Hide Me Among the Graves (69 page)

“I could—to save Johanna,” McKee insisted. Her face was pale.

“And my granddaughter.” Trelawny sat back and looked around at the cupboards and the boiler and the racked knives as if he couldn't recall how he had got here.

Johanna touched her mother's hand. “I'll do it. It won't,” she added, staring at the bottle, “be the first time I've killed a person.”

“Is it not a couple of wild Bacchantes!” said Trelawny, smiling crookedly. “Ready to tear the head off a stranger! But no, children—I'm—eighty-four years old, as of last November.”

He stood up and crossed to the brick street-side wall and leaned against it between two of the gray-glowing windows, so that his expression was hard to make out.

“Have any of you read my book,
Adventures of a Younger Son
?” he asked. “No? Well, I never took you for a literate lot. It concerned my desertion from the British navy in India, and my subsequent career as a pirate on the Indian Ocean. In it I described my rescue of an Arab princess, Zela, and how I married her, and how she died in my arms. I know Byron always thought the whole thing was a bundle of lies.”

He sighed. “And—though I can still call poor lovely, loyal Zela up in my memory more clearly than I can my last wife—” He paused and then laughed softly. “Byron was right! This is difficult for me to admit, even to myself, after all these years, but—I
didn't
desert the navy. I was honorably discharged at the age of twenty, in Bristol, because of having caught cholera. I was never a pirate, never met or married any Zela. I can hardly get my memory past the fictions now, all the sea battles and piracies, but I do know that they are fictions.”

He laced his fingers behind his head and stared at the ceiling.

“But
then in Pisa in '22 I met Shelley, and Byron, and became their friend. And after Shelley drowned, I sailed with Byron to Greece to fight for that nation's independence from Turkey. Byron died in '24, but I allied myself with a mountain bandit-king whose lair was a cave on Mount Parnassus. And I married his young sister—so in a way my imaginary Zela was really just a … premonition! And when we had a daughter, I named her Zella, slightly different spelling, to honor that dear figment.

“But—my bride's brother, the mountain bandit—was one of several powerful men vying for the leadership of Greece in those days, and he was resolved to establish an alliance with the—the stony children of Deucalion and Pyrrha.”

Evidently stung by Trelawny's assessment of her literacy, McKee explained stiffly to Johanna, “In Ovid's
Metamorphoses,
Deucalion and Pyrrha survived the great flood by setting sail in an ark, and they repopulated the earth afterward by throwing stones behind them, and the stones grew into people.”

“Into things that
looked
like people, sometimes, at any rate,” said Trelawny, nodding. “Deucalion and Pyrrha resurrected the Nephilim, pre-Adamite godlike monsters. By 1824, the Nephilim had been banished, but this chieftain was determined to call them up again and become something like a god himself.”

Trelawny rubbed one hand over his white-bearded face. “I—was young!—and I wanted the same, and I was willing to commit the large-scale human sacrifice the Nephilim required. In Euboea I killed … many Turks. Men, women, and children.” For several seconds he was silent. Then, “And I was betrayed,” he went on. “I was shot in the back with one of the living stones, so that I would merely become the bridge between the two species. The ball was fired clay, and it broke against my bones, but”—he paused to touch the base of his throat—“as you know, it's been growing back, and with it the power of the Nephilim.”

Crawford was sure the old man was about to volunteer to kill someone in order to perform the procedure Maria's ghost had described.

Instead, Trelawny stepped forward into the light and glared at him and said, “Cut it out of my throat.”

C
RAWFORD BLINKED, AND
his mouth was open for several seconds before he spoke. “Very well,” he said. “Where?”

“Right here in the kitchen. Where did you suppose, out in the street? You've got hot water in the boiler, there's brandy in the cupboard—and I can fetch my sewing kit for you to stitch me up with afterward.”

Crawford pushed his chair back and stood up, wishing that he had got some sleep last night. “You'll be fine,” he said, with more confidence than he felt. “I've cut around dozens of horse arteries without losing the patient.”

“Horse arteries,” echoed Trelawny. “Excuse me while I fetch needle and thread.”

The old man turned and clumped away up the stairs, shaking his head.

“It's brave of him,” said Johanna.

“At this point,” said McKee, “it would have been cowardice not to do it.”

“Well, that's what I said. There's no neutral place.”

Crawford had stepped across to the knife rack, and after looking over the variously sized blades, he just picked up a whetstone and was rubbing his thumb across it.

“Go through the drawers in the pantry too,” he said. “See if you can find a knife with a short blade. These here are all for hacking joints apart.”

“Well, that would
do
,” said McKee, standing up and walking into the pantry.

Trelawny came downstairs carrying a small leather box. “I've got a pocketknife with a short blade,” he said. “I'd just as soon not have you hacking joints.” His voice was light, but Crawford saw the pallor under the old man's eternal tan. “I'm not afraid,” Trelawny added.

“I'll go out and find a chemist's,” said Crawford, “and fetch some ether. I'd rather use that than chloroform.”

“It's not even half an inch deep!” said Trelawny scornfully. “Just cut, I promise not to flinch.”

