Tim Powers - Hide Me Among the Graves

And at his ear came a whisper: “Poet”—he glanced around quickly, but no one was within a dozen yards of him—“stay where you are.”

Of course, he thought nervously, the Whispering Gallery! The interior of the dome must carry sounds right around the whole stone ring.

“What?” he said softly.

“Speak against the stone,” came the disembodied whisper again.

Swinburne obediently pressed his cheek against the cold stone wall.

“What do you have to tell me?” he muttered.

“You’re in love with a ghost.” The disembodied sentence seemed to carry an implicit you fool at the end of it. “You shouldn’t need me to tell you this, and if you’ve got a brain in your head you understood it last night, but — have no further contact with the thing. I’d say ‘with her,’ but — as you probably noticed — it’s not really a ‘her’ anymore. Go meet a real flesh-and-blood girl, and fall in love with her .”

Swinburne was frowning. Could this man somehow represent the Church, or the government? Was there some old law about necromancy still on the books? He peered at the other people standing at intervals around the gallery, trying to guess which of them might be the one speaking to him. “You—” he began. “This is absurd. A ghost? You’re obviously drunk—”

“One of us probably is,” came the whisper, “but it’s not me. Chichuwee told me all about your conversation with him, and I know a couple of things that the bird man doesn’t.”

Swinburne could feel his face blushing against the cold stone, and he blinked out across the dome — a beam of sunlight from one of the windows had moved onto him, and he shuffled sideways to be out of the sun’s glare. There was a tall, white-bearded old man standing on the opposite side of the railed ring, a hundred feet away across the empty air of the dome — surely that was the furtive speaker. “This is none of your—”

“It is of mine, boy,” came the eerily far-traveling whisper, and the tall old man at the northernmost point of the gallery hunched his shoulders as the voice reached Swinburne’s ears. “If it weren’t for a sin of mine, the embodiment of which was broken but now grows again behind my jugular vein — if not for that — you could go sailing out to talk to your dead girl every night; but you’re not the only one who loves her now, and your rival is inclined toward tumultuous jealousy and will surely kill you.”

“Rival? Who, Gabriel? He doesn’t—”

“No,” and this time it was spoken: “you fool. I don’t know who Gabriel is, nor who you are, and it doesn’t matter. I only know the rival. Hah! Ask Chichuwee about the Nephilim, though I expect the answer will cost you many more birds than your previous consultation did. There’s a creature, call it a goddess, an archaic goddess, who loves your ghost-girl, and who will kill any mortals who love her too, or who she loved, back when she still could. Fortunately for you, this — this goddess is wounded and blinded right now, for another day or so, and is not aware of your ill-advised expedition last night. Don’t repeat it .”

Swinburne shuffled sideways again to stay out of the sunbeam. He was trying to be amused by this grotesque conversation. “Her husband, Gabriel— he loved her, and she loved him. Is this goddess of yours going to kill him?”

“Unless he has joined a god’s family too. And I don’t need yet another member of that sort of family to deal with, so heed me. This — why are you moving?”

“Moving?”

“Along the wall.”

Swinburne shrugged. “Staying out of the sunlight. What is this family—”

“Step back into it.” The old man on the far side of the dome was clearly staring at him now. “Yes, you’ve seen me. Now humor me — step back into the sunbeam — or I’ll drag you outside without a hat.”

Swinburne was sweating, and he glanced sideways at the sunlit patch of wall.

He took a deep breath and let it out. “I’d truly rather not.”

“Bloody hell. Does it hurt, sting?”

Swinburne shrugged, then reluctantly nodded.

“And have you lately begun to … write poetry?”

“I’ve always written poetry, I—”

A hundred feet away across the dome, the old man waved impatiently. “Damn you,” came the whisper along the wall, “has it suddenly become very good ? Better than you had imagined you could write?”

Swinburne’s mouth fell open. “Yes,” was all he could say.

“Step into the light. It won’t hurt your sorry hide today, trust me.”

This stranger knew so much about him that Swinburne, dazed, did as he was told: he shuffled sideways into the shaft of sunlight — and it was simply warm, not astringent.

“Well, through glass,” he muttered, mistrustful of the apparent relief, “and holy glass, at that—”

“Try it again when you’re outside. She bit you, didn’t she? Before she died?”

Swinburne rocked his head against the stone wall, feeling the mild sun on his face. “Yes.”

For a few moments there was no skating whisper along the wall, and the only sounds were the windy echoes of random footsteps and coughs from the nave below.

At last the stranger’s soft voice came again. “I had hoped your dilemma was simpler. It’s her poisonous attention on you, in you, that reacted to sunlight … but her attention right now is many times decimated and concentrated only on her wounded self. You have at least one more day, I think, before she’ll be expanded enough to have regard for you again. You must leave England within twenty-four hours. She won’t sense you on the other side of the Channel, the wide, cold salt water.”

Swinburne was looking at his own right hand in the sunlight, savoring the simple warmth of it, and for a moment he let himself imagine starting over again, in France, say, with no history, free of—

“Would I still be able to write poetry?” he asked suddenly.

“Not like you’ve been writing recently, no. Not like Byron and Shelley and Keats, who shared the affliction you’re now free to shed. But — like Tennyson or Ashbless, probably.”

Swinburne relaxed and smiled, very relieved that this decision had turned out to be so easy; and he stepped back out of the sunlight, toward the doorway to the stairs. The old man on the other side of the round gallery looked fit enough, but if he chose to give chase it was unlikely that he’d be able to catch him.

Swinburne went down the curling stairway like a dancer spinning and tapping through a very fast allegro sequence.

I will never, he thought, go near the English Channel again.

FOR SIX DAYS Lizzie’s body had lain in an open coffin in the upstairs parlor at 14 Chatham Place, and though Gabriel had spent nearly every waking hour in the room with her, watching her face by candlelight because the curtains were drawn across the river-facing windows, he had been sleeping on a cot in William’s room at the Albany Street house.

Now the downstairs front door at Chatham Place was open, and the black-draped laurel wreath that had hung there for six days was taken down so that the pallbearers wouldn’t snag against it when it came time to carry the coffin out. The hearse had not arrived yet, but over the course of the last couple of hours a dozen black-clad friends and family members had solemnly stepped inside and climbed the stairs to the now-crowded sitting room. The flaring gas jets were supplemented with candles on the mantel and on two high, cleared bookshelves.