Tim Powers - Hide Me Among the Graves

She huddled in the sand, shivering and nearly whimpering but somehow still clutching the spoon and the cup; and after a few snatched breaths of the rushing air, she got her legs under herself and stood up, gripping the sand with her bare toes as she staggered in the leaching wind. Moonlit dunes stretched away under a sky more full of stars than any she’d ever seen, and there was not any compensating spark of light in the landscape.

“Mother,” came a creaking voice from behind her.

She turned and then flinched at the sight of a towering black colossus starkly silhouetted by the star fields it eclipsed. It must have stood a good hundred yards away, but it dominated the view like a medieval cathedral. With its remote high shoulders and lowered head it might have been a primordial idol of a great bird, or a wolf, or a dragon; and Christina took a step backward in the sand, viscerally sure for a moment that the mountainous thing was tipping toward her.

But it stood motionless; and closer, much closer, only a dozen yards from her across the sand, was a figure she recognized.

The skeletal dead boy was naked now, and in the moonlight she could see several rents and holes in its taut hide.

“You,” it said, “you and my bride, disappeared today, in the City. You came back into view, but she did not. Has not yet.”

“William!” Christina screamed. “Gabriel! I’m in the kitchen, help me!”

But as soon as her words were flung away by the freezing wind across the limitless desert, she knew that she was somewhere fundamentally removed from Gabriel’s kitchen, or Chelsea, or even the terrestrial world.

“Jesus help me,” she moaned, hunching her shoulders against the cold.

“He knows nothing of this place,” said the dead boy.

Christina bared her teeth as her hair flew wildly around her face. “Then let’s bring Him here,” she cried. The wind was at her back, and she flung the cupful of salted water straight at the boy’s face.

The bony gray figure twisted away, making a sound like a bedsheet ripped in two.

“I baptize thee in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,” she shouted after it. “God help you, child!”

Then she looked up — and her knees gave way and she sat down and began frantically pushing herself backward through the mounding sand, for, with a cavernous rumble that rolled away across the sterile land, the colossus moved, and she knew who it was.

A black head like a castle lifted against the moon, and storm cloud wings churned the wind as they unfolded and hid the horizon.

Christina had intended to throw the spoonful of garlic at Polidori, but it was ludicrously inadequate against this, the antediluvian thing that had for a mere billion human heartbeats worn her uncle’s animate ghost.

She scooped up the crushed garlic and rubbed it over her face and throat, then sucked the spoon clean.

The night recoiled from her.

Into her head sprang a projected image of the water colliding with the face of the dead boy, and the boy shaking it off with impunity and staring back at her.

But that desperately advanced image blinked away. In actual fact, the skeletal gray figure was now convulsing in the sand; at one point its skull-like face was turned up toward the moon, and Christina saw black stains mottling the cheeks and covering the eyes.

She shivered and almost lost consciousness then as a wave of wordless rage scorched across the field of her thoughts and perceptions.

A black ripple like a blowing curtain to her left caught the fragments of her attention, and when she had somewhat mustered her thoughts again, she was able to recognize a sort of caricature of her uncle, its arms waving helplessly in the turbulent wind.

“Tell speak at the boy it no effect!” squawked the fluttering, nearly faceless figure. “Say him water only!”

“It is just water,” screamed Christina. “It’s baptism! I’ve saved his soul!”

The sketchy Polidori caricature wailed, “No soul!” and blew into scattering shreds—

And Christina slammed her hands against the kitchen table and slapped her feet against the tinglingly warm flagstones.

She was panting in the humid air of Gabriel’s kitchen, clutching the edges of the table now as if to force it to stay, and her eyes darted around to gratefully take in the stove and the window and the hallway arch. The spoon and the cup were nowhere to be seen.

For nearly a minute she simply concentrated on breathing in and out, though the smell and taste of garlic was overpowering.

But that’s right of course, she thought at last — a dead child has no soul in it to save. Still, the baptism clearly had some effect on his ghost. And it was all I could do.

She could still feel Polidori’s rage in her head, muted down to the usual pressure of his attention, and it carried now a flavor of wrathful promise — dead children, disease, despair.

MCKEE HAD ROUSED FATHER Cyprian from his room by pounding on the rectory door, and eventually he had opened an upstairs window; and after she and Johanna had conveyed something of the urgency of their situation, he had come downstairs with a candle and unlocked the church and led them inside. There was only one window, high on the wall above the altar, and the moonlight through the stained glass shone with various brightnesses of gray. The pews below were in darkness except for the priest’s bobbing candle and the candle in a red glass chimney burning beside the altar. The two banks of tiny votive candles that had been lit during the day had long since burned out.

McKee and Johanna sat down in the front pew, and the priest stood between it and the communion rail.

“Annulled?” he said finally. “Why? I don’t think you’ve been married twelve hours yet.”

“Because,” said McKee in a tightly controlled voice, “my husband has — unmerciful God! — had the misfortune to fall prey — to the devils we mentioned yesterday.” She inhaled and went on speaking. “My daughter — our daughter, and I, have to hide from him now, and I’m afraid the sacramental bond of marriage might be a thread he and his new master could follow.”

Wind sighed against the stained-glass window, and the doors through which they’d entered, facing Bozier’s Court, rattled on their hinges, making both McKee and Johanna jump.

The priest glanced toward the rear of the church and then looked again at McKee.

“The marriage has not been consummated?” he asked, and McKee turned her face away from the candle’s dim amber glow.

“No,” she said. “We’ve — been busy.”

“An annulment would take time.”

“We don’t have time,” said McKee, her voice cracking. “We’ve wasted more than an hour selling things in the New Cut Market, and we need to be on a boat bound somewhere tomorrow morning.”

“I’m sorry, Adelaide — I could destroy the record and you could destroy the certificate, but—”

“That would only erase it in legal terms,” said McKee, nodding hopelessly.

“An annulment,” said Father Cyprian, “even a simple and uncontested one on the basis of non-consummation, would still have to come through the bishop.” He spread his hands. “But it may be that the — the spiritual bond between you and him has not yet been forged.”

“It’s forged,” said Johanna. “I’m the forgery.” She sniffed. “The marriage was consummated — in advance, thirteen or fourteen years ago.”

“That may be true,” McKee whispered; and in the same moment, from the darkness at the back of the church, came Crawford’s voice: “That’s true.”

McKee uttered a short scream and whirled around in the pew, her hand darting under her coat; Johanna scrambled to stand on the pew, facing backward; and the priest raised his voice: