by Tim Powers
“And a genuine doctor?”
Crawford nodded again. “The veterinary story, the whole Michael Aickman identity, is … a pose. My real name is—”
Byron shook his head. “I don’t want to know.”
The monkey had snatched both of the cushions and climbed up onto the back of the couch, to the noisy outrage of the dogs. A tall, burly man strode into the room, saw the disturbance and crossed to the couch.
“Damn it, Byron, you’re running a bestial pandemonium here!” he called, having to speak loudly because the monkey was protesting his attempts to take the cushions away.
“That’s old news, Hobby,” replied Byron. “Ask any of the tourists at the d’Angleterre.” He limped back to the table and poured a third glass and held it out to the newcomer. “This is my new medical man, by the way—Michael, this is John Cam Hobhouse—John, Michael Aickman.”
“Got rid of that idiot Polidori, did you? Good work.” Hobhouse pried both cushions out of the monkey’s grip and pitched them through the open doorway. The animals all scrambled after them in a rush, and the room was suddenly quieter. He took the glass and sat down on the couch and stared at Crawford. “Do you write poetry? Dramas?”
The question surprised Crawford, for during the past couple of months he had found himself composing verses in his head—it always happened at night, while he was waiting for sleep to take him, and it was always as involuntary as the jerking of a limb during a dream of falling; but he hadn’t written any of the verses down, so he shook his head. “Not me.”
“Thank God.”
“Hobhouse has always been a steadying influence on me,” said Byron. “He kept me out of scandals when we were adolescents at Cambridge, and two weeks ago he came here all the way from England just to chase Claire Clairmont away.”
Hobhouse laughed. “I’m honored if my arrival had that effect.”
“Hobby was even groomsman at my wedding, and it certainly wasn’t his fault that I turned out to be marrying a modern Clytemnestra.”
Crawford recalled that, in Aeschylus’s Orestia, Clytemnestra had been the wife and murderess of Agamemnon. “Some of us just shouldn’t attempt marriage,” he said with a smile.
Byron looked at him sharply. After a moment he said, “I’m about ready to leave Switzerland … move on south to Italy. How does that sound to you?”
The idea made Crawford obscurely uncomfortable, as Byron seemed to have known it would. “I … don’t know,” Crawford said. He glanced through the window into the night. I can’t, had been his first thought; this is where she’ll come looking for me, when she comes back.
His face reddened as he realized it, and he reminded himself that he wanted to be rid of her—wanted, as a matter of fact, to stay here for a while to test Byron’s idea that the nephelim shackles could be shaken off in the high Alps.
“But before we go,” Byron went on, “I want to take a tour of the Bernese Alps. I spent a day on Mont Blanc recently with Hobhouse and another friend, but I don’t yet feel that I’ve really made the … beneficial acquaintance of these mountains.” He winked at Crawford, as though to imply that there was a meaning in his words that was for Crawford alone. “Hobhouse tells me he’s free to come along for the trip—are you?”
Crawford exhaled with relief. “Yes,” he said, trying to sound casual.
Byron nodded. “You’re wiser than Shelley. I think the only way to be quit of the sirens is to answer the call, go right up into their pre-Adamite castles, and then by the grace of God come back down alive and sane. To go back without having done that is to … come to terms with an illness, rather than get a cure.”
Hobhouse snorted impatiently at what he clearly considered to be a snatch of poetic nonsense—but Crawford, who knew something about illness and cures, shivered and gulped his wine.
CHAPTER 9
The stones are sealed across their places;
One shadow is shed on all their faces,
One blindness cast on all their eyes.
—A. C. Swinburne,
Ilicet
The rain continued throughout the next day, and it seemed to Crawford that Byron spent most of the day limping up and down the damp stone stairs and shouting at people; the irascible lord found fault with the way the servants were packing his clothes, and he kept changing his mind about what dainties he wanted the cook to stock the travelling-basket with and, having splashed through the courtyard to the stables, he swore aloud at the grooms’ perverse inability to grasp his instructions about how the horses should be harnessed.
