by Tim Powers
Pain in the stump of his missing finger woke him before dawn.
Two mornings later he was scuffing his way up the broad front steps of Guy’s Hospital, blinking at the Greek-looking pillars that stretched away overhead from the top of the front door arch to the roof two stories above; but the sunlight seemed too harsh up there among all that smooth stone, and he let his gaze drop back down to the heels of Keats’s boots, which were tapping up the steps just ahead of him.
For the last couple of days he had been attending lectures at both Guy’s and St. Thomas’s, confident that he would be able to get Appleton to acknowledge the signature he had forged on his application papers—if Crawford should decide to make it official and actually become a surgeon again under the name of Michael Frankish.
And he was fairly sure he wouldn’t be recognized. For one thing, Dr. Crawford had always worked in hospitals north of the river and, for another, he no longer looked very much like Dr. Crawford—he had recently worked very hard to lose weight so as to look his best at the wedding, and he now found himself losing more, involuntarily; and nobody who had known him a week ago would have described him as hollow-cheeked and sunken-eyed, as he certainly was now.
At the top of the steps Keats paused and frowned back at Crawford. “Are you sure you’re not too sick?”
“I’m fine.” Crawford fished a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his forehead. He was dizzy, and it occurred to him that Newton must have been right when he’d said that light consisted of particles, for today he could feel them hitting him. He wondered if he was going to faint. “What have you got today—Theory and Practice of Medicine?”
“No,” Keats said, “this morning I’m helping out in the cutting wards—people recovering from lithotomies.”
“Mind if I … follow along?” asked Crawford, attempting a carefree smile. “I’m supposed to hear about Anatomy from old Ashley, but he’ll just put me to sleep. And I’m sure I’d pick up more real acquaintance with the subject by touring the wards than by sitting through a damn lecture anyway.”
Keats looked uncertain, then grinned. “You were a surgeon’s dresser on shipboard, didn’t you say? Sure, you’ll be used to dealing with much worse than this. Come along.” He held the door open for Crawford. “Matter of fact, I’m taking the exam tomorrow, and then leaving for two months at Margate—you might very well be my successor with Dr. Lucas, so it’s only right that I show you around.”
They reported to the senior surgeon, who didn’t even look up when told that Michael Frankish was to be Lucas’s new dresser; he just gave Crawford an entry certificate and told him to use the boot-scraper before going upstairs to the wards.
It took a little over an hour to tend to all of Dr. Lucas’s patients.
As a student Crawford had not minded tending to the people recovering from surgeries in the cutting wards; the operating theater itself was far worse, a horrifying pandemonium in which burly interns struggled to hold some screaming patient down on the table as the surgeon sweated and cursed and dug with the knife, his shoes scuffing streaks in the bloody sand on the floor as he braced himself for each resisted thrust … and just as nightmarish, if quieter, were the “salivating” wards, where syphilitics drooled helplessly as a result of the mercurial ointment rubbed into their open lesions … but the cutting wards were where a student could see healing actually occurring, quietly, day by day.
Dr. Lucas’s cutting wards were different. After changing the first heavily slick, malodorous bandages, Crawford could see that Stephens had not understated the old surgeon’s skill—Crawford had never seen clumsier incisions, and it was clear that at least as many would die of the bladder-stone operation as benefit from it.
A gray-haired clergyman was on his knees beside one of the last beds they came to, and he looked up when Keats bent over the patient. The old cleric seemed to have been deep in prayer, for it took several seconds for his eyes to focus on the newcomers, and even then all he managed to do was nod and turn away.
“Excuse me, Reverend,” said Keats, “got to change the bandages.”
The clergyman bobbed his head and backed away from the bed, and he thrust his hands inside his cassock—but not before Crawford noticed blood on his fingers. Puzzled, Crawford looked up at his face, and saw the man quickly lick his upper lip—had there been blood there too?
