Tim Powers - Hide Me Among the Graves

Maria took up the slack. “Then keep that mirror in position — I’d advise putting her and the mirror in a box together, and hiding the box in a secret place. It needn’t be a big box, probably — she’s likely to diminish in substance a good deal.”

THAT WAS SEVEN YEARS ago, Trelawny thought as the hansom cab rattled south through the lamplit streets of Chelsea toward Battersea Bridge, and I’m seventy-seven years old now. And I did not succeed in catching Miss B. in a mirror — though I did manage to drive her away from me. That has been a relief, I do steadfastly insist.

DIRECTLY AFTER LEAVING THE Rossetti sisters’ house in Albany Street on that February afternoon in 1862, he had bought a three-foot-tall framed mirror and scratched the glass and rubbed blood from a cut finger onto it, and then he had set it in the chair he usually occupied, and himself sat down cross-legged behind it with a pipe and a book of Shelley’s poems to wait for twilight and Miss B.

It was a nostalgic and half-melancholy vigil. Miss B. had loved him, in spite of his evasions and derelictions and their unconsummated pairing, and in the twelve years since the night when he had found her in the ravine outside King’s Norton she had shown him marvels that had astonished even him, who had fended off vampires in Italy and questioned ghosts with Lord Byron in Athens and ridden with devils in the gorge below Mount Parnassus!

Trelawny put down the pipe and the book and leaned back against the chair legs, staring into the fire in the grate.

She had shown him visions of the earth as it had been before the sunlight changed, before the air was poisoned by the harsh, flammable element exhaled by the spreading greenness — when the creatures later called Nephilim or fallen angels had filled the red skies with their yet-unwithered wings and shaken the young mountains with their glad choruses…

And on moonless nights she had taken him out in a boat on the western sea, where the luminous curtains of the aurora borealis were reminiscent mirages of the walls of long-perished palaces…

And she had offered him immortality, of a much more tangible sort than what the Rossetti girls looked forward to in their Christian faith … but it would have required that he renew it periodically.

Trelawny shuddered behind the chair at the thought of that bloody, predatory renewal. He shook his head. In his arrogant youth he might have been able to extend his life by taking the lives of others, but he certainly could not do it now.

There was the rap of a boot on the hall floor—

And then he heard Miss B. fling open the chamber door and step heavily into the room, and he huddled motionless behind the chair. Look at the mirror, he thought; look at my blood. In spite of the fire, the air was suddenly so cold that he could see his breath.

“I see through it to you,” came her voice, heavy as gold. “I see through you.”

The floor jumped under Trelawny and the curtains swayed across the rocking walls, and as he clutched at the carpet he heard pictures and books hitting the floor, and gritty plaster dust sifted down onto his gray head and he heard a loud clank behind him, which must have been the mirror falling forward out of the chair and landing face-down on the heaving floor.

“You are the translation bridge between our kinds,” said her voice. “I must not kill you. I withdraw from you.”

And then his ears had popped and the window had burst inward with a crash, and a powerful draft had knocked the chair over and flung papers out into the hallway — and she was gone.

AND SHE DID WITHDRAW, he thought now as his cab rattled over Battersea Bridge. Looking out through the side window, over the forward-rushing rim of the left wheel, he watched distant boats silently interrupting the moon’s glitter on the water. Seven years it’s been, now, since I’ve laid eyes on Miss B., though she’s presumably still active, somewhere, with somebody. Well, that poet, for one — Swinburne.

On the south side of the bridge, the cab angled northeast through Kennington to the Lambeth Road; and when they arrived at Waterloo Bridge Road, the glow in the sky and the increasing roar of a hundred raised voices let Trelawny know that they were on the threshold of the New Cut. Soon the cab halted, blocked by dozens of milling pedestrians.

He climbed down from the cab and stood for a moment in the middle of the crowded, noisy street; behind him the rows of houses were lost in darkness in spite of the dim yellow rectangles of windows, for ahead of him the street was spangled with dazzling constellations of red and white and yellow light; gas jets fluttered over butcher shops, the pearly glare of gas lamps eclipsed the ruddy radiance of grease lamps, and candles and dips stood everywhere, in glass chimneys at the doorways of shops and stuck into vegetables on the high-piled carts of costermongers. The night breeze was from the east, funneling down the churning street, and it carried a pungent mix of smells: curry, candle wax, fish, perfume…

Booths crowded both sides of the street, and in the space of six yards Trelawny could have bought bootlaces, tin saucepans, or a smoked codfish nearly as tall as himself; and he threaded his way between gentlemen in silk hats, tradesmen in caps and leather aprons, and headless dummies wearing embroidered waistcoats and Norfolk jackets. From all sides rang the din of vendors announcing their wares: “Hot chestnuts!” and “What do you say to these cabbages?” and “Three a penny, don’t pass it up!” and “Here’s your bloaters!” as if Trelawny had misplaced the disreputable fish in question and had been looking all over the city for them.

As he stepped around some pedestrians and was jostled by others, he kept one hand on his belt buckle, directly over the pistol tucked into his trousers; he wasn’t risking some pickpocket making off with it.

Above all the flares and banners on the south side of the street stood the theater he remembered as the Coburg, now known as the Royal Vic, the Corinthian capitals of its four tall pilasters underlit by the lights below, and behind the high scalloped cornice he could just see the brick structure that had been built to hold the stage’s famous crystal curtain, which could not be rolled or folded but had to be raised all of a piece.

Trelawny didn’t believe he’d been followed, but he made for a gin shop he knew of on the east side of the theater.

The door was already ajar, spilling a streak of yellow gaslight across the stained pavement, and though in pushing it farther open he nearly knocked down a burly fellow standing just inside, Trelawny’s fierce gaze made the fellow merely touch his cap and shuffle backward. Trelawny nodded by way of token apology and stepped inside.

Just by the smell, Trelawny could tell that the place had apparently converted from gin to rum since he had last visited — the warm sweet reek of it nearly overpowered the tobacco smoke that hung in layers under the low wooden ceiling, and a big cask rested on a shelf behind the bar with a sign on it that read CHOLERA MIXTURE! He recalled reading that a doctor had recently advised rum as a preventive for that disease, and apparently all the men and women in this narrow gas-lit room were busily attending to their health — though the place still served drinks in pewter mugs, which were reputed to get a person drunk faster than ceramic or glass vessels did.

The white-haired landlady who sat behind the bar took a blackened clay pipe out of her mouth when she saw him.

“Trelawny, you villain,” she said, “don’t you trust me?”

He recalled that he had loaned her money at one time.

“Keep it,” he said curtly. “I just want to pay my respects to Oatie.”

“I remember that!” she exclaimed, giggling toothlessly. “It’s been a while since anyone gave the poor old soul a thought. I think the door’s locked — here. You can leave the key in the lock; I’ll send a boy after you to fetch it back.”