Hide Me Among the Graves (49 page)

“You can't sustain me now.”

“But you—what's your name?”

“I haven't got a name. I told you that when I drew you the pictures.”

Her right hand twitched, involuntarily. That's right, she told herself—this is the thing we contacted last night, the thing that had no name and couldn't spell. But he can't be alive at all, if we contacted him at a séance!

Don't make it angry, she thought cautiously as the perspiration beaded at her hairline. It doesn't seem to be intelligent.

“What can I,” she began, and then the breath stopped in her throat.

A woman had stepped hesitantly into the room, groping as if blind, and Christina recognized her first by the long auburn hair that tumbled over her pale face and down her shoulders.

Christina sagged on the couch, as unable to move as if this were a nightmare.

“Lizzie,” she was able to whisper.

“No,” said the woman hoarsely. “Her spirit left this form long ago. And the one I have shared it with is gone now too—she is shrunken and hardened and stopped in a box of mirrors. I'm alone here.” Lizzie's body tossed its head, throwing the lank hair back, and her heavy-lidded eyes were fixed on Christina. “I need you, my dear.
Your
mirrors broke
me,
and I'm not reassembled properly. I love you as I always have—give me your blood, and then you can do what is needed to restore me.”

“You're,” said Christina softly, “you're John, my uncle John, returned to me…”

For a moment the form of Lizzie Siddal wavered, and in the instant before it snapped back into focus, Christina glimpsed the remembered man's face, the mustache and the lips and the melancholy eyes.

“All borrowed images,” came Lizzie's scratchy voice, “but this woman's image is less effort to maintain, to reflect light in, since my partner wore it so recently.” The visible body inhaled deeply, lifting the appearance of Lizzie's bosom under the rotted black cloth of the dress. “Last night you refused me,” the voice went on, “but we weren't alone. Do not refuse me now, when I need you so desperately.”

Christina glanced at the skeletal gray boy.

“He,” came Lizzie's voice, and her face was actually smiling, “does not compromise ‘alone.'”

Algernon invited these two into this house, Christina thought. They have power here. Still, John doesn't seem willing to simply force me.

“What,” she said carefully, “is needed to restore you?”

“Something like cross-pollenization,” said Polidori through the appearance of Lizzie's mouth. “Something like sexual recombining of strengths.”

Christina's heart was hammering in her chest, and she couldn't speak.

“I need you to get the stone figure that is my physical self,” Lizzie's voice went on, “and rub on it the blood of one of my partner's subjects.”

“Your partner?” said Christina. My blood was good enough once, she thought, and then she smothered the thought. “That's… Boadicea?”

“Yes, to the extent that I am Polidori. She is
not me,
and the blood of a subject of hers, charged with her essence, will convey her differentness to me. It will fill these present fissures in me with her unrelated vitality. I will be healed.”

“And soonly,” grated the nameless gray boy.

“Soonly,” agreed the Lizzie figure, swaying with evident weariness. “Blood is made in bones, and every particle of it only lives a hundred days before it dies. My partner is in no position to renew any of it now, and she was stopped five days ago, and the blood of her subjects was not newly imprinted with her essence even then.”

He's talking as if it's already agreed that I'll let him have me now, Christina thought. Can I leap up and run out of here? To where?

No, she thought as her heart pounded and her breath came rapid and shallow, I'm not certain I can even get to my feet, and he or the boy would catch me in any case. There's nothing I can do, nothing I can do.

She heard steps in the hall, and the bony gray boy darted to the far side of the couch and huddled himself below the arm of it.

“Whoever comes,” said the Lizzie apparition, “make them go, or we will kill them.”

Who is it? thought Christina. Whoever it is is only delaying the inevitable.

And it was Charles Cayley who shambled awkwardly into the room, some book in his hands, his bald head gleaming in the light of the one gas jet over the mirror.

“Oh!” he said, blinking at Christina on the couch and the figure of Lizzie standing on the rug. “I don't mean to intrude. I was just…”

Christina stared at him, wondering if she dared wait out another of his interminable pauses. After several seconds, she said, “If you'll excuse us, Charles, we're having a confidential discussion.”

“Ah!” he said, bobbing his head and waving the book he carried. His face was red. “Certainly, excuse me, I—”

“I'll say good-bye before we leave,” Christina interjected.

Still bobbing his head and mumbling polite inanities, Cayley turned and shambled out of the room. Christina recalled Gabriel's judgment of him:
The man's an idiot.

The hideous gray skull face of the boy—Gabriel's undead son—poked up from behind the arm of the couch.

“Soonly,” he said again in his flat voice.

“You love me still,” said the Lizzie thing, clearly smiling now, and for a few moments the figure was once more John Polidori, as darkly handsome as he had been in 1845, when she had been fourteen.

“That,” quavered Christina, “doesn't settle the issue.” She made the sign of the cross, and the figure reverted to the appearance of Lizzie Siddal, who glanced at the gray boy for a moment before returning its attention to Christina.

“You sinned with me once,” it said. “God will not forgive that—give yourself to me, and never die, evade His judgment.”