The minister met his gaze for a moment, and the old face tightened with some emotion like hate or envy; one of the bloody hands emerged from the robe for a moment with the ring finger folded inside the fist, and then a spotted finger pointed at Crawford’s own left hand. The old man mimed spitting at Crawford, then turned and scuttled out of the room.
Keats was leaning closer to the figure in the bed, and now he reached over and opened one of the eyes. “This one’s dead,” he said, softly so as not to alarm the patients in beds nearby. “Could you find a nurse? Tell her to fetch a doctor and the porter so we can get this into the charnel house.”
Crawford’s heart was beating fast. “My God, John, that minister had blood on his hands! And he gave me the most horrible look before he ran out of here.” He waved at the corpse in the bed. “Do you think …?”
Keats stared at him, and stared off the way the old man had gone, and then grabbed the blankets and pulled them down to peer at the diaper-like bandage; in that instant Crawford thought Keats looked older than the clergyman had. After a few moments Keats spoke. “He didn’t kill him, no,” he said quietly. “But he was … looting the body. The blood of … certain patients has a … certain value. I’m fairly sure he wasn’t a real minister, and I’ll see to it that he’s kept out in the future—let him go haunt the wards at St. George’s.” He waved at Crawford. “So get the nurse.”
Though both disgusted and intrigued by Keats’s words, Crawford’s mood as he walked down the hall was one of dour amusement at being ordered around a hospital by a twenty-year-old … but his amusement turned to incredulous horror when he started down the stairs.
A nurse was walking stiffly up the stairs, and he had raised his hand to get her attention, but when she looked up he recognized her. It was Josephine Carmody, apparently deep in her mechanical persona.
His hand paused only a moment, then went on up to scratch his scalp as if he had never intended the gesture to be a wave, and he lowered his eyes and moved to pass her. His heart was thudding hollowly, and he felt drunk with panic.
She was too close to him when she drew the pistol from under her blouse, and instead of shoving the muzzle into his ear, she only managed to slam the flesh-warmed barrel against the back of his neck. She took a step back to get a clear shot.
Crawford yelled in alarm and swung his right fist hard up against her gun hand.
Breath whistled through her teeth and the pistol flew out of her grasp, but it clanked against the wall and then tumbled down three steps and Josephine dove after it.
Crawford didn’t think he could get to her before she could come up with it, so he went clattering back up the stairs in a half-crawl. She didn’t shoot, but he could hear her clump-clumping up after him, and somehow her imperturbable clockwork stride was more terrifying than the pistol. He was whimpering as he ran back down the hall to the room in which Keats waited for him.
Keats looked up in surprise when Crawford came lurching back into the windowless ward. “Did you find a—” he began.
“Quick, John,” Crawford interrupted, “how can I get out of here besides by the stairs?"—but the metronomic clumping had reached the floor they were on. “Jesus!” he said shrilly, and ran back out into the hall.
Josephine was standing ten yards away, pointing the pistol straight at him. He sat down and threw an arm across his face, hoping she’d fire quickly and not take time to aim—and then something burst out of the ward doorway to his right.
The gun boomed and flashed, and he wasn’t hit. He lowered his hands——and saw a glittering thing like a rainbow-colored serpent curling its heavy, scaled body in the air bet
ween him and Josephine; he was dazedly trying to make out whether it had wings that were beating too fast to see, like a hummingbird, or was hanging from some kind of spiderweb, when it simply disappeared.
The hallway’s stale air shook, and Crawford shivered in a sudden impossibly icy draft.
Josephine was staring wide-eyed at the space where the thing had been, and when she turned and ran back to the stairs it was with an animal grace that was the very opposite of her mechanical pose.
Keats was beside Crawford. “Get in here,” he was saying harshly, “and deny having seen anything.” He dragged Crawford back into the ward, where the patients were querulously demanding to know what was going on and who would carry them to safety if the building was under attack by Frenchmen. Keats told them that a nurse had gone mad and fired a pistol, and to Crawford’s surprise that explanation seemed to calm them.
“Act stupid,” Keats whispered. “They’ll assume you are anyway, to be assigned to Lucas. Tell them this fellow"—he waved at the corpse in the bed—"was this way when we got here.”
