Hide Me Among the Graves (39 page)

And at some time during the last day or so—he did glance at the bell jar pretty regularly!—the strand of Byron's hair had contracted, pulling the card over onto its face.

Byron had been bitten by Doctor Polidori in 1822, in Italy. Trelawny reckoned that the hair was a link to Polidori, a tripwire … and it seemed that the Rossettis' uncle had recently tripped it, in spite of the assurances of Christina and Maria that their uncle had been banished for good. Inefficient women!

If Polidori was up and active again, then Polidori and Miss B., wherever she was these days, could resume their seven-year-interrupted effort to bring another earthquake to London. And it would be partly Trelawny's fault, he having invited Miss B. back into the world.

On the other hand, it could be that human hair just naturally shrank over the years. He had to make sure.

Long ago he had told the Rossetti sisters about the woman who lived in this house, over the dolly shop.

If she was still alive, if she still lived here, she would surely be approached by Polidori, if in fact he was resurrected.

By touch he established where the corners of the landing were. He was directly in front of her door.

He took a deep breath and knocked.

“Go away,” came a woman's languorous voice from within.

Trelawny smiled in the darkness. “You've invited worse things in, Gretchen.”

“My God, Trelawny? You must be a hundred years old. Go away, I've got company.”

Trelawny tried the doorknob—it turned, but the door rattled against an interior bolt.

“Let me in, Gretchen,” he said.

“Write me a letter,” came her muffled reply.

Trelawny stepped back and drew the revolver from under his waistcoat, then lifted a boot and kicked the door near the knob. Wood cracked and the door flew inward and banged against some article of furniture.

Trelawny's nostrils flared at a mingled scent of roses and clay as he took two quick steps across the wooden floor inside, spinning to scan the whole room over the sight bead at the end of the gun's barrel.

By the dim glow of a red-shaded lamp he saw two figures reclining on a sofa by an open window on the street side of the long room. One was a woman in a filmy gown, and the other—Trelawny felt his heart begin thumping in his chest—was a pale man with curly hair and blood gleaming on his lips and chin under a disordered mustache.

The man wore a tight-fitting black coat and trousers, ragged at the hems and torn at the elbows and knees, but it was difficult in the faint light to be sure how big or far away he was. Trelawny was careful not to look into the man's eyes.

Trelawny swung the barrel to point at the man's chest, but the woman had stood up and blocked the shot.

“Will you kill me, Edward?” she asked, nearly laughing.

“Yes,” he said. “It'll go through you to him.” But he couldn't clearly see the figure of the man now, and Trelawny knew he had lost what he sometimes called the elephant of surprise. He blinked away sudden sweat.

The man behind the standing woman seemed to flail long arms, as if trying to stand up, or fly. “Who is it?” he said in a shrill voice like a drill bit twisting in green wood. “I see steel. I smell silver.”

The pistol grip was suddenly very hot in Trelawny's right palm; but he held it more tightly and aimed it at a point below the woman's ribs that seemed to cover the broadest part of what might be the man's chest—

But in the moment when he pulled the trigger, the barrel was jerked upward, and the gun fired into the ceiling.

Momentarily deafened by the confined explosion and blinded by the lateral flares from the gap between the barrel and the cylinder, Trelawny leaped back into the doorway; he managed to juggle the hot gun in his nearly sprained hand and not drop it, but his retinas were hopelessly dazzled by the after-glare.

Over the ringing in his ears he heard the man's creaking voice cry, “It is the bridge man!”

Trelawny swung the gun barrel toward the voice, but a clatter at the window and the rippling, receding flutter of wind in cloth told him he was too late—the creature had flown away out the window, having probably abandoned its vulnerable human form even before the gun had gone off.

Trelawny had been holding his breath and now exhaled, feeling every day of his seventy-seven years, and he realized that he had been strongly hoping that it had been some natural effect that had knocked over the card in the Byron bell jar.

The woman had moved up between Trelawny and the lamp, and he could see well enough to make out her slim form against the glow. He almost thought he could see the lines of her bones through her translucent pink flesh. She shook her head angrily, then stepped past him into the hall.

“Nothing, nothing!” she shouted. “Back to your holes, idiots!”

She shoved Trelawny aside as she came back in, and he had no trouble hearing her slam the door.

“Why didn't he kill you?” she demanded furiously.

“He doesn't dare,” said Trelawny, still blinking toward the window. He walked around the couch to it and leaned out over the sill, looking first up into the night sky and then down among the shadows of the street, but he saw no motion at all, and all he could hear over the ringing in his ears was the muted crowd noise from the New Cut Market a street away.

He pulled the window closed and latched it, then turned back toward the room.

Gretchen was sitting at a table near the lamp, and she pointed at a chair on the other side. Trelawny crossed the room and cautiously lowered himself into the chair, still holding the pistol in his burned hand but pointing it now at the floor. He peered at her and saw fresh blood gleaming on her bare throat. In the red light the blood looked black.

“Damn you, Edward,” she said, touching the blood and looking at her finger. “He might not be back now for a week, and he
needs
me now.”

