Tim Powers - Hide Me Among the Graves

“Gabriel shot someone?” exclaimed Maria. “With that gun of his? ’Stina, you didn’t tell me?”

Christina waved her hand impatiently. “She wasn’t human,” she said, “or not very much so. She seemed more to be a dog — a dog wearing clothes, that is. And when Gabriel shot her, she burrowed into the ground like a sand crab.”

Trelawny laughed at the expression of baffled dismay on Maria’s face.

“If, as I say, you are certain that you’ve killed him, then I don’t need to know where he’s buried, since his poor maligned spouse — you really didn’t see her at her best — cannot accomplish their purpose alone. But I would like—”

“What is — was — their purpose?” asked Christina.

“My patron,” said Trelawny, “would like to do again what she did in A.D. 60.”

“You will explain all this to me,” said Maria stiffly to Christina, “with diagrams, directly after this conversation.”

“Yes, Maria, I’m sorry!” To Trelawny she said, “But what did she do in A.D. 60? Besides die? Oh! She burned London.”

“It burned,” agreed Trelawny, “but first she shook it to pieces.”

“You mean Boadicea,” said Maria. “She was, or is, one of these things like our uncle, I presume.”

Trelawny bowed in his chair. “I see it’s only Gabriel who is witless among your family.”

“You haven’t met,” began Christina; “—oh, never mind.”

“He’s not dead ,” said Maria quickly, as if in spite of herself, “our uncle. Just … perpetually disrupted, shattered — cross-eyed!”

“How were they intending to destroy London?” asked Christina, apparently as much to change the subject as from curiosity. “It’s a much bigger city these days!”

“The same way she did before,” said Trelawny. “She and her daughters had been consecrated to the old British goddess known as Andraste and Magna Mater and Gogmagog, and then one of her daughters was raped by a Roman who was consecrated to a similar goddess in the Alps — the effect requires parents from two continents — and with certain rituals the birth of the resultant child was made to flex the continents, physically, like bending a sheet of glass.”

“An earthquake,” said Maria.

“That’s it,” said Trelawny. “And she would like to be that sort of catastrophic ‘grandmother’ again — to have one of her forcibly adopted family of the British goddess beget a — beget what you might call a ‘child’—by a victim of the European devil that animates your uncle.” He shrugged. “Snap the continental whip again.”

“‘Consecrated to,’” said Maria fastidiously, “means ‘bitten by,’ I gather.”

“To put it vulgarly,” agreed Trelawny.

“Are you … consecrated to her?” asked Maria.

“No — not that way, at least, not as consummated as that. Shelley was, but he was born into it, poor old fellow; and Byron was, but he had no self-control. I did invite her into my house twelve years ago, but I was able to protect myself and my family from her. I’m in a privileged position — I’m the precious Rosetta stone between the two species, the bridge, as long as I’ve got this half statue growing in my throat—”

Maria looked helplessly at Christina, who rocked her head and waved reassuringly.

“—but because I invited her in, she sticks to me like my shadow. I’d like to free myself, and even more so the world, from Miss B. Therefore—”

“‘Miss B.!’” exclaimed Maria with a smile. “That’s genteel.”

“Fewer syllables to say. Therefore, I would like to know how you managed to ‘disrupt and shatter’ your uncle.”

“So that you may do it with Miss B.,” said Christina, “who is — you said — your patron.”

“Soon to be my former patron, if you’ll tell me how.”

“But, as you say, you would still be the bridge, the Rosetta stone.”

“That’s right, and the simplest thing to do would be to have the statue cut out of my throat, you mean? — and then the overlap between the species will be gone, and the vampires will all be ‘melted into air, into thin air.’”

He picked up his cup of tea and drained it; it was lukewarm, and he wished they had served plain cold water instead. “The man who previously served as the Rosetta stone, the overlap between our species, a centuries-old Austrian, had his ambassador-statue cut out of him in 1822. He died of it.”

“Are you particularly afraid to die?” asked Maria; she was so earnest that he felt obliged to answer the question seriously.

“I’ve risked my life a hundred times,” he told her, “sometimes frivolously. But I’m convinced that this life, this mortal coil, is all there is. ‘Our little life is rounded with a sleep,’ and there’s no Heaven or Hell afterward. I’m seventy years old, and with luck my purse of years is nearly emptied, but while I don’t mind laying my remaining days down on a decent wager, I don’t want to simply toss them away.”

Maria nodded sympathetically and said, “Or even spend them, on saving the lives of strangers?”

Trelawny took a deep breath and repressed an irritable reply. After a few seconds, he said, “You’re devout, aren’t you? Some species of Christian, I imagine?”

She smiled faintly. “Yes.”

“I would say that was a mark against your intelligence, but since you’re both nice girls, I won’t say it. But you assume a sequel to this life, one in which noble sacrifices are rewarded, or at least noted. I’m convinced that no note is taken at all, and that, as far as any one of us is concerned, the universe comes to an end at the moment of his death.”

He smiled. “But if you’ll tell me how you got your uncle cross-eyed, I can do it to Miss B., and then I don’t think there will be any active vampires left in England.”

“But don’t their victims who die become vampires, in turn?” asked Christina. “There must by now be a number of those about.”

Trelawny exhaled through clenched teeth. Could these women not answer a plain question?

“My suspicion,” he said carefully, “is that your uncle and Miss B. have sustained any such; without that sustenance, any second-generation vampires will probably just fall down belatedly dead, like marionettes with the strings cut. Your uncle’s are now presumably laid to rest — I’d like to do the same for my patron’s.”

“Probably,” said Christina. “Presumably.”

“Your suspicion,” added Maria.

Trelawny smiled coldly and got to his feet. “I apologize for wasting your afternoon, ladies. Perhaps your brother would be good enough to shoot her with his silver bullets again, from time to time.”

“Mirrors,” said Maria quickly.

Christina sighed. “Do sit down, Mr. Trelawny.”

Trelawny resumed his seat and leaned forward, raising his white eyebrows.

“My sister appears to have faith in you,” Christina said. She blew a stray strand of hair out of her face. “I trust you’ll use this information as you say, and not to help your … patron protect herself!”

“I will use it as I say.”

“Very well.” Christina bit a fingernail, then spoke in a rush: “These creatures won’t ordinarily fix their attention on a mirror, because it would reflect their identities back on themselves, you see, and that’s like — apparently it’s like randomly rearranging a complicated first-person sentence, so that the verbs and adjectives and nouns are all in the wrong places, and it’s all just contradictory gibberish.”

“They can no longer utter themselves,” put in Maria, “as it were.”

“But,” Christina went on, “if you scratch lines in the glass and rub some of your blood into the lines, the creature will focus on it, out of its love and concern for you.” She blinked several times rapidly and looked away, and Trelawny realized that she had to some extent loved her uncle too.