Tim Powers - Hide Me Among the Graves

The intrusive identity was fading, but it raised a last thought that William phrased as, Soon, while her blood in her children still lives, circulates, reddens and fades and reddens again.

And then William was just sitting at his desk in the Excise Section wing of Somerset House, blinking out at the windows of King’s College.

His tie and collar were loosened, and he pushed his chair back to look at his shoes; a shaking of sand grains clung to the laces, but even as he watched, they evaporated to nothing.

He snatched up the widow’s petition — but the lines of verse on it had disappeared, and he couldn’t now remember what they had been.

His hands were shaking as he refastened his collar and knotted his tie, and he patted his hair and beard in case they had got disarranged in the hallucinated desert. But there were tears in his eyes.

I can’t have it yet, he thought. Our uncle needs to be quickened fully, freed from his long petrification; and for that he needs the blood of a … client, a child, a host of this other creature of his kind — the creature that is something like his spouse, referred to with a clear flavor of “she.” Perhaps there were only two of these creatures. And for some reason her vital renewal of her hosts’ blood seemed likely to cease soon.

He would, he thought almost ferally, ask Christina what she knew about that.

UNDER THE GRAY OCTOBER sky, the river was the color of steel, and the light breeze carried a smell of distant fires. Crawford and McKee and Johanna had walked out onto the broad stone pier of the old York water gate and paused just short of the steps that led down to an empty half-walled shed and a ramp that disappeared into the water; Crawford could make out a few of the paving stones that continued sloping away under the water’s surface, and he wondered how far out into the river the ramp extended. A hundred yards beyond, the tall black smokestack of a steam launch moved jauntily past, but other boats and the south shore were vague angularities in the mist.

It had been Johanna’s idea to venture down here before noon, and as Crawford looked back at the pillars of the old water gate, he reflected sourly that if McKee had proposed it, he would probably have refused.

Johanna’s left eye was swollen nearly shut; her second black eye in four days! And this morning they had found her knife stuck in the wall over her bed.

Crawford glanced down at her again, and touched her shoulder; she squinted up, but he just smiled and shook his head and let his hand fall away.

To the right of the pillars he could see the ranked phalanxes of chimneys along the roof of the elegant Adelphi block of flats, and the many rows of windows shone only with repetitions of the cloudy sky. Waterloo Bridge was farther off in that direction, its arches dim in the fog.

McKee followed his gaze. “That’s where we first met,” she said quietly, “about at the second arch.”

Johanna had been watching the visible extent of George Street beyond the pillars behind them, but now she looked up.

“When he saved your life?” she asked.

“Yes,” said McKee.

“And I was conceived ,” Johanna added. Clearly she had been told the word sometime and remembered it.

McKee gave Crawford an accusing look, and he shrugged helplessly.

“I know about such things,” Johanna assured her. “I was nearly married to a coster boy last year.”

“Good heavens,” said Crawford.

“I didn’t fancy him,” said Johanna, shrugging, “so I ran away.”

This was straying far too close to the events of her vision last night; clearly McKee thought so too, for she put her arm protectively around Johanna and started to say something, then just shook her head.

McKee had come to Crawford’s house early this morning, with a carpenter to make an estimate for fixing the door, and at first she had assumed that her daughter’s black eye was again the work of one of the Mud Larks; and when she had heard the full story of the attack by Polidori, and what Polidori had proposed, she had forbidden all further talk of it for now.

Crawford knew that even before the events of last night, McKee had hated not living with her daughter — apparently she didn’t believe her common-law husband could be trusted with the girl — but she clearly couldn’t bear it now.

McKee had mentioned, on the walk down to the river this morning, that Tom had not come home last night after his spectacular rage in Crawford’s surgery yesterday. It was hard to tell what she felt about that.

From not too far away, Crawford now heard high piping voices taking turns reciting something in a nursery-rhyme cadence — he was able to make out the words When the sky began to roar —

Abruptly the goldfinch in Johanna’s bag cheeped, and half a dozen seagulls that had been standing at the edge of the pier spread their long gray-and-white wings and flapped away into the sky.

“Larks coming,” said Johanna tensely. “I know some of ’em, a bit.”

Crawford looked back up the street, between the gate pillars; and he glimpsed a couple of children dart from one side of George Street to the other, and then a third child scampered back the other way. They were all ragged little scarecrows, with lean, blackened limbs flexing in tattered clothes. They seemed to move as rapidly as spiders.

Crawford was suddenly afraid that they might stressfully remind Johanna of the skeletal boy in her vision. He glanced at her out of the corner of his eye, but she was already shaking her head reassuringly at him.

“These are alive,” she told him.

“They shouldn’t hurt us,” said McKee. “We’re not infected.”

“I was ,” said Johanna, “and I’m sure you two still carry the smell of Neffy attention.” She touched the knife hilt under her coat. “And the Larks are crazy. I was.”

Now three of the wild children scuffed barefoot out onto the flagstones of the pier, their knees bent and their scrawny arms held out from their sides; their faces held no expression. Crawford shivered, remembering the morning he and McKee had eluded a previous generation of these children seven years ago.

And then he shivered violently enough to click his teeth together, and his chest suddenly felt cold and empty — for he remembered thinking then that his lost daughter would be the same age as those eerie children; and now, for the first time, it had occurred to him that she might very well have been one of them.

Johanna was scanning the dirty, vacuous faces. “Where’s Nancy?” she called.

A boy came out from behind the pillars and joined the first three in the gray daylight. He mumbled something.

“Down, sick or dead,” muttered Johanna to her parents. “This boy hasn’t got many words.”

More loudly, she said, “You see that we’re clean. Take us to the old man. The old man, right?”

Her brown hair was blowing around her face, and Crawford was struck by the contrast between her evident health — even with the black eye — and the wasted faces of the Mud Larks. She gave Crawford an uncertain grin. “I think they know I was one of them once. They knew it yesterday, at least.”

The boy said something that sounded to Crawford like a chicken gobbling.

“I’m as clean as you are,” Johanna said scornfully; and Crawford suppressed a reflexive nervous smile at the apparent inappropriateness of the remark. Johanna waved a hand around her head. “Are you already too old to see?”

The boy shrugged and stepped back, and another one of the children took an egg-shaped clay ball out of a pocket and blew into it.

It produced a prolonged low note that seemed to vibrate in Crawford’s abdomen, and he realized that he had heard this same sound on many mornings and assumed it was some sort of maritime signal.