The Stress of Her Regard (35 page)

Still sitting up, he now hiked himself back so that he could assess the damage to Josephine's head. In the rainy darkness he felt the shape of her skull, but it didn't seem to have been shattered; and her face was fine, except for some rough-feeling scratches on her cheek and jaw from having collided with the street. Then he noticed a hard lump at her right temple, and he traced its outlines gently with his fingers.

It was the pistol ball. It had evidently struck the back of her head at an angle and, instead of punching straight through the skull into the brain, had skidded along the outside of the bone like the tip of a filleting knife.

She's been lucky—but she could still easily die of this. And even if she lived, her brain might sustain damage from the concussion. Of course with
her
, he thought, it would have to be a
lot
of damage, for anyone to be able to tell.

She shifted and groaned, then all at once sat up. One arm came up like a hinged rake and clawed sopping hair back from her forehead. "Is," she said in a voice like a shovel going into gravel, "the sun . . . down yet?"

When he'd recovered from his surprise at her abrupt return to consciousness, Crawford laboriously raised his eyes to the dark sky. "Uh," he said, "I think so."

"We have to go to . . . Keats. To his apartment."

Her voice was entirely without inflection, and Crawford found it hard to believe that there was anyone at all behind it. He wondered if her personality—or personalities—were still unconscious from the pistol shot, leaving this . . . this machine to work the vacated body.

"Keats's place," he echoed. "Why?"

"This is . . . not the one that knows. But we have to . . . go there."

Crawford thought about that. They'd be likely to meet more of von Aargau's men there . . . but none of them could know of his defection yet. All the witnesses to it were dead—or at least, as in the case of the man whom he had pulled down the stairs, injured and unconscious. He could claim . . . what, that he had gone to
help
the assassins, and had been shot at by Carbonari.

Von Aargau's men would help him—he was a fellow-employee. They would certainly get him medical help, and they might even loan him some money.

Of course they'd
kill
Josephine . . . damn her.

"That's the one place we
can't
go," he told her, trying to speak clearly in spite of the powerful dizziness that made the whole street seem to spin. "The people who shot us just now—more of them will be there. They'd kill . . . us."

She stood up. "Stay or come along," she said. "This is going there."

Crawford's hands were shaking as if he'd been drinking coffee all day. He was only breathing every five seconds or so, in great, shuddering sighs, and a cold, sweaty nausea was beginning to crawl up his throat from his stomach. He'd seen these symptoms in wounded sailors aboard ships, and he knew he was in danger of "freezing up"—going into a state in which all the body's functions just slowed down and stopped.

He tried to think clearly. He could knock on a door in this street, and take his chances with whatever sort of doctor was summoned, or he could walk the near mile to Keats's place with some assurance of getting the best possible care.

The rain had stopped, and the night didn't seem to be as cold as it had been.

"Let me put a tourniquet on this first," he said.

Though Crawford sweated and swore and sobbed, and leaned ever more heavily on the fortunately mechanical Josephine, and had to sit down many times to loosen and retie the tourniquet, and toward the end started begging forgiveness from the ghosts that seemed to be walking with him, the devastated pair of them eventually came dragging and lurching into the Piazza di Spagna.

Wild piano music was playing somewhere nearby, and Crawford blinked around, trying to figure out where it was coming from and what the tormentingly familiar melody was. After a moment he realized that he had heard it only in certain unrestful adolescent dreams.

There didn't seem to be anyone in the square—the saints on the steps had of course all left many hours ago, at dusk, and if any of von Aargau's men were here, they were apparently inside the building that was Number 26—but the square flickered with a diffuse white light, and when Crawford forced his eyes to focus he saw that the second floor of the building was alive with the brushlike illumination of St. Elmo's fire.

Corbie's Aunt is paying Keats a visit, he thought blurrily—and then he noticed the two figures that stood outside the door. Somehow in the weird light he couldn't tell if they were robed or naked.

