Hide Me Among the Graves (31 page)

“Good thought.”

He heard her dress rustling and tearing, and her shoes knocked and scuffed in front of his face. He reached out and lightly touched the soles of them, and he realized that she had managed to roll over onto her back in the tight tunnel.

She shifted farther ahead, and then exclaimed, “Yes! Solid! Thank God one of us is thinking—I believe I would have killed myself going down headfirst.”

Crawford nodded in agreement, though there was no way she could see it. Sweat rolled down into his eyes.

He heard her shift forward in stages, and then it was just her heels skidding on stone and he heard her panting outside the narrow tunnel; after a few moments he heard her boots clunking on iron—they ascended a few rungs, and then descended, echoing in some bigger space.

“I'm below you now,” came her voice. “Roll over and slide out.”

Crawford was bigger around than she was, but he managed to get onto his side and push his way forward until his head and arms were projecting out of the tunnel, though there was still no light at all.

The wet-clay draft was now palpably coming from below him, chilling his wet shirt, and the noise of his breathing echoed away in a big volume of air. He could hear McKee's boots scraping on metal some yards below him, and beyond that he now heard a low, many-toned humming—and he remembered McKee's description of the
vox cloacarum,
the sound caused by pressure differences in the infinite old sewers. This seemed different.

He groped upward with one hand and found a metal rod—he tugged it, and it didn't give, so he pulled himself farther out and was able to roll more and get his other hand on it too.

He pulled himself farther out into the black abyss and had to push with his heels to get his shins out past the top edge of the tunnel, but at last he was able to set his feet on the bottom edge of it, and then up onto the rungs.

Then he was following McKee in her audibly slow descent, past the tunnel mouth and farther down into the well.

After climbing down a few more rungs, he said, “That wasn't ‘oranges and lemons.'”

“It was Latin for ‘I know thee as the god of the temple,'” she said. “Now hush.”

Crawford was too sore and tired to do more than twitch at the first touch of the insect wings, and after the surprise of the first flutter at his cheek, he ignored their feather touches on his face and hands. The work of moving one hand and one foot, and then the other hand and the other foot, and the rhythmic chuff of his breath against the stone wall in front of his ever-flexing knuckles, became nearly automatic, and he tried to imagine the long-lost people who must have built this well. Into his mind swam images of Roman soldiers battling men who fought naked with crude black-iron swords.

“Again there's a drop,” came McKee's voice from below him, jarring him out of the insistent daydreams. “I can't see a thing below, but—Johanna did it, so we can.”

Crawford's first thought was that if he heard McKee fall a long way he could climb up the ladder and make his way back through the tunnel to the open air—but he couldn't permit that.

“I've,” he said, “got a new watch. Let me drop it and we can listen and see how long it takes to hit something.”

“A capital notion, my dear,” she said, and he heard a shiver of exhaustion and relief in her voice. “I owe you a lot of time.”

He pulled his watch out of his waistcoat pocket and fumbled one-handed at the little bar on the end of the chain; it was tucked through a waistcoat buttonhole, and when he finally poked it free, he lost his grip on the watch.

“There it goes,” he said hastily.

He waited several seconds, but heard nothing.

His belly was suddenly icy and tingling at the thought of a vast drop below them, and he gripped the rung he was holding on to tightly and tried to flatten himself against the wall.

“Climb … back … up,” he said distinctly through clenched teeth.

McKee's quavering voice said, “But—she must have come this way—”

And then another voice, a little girl's, spoke hesitantly from not far below them: “I caught it before it could fly away. And you must fall too.”

Crawford didn't like the sound of
must fall,
but he said to McKee, “I'll climb down and drop as soon as I hear you land and step aside.”

THE FOUR BURLY GRAVEDIGGERS
in their rough corduroy trousers and jackets had slung a pair of ropes under the gleaming black coffin, and now they came forward out of the tree shadows and lifted it off the bier and plodded across the grass toward Christina, with the coffin swinging between them. She stepped back hastily, and two of them moved to each side of the grave and then began lowering the coffin into the hole.

The mourners shuffled closer, with the white-haired old priest leading the way; Christina wondered what the old cleric would do if he knew what was in the grave. And Gabriel looked ready, Christina thought with sudden agonized sympathy, to jump into the grave himself. And this is all my fault, she thought; and Papa's too, and Papa's too, for bringing the hellish thing back from Italy and then giving it to me.

The ropes went slack, and two of the gravediggers rapidly drew them up and coiled them, and then all four stepped back.

Christina's face went icy cold—for her uncle's attention was still a quivering shadow on her mind; desperately she steered her thoughts toward her father's old headstone and away from the panicky realization that her uncle's identity was
not
fragmented now that Lizzie's doctored coffin sat on top of her father's.

The priest shook more holy water down into the grave and said, “‘We therefore commit her body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in the sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life.'”

Christina made the sign of the cross, though she wasn't Catholic. He is paying such exclusive attention to me, she thought, because I'm still physically close to his petrified body. The terrible attention will wane as I drive away.

And she knew that Polidori had caught that thought and ruefully agreed with it; though his intrusive identity seemed to promise a more lasting intimacy someday soon.

Gabriel stepped forward and crouched beside the shovelful of dirt beside the grave, and he picked up a handful and scattered it gently into the grave.

CRAWFORD HAD HEARD MCKEE
splash into mud when she dropped from the last rung, and so he was not surprised when his boots plunged into viscous muck; and he had landed with bent knees and managed to stay upright.

