Tim Powers - Hide Me Among the Graves

And then something buzzed past her ear, and when she jerked back, she saw a wasp swinging away through the moving veils of snow.

A wasp, she thought, in the middle of a snowstorm? Only after that did she think: An earthquake? In London?

“Follow me!” yelled Trelawny, moving now away from the way McKee and Crawford had come, toward the roof-edge wall beyond which the Larks had disappeared.

The roof was still swaying, and Johanna helped her father to his feet, waving away another wasp, and before hurrying after Trelawny she glanced back the other way.

A figure stood now beside the chimney where her mother and father had first appeared; its face under a tall silk hat was shiny black, and at the end of each of its long arms it waved a thin bamboo stick as if conducting an enormous orchestra.

“Where where where?” it called, in such a melodious voice that Johanna thought it had begun to sing.

A loud, hard pop shook the air, and the figure bowed and thrashed its sticks wildly but didn’t lose its balance; looking the other way, Johanna saw Trelawny lowering a smoking pistol.

“Mere de Dieu!” she exclaimed, halting. “What are you doing?”

“Get over here!” yelled Trelawny, tucking the pistol away.

Johanna hustled her father to the far edge of the roof where Trelawny was waiting impatiently, and then the four of them climbed over the low wall and dropped six feet into a narrow snow-filled gully between two projecting gables.

The footprints and handprints of the Larks were visible in the snow to the left, and had presumably extended up the shingle slope on that side before the shaking of the earthquake, but Trelawny led them through the knee-deep snow the other way, up and between a pair of cupolas and down into another snow-choked trough, this one thickly hazed with black smoke from a rank of chimneys at the downhill end.

Crawford was coughing before they had moved three paces, and when Trelawny stopped, Johanna yelled, “Get us out of this smoke!”

“In a minute,” the old man called back hoarsely. “The smoke will repel the wasps, and they’re how he sees.”

From somewhere behind among the slopes and peaks and chimneys, Johanna heard again the nearly musical Where where where? Had Trelawny’s pistol ball missed the man with the sticks?

“Christina Rossetti—” began Trelawny, then paused to cough himself before going on, “blinded him seven years ago.”

Crawford managed to choke out, “Can we — get down this way?”

Johanna could hardly see her companions through the stinging billows of smoke.

“We can get farther away,” said Trelawny. “I don’t know about down. Follow me.”

Beyond the next gable ridge, blessedly out of the worst of the smoke now, they found a row of windows overlooking Whitefriars Street extending away to their right, and the sills were a foot-wide stone ledge over the sheer drop. Trelawny began shuffling along it, facing the building and edging to his left, gripping the eaves that projected at shoulder height above the windows. Over the sighing of the wind, Johanna could faintly hear the rattle of wagons and carriages eight floors below.

Johanna quickly unstrapped the wobbly pattens from her boots and saw her mother doing the same. They wouldn’t fit in the pocket of her coat, so she dropped them on the roof.

Then, her ears ringing with fright, she shuffled out onto the ledge after the old man, her gloved hands holding tightly to the eaves and her boots scuffing in the tracks Trelawny’s had cleared in the snow. Her father was right behind her.

“Hang on,” she said to him over her right shoulder, earnestly and unnecessarily. “Walk carefully.”

“You too.”

The wind was from the north, sweeping straight down Whitefriars Street, and it kept funneling between her torso and the window lintels and trying to push her outward. Every new grip on the eaves shingles was tight enough for her fingers to feel the grain of the wooden ridge through the leather of her gloves, and she scraped her boots slowly along the ledge, very aware of the glaze of ice.

“Who,” she panted through clenched teeth, speaking mainly to distract herself from the abyss an inch behind her heels, “is he? The blind wasp man?”

Trelawny’s snow-dusted hat twisted around, and for a moment she caught the gleam of one eye above the scar-twisted lips.

“You should know him,” he said, looking forward again. “He’s the dead boy who hoped to have his way with you.”

“But — he’s a blackamoor now!”

“It’s paint.”

Johanna looked back to her right and was relieved to see the silhouettes of her father and mother slowly shuffling single file along the ledge behind her.

“Why is he — here?” called Johanna.

“Speaking of hear,” growled Trelawny, “he’s not deaf.”

Polidori used to call me Josephine sometimes, she thought. That was my grandmother’s name, and she was supposed to be a particular favorite among his victims fifty years ago, though she got away from him in the end.

I’ll bet Polidori — and his dead boy — would rather have me than Trelawny’s granddaughter, if given a choice. All things considered! I’m in what Polidori would think of as his chosen family, and she’s not. He might let the granddaughter go, if he had me.

“Is that why you called me here, in the dream?” she asked, speaking into the wind in a normal tone so that Trelawny might or might not hear.

But he had heard. “Would you have stayed in France, either way?”

She shuffled along after him, tense and careful, without answering.

No, she thought, even if I’m just back here to be a red flag to distract a devil bull from a young girl, I’ll do it, I’ll be that. I can’t bear to think of another girl going through what I went through.

“You’re still a bastard,” she said.

“Now and forevermore,” Trelawny agreed. He had halted, his cape blowing around him more violently now. “We’re at the corner,” he said. “We can’t go any farther.”

At that, Johanna’s resolutely sustained control deserted her. Can’t go any farther ? Her arms and legs tingled with sudden fright, and the ledge seemed narrower — the way back to the gable roof and the smoky chimneys seemed impossibly long and precarious, and her mother and father were blocking the way and might panic and refuse to move—!

And what if the earthquake wasn’t quite finished?

Breathing rapidly, she gripped the slanting eaves in front of her with no intention of ever letting go.

“So,” said Trelawny, “we’ll take the stairs down.” He swung one leg back, out over Whitefriars Street so far below, and then drove his knee forward into the top of the windowpane in front of him.

It shattered inward, the noise muffled and blown away by the wind.

Johanna realized that the first person to climb in would have no one to grab his hands and clothes while he crouched, but Trelawny let go of the eaves and squatted on the icy ledge with no evident qualms, and in the moment before he would have tipped over backward he reached out with his right hand, broke a wedge of glass out of the window frame, and then gripped the frame just as his weight came on it. Then his left hand gripped the opposite side and he hiked his legs forward into the dark room beyond. He disappeared inside, and she heard his boots knock on a wooden floor.

A moment later his squinting white-bearded face and one hand were back out in the wind.

“A little farther, child,” he said.

“I’m right behind you,” came her father’s strained voice.

In her panicky state it seemed suicidal to release her iron grip, but Johanna exhaled and took a deep breath, and was able to let go of the eaves she was clinging to and reach out to take hold of the one over Trelawny; the move made ice water of her guts, but she gritted her teeth and followed it with a shuffle forward, and then Trelawny had a firm hold of her waist.