Crawford, who had encountered such masters on shipboard, expected to see in the servants’ faces the resentful stubbornness that promised slow and minimal work, but Byron’s servants just rolled their eyes and grinned and tried to follow their employer’s most recent instructions; clearly Byron inspired at least as much loyalty as irritation among them.
The following morning dawned sunny, and the touring party managed to set out at seven o’clock. Crawford sat with Byron and Hobhouse and Byron’s valet in a big, open charabanc carriage, rocking sleepily on the cold leather upholstery and blinking back through the dappled sunlight at the grooms and servants who were bringing along the saddle horses. Crawford was glad the monkey had been left behind with the house staff.
All day they travelled eastward along the road that skirted the north shore of the lake, and when dusk had claimed all of the landscape except the distant rose-lit peaks of Mont Blanc and the Aiguille d’Argentière, they stopped for the night at an inn in the port village of Ouchy, just below the blocked-out piece of sky where the lights and spires of Lausanne fretted the slope of Mont Jurat.
Byron retired early, but the sheets on his bed proved to be damp, and he spent ten minutes swearing and stripping them off and flinging them around before he finally wrapped himself up in a blanket and returned to bed.
The company was up, if grumbling, at five the next morning, and they were all dressed and fed and mounted and clattering away eastward while the workmen around the quay were still shovelling up frozen horse-droppings in the shadows of dawn; and only the highest pastures had begun to glow emerald in the peak-descending sunlight when the travellers, who had been aware of the dark face of the lake edging higher and higher up the embankment at their right, found the road ahead of them sheened with water, so that the trees bordering the right side of it seemed to have grown up out of the lake in single file, a sunrise phenomenon as wondrous as the rings of mushrooms Crawford remembered finding on dewy lawns when he was a boy in Scotland. To make the carriage lighter in case a wheel should find a submerged pothole, Crawford and Byron and Hobhouse got out and rode horses, and the horses’ hooves, splashing in the fetlock-deep water, made a wake that stretched far out across the brightening lake.
They spent that night at Clarens, on the east shore of the lake, and on the next day they hired pack mules and started into the mountains.
Breakfast was a stop under the pine trees on the slopes of Mont Davant. One of the servants started a fire and made a pot of coffee, and paper-wrapped pieces of last night’s chicken were passed around by Byron’s valet, and Byron himself circulated among the crouching company with a magnum bottle of cold white wine, filling up any cups that had been emptied of coffee.
Byron eventually sat down on a sunlit heap of brown pine needles near where Crawford was trying, for the first time in at least a week, to shave. Even though he had nothing but cold water, Crawford had managed to work up some lather from the cake of soap he’d borrowed from Hobhouse, and now he was carefully drawing a straight razor down his lean cheek. He had propped a small mirror on a fallen black branch that lay against a trunk, and after every slow razor-stroke he peered curiously at his reflection. Because of the altitude, or perhaps the early morning wine, his own face looked less familiar, and more like the face of some imbecile, every time he glanced at it.
When he was done he wiped his face on his coattail and took one last look in the mirror. By now he couldn’
t recognize himself at all, and the visage in the mirror seemed to be nothing more than a bumpy blob of flesh with eyes and holes and dots of blood arranged randomly on it. He pondered it thoughtfully for several minutes.
“Did you ever notice,” he asked Byron finally, “how foolish your face looks?”
Byron glanced sharply up from his wine, obviously startled and angry. “No, Mister Aickman,” he said, “how foolish does my face look?”
“No no, I mean if you stare at your own face for long enough it stops looking familiar—or even like any face at all. It’s the same effect you get if you repeat your name over and over again; pretty soon the name sounds like nothing but frog croaks.” Crawford waved, a bit drunkenly, at the mirror. “I’ve been shaving, here, and now I can’t recognize myself at all.”
He was glad he had had several glasses of wine, for he found the bestial face in the mirror obscurely frightening.