The humming he had heard earlier was louder now and sounded even less organic.

“Johanna!” called McKee. “Where are you?”

Crawford jumped as a chorus of harsh voices, all speaking in unison, echoed in reply, “She is here with me. Come in.” The voices seemed to reverberate from another chamber than the space in which Crawford and McKee stood.

Crawford didn't move now, and from the silence that followed the echoes of the voices, he knew McKee didn't either; then he heard a rustle of clothing and a faint metallic scrape, and his nostrils caught the pungent smell of garlic. Hastily he dug his own little bottle out of his waistcoat pocket, though he didn't unscrew its lid yet.

He heard her step forward in the mud to his left, in the direction the voices had seemed to come from; and, though his face was icy with sweat and his knees were shaking so badly that he feared he might fall down, Crawford made himself lift one foot and swing it ahead and then put it down in the unseen mud and set his weight on it, and then lift the other. His free hand was extended out in front of himself, and when he heard McKee slap some surface, he found no obstacle, though through his boot toe he felt a rounded shelf to step up onto.

Her whisper came to him from a yard away to his left: “A sort of bent pillar, here.”

“An opening here,” he muttered. “And a step.”

Her hand touched his shoulder, then slid down to his hand and squeezed it. “Thank you for staying,” she whispered. “You are—Oh, hell. Thank you.”

He could think of no answer, and only squeezed her hand in the moment before she drew it away.

With his boot he could feel the edge of a hole in the curved surface of the step, and, carefully sliding his leading foot around it to move ahead, Crawford felt a close concave wall in front of him with an opening in it; he reached up and down to trace the shape of the opening—it was tall and narrow, and the top third curved to the right so that he would have to go through sideways, leaning forward. Whatever this structure was, it appeared to have no straight lines or corners.

“Hole in the floor,” he told McKee softly. “Opening in the wall directly ahead.”

He could still see nothing, but he strongly sensed sentient presences on the far side of the curved slit in the stone wall.

He managed to whisper, “I'm stepping through.”

There was no reply beyond her fast breathing, so he gritted his teeth and slid through the narrow, bent gap and found himself standing on a smooth, slanted floor. The air was warmer on this side of the partition, and smelled of incense and machine oil.

McKee scraped through behind him, and her shoulder bumped his.

At that moment, glaringly bright yellow flames sprang up overhead all around them—Crawford yelled in surprise and leaped back, throwing one arm across his eyes, but the slick floor sloped up steeply behind him; his heels skidded and he found himself sitting down and sliding forward to where he'd been standing a moment before.

He stood up again, slowly, holding his arms out for balance. McKee had dropped to a tense crouch. Blinking and squinting, he could now see that they were in the narrower end of a large, roughly egg-shaped chamber, as if they had entered a barn-sized bubble in solid tan marble; torches blazed at intervals high up on the incurving walls.

A dozen vaguely man-shaped figures that seemed to be made of shifting mud swayed on a lower level in the middle of the chamber—the humming seemed to emanate from irregular sputtering holes in the fronts of their heads—but Crawford's attention was helplessly fixed on the man who stood on a wide rise beyond them. They were of human height, but the man towered above them, and Crawford's first impression was that the man was very far away, miles away, and stood as high as a mountain.

Then Crawford saw that the man held in his arms the little girl they had seen running away among the gravestones, and this restored the perspective—the man and the girl were no more than forty feet away—though Crawford's eyes ached with the effort of trying to keep the man in focus.

The man's outlines and colors flickered, as though he were a magic lantern projection, but at the same time he radiated so aggressive an impression of physical volume that his body seemed to possess mass beyond its boundaries, as if it occupied more space than ordinary dimensions permitted—what quality was this that transcended volume, as volume transcended mere area? It took Crawford a moment to note the mundane details—dark curly hair, a mustache, an indistinct black coat, and eyes like glittering black glass.

The mud figures below him all suddenly spoke clearly, in unison: “My name has been John Polidori,” and Crawford knew that the man beyond them was speaking through them.

“You are the fleshly origins of this child,” the voices went on, “and she is ready now to abandon the cords of merely human flesh.”

McKee took a step forward on the concave ivory floor. “No,” she said in a loud but level voice, raising her little bottle of crushed garlic, “she is not.”

Crawford desperately wished she hadn't advanced, but he made himself shuffle forward to stand beside her. The bright torchlight was still making him squint, and he couldn't stare directly at Polidori—but in his peripheral vision he could see the little girl swinging his watch on its chain.

McKee threw the opened bottle toward Polidori—and several of the mud figures instantly splashed upward in a single solid sheet; the bottle and its spilled contents cratered into the mud surface, which then collapsed back to the pit in the floor.

CHRISTINA NOTICED THAT SWINBURNE
kept looking back toward the grave as the funeral party trudged away toward the stairs that led down toward the yard and the chapel and the waiting coaches. Does he think we left someone behind? she wondered.

When the group had descended the stairs from the lawns to the crushed-stone yard, Swinburne exhaled and shoved his hands into his coat pockets and looked around at the mourners—and then his eyes widened and he stepped back toward the rear of the group.

Christina looked in the direction Swinburne had been facing and saw that Trelawny was staring after him.

Trelawny caught her gaze and fell into step beside her. The white-bearded old man's back was straight and his shoulders were almost militarily squared—in something like defiance, Christina thought.

“Who is the young poet?” he asked.

Christina glanced back after Swinburne. “He
is
a poet, actually! Algernon Swinburne.”

“One of your damned crowd? I should have expected it.”