed a slightly darker shade of white, as if the sea had once tried to engulf the cathedral and then impotently receded.

And I’m out of my depth, he thought as he began reluctantly tapping up the steps. He was wearing a hat and gloves, not because of the cold but because direct sunlight had begun lately to irritate his skin — at least this distasteful place offered welcome shade.

It was of course a church, a Christian church, and mentally he recited lines from a poem he’d written: Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath; We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death.

Certainly Swinburne didn’t seem to be conquering by pursuing the pagan sorts of supernaturalism. They were real enough — as proved by the two ghosts he had spoken to out at sea last night! — but the world had indeed grown gray, grayer than he had guessed when he had written the poem; and he was afraid that he would never be able to drink of Lethe’s river: to forget his love for Lizzie … and her refusal of him.

The broad interior of the cathedral, with its columns and the arches of its ceiling peaking impossibly far overhead, made him feel like a rodent; no service was going on at the moment, fortunately, and the isolated figures praying in the pews were all facing away from him. Who, he wondered as he scuttled through slanting beams of rainbow-colored light from the south-facing stained-glass windows, is this man who wants to talk to me? And why does he?

Far overhead, the interior of the great dome ballooned up in what must have been eight huge triangular concave panels with vague dark murals painted on them, but Swinburne slanted off to the right across the marble floor, to the stairs, before he would have to walk under its ornate high immensity; and the tall white-and-gold altar was thankfully still farther away down the long central aisle.

The corkscrew staircase was comfortably narrow and dim; it was warmer than the vast nave had been and smelled reassuringly of tallow and old book paper. He took off his hat to keep from bumping it against the low ceiling. After about a hundred ascending steps, he reached a gallery with a library at one end of it, but the Whispering Gallery proved to be higher up, so he returned to the stairs and kept climbing.

After puffing his way up an even greater number of stone stairs than before, he stepped out into the highest gallery inside the cathedral, a circular catwalk high above the nave, at the very base of the incurving dome.

A ring of tall windows in the dome above him let in bright daylight, and above them were the huge murals he had glimpsed the bottoms of from the nave floor below. He stepped out to the railing and looked down — a hundred feet directly below, the white-and-black checkerboard pattern of the floor was interrupted by a wide compass-rose mosaic.

The enormous Gothic geometry of it all, the slanting insubstantial buttresses of sunlight, and the sheer volume of empty space above and below him, were dizzying, and it was several moments before he remembered that he was supposed to meet someone right here — at the south rim of the dome, by the stairs.

He pulled out his watch and squinted at it: noon exactly. Three or four other people stood at other points around the gallery’s circumference, peering up at the murals, but none of them was paying any evident attention to him.

The view below chilled his belly, and he stepped back to lean against the rounded wall below the windows.