“No, cutting so close to the vein, I—”

“And what's happening to Rose, while we wait for you to find a chemist's? Just cut; I won't move.”

Crawford frowned at the defiant old man, then shrugged.

“Would you,” ventured Johanna, “like me to return a favor? I could … baptize you.”

“Me loyal old Lark,” said Trelawny, turning to her with a smile. “No, thank you, my dear, though I—” He shut his mouth, and after taking a deep breath and letting it out, he said, “I appreciate the thought behind the offer, more than I can say.”

Crawford eventually settled on one of the short blades in Trelawny's bone-handled pocketknife, and when Johanna had lit a candle and brought it to the table, he held the blade in the flame.

“Open your shirt and lie down across the table,” he told Trelawny. His eyes were stinging from not having slept last night, and he squeezed them shut and then opened them wide; he looked at his hands and was reassured to see that they were not trembling.

The old man took his shirt off, exposing a broad chest matted with white hair and shoulders still corded with muscle. He touched a spot on his throat just above his collarbone, on the left side. “Here's your target, Doctor.”

The lump did appear to be firmly stuck in place, very close to the jugular vein.

Crawford took off his coat and rolled his sleeves up past the elbow. “Pour a lot of brandy over my hands,” he told Johanna, “and then soak a towel in it and—”

“—Scrub where you're going to cut,” said Johanna.

“That's it.” He looked up at Trelawny's drawn face. “I'd really like to get some ether. This is likely to hurt quite a bit.”

“I don't mind hurt,” said the old man through his teeth. “Me and hurt go way back.”

Crawford shook his head. “As you please. Just, whatever you do, don't twitch.”

When Crawford had rubbed his hands in the sluicing brandy and Johanna had swabbed the old man's throat with the soaked towel, Crawford held the lump in Trelawny's throat with his left hand and reached out with the knife in his right—

—and the blade stopped abruptly, two inches above Trelawny's skin, and would move no closer.

Peripherally Crawford noticed that Trelawny's face was slicked with sweat.

The heady smell of brandy was overpowering. Crawford carefully increased the pressure against the invisible barrier, not wanting to spear the old man if it were suddenly to relent—but the blade simply skittered aside; as if, it occurred to him, he had tried to push it through Chichuwee's invisible pot.

“The blade,” he said in a strained voice, “won't get close to your throat.”

For a moment the old man just breathed in and out. Then he whispered, “Infirm of purpose, give me the pocketknife,” and took it from Crawford's hand.

The blade was steady in Trelawny's hand as he pressed it to the base of his own throat, but again the metal was turned aside.

“What's this?” snapped the old man, sitting up and jabbing uselessly at his throat several more times. “I shave, sometimes!”

“Not with the intention of cutting the stone from your throat, though,” said McKee. “The stone can evidently tell the difference.”

Trelawny dropped the knife and it clattered on the floor.

“This is Polidori's protection,” he said furiously. “It seems the Nephilim won't permit any human to cut the man who is the bridge between the species. But it shouldn't protect me from
me;
I'm not just
any
human.” He glared around at the others. “I wouldn't have confessed my sins here if I'd thought I wasn't going to
die
.”

He picked up his shirt—which had got liberally splashed with the brandy—and tugged it on.

His face was grim as he added, “It seems we must rescue my granddaughter by Maria's means.”

“And who'll commit a murder?” asked Crawford.

“Oh, who was
ever
going to do it?” grated Trelawny. “It will be me. I've got so many mortal sins on my soul that one more won't matter. I really thought—”

He finished buttoning his shirt and tucked it into his trousers. “I really
thought,
there for a moment, that the universe was offering me a noble death. Expiation.”

He walked to the stairs and was halfway up when he turned. “Come along, my sad crew—I've got an errand to run, and you've got to go roust Christina out of her nest.”

THEY BORROWED HATS AND
two coats from Trelawny before getting into a cab in front of his house, so Johanna had a black bowler hat that made her short brown hair stick out to the sides and McKee wore a straw boater with a flower-pattern ribbon, surely something left behind at Trelawny's by a guest. Crawford was wearing Trelawny's Inverness cape and a tall brown beaver hat that had probably been fashionable in 1830.

None of them made jokes about the hats on the ride east past Green Park and up the Mall to Charing Cross Road. Crawford held the bottle with the sea mouse bobbing in it, and he tried to project a mental apology to the ghost but got no sense of acknowledgment.

“We can't let—” he began finally as the cab started up Gower Street, but McKee and Johanna both interrupted him.

“Certainly not,” said McKee.

“I
could—” said Johanna, but Crawford waved her to silence.

“None
of us,” he said.

His wife and daughter both looked at him uncertainly.

“If—” Crawford said, pausing to look around to be sure the cab had four walls and a roof, “if Polidori appears in vulnerable human form even for a moment, we must try to kill him in that moment. We can't let poor old Trelawny commit a murder—nor participate in one ourselves.”

Both women seemed to relax, cautiously, though their expressions were skeptical.

“We'll fail,” said Johanna.

“We can jump into the river,” said Crawford, “if we fail.”