Tim Powers - Hide Me Among the Graves

“I need to see the old man,” she called. “He sent for me.”

“Bugger that,” one of them growled. He or she was holding a long-bladed knife in one raggedly gloved fist.

“And I saw one of the black fliers just now,” she went on. “It went down over Fleet Street, very near here. Did any of you sorry lot see it? He’ll want to know about it.”

The line of heads wobbled uncertainly, and another of them spoke up. “You got the Neffy smell on you.”

“So do you, each of you. I used to be one of you, damn it. He sent for me, call him.”

For several seconds the shadowed faces just peered down at her. Then regular clanking sounded from the far shoulder of the building; at least one person of adult weight was ascending the iron ladder from the adjoining rooftop. Could it be the old man already?

But she recognized the voice that called “Johanna!” and her eyes widened in dismay.

The Larks had ducked away out of sight on the far side of the roof, and Johanna scrambled up to the peak and glared down at where they were crouched in the lee of an advertising sign overlooking Whitefriars Street.

“Call the old man!” she said fiercely.

After a moment, one of the ragged Larks dug a clay egg out of a pocket and blew the remembered low, mournful note; it rolled away through the snowy air, seeming to shake the spinning snowflakes.

Johanna stared unhappily to her right, at a ridge between two nearby chimneys in the direction opposite the gang of Larks, and soon two bundled-up figures began to appear by labored degrees from behind it, and Johanna recognized her mother’s overcoat, and then her father’s cough. Her mother was forty-one now, and her father fifty-three, and Johanna blinked rapidly to keep tears from spilling down her cheeks and freezing on the scarf. They should both be sitting by the fire back in the rented house in Cherbourg, she thought furiously.

Her father was holding her mother’s hand as she stepped carefully down a snow-covered slope of shingles, the pattens on her boots scraping up shavings of ice, and as he followed her McKee was facing the Mud Larks across the flat section of roof that was hidden from the streets below.

“Where is our daughter?” she demanded. “We heard her singing with you.”

“Up here,” called Johanna through clenched teeth. She pounded a gloved fist against the roof peak, loosening a little avalanche. “I told you not to come after me! I begged you to stay home, in my note! I’m — an adult now!”

“So are we,” gasped her father, waving his arms to keep his balance on the squeaking icy roof. “And then some.”

Johanna hiked herself up to sit astride the roof peak. “How did you … find me?” she called down to them.

“We followed the Larks,” said her father, looking around the rooftop clearing in evident bewilderment.

“Why now ?” wailed McKee, squinting up at Johanna. “Cherbourg was safe!”

The Lark blew the little whistle again, and the flat note stretched out over the rooftops.

“Safe for the last what, month?” retorted Johanna. “Just as Rouen was, or Amiens, or St. Brieuc, or — how long do you think it would have been before he found me in Cherbourg too?”

“But,” McKee said, “with no preparation, in the winter — in the middle of the night!”

“And a dreadful day for a Channel crossing,” said her father; he paused to cough, and then he went on, “We caught the first boat out of Le Havre, but you weren’t on it. You must have found one right at the docks in Cherbourg.” He coughed again. “What kind of springtime weather is this?”

Johanna sighed through her ice-crusted scarf, and was about to answer her mother, when a new voice intruded:

“I called her.”

A lean figure in a black Inverness cape and a slouch hat stepped out from behind the tallest chimney, on the far side of the low square area below Johanna.

And she caught a hint of echo in her own head, a leftover of the mental connection that had conveyed his message to her in a dream two nights ago.

Her mother now had her back to Johanna, staring up at the newcomer.

“Are you — a ghost?” asked McKee.

The question seemed to irritate Trelawny — he swept his hat off and flung his head back, his white hair blowing around his dark face in the snow, and said in a booming voice, “I wish to God I were! It’s a bad world that brings an old man out onto the roofs on a day like this. Back down to the streets, now — we’re fools to talk under the bare sky, let alone all clustered together.”

“I saw a flier two minutes ago,” said Johanna. She waved a hand north. “It went to earth a street or two away northeast, probably in the Strand around St. Bride’s or Ludgate Circus.” In spite of everything, she smiled behind her scarf, pleased that she still remembered London geography after having been away for seven years.

“Fliers!” cried Trelawny. “So close! And such as you are on the roofs! Down, now. If we’re not—”

“He called you?” interrupted McKee, though she was walking back toward the roof slope she had just descended, and the ladder on the far side. “How?”

“He can reach me in dreams,” said Johanna, swinging a boot over the roof peak and sliding down to the surface her parents stood on, “just like the other can.” She stepped across the icy tarred surface and stood worriedly beside her father. The bitter chill couldn’t be good for his lungs.

Trelawny had skated down from his perch to join them, and now he raised his gloved hands. “Reach her from the opposite spiritual direction,” he clarified. “These, you recall, are the hands that baptized her.” He turned to the mute Larks on the other side of the flat roof and said, “Good. Resume your patrol.”

“You called our daughter back to London?” said her father, who hadn’t moved.

Trelawny’s face was shadowed as he pulled his old hat back over his head. “I tried Chichuwee, day before yesterday,” he said gruffly, “but he could provide no help.”

“Help in what? Never mind, it doesn’t matter — our daughter is leaving with us on the next boat back to France.”

“You and Mother take it,” said Johanna. She squeezed his hand through two layers of glove leather. “This is for me to do. You two will just get killed if you stay — wait for me in”—belated caution kept her from again saying the name of the city—“in the place we’ve been living.”

“What’s for you to do?” burst out McKee.

“He,” said Johanna, not wanting to pronounce the name Polidori out here either, “has got himself another girl. She’s fourteen, just a year older than I was when that dead boy came after me, wanting to — to have a child, some sort of child, by me. She’s to be his bride, since I fled.”

“My granddaughter, that is,” said Trelawny. “Rose, Rose Olguin. I will— not have her digging her way up out of a grave and”—he added with a shudder—“and having congress with that dead thing.”

“You said your children were in America,” protested Johanna’s mother.

“Argentina,” said Trelawny impatiently, “one of them. Others stayed here and died. Of course. But the daughter in Argentina moved back to London two years ago, in spite of my warnings, and now her fourteen-year-old daughter—”

Johanna noticed that the Larks had disappeared over a low wall to the left; and a moment later the roof moved sideways under her boots. She hopped to keep her balance, but her father sat down and her mother crouched and braced one hand against the roof surface. Patches of snow slid down all the roof slopes, and she heard a low rumble roll across the City.