“I think,” whispered Christina, though she was far from sure of it, “He will.”

“But I'm dying, your mirrors have broken me—will you condemn me to everlasting Hell, when you could heal me?” For a moment the face was Polidori's again, and the eyes glittered with tears.

No, John, she thought, never!

But she found that she simply could not say it; instead, though it felt like a treacherous lie and it turned her stomach to say it, she answered, “He will forgive you too, whatever you are.”

“I can simply take you,” came its voice, sounding more crystalline than organic now.

The boy behind the couch shifted his feet, staring at her with his wide eyes.

“Possibly you can,” Christina whispered.

The figure of Lizzie glided toward the couch as Christina stared breathlessly up into its alien eyes—she seemed to be tilting forward, falling—

And then she grimaced involuntarily at a sudden, powerful reek of crushed garlic.

The face of Lizzie Siddal was just an array of curved planes and two glittering spots as it turned to Christina's left.

Christina looked in that direction and saw Charles Cayley standing again in the doorway; his hands were trembling, but were now gleaming wet and bristling with yellow shreds.

The gray boy scampered to the river-side window—Cayley jumped in huge astonishment at his sudden appearance but held his ground—and the long gray fingers unlatched it, and when the boy had pushed it open, he and the Lizzie figure broke up into pieces like images viewed through a rotating kaleidoscope, and the pieces turned black and spun churning out through the open window.

Christina exhaled and found that she was sobbing silently.

Cayley stepped to the window and with shaking hands pulled it closed and latched it again.

“Charles,” Christina was able to say gaspingly, “I believe—you just saved my soul. I—should be grateful.” She took a deep breath, and then said, “How did you know to get garlic?”

Cayley blinked at her in evident bewilderment. “Well, she's dead, isn't she? I was at her funeral, you recall.” He smiled hesitantly, though his face was even paler than usual. “I couldn't see you in peril and not try to save you.”

She almost said,
I should have married you, Charles.
But with her uncle John up again, she didn't dare love anyone.

And, she thought, the original obstacle, God help me, probably
still
applies.

Gabriel's harsh voice broke the moment: “What was Algy doing in the hall?” he asked, then frowned at Cayley's hands. “What on earth—” He sniffed. “Is that garlic?” He glanced quickly at the closed window, and then at his sister. “What's been going on here?”

“Lizzie,” she answered weakly, rubbing her eyes. “And that boy. Charles knew how to chase them away.”

“Really!” Gabriel looked at Cayley more closely. “That was good, Charles. I—that was good, thank you.”

Cayley began stammering out some reply, and Christina interrupted, “I think you could wash your hands now, Charles.”

Cayley nodded and hurried out of the room.

“Algy was in the hall?” said Christina. “I didn't know.” She stretched and thought she could stand up now.

“Eavesdropping. William and Maria are ready to go home.” Gabriel seemed distracted. “Was anything important said here?”

Christina laughed weakly. “Oh, you know, just social pleasantries! Yes, some things were said. He wants—”

“Who, that boy?”

“No, it was Uncle John, in Lizzie's form.”

She told him what Polidori had said about rubbing on his little statue the blood of one of Boadicea's victims. “He didn't know that you plan—we plan—to do exactly what he wants—at least to the extent of digging up the statue.”

Gabriel shuddered visibly. “We won't do what he wants—no blood at all must get on the thing. Did Swinburne hear any of this? But you didn't know he was there.”

He was snapping his fingers nervously. “It's tomorrow night that Lizzie is to be exhumed. Charles Howell has arranged it with the Blackfriars Funeral Company. I'm supposed to wait at Howell's house in Fulham while the exhumation goes on—Howell is to retrieve the poetry notebook and bring it to me there. But I've arranged with the funeral company to attend as a third gravedigger, hanging back as if to mind the carriage, and after Charles has left with the poetry notebook, I'll bribe the other two to step away while I attend to Papa's coffin. I'll have a hammer and chisel—it shouldn't take long.”

“And a knife,” said Christina. For Papa's throat, she thought.

“Er, yes. And then—I think we ought to destroy the statue as soon as possible…?”

Christina stood up, staring at the window. “I suppose so.” Then she shook herself and caught Gabriel's arm.
“Yes,”
she said, “the moment you've got hold of it.”

I
USED TO HATE
sunlight,” remarked Johanna as she and Crawford and McKee hurried across Tottenham Court Road at the junction of Oxford Street on Thursday, dodging the horses pulling cabs and carriages. Now she had taken off her bonnet and shaken back her hair to let the afternoon sun shine on her face. “Now it's like strong beer.”

Crawford gave McKee a worried glance. Johanna had had a glass of Mieux stout with her steak-and-ale pie, and he was hoping she wasn't fated to be a drunkard—especially since they had decided to flee to France. Crawford had the idea that the French drank wine all day long.

Yesterday he had approached another London veterinary surgeon to negotiate selling his practice to the man, and they had agreed on a deal that involved the man taking over Crawford's office and caring for the cats, and this morning Crawford had gone to Barclay's Bank to arrange for a draft of all his savings and operating capital to be transferable to a bank in Paris.