Tim Powers - Hide Me Among the Graves

And then the imagined readjusted pliers were brought to bear and closed in and something began to go wrong with his mind. Memories intruded forcefully into his narrowed attention, broken and jammed together, like roof beams crashing into a bedroom under an unsustainable weight: the image of his son Girard replaced a dog that Crawford was cutting open for surgery; and he saw the heads of his parents on crows flying over the London Bridge; and his wife Veronica’s face instead of his own staring at him from a mirror, and then the mirror sprang forward and shattered against his forehead and Veronica’s mind was leaking into his.

Her memories were brutal — a hot haze of drunkenness veiled a dim view of naked men with the heads of bulls and birds of prey, and a wailing baby that was carried away by animated skeletons, and fingers tense on the wet grip of a knife—

And his flickering awareness grasped that these were not a distortion of Veronica’s memories, but of McKee’s —

Adelaide! he thought.

The psychic pressure increased, and he caught one last image from her smothered mind — it was of McKee in a white wedding dress in a church, and Crawford was standing beside her on the altar.

And then his mind was too compressed to sustain consciousness.

AT FIRST CHRISTINA thought the sense of constriction signaled the onset of a headache or some distress in her stomach, and she shifted on the leather carriage seat and looked away from Cayley to face the window and take deep breaths of the cold fresh air. The carriage had passed under the stone arch of Highgate Cemetery’s entrance and rocked in a left turn onto the road, and she dreaded the shaking of the increased speed that was sure to follow.

But the uncomfortable tightness was somewhere else, not in her — somewhere in the oppressive and unceasing attention of her uncle.

“Are you well, my dear?” asked Cayley, leaning forward solicitously.

Polidori’s disembodied attention was all to do with squeezing and crushing something, and Christina had to breathe deliberately just to convince herself that she could. She held up her hand to put off answering Cayley.

And then it was gone. She had apparently moved at last out of the sphere of Polidori’s ground-state attention, and she felt all at once lighter and younger. The increasing headwind sluicing through the open window as the horses quickened their pace was pleasantly cooling on her damp forehead.

“Yes, Charles,” she said, her voice lively with surprised relief, “I’m fine.”

Deeply and gladly she inhaled the cold air, and she stretched her fingers on her lap, feeling as though she had at last shed a pair of gloves that she’d worn for decades.

His attention was always on me to some extent, she thought, during these seventeen years, and it’s finally completely gone.

I’m alone on my own.

LIKE A TAUT ROPE suddenly cut, the stretched awareness of the thing that was largely John Polidori snapped back — and then reflexively reached out again to reestablish the broken connection; and its attention fixed on what seemed to be its goal but was instead only streaks of familiar blood in grooves cut into a cluster of mirrors…

And the wave-form that was the Polidori thing’s identity was reflected back onto itself and instantly fragmented into a turbulence of nullifying contradictions and meaningless emphases.

A BOOMING CRASH OF collapsing masonry and the thudding of tons of dirt jarred Crawford, and he rolled over painfully on a wet floor, blinking at shadowed stone walls and coughing grit out of his throat. He could feel hot blood running from his nose and clotting in his mustache and beard, and he peered around him in the darkness, assuming that he was in a building that had partially collapsed.

He knew vaguely that there were a number of ages he might be, but he had no idea which of them might include this experience, whatever it was.

He could hear water rushing in a roofed channel very close by, and now he could dimly see that someone was lying on the stone floor near him — a woman. Had she been injured in the collapse? Had he? He tried to stop coughing and think.

Memories prickled in his consciousness, opening one clear area after another. He was older than he would have guessed, and he was wearing the torn ruins of a linen shirt and creased woolen trousers — he had been at a funeral! — and the dim radiance filtering down the shaft overhead was probably the light of a far-off overcast sky; the woman lying beside him was … was the mother of his daughter!

Then with a mental expansion that felt like his ears popping, he remembered it all, and he quickly rolled over to peer across the rushing stream; but through a haze of dust he saw that the stone platform and bridge-end that had been on that far side were gone now, buried under a new slope of jagged rock and freshly turned earth.

Johanna had been standing over there, with the Polidori thing.

He tilted his head back to stare up at the hole in the arched ceiling over the stream; the ceiling was high, and the light that touched the stone edges of the hole was very faint. He turned to look behind him, in the direction from which they’d come, but could see nothing.

He reached across and shook the woman’s shoulder. “Adelaide!” he whispered.

Her shoulder was yanked away and he heard her scramble into a crouch, suddenly panting.

“I’ve got a knife,” she gasped. “Come near me and I’ll kill you.”

“Adelaide, listen to me.” He got to his feet and reached toward her — then snatched his hand back and heard the blade whistle through the air where it had been.

“Keep back!” she said. “I’ll kill you and that Carpace bitch, both. Tell her—”

“Adelaide,” he interrupted, “Carpace is dead. I killed her. I’m John Crawford.”

She hesitated. “Killed her? What place is this? Strike a light.”

“I can’t. We’re underground, under Highgate Cemetery.” And our daughter is dead, he thought.

“Highgate — do you work at the Magdalen Penitentiary?”

“No, you’ve been out of there for … two years, I think you said.”

“What year is this?”

“1862. And we have to—”

“Ach, so old, all at once? And who are you?”

“John,” he said, “Crawford. I—”

“John!” For several seconds she didn’t move, and then her head whipped around to stare at the spot across the stream where the other stone platform had been.

And she wailed and fell to her knees when she saw the new slope of churned earth and rubble over there.

“Johanna!” she screamed; and then she screamed it again, making Crawford wince, but the third time her voice broke into sobbing.

After a few seconds, she caught her breath and choked, “What happened?”

“I don’t know!” He too was staring at the tumbled stone and dirt across the stream. “I–I believe I slowed him down, in his attack on you, when I interposed my head in his psychic vise — and then he began to crush us both — but I lost consciousness and revived only a moment before you did.”

“This is Sister Christina’s stroke,” said McKee softly. “It was her stroke that stopped him from crushing our minds, and crushed him instead — and my daughter.”

Our daughter, thought Crawford.