Tim Powers - Hide Me Among the Graves

He pulled the window closed and latched it, then turned back toward the room.

Gretchen was sitting at a table near the lamp, and she pointed at a chair on the other side. Trelawny crossed the room and cautiously lowered himself into the chair, still holding the pistol in his burned hand but pointing it now at the floor. He peered at her and saw fresh blood gleaming on her bare throat. In the red light the blood looked black.

“Damn you, Edward,” she said, touching the blood and looking at her finger. “He might not be back now for a week, and he needs me now.”

Trelawny laid the gun down on the table at last. “Do you have cold water?”

Gretchen scowled at him, but she got up and lifted a basin from a table near the bed and shuffled back to set it heavily in front of him. It was half full of rocking water, and he gratefully sank his hand into its coolness.

“That lad must be new,” he remarked, wincing as he flexed his fingers. “He looked like a black chicken.”

She was clearly affronted. “Lad? A chicken? There hasn’t been time for any to die and come back. That was my very own—” She waved her hand.

“That was Polidori himself ?”

“He’s been broken for seven years. He’s only just back — and he’s ill.”

Trelawny touched his neck and nodded toward her. “But you’re helping to restore him to his old stature.”

“I do what I can for him,” she agreed, nodding. “He loves me.”

Trelawny drummed the fingers of his free hand on the table. He sighed. “No use offering you garlic, or the pistol.”

“Give me the pistol and I’ll shoot you with it.” She stretched sleepily. “What do you mean, he doesn’t dare kill you?”

“You heard him say it. I’m the bridge man.” He touched his neck again. “If this flesh dies, the bridge between our two species dies. So he wouldn’t thank you for shooting me.”

Her eyes were half shut, and she cocked an eyebrow. “Really. Edward John Trelawny is the mixer.”

“The catalyst.” He smiled wearily and got to his feet. “I’m it.”

“Well then, you take good care of yourself, Edward,” she said, “and I think a visit every seven years is too frequent for our acquaintance — I’d be grateful if you’d simply forget the way to this house.”

“Gladly.” Trelawny picked up the pistol, and it had cooled enough for him to gingerly tuck it back into his trousers.

He opened the door, walked out to the landing, and began descending the stairs. I won’t be able to do anything with Polidori, he thought, at least not here — but I might have another go at Miss B. — I believe I know a close friend of hers.

THE LOG IN the fireplace collapsed in a swirl of sparks at the same moment that the knock sounded at the door, and John Crawford wasn’t sure he hadn’t imagined it, in the same way that he sometimes imagined voices in the splashing sound of a tub filling, or footsteps in the clatter of leaves blowing across empty pavements.

But he put down his glass and stood up unsteadily and weaved his way to the hallway and the street door.

He pulled his dressing gown more tightly across his shoulders before unlatching the door and pulling it open, and he winced when the chilly night air swept inside — but there was no one on the doorstep.

He pushed his lanky hair out of his eyes and peered up and down the street, but he could make out no distinct figures in the close-pressing shadows of Wych Street.

He was about to close the door again when he looked down and saw a rounded metal disk on the top step, and he bent carefully to pick it up.

It was a gold watch, and it was warm.

The watch had been holding down a scrap of paper, and he managed to slap his palm onto it before it could blow away; holding the watch and the paper, he straightened and stepped back into the house and closed the door.

He shuffled back to his chair and picked up his reading glasses from the table beside it — and his chest went cold when he fitted them on and looked more closely at the watch.

It was his own watch, one that he had lost. He pried up the back cover and looked at the engraving on the inside of the cover: John Crawford, 7 Wych Street, February 12, 1862.

But, he thought, I smashed this watch against a wall in the sewers seven years ago, to repel the ghosts of my wife and son! He looked hopefully back toward the entry hall — could they have put it together again somehow, and brought it back? Were they even now outside, waiting?

But no — I bought another watch a few days later, and had this engraving done in it. Yes, that was February of ’62. What became of it?

As if it were a belated effect of the cold air he had inhaled at the door, memory blew the alcohol fumes and maudlin fantasies out of his mind.

He had dropped it in the tunnels below Highgate Cemetery to gauge the depth of the well he and Adelaide McKee had climbed down.

And he remembered a little girl’s voice calling from the darkness below them: I caught it before it could fly away. And you must fall too.

It had been McKee’s daughter — his daughter — Johanna; and later he had seen her cradled in the inhuman arms of John Polidori, swinging this watch by its chain.

He laid the watch down on the table and quickly spread the scrap of paper out flat beside it.

Scrawled on it, in awkwardly penciled letters, were the words HELP ME JOHANNA.

Crawford’s face was suddenly cold.

Perhaps she had not died in that cave-in.

But — the last time he had seen Johanna, she had been with the Rossettis’ monstrous uncle, Polidori; and pretty clearly she had been bitten by him. Christina Rossetti’s trick that day, whatever it had been, had apparently killed Polidori, but would it have freed Johanna?

All the warnings his parents had given him, and which Adelaide McKee had reinforced, about carelessly inviting entities into his house, flooded back into his mind now. He should run upstairs and fetch his neglected old garlic jar — he was pretty sure he knew where it was — and smear the stuff around the door and window frames, and then go to bed with the obliterating whisky bottle.

But he had run away from Girard, nine years ago … and Johanna had written “help me.”

Sweat dripped onto the note.

How long had it been since he had taken the watch and note inside and shut the door? Would she leave? He took a deep breath and let it out, and then he strode quickly back to the front door and pulled it open, and he had scuffed down the steps to the pavement before noticing that he was wearing his slippers.

But he peered up and down the street, puffing steam in the cold air and straining to see into the shadows below the overhanging upper floors of the old houses.

“Johanna?” he called.

There was no reply, and he couldn’t see anything in the deep shadows all around.

The cold breeze corkscrewing down the narrow street got up his pants legs and into his collar, and he was about to run back inside for at least a coat and boots, when at last he saw movement on the far side of the street, in the recessed doorway of a house to his left.

He forced his eyes to focus — it was a small person, he could see that much — and then the figure stepped forward, and by the light that slanted down from the Strand he saw that it was a young person with long hair trailing from under a hat.