Tim Powers - Hide Me Among the Graves

The mourners shuffled closer, with the white-haired old priest leading the way; Christina wondered what the old cleric would do if he knew what was in the grave. And Gabriel looked ready, Christina thought with sudden agonized sympathy, to jump into the grave himself. And this is all my fault, she thought; and Papa’s too, and Papa’s too, for bringing the hellish thing back from Italy and then giving it to me.

The ropes went slack, and two of the gravediggers rapidly drew them up and coiled them, and then all four stepped back.

Christina’s face went icy cold — for her uncle’s attention was still a quivering shadow on her mind; desperately she steered her thoughts toward her father’s old headstone and away from the panicky realization that her uncle’s identity was not fragmented now that Lizzie’s doctored coffin sat on top of her father’s.

The priest shook more holy water down into the grave and said, “‘We therefore commit her body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in the sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life.’”

Christina made the sign of the cross, though she wasn’t Catholic. He is paying such exclusive attention to me, she thought, because I’m still physically close to his petrified body. The terrible attention will wane as I drive away.

And she knew that Polidori had caught that thought and ruefully agreed with it; though his intrusive identity seemed to promise a more lasting intimacy someday soon.

Gabriel stepped forward and crouched beside the shovelful of dirt beside the grave, and he picked up a handful and scattered it gently into the grave.

CRAWFORD HAD HEARD MCKEE splash into mud when she dropped from the last rung, and so he was not surprised when his boots plunged into viscous muck; and he had landed with bent knees and managed to stay upright.

The humming he had heard earlier was louder now and sounded even less organic.

“Johanna!” called McKee. “Where are you?”

Crawford jumped as a chorus of harsh voices, all speaking in unison, echoed in reply, “She is here with me. Come in.” The voices seemed to reverberate from another chamber than the space in which Crawford and McKee stood.

Crawford didn’t move now, and from the silence that followed the echoes of the voices, he knew McKee didn’t either; then he heard a rustle of clothing and a faint metallic scrape, and his nostrils caught the pungent smell of garlic. Hastily he dug his own little bottle out of his waistcoat pocket, though he didn’t unscrew its lid yet.

He heard her step forward in the mud to his left, in the direction the voices had seemed to come from; and, though his face was icy with sweat and his knees were shaking so badly that he feared he might fall down, Crawford made himself lift one foot and swing it ahead and then put it down in the unseen mud and set his weight on it, and then lift the other. His free hand was extended out in front of himself, and when he heard McKee slap some surface, he found no obstacle, though through his boot toe he felt a rounded shelf to step up onto.

Her whisper came to him from a yard away to his left: “A sort of bent pillar, here.”

“An opening here,” he muttered. “And a step.”

Her hand touched his shoulder, then slid down to his hand and squeezed it. “Thank you for staying,” she whispered. “You are — Oh, hell. Thank you.”

He could think of no answer, and only squeezed her hand in the moment before she drew it away.

With his boot he could feel the edge of a hole in the curved surface of the step, and, carefully sliding his leading foot around it to move ahead, Crawford felt a close concave wall in front of him with an opening in it; he reached up and down to trace the shape of the opening — it was tall and narrow, and the top third curved to the right so that he would have to go through sideways, leaning forward. Whatever this structure was, it appeared to have no straight lines or corners.

“Hole in the floor,” he told McKee softly. “Opening in the wall directly ahead.”

He could still see nothing, but he strongly sensed sentient presences on the far side of the curved slit in the stone wall.

He managed to whisper, “I’m stepping through.”

There was no reply beyond her fast breathing, so he gritted his teeth and slid through the narrow, bent gap and found himself standing on a smooth, slanted floor. The air was warmer on this side of the partition, and smelled of incense and machine oil.

McKee scraped through behind him, and her shoulder bumped his.

At that moment, glaringly bright yellow flames sprang up overhead all around them — Crawford yelled in surprise and leaped back, throwing one arm across his eyes, but the slick floor sloped up steeply behind him; his heels skidded and he found himself sitting down and sliding forward to where he’d been standing a moment before.

He stood up again, slowly, holding his arms out for balance. McKee had dropped to a tense crouch. Blinking and squinting, he could now see that they were in the narrower end of a large, roughly egg-shaped chamber, as if they had entered a barn-sized bubble in solid tan marble; torches blazed at intervals high up on the incurving walls.

A dozen vaguely man-shaped figures that seemed to be made of shifting mud swayed on a lower level in the middle of the chamber — the humming seemed to emanate from irregular sputtering holes in the fronts of their heads — but Crawford’s attention was helplessly fixed on the man who stood on a wide rise beyond them. They were of human height, but the man towered above them, and Crawford’s first impression was that the man was very far away, miles away, and stood as high as a mountain.

Then Crawford saw that the man held in his arms the little girl they had seen running away among the gravestones, and this restored the perspective — the man and the girl were no more than forty feet away — though Crawford’s eyes ached with the effort of trying to keep the man in focus.

The man’s outlines and colors flickered, as though he were a magic lantern projection, but at the same time he radiated so aggressive an impression of physical volume that his body seemed to possess mass beyond its boundaries, as if it occupied more space than ordinary dimensions permitted — what quality was this that transcended volume, as volume transcended mere area? It took Crawford a moment to note the mundane details — dark curly hair, a mustache, an indistinct black coat, and eyes like glittering black glass.

The mud figures below him all suddenly spoke clearly, in unison: “My name has been John Polidori,” and Crawford knew that the man beyond them was speaking through them.

“You are the fleshly origins of this child,” the voices went on, “and she is ready now to abandon the cords of merely human flesh.”

McKee took a step forward on the concave ivory floor. “No,” she said in a loud but level voice, raising her little bottle of crushed garlic, “she is not.”

Crawford desperately wished she hadn’t advanced, but he made himself shuffle forward to stand beside her. The bright torchlight was still making him squint, and he couldn’t stare directly at Polidori — but in his peripheral vision he could see the little girl swinging his watch on its chain.

McKee threw the opened bottle toward Polidori — and several of the mud figures instantly splashed upward in a single solid sheet; the bottle and its spilled contents cratered into the mud surface, which then collapsed back to the pit in the floor.

CHRISTINA NOTICED THAT SWINBURNE kept looking back toward the grave as the funeral party trudged away toward the stairs that led down toward the yard and the chapel and the waiting coaches. Does he think we left someone behind? she wondered.