Crawford was about to protest that the patient really had been dead when they’d arrived, but before he could speak he looked down at the figure in the bed.
The body was collapsed, like a trolling net with the stiffening hoops taken out of it, and the mouth was now gaping and charred and toothless. When Crawford looked up, Keats was staring at him coldly.
“Your … rescuer … came out of that,” Keats said. “If the old scavenger in the clergyman suit hadn’t drained off some of the potency first, the thing probably would have killed that woman, in addition to stopping her shot.”
CHAPTER 4
The stones …
Began to lose their hardness, to soften, slowly,
To take on form, to grow in size, a little,
Become less rough, to look like human beings,
Or anyway as much like human beings
As statues do, when the sculptor is only starting,
Images half blocked out….
–Ovid,
Metamorphoses
Taking Keats’s advice, Crawford thickened his voice a little and let his mouth tend to hang open when they were questioned by the senior surgeon; total bewilderment he didn’t have to feign, nor a tendency to jump at any sudden motions around him. The senior surgeon told them that the nurse who had fired the gun had fled the hospital, so Crawford was able to say that he’d never seen her before and had no idea what she had hoped to accomplish. The condition of the corpse in the hospital bed was blamed on the ricocheted pistol ball, and it required an acting ability Crawford hadn’t known he possessed to nod and agree that that sounded likely.
Keats was through for the day, and Crawford knew that his own days as a medical student were over now that Josephine had somehow found him, and so the two of them walked homeward together up Dean Street. Men were unloading bales of old clothes from several wagons by the south corner of St. Thomas’s Hospital, and the yells from the vehicles of the merchants and cabbies blocked behind them were almost drowned out by the clamor of the dozen boys and dogs playing around the halted wheels, and for several minutes as Keats and Crawford shouldered their way through the crowd neither of them spoke.
Finally they were past the worst of the noise, and Crawford said, “John, what was that thing? That flying snake?”
Keats seemed bitterly amused. “Are you really trying to tell me you don’t know?”
Crawford thought about it. “Yes,” he said.
Keats stopped and stared at him, obviously angry. “How is that possible? How the hell much do you expect me to believe? Am I supposed to think, for instance, that your finger was really amputated because of gangrene?”
In spite of the fact that Keats was shorter than he and fourteen years his junior, Crawford stepped back and raised his hands placatingly. “That was a lie, I admit it.” He wasn’t sure he wanted to share any of his recent personal history with Keats, so he tried to change the subject. “You know, that fake priest was staring at my … at where my finger used to be.” He shook his head in puzzlement. “It seemed to make him … angry.”
“I daresay. Can you really not know about all this? He thought you were there for the same reason he was, and he was angry because you pretty clearly didn’t need to be anymore.”
“He was—what the devil are you saying, that he was there to get a finger amputated? And jealous because I’m missing one? John, I’m sorry, but this doesn’t even—”
“Let’s not talk about it in the street.” Keats thought for a moment, then looked hard at Crawford. “Have you ever been to the Galatea, under the bridge?”
“Galatea? No. Is that a tavern? It sounds as if …” He let the sentence go, for he’d been about to say as if the barmaids are living statues. Instead he said, “Why is it under the bridge?”
Keats had already started walking forward. “For the same reason that trolls hang about under bridges,” he called back over his shoulder.
The Galatea was indeed a tavern under London Bridge. After shuffling down a set of stone steps to the narrow river shore—into the shadows of the beached coal barges, where the two of them picked their way over unconscious drunkards and piles of rotting river weed—they stepped into the dank darkness under the bridge, and at one point even had to shuffle single file along a foot-wide ledge over the water, and Crawford wondered if there was another entrance for deliveries or if all the food and drink was delivered to the front door by boat.
They passed the place’s warped windows before they got to the door; lamplight made luminous amber blobs in the crude glass, and it occurred to Crawford that sunlight must never get this far in under the wide stone belly of the bridge overhead. Nine tiny lamps burned over the door, and Crawford wondered if they might be just the remainders of a pattern of now mostly missing lights, for
their positions—four in a cluster, then two, then three—seemed intentional.