One was male and the other, which he recognized instantly even after four years, was female. He sighed profoundly, and knew that even if he had had his flask with him, he wouldn't have had the strength to resist, not now, not injured and exhausted like this.

He hoisted himself away from Josephine's shoulder and began limping forward. The music strengthened and jumped up into the higher octave.

Josephine started forward too, and though she was weaving drunkenly he fleetingly got the impression that she was
somebody
again. The music was in cut-time now, and wilder, like a horse galloping down a steep road at night.

"Run," he whispered harshly to Josephine, even though he had little breath to spare. "You'll die here. This has . . . nothing . . . to do with you."

He looked over at her, and saw on her face the same hungrily despairing expression he knew was on his own. "
He
has to do with me," she said. Her voice was a defeated monotone, but he still thought she had recovered from her mechanical mode.

The woman at the doorway kept her brightly reptilian eyes on Crawford as he approached, and when at last he paused, a few yards in front of her, she smiled, baring inhuman teeth.

"You lost me in the Alps,"
she hissed.
"Invite me back now and I'll heal you entirely, and you can forget everything."

She held out to him a hand—it was slightly more like a jewelled bird-claw than like a woman's hand, but he remembered it sliding languorously over his naked body four years ago, and his heart was pounding with the desire to take it. The music was doing arabesques around his rapid heartbeat now, and he thought he could almost remember the steps of a dance so ancient and wild that trees and rivers and storms took part in it.

A moment later Josephine rocked to a halt beside him, and the male figure said to her,
"You lost me in the Alps. Invite me back now and I'll fulfill you, and you can forget everything."

The parallel statements had fit into the music like sections of gold thread in a vivid tapestry, and almost seemed to be lyrics, implying more to come.

Tears were running down Crawford's face—he didn't see how he could be expected to resist her any longer. For four years now he had ignored his nocturnal urges when he could, and had drunk himself insensible when he could not, and had lived with the memories that she could rid him of, and had not once given in to the temptation to call her—but now, surely, he could do it, could surrender his despised identity and just become an extension of her.

Faintly over the music he thought he caught an echo of harsh coughing; and then, "Not yet," grated Josephine beside him. "Upstairs—free Keats to die."

Crawford had vaguely assumed that she was talking to herself, but when he raised his arms toward the faintly luminous female figure in front of him, Josephine struck them down.

The music, which had been rising, fell off a little.

He blinked at her impatiently. "
We
do? Why?"

She waved her hands helplessly. "Because . . . because of the
sister
," she said. She seemed to have trouble talking, but then words came in a rush. "We can't let the sister die, not again. We've got to buy ourselves out of debt.
Then
we can go to hell."

I never
had
a sister, he thought—and then, for the first time in quite a while, he remembered the boat foundering in the Moray Firth, and remembered his brother's arm waving, for a while, in the savage water.

He stepped back, and though he was talking to Josephine his eyes were on the lips and the flickeringly lit eyes of the woman in front of him. "But they're dead!" he said loudly. "What can we do about it now, except forget it?"

"Nothing,"
the woman in front of him said.
"Come to me."
Her bare breasts were nacreous white, and seemed to be very finely scaled, and he knew how they would feel under his hands, or against his bare chest. The music surged, booming through the square and away up the steps to ring in the dark forest beyond the church.

"Save this one," interrupted Josephine, and again he wondered if she was talking to herself, for she was talking almost too softly to be heard. "Do what's left."

"I . . . can't." Crawford took a step forward, reaching for the inhuman woman and opening his mouth to pronounce, gratefully, the long-resisted invitation—he could feel the appropriate point in the music approaching.

"Wait!"
screamed Josephine, so harshly that he actually slowed for a moment to glance back at her.

She darted a hand to her face and seemed to dig and pull, and a moment later he was startled to see that she had gouged out her false eye. She popped it into her mouth and bit down hard, and even through the muffling of her cheeks he heard glass crunch.

Then Josephine had pulled him back and locked her arms around him and was kissing him furiously, her dry lips opening and leading his tongue into a mouth that was full of blood and glass splinters and—startlingly—crushed garlic.

