Hide Me Among the Graves (22 page)

“Somehow,” agreed Gabriel, rocking on his heels.

McKee scowled at both of them, but a reluctant smile was tugging at the corners of her lips. “You could have
interrupted
him to do it.”

“You always were headstrong, Adelaide,” Christina said with a sigh. “He might be an ally, and his devil isn't the one that threatens us.”

Gabriel's face was blank.

“No,” said McKee, turning on her, “your uncle is that. And he and my daughter both seem to be connected to Highgate Cemetery. You know more about all this, I see, than you could possibly tell us now—come there with us.”

Gabriel blew out a breath and shook his head. “My sister isn't well; it's out of the question.”

“I really couldn't do it,” said Christina. “But I can tell you any number of—”

Crawford interrupted her with an involuntary gasp. The figure he had been watching was closer now, and there was something wrong with its silhouette.

Its wide leather hat, as wide as a horse collar, had no crown and seemed to rest directly on the figure's neck, with no room for a head in between.

The others had followed his wide-eyed gaze, and now Christina waved urgently.

“He's blind,” she whispered. “Complete silence, all of you.”

Crawford's ears were ringing shrilly though almost inaudibly, and he could feel his heart thudding in his chest.

Below the impossible hat the figure wore an old brown coat that trailed on the gravel of the outer circle road, and the thing was meandering back and forth in the road like someone looking for a dropped coin, but its random-looking course kept bringing it toward the row of cages. Its harsh breathing was audible already, and soon Crawford could hear it muttering to itself in a hoarse voice as resonant as someone speaking from the bottom of a well, though he couldn't make out words.

McKee's hand was gripping Crawford's upper arm tightly. He glanced at her, but she was staring out white-faced at the advancing thing.

The brim of the hat flapped as the creature spoke, and Crawford's heart seemed to freeze solid when he realized that the thing's mouth was as wide as the hat brim, a yard across at least. He looked away, fearing that it might sense and track his gaze, but not before he had glimpsed two long rows of shadowed teeth and a tongue like a black sunfish.

Its words were audible now: “My darling, my Diamonds! Do you move so fast? My sister is hurt, away under the ground in the dark; help me find her. Touch me—where are you? Take my hand! Don't you hate the sun? You know what those children sing? ‘When the sky began to roar, / 'Twas like a lion at the door!'”

Its long arms were extended as its shoes scuffled and scraped across the gravel, and its hands were hidden under the long, flapping sleeves. The breeze seemed to have halted, frozen like glass.

Crawford was watching the thing only from the corner of his eye, and so he saw Christina open her mouth when it became clear that the thing's wobbling course would take it past the cage toward the canal, with yards to spare; but Gabriel gripped her shoulder, and she closed her mouth and gave him a guilty look. Gabriel's free hand was visibly a fist in his coat pocket, no doubt gripping his now-empty revolver.

None of the four moved their booted feet on the sandy cage floor, but their heads slowly turned to watch the thing's hunched back and flopping hat recede in the direction Trelawny had taken.

Several minutes passed before the shambling figure disappeared among the elms to the west, but none of the people in the cage spoke until it was out of sight, though Christina began panting.

“That was your damned—” said Gabriel to Christina, “your—what did you call him?”

“Mouth Boy,” said Christina breathlessly. “But it was Uncle Polidori, wearing the form of my childhood nightmare.” She rubbed her eyes with trembling hands.

“Yes.” Gabriel gave her an angry glance. “I don't know what you see in him.”

She squinted at him. “Yes, you do.”

“I'd have shot him if I'd had a seventh bullet.”

Christina didn't reply. She stretched and retrieved her parasol and stepped to the cage gate. “We should separate, all be indoors by sunset.” To McKee she said, “When can we meet at Highgate Cemetery?”

“You can't!” said Gabriel. “You're not strong—”

“Tomorrow,” said McKee.

“I will,” Christina insisted to Gabriel. “It's because I woke our uncle—and because you … brought him to Adelaide—that her daughter's soul is in danger. It may be that we can find his statue, and—”

Gabriel gave her a look that seemed both cynical and pleading.

“
—and destroy it, and him,” Christina went on firmly, “and free Adelaide's little girl. And you and me.” She clasped both hands on the parasol handle, possibly to keep them from shaking. “It doesn't matter if I—what my natural feelings for him still are.”

After a grudging pause, Gabriel said, “You don't mention Lizzie.”

Christina touched his arm. “And go some way toward saving Lizzie too,” she said gently. “You believe she's
shared
by these two devils?”

“I—damn it,
yes.
And either one could have assumed my form and … potency. I can't know which of them it was who—”

Crawford thought about his practice and his rent, then sighed and quietly said to McKee, “After noon, please.”

McKee nodded.

Christina turned to Gabriel. “I think you'll come too.”

Gabriel almost seemed ready to spit; but, “You're my sister,” he said, “and their child might just as easily have been my daughter. And it is conceivable we might be able to do something to help Lizzie.” He heaved a windy sigh. “Yes, I'll go along.”

Crawford forced himself not to scowl. Damn the man, he thought. Might just as easily have been his daughter indeed!

