Tim Powers - Hide Me Among the Graves

McKee smiled. “I’ll send out invitations at once.”

“And I,” the priest said, “have to make some corrections in the banns list.”

He shook Crawford’s hand and then strode away back toward the altar and the door to the sacristy, and McKee led Crawford and Johanna back out into Bozier’s Court.

THAT NIGHT AN ODDLY warm October breeze shook the bare branches of the oaks and elms in Highgate Cemetery. The fire the gravediggers had kindled next to the grave made a spot of glaring orange light in the moonlit landscape of headstones and waving groves. Far overhead, ragged clouds surged across the spotted face of the moon.

Gabriel had been leaning against a tomb thirty feet away, where he could watch the gravediggers plunge and lever their spades in the loam while the cloaked figure of Charles Howell stood by the fire and stared into the deepening hole; but when one of the men eventually climbed out of the grave and fetched a couple of ropes, Gabriel stepped closer, and when the two gravediggers had hauled the dirt-caked coffin up out of the hole and swung it heavily onto the firelit grass, he edged around behind a thickly vine-hung elm to view the proceedings more closely.

He was viewing the coffin from the foot now, from a distance of only a couple of yards, and so when the men pried up the lid and laid it aside, he found himself looking directly at Lizzie’s face by the fire’s illumination.

Howell and the gravediggers were momentarily motionless, staring into the coffin, and Gabriel stepped hesitantly forward, out of the shadows, and peered.

Lizzie’s face was pale but apparently undecayed, framed in masses of red hair that gleamed in the firelight — much more hair than when he had closed the coffin in the Chatham Place flat seven years ago!

Belatedly it occurred to him that the mirror-veil Maria had made was no longer over Lizzie’s face.

Gabriel could see the poetry notebook. He had laid it in on top of her hands at her funeral, but Lizzie’s smooth white fingers were curled around the edges of it now, and — he blinked rapidly and stared — her fingernails seemed to have grown too, in the grave, and now indented or even pierced the binding.

Lizzie’s body was fresh and undecayed, but the notebook was now stained and warped.

Gabriel choked and blinked back tears, glad that her eyes were closed. He retreated back into the shadows behind the elm tree. The warm wind in the trees seemed to be full of whispering voices.

His view was blocked then as Howell at last leaned in and worked with both hands; Gabriel heard popping and scratching, and whispered curses from Howell, and then the man had straightened up, panting, holding Gabriel’s ragged notebook. Howell curtly said something to the gravediggers, dug some banknotes out of his waistcoat pocket — the twenty-two pounds with which Gabriel had provided him — and handed it to them and then strode away quickly through the sparse red-lit grass toward the lane and the stairs. Gabriel stepped back as he passed, deeper into the shadows.

The two gravediggers were refastening the lid onto Lizzie’s coffin when Gabriel heard Howell’s carriage snap and clatter into motion, and he stepped forward into the firelight.

One of the gravediggers looked up at him from under a battered tweed cap. “You weren’t along to help, I reckon.”

“No,” Gabriel agreed. “I came along to pay you to take a rest now, down in your carriage.” He dug six gold sovereigns from the pocket of his Inverness cape and gave three to each man. “I’ll call you when the rest period is finished.”

The men blinked in surprise, and then one of them said, “Take your time, guv’nor!” and they ambled away across the grass toward the stairs.

Gabriel waited until he heard their steps on the gravel lane below the stairs, then crossed to the open grave and stared down into it as he pulled on a pair of gloves.

In the deep shadows he could see a few patches of wood showing under the scuffed dirt, and he sighed and sat down on the edge with his feet swinging in the hole.

I can drop down, he thought, and avoid putting my feet through Papa’s coffin, but can I get out again? Will I have to call those two back to help me?

Oh well, I’ve paid them enough to provide that service too.

He pushed off and landed with a thump, his boots straddling the long mound that was his father’s coffin. Quickly he reversed his feet and then crouched, tugging the hammer and chisel from his belt.

He set the chisel blade crossways to the grain of the wood and swung the hammer. There was enough dirt still on the coffin to mask the shape of it, and he hoped he was not about to see his father’s feet.

The clang of steel on steel seemed awfully loud, but he supposed the noise was muffled somewhat by the walls of dirt; and after a dozen blows he was able to drop the tools and reach down to pull up a splintered section of still-glossy oak. He wrinkled his nose at a smell like toasted cheese made with a very old, metallic-tasting blue cheese.

He tore the section of wood away, and then by the reflected light of the fire on the grass above he was staring down at his father’s collapsed and withered face, black as coal.

His only emotion was intense anxiety to get this over with, and he supposed that he would feel guilt and horror later, at his leisure.

Gabriel pulled the penknife out of his pocket and opened the long blade, but when he pushed his father’s cold chin back, the whole neck simply broke, like a roll of frail glass sheets. He brushed thin black shards off his gloves. His hands were visibly shaking now.

He tapped the base of his father’s throat with the back end of the knife, and it clinked, steel on black glass.

Whispering shrilly and not even listening to what he was saying, prayers or curses or the multiplication table, he put the knife away and picked up the hammer again — and then he rapped his father’s throat smartly with the head of it.

The glassy flesh shattered inward in a thousand pieces, and he picked among them, tossing them aside — and, deeper than he would have thought, he felt the rounded head of the little statue; he gripped it and pulled, and with a creaking and snapping and a shower of glassy throat fragments, the thing was free, and he was holding the little statue he had last seen on the high shelf in his father’s bedroom, back in the old house on Charlotte Street.

And there was a faint pressure in his mind, a flavor of greeting and promise.

Suddenly he was moving with feverish haste — he shoved the statue into his pocket and wedged the broken piece of wood back over the hole in the coffin and his father’s now crookedly uptilted face, and then he had gripped the grassy edge of the hole and pulled himself up and swung a leg up onto the surface, and a moment later he was lying on his back on the grass, panting so hard that he was blowing spit onto his goatee.

He rolled up onto his hands and knees. The gravediggers had taken their spades away with them, so with his hands he shoved piles of dirt down into the hole until he supposed any evidence of tampering must be concealed — he wasn’t going to actually look, for he could imagine the broken piece of wood knocked aside now and his father’s black face peering blindly up at him — and he got wearily to his feet.

All at once immensely tired and longing for his distant bed, he trudged to the lane and the steps down to the yard, where the gravediggers straightened up and knocked the coals out of their clay pipes and began trudging back up the steps with their shovels.

Now I’ve got to get to Howell’s house, Gabriel thought as he hurried to the rented Victoria carriage he had left tied up on the far side of the chapel, and convince him that I’ve been there all along — and if he’s there ahead of me, as is likely, I’ll claim I had to take a ride in the fresh air.