Tim Powers - Hide Me Among the Graves

Two more pistol shots hammered the air under the arch, and somewhere on the other side of the horse a man screamed.

The mare was frantically shying away, backing the cab and grinding her flank against the brick wall, and Trelawny forced his sharply protesting knees to step back to avoid being knocked down and trampled. Through the slack reins he glimpsed men in some thrashing struggle, but his focus now was simply on the wedge of clear pavement between the wall and the jigging cab, and he grabbed the cab lamp with his free hand and pulled himself farther toward the rear of the cab, away from the stamping mare. He was panting and blinking sweat out of his eyes.

Then a squat figure had blocked the gray daylight in front of him, between the rear of the cab and the wall. Trelawny raised his shaking pistol and forced himself to focus on the lumpy silhouette, and he saw that it had no head, just a broad flat hat that rested right on its shoulders.

Trelawny recognized it — he had seen it in Rossetti’s bedroom only a few hours ago — but in that instant the thing once again dissolved into oily smoke, and when the gun jumped and cracked in Trelawny’s hand, it was too late. The pistol ball whacked into brick somewhere across the street.

Trelawny wasn’t able to take a deep breath, and his vision was darkening; and he didn’t resist when an arm caught him around the ribs and braced him up. He barely had the strength to lift the revolver and tuck it into his belt, and he let his unseen companion boost him up into the cab.

The long reins slid through the bracket on the roof and then were caught and drawn inside hand over hand, and the cab was rocking as the mare eagerly backed out of the shadowed arch into the bright yard.

After a few seconds of the cab rolling backward, the reins snapped and the mare snorted and stamped but began trotting obediently forward. Trelawny was rocked against the cab’s right panel.

He rolled his throbbing head to look at the stranger who was now driving the cab from inside.

The teeth were bared in a permanent rictus grin in the skeletal gray face, and its wide eyes swiveled toward him and then back to the horse. The spidery gray hands on the reins were splashed with fresh blood.

The thing spoke then, and its voice was a flat squeak: “A spirit present? In a sense!” And it reached up with its left hand and knocked once against the cab’s low ceiling. A few moments later it sighed, with a sound like sand spilling from a shovel.

It rolled its eyes toward Trelawny, and its involuntary grin widened. “Marry!” it said then in a voice like wood creaking. “Well, not the ceremony, but one part of ‘marry,’ yes!”

It reached up and knocked again.

GABRIEL HAD PULLED THE curtains across the brightening view of the river, and William had fetched the table while Christina assembled papers and pencils, and the first question they had asked when the three of them had sat down was, Is there a spirit present?

The table had shaken with a single knock — yes.

The next question had been, Are you Gabriel’s son, who wants to marry the horse-doctor’s daughter?

After a pause, there had again been a single knock.

“Our uncle,” said Christina now, speaking into the air below the high ceiling, “was locked up for seven years. Do you know how we might banish him forever?”

THE GRAY BOY HAD guided the cab into an alley across Limerston Street, and then its nimble fingers had untied the strings on a canvas rain-flap that tumbled down to block the view of shadowed windows and doors ahead. The only light in the cab’s narrow interior now was the dim reflection from the close brick walls visible through the windows on either side.

Trelawny made himself face his grotesque companion without flinching, though he allowed himself to press against the right panel. The creature had tucked a ragged parasol between its knees, and Trelawny noticed for the first time that it was wearing a big blanket wrapped around its shoulders like a toga, and a couple of little round holes in it seemed to be bullet holes, though there was no blood around them. The thing’s breath, he noticed, was colder than the outside air and smelled of river mud.

The dead boy had picked up the mirror box in its left hand and was clutching it to itself, away from Trelawny.

“I do know a way,” it said, and raised its right hand to the roof and rapped on it once.

THE TABLE SHOOK AT a single knock under Christina’s fingertips.

“How?” she whispered.

The clock on the mantel ticked off a dozen seconds, and William cleared his throat.

“Remember it can’t spell.”

“Does it,” asked Christina, “involve cutting Edward Trelawny’s throat?”

“THEY KNOW ABOUT YOU,” quacked the gray thing as it rapped the cab’s roof once. It wiggled its bloody fingers. “Just as these dead men did.”

“Those … dead men wanted to kill me.”

“Fools,” said the thing.

“They didn’t want the box,” Trelawny added, nodding toward the box in the thing’s left hand.

“Fools,” it said again.

Trelawny’s heart was knocking hollowly in his chest, and he had to take a breath to speak again.

“You … rescued me from them?”

“I rescued her,” the thing said, shaking the mirror box.

Trelawny’s head ached. “Stop hitting the roof, will you?”

The dead boy shrugged his knobby shoulders under the blanket. “I can do it just as well with my teeth.”

The thing wasn’t looking at him, so Trelawny let his hand slip toward the flap of his coat that concealed the revolver.

“THAT’S A YES,” SAID Gabriel. “I should have cut the old bastard’s throat in Regent’s Park.”

“I wonder if that’s what Maria won’t tell us,” said William. “She can’t condone murder.”

“Neither can we,” said Christina.

“What do you call killing our uncle?” asked William.

“He’s not human,” said Christina desperately, “and he’s died already, by his own hand.”

“You,” said Gabriel, speaking toward the ceiling, “had two human parents—”

THE DEAD BOY BESIDE Trelawny clicked its teeth together — three distinct times.

“I had at least three human parents,” the thing said to Trelawny. “The first time, though, I was lost in a miscarriage.”

“You look it,” said Trelawny.

Then he snatched out the revolver, rammed it against the blanket over the dead boy’s ribs, and pulled the trigger.

Even with the muzzle against the cloth, the detonation battered Trelawny’s eardrums in the curtained cab interior.

“NO?” SAID GABRIEL AFTER the latest three knocks, and the dawning relief was evident in his high-pitched voice. “Am I your father or not?”

The pause that followed this was so long that Gabriel had opened his mouth to speak again, when the table knocked once in reply. Yes.

“But Lizzie was your mother…?”

Again there was the Yes reply.

“That’s two! Both all too human!”

Christina was dizzy, and a high-pitched wail seemed to be keening in her head. “Was there ever,” she said, speaking too loudly; she exhaled and went on, “a third parent?” Earlier? she thought.

The table banged once.

“Were you,” she asked, “reincarnated, after that, as Lizzie and Gabriel’s child?” She sat back and whispered, “Insistent to be born?”

She had half expected it, but the single rap made her jump.

TRELAWNY WAS COUGHING IN the haze of black-powder smoke as the dead boy’s right hand reached across him and gripped the pistol, and its lengthening, twining fingers held the hammer down and prevented a second shot.

Blinking and gasping in the dimness, Trelawny could see that a fresh, smoking hole had been punched into the blanket over the boy’s torso, but there was no drop of any blood, and the dead boy seemed unconcerned — the big white teeth had clicked again, four distinctly separated times, in the moments since Trelawny had fired the gun.