Still frowning, Byron took the mirror and stared into it for nearly a full minute; finally he shook his head and handed it back. “It doesn’t work for me—though sometimes I wish I could fail to recognize myself.” He sipped his wine. “And it would certainly be a relief to be able to hear the syllables ‘By-ron’ without …” He made a fist.
“Without having to take it personally,” Crawford suggested. “Without it being a … call to the battlements.”
Byron grinned, and it occurred to Crawford for the first time that the poet was younger than himself. Crawford dropped the mirror into his jacket pocket and got up to return Hobhouse’s soap and razor.
They were attacked an hour later, when the road had become so steep that everybody had had to get out of the carriage and ride or walk, and even the baggage had been taken out of the boot and strapped onto the backs of the mules. Crawford was riding one of the saddle horses, alternately warmed and chilled as the horse climbed through slanting bars of sunlight and tree-shadow; ahead of him swayed one of the baggage-laden mules, and beyond it rode Byron, leading the plodding procession.
The horses moved slowly, audibly sniffing the cold air from time to time, though Crawford could smell only morning-damp earth and pine needles.
Crawford, still a little drunk, was singing a song that old des Loges had sung interminably on that day, nearly two months ago now, when Crawford had pulled him in a wagon from Carnac to Auray and back. The song, which of course Crawford knew only in des Loges’s debased dialect, recounted how badly the songwriter had been treated by the woman he loved.
After the first stanza had gone ringing away through the pine trees that towered up from the slopes above and below them, Byron reined in his horse to listen; and when Crawford came to a stanza in which the singer compared himself to laundry beaten on rocks in a stream, Byron let the mule pass him and then edged his own horse between Crawford’s and the road’s edge, so that he could comfortably talk to Crawford as they rode.
“Who set Villon to music?” Byron asked.
Crawford had heard of the fifteenth-century poet François Villon, but he’d never read him. “I didn’t even know that’s who wrote it,” he said. “I learned the song from an old madman in France.”
“It’s the ‘Double Ballade’ from The Testament,” said Byron thoughtfully. “I’m not sure I ever really paid attention to it before. Do you remember the rest?”
“I think so.”
Crawford began the next verse—which lamented the fact that even the penalties for practicing witchcraft wouldn’t deter young men from pursuing women like the one that ruined the singer—but suddenly and for no apparent reason his heart was pounding, and a dew of sweat had sprung out on his temples.
The wine, he thought—or the disquieting lyrics of the song.
Then the path shook to a heavy, splintering crash on the uphill slope at their right, and Crawford heard branches snapping and drifts of pine needles hissing like fire as something big came sliding down toward him.
Byron had just grabbed the reins of Crawford’s horse and tried to pull both of them back, out of the path of whatever was tumbling down the slope, when the thing roared like an earthquake and sprang at them.
Dazzled by the blue sky, Crawford wasn’t able to see the thing until, in midair, it erupted from the shadows—then he got an instant’s glimpse of a mad-faced, eyeless giant before the thing collided with him and punched him right out of the saddle.
The downhill slope was steep, and Crawford fell through four yards of chilly air before he hit the muddy slope; but he landed feetfirst and slid, and so it was his feet and legs and rump that took the worst of the beating against the low branches and upward-projecting rocks; and when he finally jolted to a stop against a tree trunk dozens of yards down the slope, flayed and wrenched and whooping with the effort of getting air into his abused lungs, he was at least still conscious and not badly broken physically.
They were in the mountain’s shadow, and even after he had brushed the leaves and dirt and blood out of his face, it took several seconds for Crawford’s eyes to adjust to the cathedral dimness; he heard, more than watched, as the roped-together bundle of luggage rolled noisily down the slope, finally stopping with an expensive-sounding internal crash against a tree trunk. After that, all he could hear was the diminishing rattle of dislodged dirt-clods tumbling away far below.
