Tim Powers - Hide Me Among the Graves

They live if I do this, his mind shouted at his rigidly restrained reflexes. They live if I do this!

The silvery ripples of moonlight on the surface were quickly lost in darkness, and his ears seemed to be imploding with the pressure — the withering chill of the black water grew worse as he continued to sink, and irretrievable bubbles of air escaped from his lungs as hitching sobs — and finally his boots actually sank into mud, up to the ankles.

Knowing that he would soon begin involuntarily to struggle back up toward the distant surface in spite of his quaking determination, he forced the last tiny volumes of air out of his throat and mouth, and let himself sink toward a sitting position. He was shivering and clenching his teeth in a mouthful of salty river water.

In his head were ringing Trelawny’s remembered words: When I really thought I was drowning, I could feel the devil claws pulling out of me, reluctantly! I was as clean as a newborn babe…

And Crawford felt something like a cold worm in his mind convulse and withdraw. He was all alone now in the dark and cold at the very bottom of the world.

By the time his spine overcame his brain and set his hands to flailing in the lightless water, his lungs were aching and heaving against his closed throat, and he had struggled only a few yards up from the bottom when his tugging lungs forced him to inhale, and then he was choking, his nose and throat full of water and his chest spasming uselessly.

THERE WAS NO LIGHT, but he could sense his own limp body drifting below him; and it seemed to him that the river floor was like the upthrust hands of a dense crowd, as a multitude of unseen fishes and worms hungrily groped and corkscrewed up toward him, toward his disembodied identity — but his identity was diminished and no longer able to feel any anxiety. The river was the world, flickering and agitated at its finite surface but eternally unchanging in the endless volume below.

Crawford directed his dimming consciousness downward, toward the approaching fins and tentacles.

But a shiver of something like a remembered melody or scent buoyed his awareness — and he sensed the approach of old companions who didn’t quite forget, and a graciousness that was not wholly erased by death.

His eyes registered a dim phosphorescence, and his hands reached out — he was back in his body! — and he felt rippling fur against his palms.

Tails and arching backs moved in his vision, and paddling paws; and then in front of him hung the face of a cat — only one eye stared into his eyes, for where the cat’s other eye should have been was an empty socket.

And he dazedly recognized the tufted cheeks and one crumpled ear — this was Raymond, one of his distressed cats who had died in his arms years ago.

Crawford was gratefully ready to expire in the ghost company of Raymond and all the other cats he had loved…

But Raymond poked his muzzle into Crawford’s mouth, as he had often done when he was a kitten, and Crawford had to struggle not to push the animal away, for it felt as if the cat were sucking the remaining wisps of life out of him. But Crawford knew he was surely dying in any case, and he surrendered to his old friend.

Shifting forms gathered under Crawford’s body, pushing him upward — when he groped below him, he felt tails, and velvet paws, and muscles under fur.

Now Raymond was exhaling, blowing lion’s breath into Crawford’s lungs, and inhaling, and exhaling again. The cat’s breath drummed with a well-remembered purring, and Crawford could sense two paws against his chest alternately clenching and relaxing. And the backs of what must have been dozens of cats were pressing him upward through the shifting cold water.

When Crawford could see the moonlit ripples on the river surface above him, Raymond drew back and stared into his eyes for a long moment, and the one eye shone with unforgotten companionship and play, and then he and all the ghost cats swirled away below.

Crawford found that he was holding his breath, and he kicked and spread his arms out and down. Luckily he seemed to have lost one of his boots in the mud of the river bottom, for the remaining one was a heavy anchor on his foot; but he gave a last powerful kick and then his face was above the water, in the cold air, and he was treading water and coughing violently.

Within a minute he was able to inhale more air than he coughed out, and he held his breath and ducked his head under the surface, and unbuckled his remaining boot and let it sink away.

Raising his head, he found that his breath was still hitching and uneven — and he realized that he was weeping for the loss of gallant Raymond and all the other beloved small identities who had remembered him even after death, and saved him. Ancient Egyptians had believed that a cat’s lives numbered nine — a trinity of trinities — and perhaps each of the cats who had loved him had saved one of theirs for him, saved its last breath.

He spread one hand flat on the surging dark water in a frail gesture of thanks and good-bye.

Finally, after one last racking series of coughs that dizzied him, he took a deep breath and shook his head to clear it and looked around him.

He couldn’t see either shore, but he could see the descending north arches of the moonlit bridge. He forced himself to begin swimming as strongly as he could toward the north shore.

The mind-flattening attention of Polidori was gone, and he was desperate to find McKee and Johanna.

He could feel the weight of a handful of silver coins in his trouser pocket, but he didn’t dig them out and let them sink — he would probably need it all to convince a cab driver to take a soaking wet passenger anywhere.

And there was only one destination he could think of.

CHRISTINA HAD BEEN HELPED to Gabriel’s bedroom, and after changing out of her muddy clothes into one of Gabriel’s voluminous nightshirts and downing a glass of brandy, she had fallen into a fitful sleep, and Gabriel and William had gone off to the studio.

When she awoke with a start an hour later, she hadn’t known where she was — moonlight slanted in through the one tiny uncurtained window, and she had just been able to make out the crucifix on the far wall.

Did I fall asleep, she had wondered at first, in my room at the Magdalen Penitentiary? Not in such a grand bed…

Then with a sinking heart she had remembered where she was — and what she had learned at the séance — and she got out of bed and, barefoot, hurried downstairs to the dark kitchen. The stairs were carpeted, and the flagstones of the kitchen were warmed by the stove; and though the wind boomed outside the window overlooking the back garden, she was not at all chilly in the nightshirt over her chemise.

Without striking a match to the gas jet, she dipped a teacup full of water from a basin by the sink, and she found a saltcellar and salted the water heavily; and then she pulled down one of Gabriel’s many hanging braids of garlic and crushed a dozen cloves of it with the flat of a knife and scraped up the pulp with a silver serving spoon.

She sat down at the cook’s table in the darkness and gripped the spoon and the cup. She took a deep breath; the crushed garlic overpowered the usual smells of grease and coffee.

Finally she whispered, “Are you here?”

She waited several seconds — and then the table shook once under her elbows. One knock: yes.

“Is this — am I speaking to — the child I miscarried?”

Again the table jumped once.

Her voice was thick: “Come to me, child.”

Abruptly the walls and ceiling and even the chair she was sitting on disappeared, and she sat down heavily in loose sand. A cold night wind instantly blew all the warm kitchen air out of the folds of her clothing.