“Get your gun loaded again,” McKee told Gabriel. “Load two, if you have them.”

T
HE DINNER AT
La Sablonniere in Leicester Square was, Gabriel thought cautiously, going as well as could be expected. He was more comfortable with the informal dinners he served for friends at home—“nothing but oysters and of course the seediest of clothes,” as he often specified in his invitations—but this dressing up for an elegant restaurant was what Lizzie had apparently wanted.

It helped that the young poet Swinburne was there. Swinburne was twenty-five but looked a malnourished sixteen, and his wild mane of kinky hair was the same carroty color as Lizzie's, and his twitchy cheerfulness often sparked a like response in Lizzie.

Lizzie had in fact vacillated all evening between giddy hilarity and a wooden silence, and she had drunk several glasses of Haut-Brion Blanc but had eaten only a few bites of her
supreme de volaille,
a chicken breast in a white sauce; Gabriel recognized all this as the effects of her damned laudanum.

Their table for three was beside a window overlooking the streetlamp-dotted darkness of Leicester Square, and now Lizzie had pulled off her shawl to polish the glass, and her bare shoulders glowed too pale in the glare of the restaurant's wall-mounted gas jets.

“There's a … new building there,” she said. “In the middle of the square.”

Swinburne, not entirely sober himself, goggled at the glass but apparently couldn't see beyond his own reflection and the steam of his breath.

Gabriel leaned forward and squinted. The high dome and pillared entrance to the Wyld's Globe exhibit was the only building visible out there in the dark. “Nothing new that I can see,” he said.

“That dome,” Lizzie said. “Wasn't it grass there…?”

“That's been there for eleven years, Guggums. Ever since the Great Exhibition.”

“Is it a church?”

“My sort of church,” said Swinburne, slouching back in his upholstered chair and reaching for the decanter of claret. “The world, introverted.”

“It's a giant globe,” said Gabriel patiently, “turned inside out. You go in and you can see all the seas and continents around you.”

“Turned inside out,” echoed Lizzie. “I'm turned inside out. Everything around me is my own grief and loss, and inside I'm just an empty street, an empty building.”

Gabriel wished she weren't so devoted to poetry; she wrote a lot of it, and it was, frankly, pedestrian stuff, though Swinburne loyally claimed to admire her verses.

“Nonsense, Gug,” Gabriel said. “You're ill, it colors your mood. I think a crème brûlée and a glass of sauternes—”

Lizzie was frowning and shaking her head. “If the globe is inside out, where's God? Rise up from one place and soon you'd only bump your head against another! And Hell—under the surface—is infinite! Don't bury me!”

“For God's sake, Gug, pipe down! Nobody's going to bury you, you're not dying. Algy, she listens to you, tell her she's not dying.”

Swinburne was a frequent visitor at Chatham Place, and he and Lizzie were forever reading to each other, or playing with the cats, or jointly composing nonsense verses and wrestling for possession of the pen as inspiration struck one or the other of them.

Swinburne blinked at her now over the rim of his wine glass. He lowered it and said, “Don't die, Lizzie darling. Who else could I find who doesn't despise me?”

She sniffed and shook her head. “It's the ones who love us that are the peril. ‘And well though love reposes, in the end it is not well.'”

Now she was quoting an unpublished poem of Swinburne's. The young man, whose red hair was now sticking out in all directions, pursed his lips in wry acknowledgment. “But Gabriel and I love you. We're no peril.”

“You don't love me as much as two others do,” she whispered.

Gabriel shivered. Two, he thought; and he remembered Trelawny's words this afternoon: …
if the person were so unwise as to welcome one of them and then welcome the other one as well.

Lizzie looked back out the window, and tears stood on her eyelashes as she kissed one finger and then stroked it down the glass. “Oh, do you see her? She followed us, but she won't come in where it's warm.”

“Who?” asked Swinburne, to Gabriel's alarm.

“Don't let her get started on—” he began, but it was too late.

Lizzie was sobbing, and Gabriel pushed his chair back and stood up, waving to the waiter.

“My daughter,” wailed Lizzie, “dead but weeping, immortal but starving!” Gabriel had strode around to her side of the table and was pulling her shawl across her shoulders and shushing her, but she went on, “Is my second child to join her out there?”

Gabriel was peripherally aware of eyeglasses and red lips and mustaches turned toward them from the tables nearby, and for a moment a smell of wet clay seemed to eclipse the aromas of beef and cigar smoke and wine sauces, but he had got Lizzie to her feet and was concentrating on guiding her toward the dining room door; he could hear Swinburne's boots rapping on the polished wood floor behind him.

Gabriel dug a five-pound note out of his pocket and thrust it at the wide-eyed waiter, who hurried to fetch their hats and coats; and after what seemed like an infernal eternity of tugging at sleeves and scarves and glove cuffs, they were at last stepping across the foyer and he was pushing open the heavy front door. Wintry air numbed his cheeks and stung his teeth as he whistled to a cab standing at the curb a dozen yards away, and when the driver shed his blanket and shook the reins, Gabriel turned to Swinburne over Lizzie's shaking shoulder.

“Sorry, Algy,” he said, “she's—”