His breathing was a confusion of hiccups and frightened sobs. He was trying hard to believe that the rushing bulk had been a boulder, and wishing passionately that he had stayed back down in the lowlands.
He was cramped in tension, his nerves uselessly braced for some crushing, malevolent impact; it didn’t come, and after several seconds he cautiously let himself relax a little.
He hitched himself up to a less painful position and looked around for Byron. After a few moments he saw him, perched on a rock above Crawford and to his left, chewing his knuckle and staring down at him.
“Aickman,” Byron said, just loudly enough for his voice to carry across the abraded slope, “it’s important that you do exactly as I say—do you understand that?”
Crawford’s stomach was suddenly icy, and his muscles had tightened up again. He managed to squeeze the word “Yes,” out of his rigid lungs.
“Don’t move—if you move, it’ll get you. You can’t slide away faster than it can jump onto you.” Byron stretched and reached under his jacket.
“Where,” said Crawford stiffly, “is … it?”
Byron had drawn his pistol, and was looking closely at the leaves and dirt around him, as if he’d dropped something. “It’s—do keep calm now—it’s right over your head. I suppose you could look, if you can do it slowly.”
Crawford felt drops of sweat run down his ribs under his shirt as he slowly forced the muscles of his neck to tilt his head up; he saw the upper slope, bristling with trees that obstructed a view of the road, and then he saw the outer branches of the tree he was braced against, and finally he gathered his tattered courage and looked straight up.
And it took all of his self-control not to recoil or scream, and he was distantly resentful that he couldn’t just die in this instant.
The thing was clinging upside down to the trunk, its projecting snout only a few feet above his face. It had no eyes, nor even eye sockets, and its corrugated gray hide and anvil-shaped face were anything but mobile, but he could tell that he had excited its profoundest attention. A mouth opened under the snout, exposing teeth like petrified plates of tree fungus, and the creature began to stretch its neck downward.
“Lower your head,” called Byron tensely.
Crawford did, trying hard not to be sudden about it and he let the motion sweep his gaze across Byron’s perch. Byron was kneeling up on the rock and aiming his pistol in Crawford’s direction, and Crawford saw that a stumpy section of tree branch was now projecting from the muzzle.
“God help us both,” Byron whispered, and then he screwed his eyes tightly shut and pulled the trigger.
The deafening bang and the spray of splinters struck Crawford simultan
eously,
and he convulsed and lost his balance and slid away from the tree; and though he was able to dig his fingers and toes into the dirt and drag to a stop five yards farther down the slope, he couldn’t make himself lift his head until he heard the creature fall heavily out of the tree and then begin to crawl uphill, away from him.
The thing, he saw then, was moving slowly on all fours toward Byron, lifting its long legs high over its body with each step, as if it were crawling through deep mud, and audibly snuffing the air with its upraised, elongated face. The young lord had stood up on his rock and was waiting for it, his spent pistol gripped clubwise in a white fist, his face even paler than normal but resolute. Crawford wondered why he wasn’t scrambling back uphill, and then remembered his lameness.
People were calling now from up on the road, but Crawford was busy digging a fist-sized rock out of the slope, and he had no breath to answer them. The effort of flinging it upward made him slide another yard downhill, but he had thrown accurately—the stone thudded against the nightmarishly broad back of the creature.
He coughed out a hoarse cry of triumph—which became a grating curse when he saw that he had not even slowed the monster down.
“Save yourself, Aickman,” said Byron in a voice that was flat with control.
With despair Crawford realized that he was not going to obey. His heart was still pounding alarmingly in his ribcage, and he knew he could accomplish nothing, but he began climbing uphill after the slow, snuffling, misshapen thing.
Peripherally he noticed a silent flare of green above him and to his right, and he paused to look.
It was morning sunlight in the top branches of a pine tree; dawn was finally, belatedly, coming to this west-facing mountainside. Beyond the tree was a slanting ridge that stood higher than the rest of the slope, and on the humped spine of it dew glinted dazzlingly in the brown carpet of pine needles.
