Tim Powers - Hide Me Among the Graves

“You have no power here.”

“I have no p-power anywhere,” said Crawford hoarsely, shambling forward. “Adelaide, Johanna — I’ve escaped him, the way Trelawny did in America, by drowning myself. Throw—” He was interrupted by a fit of harsh coughing, and his hands slapped one of the middle pew backs. “Throw garlic at me. Or roll your j-jar down here and I’ll eat it.” He gave a shaky laugh. “Wait till dawn and I’ll — dance naked in direct sunlight.”

Johanna took the candle from the priest and began walking down the aisle toward Crawford.

McKee shouted, “Johanna, don’t!” She drew her knife and ran after her, but Johanna began running too, and the candle went out; and when McKee caught up with her daughter, the girl was already in Crawford’s arms.

“Don’t stab him!” yelled Johanna. “He’s right! I’d know!”

“Get away from him,” said McKee through clenched teeth.

“No! I say he’s clean, and I was a Lark!”

“Was.” Holding her knife half extended for a stab, McKee reached out tensely with her free hand to pull Johanna out of the way; and she touched Crawford’s sleeve. Then she let her fingers tap across his waistcoat.

“You’re soaked,” she said. “And shivering.”

“I j-jumped into the river,” he said. “Again. This time I went all the way to the bottom, and — and I very nearly died, but — ghosts found me and revived me.”

“Ghosts did?” said McKee. “What ghosts?”

Crawford exhaled, and McKee got the impression that it was so that his voice wouldn’t crack when he spoke. “Old friends,” he said. “I–I look forward to seeing them again, when my time comes.”

McKee didn’t move for several seconds, then swore and tucked her knife back into its sheath.

“Father,” she said, turning back toward the dimly visible altar, “never mind the annulment, but could we buy some dry clothes from you?”

THE DOVER-TO-DUNKIRK STEAMSHIP WAS a 180-foot side-wheeler, and though its funnel was puffing black smoke into the blue morning sky and the pistons drummed under the deck, two sails on its foremast appeared to be doing most of the work. Beyond the white sails, the remote blue sky met the sea in every direction.

Crawford and McKee and Johanna were huddled with a dozen other passengers just aft of the big starboard wheel cowling. Crawford’s cough had not abated, and he hugged himself inside the overcoat he had bought at a train stop in Maidstone.

“Sorry,” he gasped after the latest coughing fit. “Thames water doesn’t seem to be good for one’s lungs.”

“The cats,” said Johanna, holding on to her hat in the breeze from behind, “probably gave you an extra life or two.”

McKee just shook her head, staring out at the green waves of the English Channel. Crawford knew she was worried about his health, and the money that they were spending much more rapidly than planned, and the prospect of beginning life anew in a country whose inhabitants spoke a language she didn’t know.

They were still an hour out of Dunkirk, and they had been told that the tide would be low there, and that the ship would not dock but land passengers in rowboats.

Crawford said to McKee, “What shall we have for le petit déjeuner, Madame Crawford?”

McKee had learned that much from him on the train. “Frogs,” she said.

“Great bread and cheese,” countered Crawford.

“And wine,” put in Johanna.

“Will we ever come back?” burst out McKee. “Will we ever … see London again?”

Crawford leaned against the tall cowling, feeling the vibration of the big paddle wheel turning inside it.

“I think we had better hope not,” he said.

SNOW WHIRLED DOWN out of the gray sky, and the young woman who was crouched behind the big letters of the ENO’S FRUIT SALT sign high over Tudor Street pressed her back against the warm chimney bricks and began the song once again, singing loudly against the wind:

It occurred to her that she was in her own garden of snow up here, with rounded white drifts at various levels all around her, and icicles fringing roof edges and the projecting rims of cold chimneys.

The metal pattens on her boots were braced against the shingled roof of a tiny gable that poked out of the main slanting roof, and she wondered if anyone within might hear her; but the window would certainly be closed in this weather, and the little garret room probably wasn’t heated — the chimney at her back wasn’t radiating warmth from any hearth within a dozen vertical yards. She felt as if she were on the lowest-hanging skirt of some slow-moving airship, hidden by the snow and the fog from the earthbound city so far below.

She shivered and fished a flask from under her outermost coat and unscrewed the cap with trembling gloved fingers, then pulled the scarf down from her face and took a sip. The whisky was warm, and she exhaled a plume of aromatic steam before pulling the scarf back up.

She still couldn’t hear a reply to her singing, and she hoped this unseasonably late winter weather had not diverted them from their usual early-March routine: go to the rooftops to watch for churning black clouds rushing over the skyline. She recalled seeing several of the things during her years as a Lark — sometimes the weirdly distinct little clouds were elongated perpendicular to the direction of travel, and waving at the ends like wings.

And in the moment before her recent singing was answered from another roof, she saw one — a rolling black shape nearly invisible in the snow-veiled distance to the northeast; it dipped and disappeared behind some paler building that blended into the uniform whiteness. I’ll have to mention it to them, she thought, when they get here.

Only because she knew the song was she able to recognize the lyrics audible now from some nearby roof:

She pulled down the scarf for another warming sip of the whisky and then screwed the cap back onto the flask and tucked it away.

She was twenty years old now, far removed from the deep perceptions and narrow lives of the Larks — even seven years ago she had had difficulties dealing with them. She wondered if she would even be able to convey the news of the black flier over Fleet Street.

She hesitated, for she could hear the muffled clatter of them scrambling across the far side of this roof, then sang the last line:

Crouching on the roof now and squinting back up its slope, with one arm braced against the chimney, she saw three shapeless hats, then a fourth and a fifth, poke up from the roof crest above her against the marble sky. The lean faces under the floppy hat brims were in shadow.