Tim Powers - Hide Me Among the Graves

But there was no way Christina could ask them to clear all the dirt away from her father’s coffin to see if there was a hole in it.

The pile of earth they had dug out — for the second time in eight years — was a mound under a green tarpaulin off to her left, though a token shovelful of dark loam had been left on the brown grass beside the grave.

The priest was shaking holy water onto Lizzie’s coffin now, the drops beading up on the varnished lid like raindrops, and he was reading something from the Bible in a frail voice that the breeze snatched away.

Lizzie’s coffin lay now on a black-velvet-draped bier on the grass to the right of the group of mourners. It would have cost Gabriel quite a bit — not just the two-inch-thick polished oak and the brass handles and plaque, but, as William had whispered to her, the sacrificial offering inside it of all of Gabriel’s poems!

Christina reflected with a shiver that she could never sacrifice her own poetry that way. It would be like burning an old lover’s letters — destroying something that was not entirely hers to dispose of.

The thought of her poetry brought on another dizzy, fiddling wave of her uncle’s attention, so strong that she almost expected to see him among the mourners, staring intently at her with the eyes of the portrait on the wall at home; but she knew he was down in that hole, inside her father’s coffin, in fact inside her father’s dead throat.

If only the damned priest could hurry, and at last … at last let the gravediggers fill in the hole, she thought quickly, steering her mind away from a thought she must not let her uncle perceive.

She frowned and shut her eyes and tried to pray, though she was even more afraid of God’s attention than of John Polidori’s.

EVENTUALLY, “A WELL,” CAME McKee’s voice from the darkness ahead. “I think.”

Crawford kept crawling forward until his fingertips brushed the soles of her boots in the pitch blackness.

“Don’t crowd me,” she said. “I can feel rungs down in it, like the one by St. Clement’s. Damn, I should have come in feet first.”

She was hesitating, and Crawford almost said, Let me go first, before he realized how useless that thought was; then she said softly, perhaps speaking to herself, “I think we’re closest to St. Mary-le-Bow in Cheapside. ‘I do not know, says the great bell at Bow.’” Then, louder, she said, “Aedis te deum nosco.”

Her boots moved forward, out of reach, and he heard the fabric of her dress sliding against stone.

“What are you going to do?” Crawford asked hoarsely.

“I’m going to grab hold of one of the rungs below me, and then — do a somersault, I suppose, and try to hang on through it.”

Crawford tried to picture what she was describing, and he couldn’t see how she could maintain her grip through such a move.

“Are there,” he asked desperately, “rungs above you?”

“Good thought.”

He heard her dress rustling and tearing, and her shoes knocked and scuffed in front of his face. He reached out and lightly touched the soles of them, and he realized that she had managed to roll over onto her back in the tight tunnel.

She shifted farther ahead, and then exclaimed, “Yes! Solid! Thank God one of us is thinking — I believe I would have killed myself going down headfirst.”

Crawford nodded in agreement, though there was no way she could see it. Sweat rolled down into his eyes.

He heard her shift forward in stages, and then it was just her heels skidding on stone and he heard her panting outside the narrow tunnel; after a few moments he heard her boots clunking on iron — they ascended a few rungs, and then descended, echoing in some bigger space.

“I’m below you now,” came her voice. “Roll over and slide out.”

Crawford was bigger around than she was, but he managed to get onto his side and push his way forward until his head and arms were projecting out of the tunnel, though there was still no light at all.

The wet-clay draft was now palpably coming from below him, chilling his wet shirt, and the noise of his breathing echoed away in a big volume of air. He could hear McKee’s boots scraping on metal some yards below him, and beyond that he now heard a low, many-toned humming — and he remembered McKee’s description of the vox cloacarum, the sound caused by pressure differences in the infinite old sewers. This seemed different.

He groped upward with one hand and found a metal rod — he tugged it, and it didn’t give, so he pulled himself farther out and was able to roll more and get his other hand on it too.

He pulled himself farther out into the black abyss and had to push with his heels to get his shins out past the top edge of the tunnel, but at last he was able to set his feet on the bottom edge of it, and then up onto the rungs.

Then he was following McKee in her audibly slow descent, past the tunnel mouth and farther down into the well.

After climbing down a few more rungs, he said, “That wasn’t ‘oranges and lemons.’”

“It was Latin for ‘I know thee as the god of the temple,’” she said. “Now hush.”

Crawford was too sore and tired to do more than twitch at the first touch of the insect wings, and after the surprise of the first flutter at his cheek, he ignored their feather touches on his face and hands. The work of moving one hand and one foot, and then the other hand and the other foot, and the rhythmic chuff of his breath against the stone wall in front of his ever-flexing knuckles, became nearly automatic, and he tried to imagine the long-lost people who must have built this well. Into his mind swam images of Roman soldiers battling men who fought naked with crude black-iron swords.

“Again there’s a drop,” came McKee’s voice from below him, jarring him out of the insistent daydreams. “I can’t see a thing below, but — Johanna did it, so we can.”

Crawford’s first thought was that if he heard McKee fall a long way he could climb up the ladder and make his way back through the tunnel to the open air — but he couldn’t permit that.

“I’ve,” he said, “got a new watch. Let me drop it and we can listen and see how long it takes to hit something.”

“A capital notion, my dear,” she said, and he heard a shiver of exhaustion and relief in her voice. “I owe you a lot of time.”

He pulled his watch out of his waistcoat pocket and fumbled one-handed at the little bar on the end of the chain; it was tucked through a waistcoat buttonhole, and when he finally poked it free, he lost his grip on the watch.

“There it goes,” he said hastily.

He waited several seconds, but heard nothing.

His belly was suddenly icy and tingling at the thought of a vast drop below them, and he gripped the rung he was holding on to tightly and tried to flatten himself against the wall.

“Climb … back … up,” he said distinctly through clenched teeth.

McKee’s quavering voice said, “But — she must have come this way—”

And then another voice, a little girl’s, spoke hesitantly from not far below them: “I caught it before it could fly away. And you must fall too.”

Crawford didn’t like the sound of must fall, but he said to McKee, “I’ll climb down and drop as soon as I hear you land and step aside.”

THE FOUR BURLY GRAVEDIGGERS in their rough corduroy trousers and jackets had slung a pair of ropes under the gleaming black coffin, and now they came forward out of the tree shadows and lifted it off the bier and plodded across the grass toward Christina, with the coffin swinging between them. She stepped back hastily, and two of them moved to each side of the grave and then began lowering the coffin into the hole.