Tim Powers - Hide Me Among the Graves

“There’s nothing more we can do,” he said. “We need to get out of here, back up to daylight.”

Slowly, panting as if she’d been running, McKee straightened and peered around in the darkness. To the right, the ledge they were on slanted uphill for at least some distance before it was lost in shadows, and he took her elbow.

She shook it off. “I saw into your head, when he was crushing us — you must have seen into mine.”

“I think so.” He remembered now the image of a wedding, but only said, “Just — distorted fragments.”

“That’s — all?”

“Yes. We’ve—”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes!” He spread his fingers and then clenched his fists and repeated, “We’ve got to get out of here!” He reached out and fumbled for her hand, but she snatched it away.

“Don’t touch me,” she said.

“Wha — why?”

“Why do you think?” She was still panting. “We tried to save Johanna, and we failed, she died. I failed, which is shameful, and you failed, which is shameful.”

“For God’s sake, Adelaide,” he said, starting forward along the ledge and then pausing, “what more could we have done? Damn me, how is it that we did as much as we did?”

McKee stared again for several moments at the jagged slope on the other side of the stream. Then, “Let me lead the way,” she said quietly, stepping around him, “and please don’t speak unless you perceive some danger along our course.”

THEY GROPED THEIR WAY through pitch-blackness, in silence except for the scuff and stumble of their boots on stone and in mud, and when they came to cross-tunnels, or broad areas that seemed spacious judged by the echoes of their breathing, McKee shuffled around until she had found the uphill direction, and they followed that — though several times it crested out and led them farther down. Twice Crawford saw hints of reflected firelight far away down what must have been side corridors, and at one point, when he and McKee were edging along a narrow ledge over a pit, he heard monotonous singing or chanting far below. They clambered blindly over heaped stones that sometimes felt as if they’d been shaped by tools, and made their way up out of waist-deep pools by climbing ancient stone stairs, and edged around boulders made of rusted-together pieces of metal — Crawford’s fingers traced corroded spoons and sword hilts and coins of unguessable age all stuck together like clusters of barnacles.

After at least an hour, he and McKee found themselves walking along a concave floor that was straight and smooth but very slippery — the smell was now very bad, like full chamberpots and rotten eggs — and Crawford heard McKee patting a wall.

“This is modern brick,” she whispered. “The Northern High Level Sewer between Hampstead and Stoke Newington, it must be. There’ll be a ladder.”

And there was, though to find it they had to climb over two chest-high brick walls that McKee called diversion dams. The ladder rang faintly when McKee’s groping hand collided with it.

Crawford gingerly patted his way around McKee and then preceded her up the new iron ladder, and when his head bumped a metal grating, he felt along the bars of it until he was touching the latch, and he managed to climb a few rungs back down as he lowered it on its hinges with one hand.

Above that was a square of solid iron, but it was hinged too, and he trusted the new ladder not to break under his boots when he braced his shoulders under the manhole cover and forced it upward. It squeaked up — he braced his hands in dazzling gray daylight on the steel rim embedded in the street pavement, and pushed — and then the cover fell away behind him with a loud clang that echoed between close housefronts.

He didn’t hear hooves or wheels bearing down on him, so before looking around, he scrambled out of the shaft and reached down for McKee’s hand. And when they had both got to their feet on the crushed stone of the street surface, and he had swung the iron cover back into place, and he and McKee had stumbled to a curb, he saw through narrowed eyes that they were in front of a pastry shop window.

“Would you like a cup of tea?” he croaked. “I’ve got some money.”

Then he flinched at a woman’s harsh voice from behind them. “Breaking into cellars, then, were you?”

Crawford turned toward the voice. In the gray but blinding daylight, an enormous woman in an apron was striding across the street toward them.

“You’re the ones made off with my pig, eh?” she went on loudly.

“No, no,” called Crawford hoarsely, “street collapsed in Highgate — women and children swept into the sewers—”

“Come along,” muttered McKee, grabbing his arm and pulling him into a trot.

“Get help!” yelled Crawford for verisimilitude over his shoulder. “Ropes, ladders!”

He had at least succeeded in baffling the woman, who had stopped and was looking uneasily at the manhole cover.

McKee had yanked Crawford around a corner and the two of them were now walking, as briskly as they could in their clinging wet clothes, against a bone-chilling headwind that made his eyes water. She had let go of his arm.

“Tea!” she said scornfully. “We look like we crawled out of a cesspool!”

Crawford looked at her as she strode along, then glanced down at himself.

It was true. Her dress and his shirt and trousers were slimed with what he hoped was just black mud, though in truth both of them smelled pretty horrible. His beard was stiff with dried blood, and McKee’s dark hair looked like a plundered bird’s nest.

They had been walking south down the middle of a rutted dirt road between old overhanging Tudor houses, stared at with disfavor but with no active interference by a couple of cart drivers who passed them, but now McKee stopped, hugging herself and shivering.

She faced Crawford and spoke clearly. “Our daughter is dead — and thank God she will at least stay dead, with the resurrecting devil killed too.” She took a deep breath and let it out. “I’m leaving London. There’s nothing I can hope for in this city.” She squinted at him, as if to fix his face in her memory. “This village is Lower Clapton — I know it well, I’ve often caught birds near here. Kingsland Road is that way,” she said, waving to the east, “and if you walk south along it for two or three miles, you’ll get to the river at London Bridge. I suggest you jump right in.”

“Can I—” he began; then he shook himself and just said, “I wish you would stay.”

“It would only remind me of lost and impossible things. Everything you and I had in common is gone.” She turned and began striding away in the direction opposite to the way she had directed him.

“Adelaide!” he called after her, but she didn’t alter her pace.

When Polidori had vanished, Crawford had felt his mind popping by degrees back out to its former extent, like a half-crushed hat being poked back into shape; now one last dent seemed to spring back out, though it felt as if he’d been living with this one for years.

“Adelaide,” he yelled desperately, “marry me!”

She hunched in her ragged and fouled clothes, as if someone had thrown a stone at her, but kept walking — and through one last dissolving thread of the compaction that Polidori’s attack had imposed on their minds, he caught a final thought from her: So we can have more children?

Implicit in the thought were the names Johanna and Girard.

That froze him in place for a moment; then he was stumbling after her in his sopping trousers, ignoring the horrified cries of a crowd of children leaping out of his way.

McKee had rounded the corner of an old three-story whitewashed public house, and when he came skidding around it after her, she had disappeared.