Tim Powers - Hide Me Among the Graves

“Johanna!” he called again, starting forward across the crushed gravel of the street, but she stepped back into the shadows and he lost sight of her.

“Damn it,” Crawford muttered, shivering. “Come in,” he said loudly. “I’ll help you!”

“Shut up!” yelled someone from a window overhead.

Oh, for—“I’ll leave the door unlocked!” Crawford called, and then hurried back into the house.

He even left the door an inch ajar as he hurried up the stairs to find boots and a coat and a scarf, in case he might have to go out to talk to her — but when he got back downstairs, carrying his outdoor gear, the front door was shut, and he heard the couch creak in the parlor.

He froze in the hall. What had he just invited into his house — thoughtlessly invited into his house ?

Trembling, remembering the creatures he had seen on Waterloo Bridge and at Carpace’s salon and under Highgate Cemetery, he laid the coat and boots on the floor and then peeked fearfully around the doorway jamb into the parlor.

But the young girl sitting on the couch did not seem to be any sort of vampire. Her face, framed by a slouch hat and disordered locks of brown hair and the pushed-up collar of an oversized wool coat, was pink with the evening’s chill, and her bright blue eyes held only cautious curiosity. One of his distressed cats, a Manx with only one eye, was sitting on her lap, audibly purring.

“I’m pure human,” she said in a light voice. “But you shouldn’t ask things in so quick. But — I’m glad you did tonight.”

“You’re… Johanna.”

“You look older, your beard is gray. Yes, I’m Johanna. I do too, I’m sure — people say I’m probably fourteen now.” She yawned. “You said that time that you’re my father.”

She really did seem to be fully and only human. He let his legs and shoulders relax. “Yes. And your mother said you were born in March of ’56, so you’re…”

“ Thir teen.” She shrugged, then looked directly at him. “Is my mother still alive?”

“She was when I last saw her,” he said. “That was on that day we saw you.” He felt his face reddening. “You, uh, didn’t die when that tunnel collapsed.”

“No,” she agreed. “I crawled up a side tunnel before it all fell in.”

“I’m sorry — we assumed—”

She shrugged again, apparently with no resentment.

After a few moments of silence in which his breathing and heartbeat slowed to their normal paces, he sighed and asked, “Are you hungry?”

She nodded solemnly.

There were no servants in the house; Mrs. Middleditch had died peacefully in her attic room three years ago, and since then Crawford had got by with a maidservant and a charwoman, both of whom came in three times a week.

“You can bring the cat into the dining room,” he said, pushing open the door on the far side of the room from the curtained windows. He looked back — the cat had jumped away, and the girl paused to pick up the watch and thrust it inside her coat.

In the narrow dining room, he turned up the gas jets and waved her toward a chair at the table, but she came tapping after him in her narrow boots to the stairs that led down to the kitchen and scullery.

He paused at the stairway door. “I’ll bring some things up.”

“I’ll come along down.” She reached into her voluminous coat and pulled up the grip of a knife, then slid it back, apparently into a concealed sheath. “Cold iron,” she said. “And I’ve got garlic too. I don’t smell any of that in this house.”

“It’s been seven years since I’ve needed it,” he told her. Then, after looking directly into her eyes, he laughed in surprise and added, “I’m —how did you put it? — pure human!”

She peered at his face, then nodded. “I suppose you are.”

“Wouldn’t you rather wait up here?”

“No.”

“Very well. You can bring those things along if you like, but I’d advise leaving your coat and hat up here.”

She nodded and shrugged out of the coat — under it she was wearing shiny brown corduroy trousers and at least two plaid flannel shirts — and threw it and her hat into a corner. The sheathed knife was on a leather strap around her neck, and she tucked it into the shirts.

He led the way down the stairs, each step of which was more damp than the one above it.

The steamy kitchen was a tiny dark room with three soot-blackened windows just under the low, beamed ceiling, and when Crawford struck a match to the kerosene lamp over the stove, he winced at the look and smell of the place.

The boiler over the stove gurgled like a colicky cow’s stomach. Shirts and stockings, still visibly damp two days after washing, hung from a clotheshorse attached to one of the ceiling beams, and he had to duck around them to step to the larder. He tried to carry the lamp so that his small guest would not see through the doorway on the left, into the scullery, where he saw dirty dishes still piled in the sink over the wet stone floor.

But she seemed unconcerned by the squalor. “Ham!” she said. “And onions! And cheese! Have you got mustard?”

“Back upstairs.”

“We can do without. Better we talk underground.”

“The last time we talked, it was underground.”

Johanna had reached up to the larder shelf and hoisted down the platter of ham, and she carried it carefully to the narrow servants’ table by the oven and clanked it down.

“Dirt’s an extra roof,” she said, going back for the cheese. “Hides him from the sun, hides us from him.”

Crawford frowned. “‘Hides’? But he’s dead … surely.” He found a knife in the scullery and wiped it on his shirt, then tugged an onion free from a braid of them and joined her at the table. He set the lamp down beside the platter.

“I thought so too,” she said. Her tone was light, but she had pulled her knife out to cut the ham, and he saw the blade shaking. “But he — visited me! — this evening.”

“Good God!”

She darted a glance at him and might have briefly attempted a smile. “He’s thin now, his clothes are black paper, and he smells like mud. He’s got to start over, and he wanted to bite me again, get me in his boat again. I ran away from him.” She twitched the knife blade. “I already had this, but I got some garlic quick.”

Belatedly it occurred to him to wonder how she had been living during these past years. “Stay here. You’re safe here.”

“Here! He’s on to you too. He fancied your mother but got jilted by her, he said — my grandmother! — in the long ago, in Italy. And he can always find me .” Her voice broke at last as she added, “He says by his reckoning I’m his d-daughter.”

“You’re my daughter,” Crawford said, with more feeling than he had anticipated. “And I’ll protect you from him.”

“However much you can. But thanks.” She sniffed and scowled and brushed her sleeve across her eyes, and then went on almost briskly, “Was your mother’s name Josephine?”

“Yes. How did you—?”

“He used to call me that, sometimes. How did you see him, that day under the cemetery?”

Crawford blinked. “See him?”

“Where did it look like you saw him? In the old tower full of rolled-up books? On the glass seashore? In the big skull? In the hanging boat? Among the giant wheels?”

“The skull,” said Crawford. “You were there — you didn’t see the interior of an enormous skull?”

“I only saw a dark tunnel and an underground river with a broken bridge over it. The skull means he’s worried. Was. With good reason, as it turned out.” She had cut several ragged pieces of ham free of the bone, and now wiped the knife on her sleeve and sat down in one of the two wooden chairs.