Trelawny laid the gun down on the table at last. “Do you have cold water?”

Gretchen scowled at him, but she got up and lifted a basin from a table near the bed and shuffled back to set it heavily in front of him. It was half full of rocking water, and he gratefully sank his hand into its coolness.

“That lad must be new,” he remarked, wincing as he flexed his fingers. “He looked like a black chicken.”

She was clearly affronted. “Lad? A chicken? There hasn't been time for any to die and come back. That was my very own—” She waved her hand.

“That was Polidori
himself
?”

“He's been broken for seven years. He's only just back—and he's ill.”

Trelawny touched his neck and nodded toward her. “But you're helping to restore him to his old stature.”

“I do what I can for him,” she agreed, nodding.
“He
loves me.”

Trelawny drummed the fingers of his free hand on the table. He sighed. “No use offering you garlic, or the pistol.”

“Give me the pistol and I'll shoot
you
with it.” She stretched sleepily. “What do you mean, he doesn't dare kill you?”

“You heard him say it. I'm the bridge man.” He touched his neck again. “If this flesh dies, the bridge between our two species dies. So he wouldn't thank you for shooting me.”

Her eyes were half shut, and she cocked an eyebrow. “Really. Edward John Trelawny is the mixer.”

“The catalyst.” He smiled wearily and got to his feet. “I'm it.”

“Well then, you take good care of yourself, Edward,” she said, “and I think a visit every seven years is too frequent for our acquaintance—I'd be grateful if you'd simply forget the way to this house.”

“Gladly.” Trelawny picked up the pistol, and it had cooled enough for him to gingerly tuck it back into his trousers.

He opened the door, walked out to the landing, and began descending the stairs. I won't be able to do anything with Polidori, he thought, at least not here—but I might have another go at Miss B.—I believe I know a close friend of hers.

T
HE LOG IN
the fireplace collapsed in a swirl of sparks at the same moment that the knock sounded at the door, and John Crawford wasn't sure he hadn't imagined it, in the same way that he sometimes imagined voices in the splashing sound of a tub filling, or footsteps in the clatter of leaves blowing across empty pavements.

But he put down his glass and stood up unsteadily and weaved his way to the hallway and the street door.

He pulled his dressing gown more tightly across his shoulders before unlatching the door and pulling it open, and he winced when the chilly night air swept inside—but there was no one on the doorstep.

He pushed his lanky hair out of his eyes and peered up and down the street, but he could make out no distinct figures in the close-pressing shadows of Wych Street.

He was about to close the door again when he looked down and saw a rounded metal disk on the top step, and he bent carefully to pick it up.

It was a gold watch, and it was warm.

The watch had been holding down a scrap of paper, and he managed to slap his palm onto it before it could blow away; holding the watch and the paper, he straightened and stepped back into the house and closed the door.

He shuffled back to his chair and picked up his reading glasses from the table beside it—and his chest went cold when he fitted them on and looked more closely at the watch.

It was his own watch, one that he had lost. He pried up the back cover and looked at the engraving on the inside of the cover:
John Crawford,
7
Wych Street, February 12, 1862.

But, he thought, I smashed this watch against a wall in the sewers seven years ago, to repel the ghosts of my wife and son! He looked hopefully back toward the entry hall—could
they
have put it together again somehow, and brought it back? Were they even now outside, waiting?

But no—I bought another watch a few days later, and had this engraving done in it. Yes, that was February of '62. What became of it?

As if it were a belated effect of the cold air he had inhaled at the door, memory blew the alcohol fumes and maudlin fantasies out of his mind.

He had dropped it in the tunnels below Highgate Cemetery to gauge the depth of the well he and Adelaide McKee had climbed down.

And he remembered a little girl's voice calling from the darkness below them:
I caught it before it could fly away. And you must fall too.

It had been McKee's daughter—his daughter—Johanna; and later he had seen her cradled in the inhuman arms of John Polidori, swinging this watch by its chain.

He laid the watch down on the table and quickly spread the scrap of paper out flat beside it.

Scrawled on it, in awkwardly penciled letters, were the words
HELP ME JOHANNA.

Crawford's face was suddenly cold.

Perhaps she had
not
died in that cave-in.

But—the last time he had seen Johanna, she had been with the Rossettis' monstrous uncle, Polidori; and pretty clearly she had been bitten by him. Christina Rossetti's trick that day, whatever it had been, had apparently killed Polidori, but would it have freed Johanna?

All the warnings his parents had given him, and which Adelaide McKee had reinforced, about carelessly inviting entities into his house, flooded back into his mind now. He should run upstairs and fetch his neglected old garlic jar—he was pretty sure he knew where it was—and smear the stuff around the door and window frames, and then go to bed with the obliterating whisky bottle.

But he had run away from Girard, nine years ago … and Johanna had written “help me.”

Sweat dripped onto the note.

How long had it been since he had taken the watch and note inside and shut the door? Would she leave? He took a deep breath and let it out, and then he strode quickly back to the front door and pulled it open, and he had scuffed down the steps to the pavement before noticing that he was wearing his slippers.