Keats was in front, and pushed open the door and disappeared inside. When Crawford followed him in, he saw that there was no consistent floor to the place—every table was on its own shoulder or slab or projection of primordial masonry, connected by stairs and ladders to its neighbors, and each of the half-dozen oil lamps hung from the ceiling on a chain of unique length. Considering the place’s location, Crawford wasn’t surprised that it smelled of wet clay.
There were only a few customers huddled down there on this summer morning, and Keats led Crawford past them, in a winding, climbing course, to a table on an ancient pedestal in what Crawford assumed must have been the back of the place. One of the lamps swung in a subterranean breeze a couple of yards above the scarred black tabletop, but the shadows were impenetrable around them as they sat down.
“Wine?” suggested Keats with incongruous cheer. “Here you can get it served in an amethyst goblet—the ancient Greeks believed that wine lost its power to intoxicate if it were served that way. Lord Byron used to drink wine out of an amethyst skull.”
“I read about that—but it was just a skull, I think, a plain old bone one,” said Crawford, refusing to be intimidated by Keats’s manner. “A monk’s, I believe. He dug it up in his garden. And yes, wine would be just the thing on a day like this—sherry, if they’ve got a thick, strengthening one here.”
A big, moustached man in an apron climbed up beside Keats and smiled at the two of them; Crawford guessed that he had grown the moustache to partially conceal the no doubt cancerous bump that disfigured his jaw. “Well now, look who we have here!” the man exclaimed. “After some company, are you, my men? Neffy on this fine day? I’m not sure who’s around right now, but there’ll certainly be several who’ll pay for—”
“Have you met my friend?” interrupted Keats. “Mike Frankish, Pete Barker.”
Barker bowed slightly. “Anyone who can persuade Mr. Keats to grace my estab—”
“Just drinks,” interrupted Keats. “An oloroso sherry for my friend, and I’ll have a glass of the house claret
.”
The man’s smile remained mockingly knowing, but he repeated their orders and went away.
“He didn’t know you.” Keats sounded thoughtful. “And Barker knows all the neff-hosts in London.”
“What is that, and why did you think I was one?”
The drinks arrived then, and Keats waited until Barker had climbed away into the darkness again. “Oh, you are one, Mike, or you’d be gripping the sides of the operating table right now while some doctor probed your abdomen for that pistol ball. But I knew it when I first saw you. There’s no mistaking the mark—kind of an ill look about you that’s all in the eyes. At first. Clearly you only became one recently—you couldn’t live with the mark on you in any city for very long without noticing the kind of attention you’d be drawing—and anyway your finger still hasn’t healed, and their bites heal quickly.”
“It wasn’t bitten off, damn it,” Crawford said. “It was shot off.”
Keats smiled. “I’m sure it seemed that way. Try telling that to the neffers, though—the people you’ll be meeting who live the neffer life.”
More mystified than ever, Crawford drank some of the syrupy sherry and then set the glass down hard. “What,” he said levelly, ignoring a faintly echoing groan from the darkness behind him, “is that?”
Keats spread his hands and opened his mouth to speak, then after a moment exhaled and grinned. “A sexual perversion, actually. More often than not, anyway. According to the police, it’s a taste for congress with certain sorts of deformed people, like Barker there with his big jaw. According to its devotees, though, it’s the pursuit of … succubae, Lamiae.”
Crawford was both unhappy and amused. “So I’m the sort who’d mistake Barker for a beautiful female vampire, am I? Goddammit, John—”
“No, you’re not one of the pursuers.” He sighed. “The problem is that there aren’t any pure-bred lamiae, pure-bred vampires, anymore.” He squinted at Crawford. “Hardly any, that is. And so people nearly always make do with remote descendants of that race. And it’s generally some sort of … tumor … that distinguishes such. The tumor is the evidence—the substance, in fact—of the kinship.”