The piano screamed.

And all of Crawford's years-pent-up eroticism battered at him now in a sudden, hot flood—he responded passionately, grabbing the blood-thick hair at the back of her head with one hand so that he could crush her face into his, and pulling her pelvis hard against him with the other. The pistol ball under her scalp was hot against his fingers, and he could feel the one in his thigh radiating heat.

For ten intolerably drawn-out seconds they reeled there on the pavement, grinding against each other as the echoes of the music's shrill last chord resounded away among the domes and streets of Rome and into the sky. . . .

And then the night broke, and the rain came down again in a cold torrent, and when Crawford lifted his ravaged mouth from Josephine's he saw two heavy but hummingbird-like flying serpents hanging unsupported in midair, curling and snapping their long tails, at eye level in front of the door to Keats's building; the music had either stopped or gone very quiet, and the chitinous buzz of their blurred wings underscored the hiss and rattle of the rain, and Crawford could smell the musk of them over the dry-wine scent of the wet street.

The smell only repelled him, and he knew he was immune to the lamia's attractions for at least a while now.

In the relative silence the buzzing of the reptilian wings wavered up and down the scale, and became words.

Silver in your blood, and garlic.

It was impossible to tell which of the hovering things produced the words—perhaps they both did, in unison, still singing the night's song though the music had retreated.

Though more exhausted than ever, Crawford was now coldly clear-headed, and he realized that von Aargau's assassins must have used silver bullets. "Yes," he said, and the cloud that was his breath reeked so of garlic that the serpents swung ponderously away through the chilly air. "Get out of our way."

The serpents slowly moved farther back, one on each side of the door, though their eyes glowed with a terrible promise.

Crawford kept one arm around Josephine as the two of them lurched between the buzzing things, through the doorway. They stumbled up the dark stairs, spitting blood and glass and holding on to each other for support.

The music had resumed, and was whirling up around them like bubbles in a glass of champagne. Crawford knew now that they would find none of von Aargau's men here—clearly the job had been left to other sorts of agents.

When they got to the second-floor landing they could see Keats's door, for it was open, and the inside of the apartment glowed as bright as noon. Josephine pulled a scarf out of her pocket and tied it around her head slantwise, so that her empty eye socket was covered.

Crawford forced himself to walk forward through the hailstorm of crystalline music, trying to remember what Josephine had said out front, and why it had seemed compelling—and, forlornly, reminding himself that his flask, at least, was inside.

Little long-legged things with big eyes pirouetted out of his way as he shuffled up the hall, and he heard whispering and chittering from a dozen swinging sacks that were attached by some sticky stuff to the ceiling, and creatures like starfish clinging to the walls waved tentacles at him, but none of the lamiae's unnatural retinue obstructed the two humans, who advanced hand in hand toward the open door.

Crawford was the first to peer around the doorframe, and he was surprised to see that it was the meek Severn who was wringing the demonic music from the piano—it was a radical change from the polite Haydn he'd been playing earlier—but then he noticed that the young man's eyes were closed, and that a thing like a cat with a woman's face was crouched on his shoulder and whispering into his ear.

Josephine bumped Crawford from behind, and he stumbled into the room.

The street-side wall was gone, and beyond where it had stood rose a grassy hill, with the dawning sun glittering on dewy flowers; for one stunned moment Crawford wondered if he had somehow lost an hour or two while climbing the stairs—but then he looked at the windows facing the steps, and he saw blackness beyond them, and even, in spite of the sunny glare, the orange spots of a few streetlamps; and, looking back toward the open side of the room, he saw that the foot of the hill met the floor and was flush with it, even though this was an upstairs room, and he noticed too that the sun was rising in the south.

The music was brighter and more adventurous, though still carrying an undertone of dark glamor, and now Crawford saw two young people, a man and a woman, running hand in hand up the sunny hill . . . and then he recognized the young man as John Keats, looking healthy and tanned.