Tim Powers - Hide Me Among the Graves

Whimpering, he rushed forward through the suddenly cold air, but he ran toward the door to the hall and didn’t look at the window; and in the doorway he collided with a figure who was hurrying in. A glimpse of copper hair made Gabriel think that it was the vampire in Lizzie’s body again, and he grabbed for its throat—

But his hand closed on a stiff collar and tie and the lapel of a jacket; and, peering through tears, Gabriel saw that it was the much shorter and thinner figure of Swinburne.

“Gabriel!” Swinburne exclaimed, pushing his hand aside. “What on earth?”

“Algy,” gasped Gabriel, “Algy, I—”

Swinburne was peering past him into the drawing room, angling his oversized head to see down the length of it.

“Did they jump out the window ?” he asked incredulously.

“Yes, Algy, they—!”

“Why?” Swinburne stared at Gabriel wide-eyed. “Gabriel, it was Lizzie! Alive!”

He ran past Gabriel to the window and leaned out through the ragged gap in the panes, his curly red hair blowing around his face.

“There’s no one visible below,” he said; then, “Christina!” he yelled out into the evening air. “Did you see anyone fall?” He leaned out as far as he could without touching the broken glass on the bottom edges. “Fall,” he repeated. “Oh, never mind, wait, we’ll be down in a moment!”

Gabriel made himself step up beside Swinburne at the window. He waved vaguely down at the figure of Christina, who had closed the street gate behind her and was hurrying toward the house, and then he cautiously inclined his own head out into the chilly breeze, but Swinburne was right — there were no figures on the narrow patch of grass or on the walk.

“Algy,” he said, “you were downstairs — did you invite them in?”

“Of course I did, it was Lizzie! — and some sick child. Come on!”

Gabriel stepped back from the window. “A dead child, Algy, and Lizzie was dead too. Is dead. That wasn’t her.”

“Of course it was her, she knew me! We’ve got to go downstairs; they’re probably hurt—”

Gabriel gripped his shoulder and shook him. “Algy, damn it, it was not her! It was a ghost, a demon in her form — do you think I wouldn’t know ?”

“A demon ?” Swinburne had raised his hands and now dropped them. He exhaled and brushed his windblown hair out of his face and squinted at Gabriel. “But it was not her ghost. I — that’s not how ghosts look, and her ghost — wouldn’t be here.” He looked out across the Cheyne Walk pavement to the dark river. “But she did know me,” he added quietly, almost to himself.

He looked back at Gabriel, and his eyes were bright. “A demon, you say?” And he actually laughed. “An archaic goddess, perhaps!”

Gabriel shook his head unhappily. “You don’t know anything about it, Algy.”

“Good God!” came a voice from the hallway door, sounding flat with no resonance from the missing window. Gabriel looked up to see his young assistant, Henry Dunn, gaping at the wide new gap in the windowpanes. “What happened?”

“I leaned on the glass,” said Swinburne.

Dunn stared expressionlessly at Swinburne for a moment, his mouth open, then said to Gabriel, “Your sister is here. Christina.”

And in fact Christina now hurried into the room right behind Dunn. She glanced from Gabriel to Swinburne through narrowed eyes, not even looking at the window.

“Algy,” she said, breathing hard as if she had run up the stairs, if not all the way from Euston Square, “I need to talk to my brother privately, if you would excuse us.”

Swinburne nodded and bobbed to the door. “It was a goddess!” he called before disappearing down the hall.

Dunn crossed to the remains of the window and pulled the curtains closed; they rippled, but they were heavy enough to keep out the river-scented breeze and the indistinct roar of the city. Then he nodded too and stepped back out of the room and closed the door.

“I saw two clouds of smoke,” Christina said, “—distinct, not dissipating in the air, like — splashes of ink in oil! — they burst out through your window and churned away over the river! Darker than the night! Our uncle John—”

“Is awake again; I know,” said Gabriel, pulling two chairs out from the table and slumping into one of them. “My visitors told me. My inky visitors. God.”

“It wasn’t him, himself, then,” said Christina. “Thank God for that.” She sat down in the other chair and took his hand. “Who were they?”

“One was a boy, like a starved corpse galvanized. The other—” He had run out of air, and had to take a deep breath to go on. “The other was — Lizzie. Or your Celtic queen, the one who died in A.D. 60, animating my Lizzie.”

“Lizzie? But she was blocked with mirrors too! Did they all dissolve ?”

Gabriel rocked his head back and stared at the rings of gaslight on the high ceiling. “Corrode, tarnish, I don’t know.” He put a hand over his eyes, but his voice was still steady when he said, “My poor Lizzie! This thing said that what’s left of my wife has two true parents, meaning our uncle and this Boadicea creature.”

“And … the other one, the boy?”

“God knows who the boy is, or was. They said I need to renew my lapsed vows.” He gave his sister a bleak smile. “They said Uncle John is wounded — by your mirrors apparently, while they still worked.” He leaned forward to see the clock over the mantel, then glanced moodily at the waving curtains. “William is due soon for dinner. I suppose we’ll eat in the breakfast room, rather than in here.”

“That room has several mirrors,” Christina agreed. “And I left a note for Maria, saying to join me here.”

“All four suits together, Diamonds, to play this hand.”

Christina shook her head and pursed her lips. “I can’t imagine what William will think of all this. But we’ve got to try to warn him.”

“He’s big on science. We’ll tell him that it’s all to do with magnetism.”

WILLIAM STOPPED AT THE Euston Street house to refill his tobacco pouch — Gabriel’s guests always smoked up the tobacco he left in a box on the mantelpiece at Tudor House — and so he and Maria arrived there together in the cab William had hired.

William only spent a night or two a week in his room at Tudor House, because, unlike Gabriel, he generally had to arise at eight in the morning to be at his office at the Board of Inland Revenue in Somerset House by ten. He was forty years old and had worked there since the age of fifteen, and he was now the assistant secretary in the Excise Section.

His real allegiance was to art and poetry, but he had no particular skills in them himself — he had written a translation of Dante’s Inferno, but Macmillan had rejected it twelve years ago and reconsidered eight years later only because William’s mother contributed fifty pounds toward the expense of its publication — and he tried to be content with being a financial and emotional support to his sister and brother as they pursued their areas of genius. He was currently devoting a lot of his free time to editing a collection of Shelley’s poetry, a project that had brought him into contact with Shelley’s oldest-surviving and most controversial friend, an old pirate named Trelawny.

Neither he nor Maria noticed the broken first-floor window as they stepped from the cab through the streetlamp radiance to Gabriel’s iron gate, but Christina met them on the walkway and hurried them inside, glancing nervously at the dark sky.

She led them upstairs to the studio, where they found Gabriel staring at his painting Beata Beatrix, a portrait of his dead wife, Lizzie, as Dante’s Beatrice. The painting, still unfinished seven years after it was begun, portrayed Lizzie in three-quarter profile with her eyes shut, as a dove dropped a poppy into her limp hands; behind her stood the indistinct figures of a man in black and a woman in red, who Gabriel said were intended to represent Dante and Love.