The Stress of Her Regard

by Tim Powers

  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 glamour, 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.

  “I think we’re too late,” he said to Josephine, whose hand he still held.

  “No,” she said. He looked at her, and then followed her stare toward the door to the other room.

  Keats stood there, the real Keats, leaning against the frame, his eyes blazing from his wasted face as he watched the illusion on the far wall, and Crawford suddenly knew that the woman on the hill with the phantom healthy Keats was an illusory image of the woman he was engaged to marry.

  Then the illusion faded, and the copy of Keats’s poems on the table flew up into the air. The book swelled and grew in size as it moved toward the wall where the illusion had been projected, and when it was nearly as tall as Crawford the covers swung open like a pair of doors, presenting the text on two of the pages. The spine of the giant book bumped against the wall, and clung.

  The verses printed on the pages seemed to glow darkly against the white paper … and then suddenly it was a different book hanging there, possibly a book of poems Keats had not yet written, and the verses fairly sprang off the rapidly turning pages into Crawford’s mind—and, he could see, into the minds too of Josephine and Keats himself.

  The music was unbearably sad now, conjuring images of future sunsets none of them would live to see, evening breezes none of them would live to feel; and it had a Latin tone to it, reminding the hearers that they were in Italy, in Rome, where the grandest accomplishments of mankind were as commonplace as the onion-sellers on the streets … and that the invalid Keats, who would so desperately appreciate it all, would die before seeing any of it.

  The Temptation of St. Keats, Crawford thought. He looked around for his flask, and saw it on the table where the book had been, and he wished passionately
that he dared to cross the room to it.

  The woman Crawford had seen on the illusory hill was in the room now, watching the succession of brilliant poems, and after a moment she turned and held out a hand toward the dying young man standing in the bedroom doorway. Her eyes glittered like crazed glass in the lamplight, and Crawford wondered if she still much resembled Keats’s fiancée … and if it still mattered.

  Crawford noticed that when she turned away the magnified pages faded—and when he looked again at his flask it rose up in the air and flew across the room to him; without bothering about how it had happened, he snatched it out of the air and unscrewed the cap and took a deep gulp of the brandy.

  The real book was in one of the woman’s hands, and Keats’s reached out toward her other hand, and Crawford drank some more, hoping to drown all concern for the doomed sister of the young poet, all concern for all betrayed sisters, and brothers….

  He looked away, toward the wall where the book had been hanging—the book was gone, and he was jolted to see instead the image of Julia, his dead wife, smiling and walking down a country lane, between tall chestnut trees; as she walked, pieces of her were falling off into the dirt—first a hand, then an entire arm, then a foot—though she moved along as smoothly as ever, and her smile didn’t falter. Behind her came a little dark thing that clicked and whirred as it moved, and it was picking up the fallen pieces and fitting them on over its own rusty limbs.

  Josephine’s hand tightened convulsively in his, and he looked at her—her single eye was fixed intensely on the illusion.

  He looked back at it—and then stared in horror, for what he saw now was storm-surf and cliffs under a steel-colored sky, and the keel of an overturned boat sliding across the foam-streaked faces of the waves. He knew he would see his brother’s raised arm any moment now, if he didn’t look away….

  And there it was! No, the scene had changed—the shifting blue surface was now a field of flowers, and the person waving was a young girl; a moment later he heard her yell, Johnny….

  Crawford looked back toward Keats, and saw that he had lowered his hand and was staring at the illusion. The woman followed his gaze and then, with an impatient hiss, clicked her fingernails together, and the street-side wall was restored, all visions banished. The room seemed suddenly very dark.

  Crawford guessed that Josephine, and then himself, and then Keats, had been involuntarily projecting the scenes, had for a few moments made helpless use of the lamia’s magical tools while her attention had been distracted by Keats’s near surrender. His summoning of the flask must also have been done by magic borrowed from her.

  And the final vision, the vision of Keats’s sister, had undone all her work.

  Keats was shaking his head and turning back toward the bedroom. The woman followed him, and Josephine dragged Crawford after them. In the corner Severn was torturing a high-pitched, urgent tune out of the piano, but no one seemed to be listening.

  The bedroom window was open to the rain, according to the directions Crawford had tried to give this afternoon, and he wondered if poor Severn had been duped into washing the windowsill and asking the vampire in.

  Keats had fallen across his unmade bed, and it really looked as though the exertion of standing up had been too great a strain on his ruined lungs—there was a bubbling undertone to his desperate wheezing now.

  The woman hurried to him, holding the book of poetry. “Quickly,” she said, ‘sign the book, save your self.” She took a pen from the top of the dresser and, when he raised a weak hand to fend her off, she jabbed the pen point into his palm. ‘Sign,” she repeated, holding the pen toward him.

  Keats took the book from her, but there was bitter disappointment on his face, and he shook his head again. He looked past her to Josephine, who had been his nurse. “Water,” he whispered.

  The inhuman woman moved toward Josephine, but Crawford stepped in front of her and coughed garlic fumes in her narrow face; she recoiled, her hair shuddering and contracting away.

  Josephine turned to the open window, scraped the palm of her hand along the rain-wet sill and then took a step toward the bed with her hand cupped in front of her.

  Keats reached for her.

  Suddenly the room was tilting—or seemed to be: when Crawford grabbed at the windowsill to keep his balance he saw that the streets outside were still parallel to the sill and the floor, and for an irrational moment he thought the whole world must be falling over sideways.

  Josephine took another step, a very uphill one, but then started to topple backward toward the sitting-room door, which was beginning to seem like part of the floor. Keats, apparently insulated from the gravitational tricks, lunged desperately for her, but was too far away, and too weak to get up and step toward her.

  Crawford hiked his good foot up into the window frame and then sprang out across the room in the direction that felt like up; his open hands slammed into the small of Josephine’s back, shoving her into balance, and he fell away backward and hit the wall hard enough to blind him for a moment with the pain in his broken ribs.

  Josephine had grabbed one of the posts of Keats’s bed and, holding herself up by it, she extended the hand in which she still cupped some of the water she’d scraped from the windowsill.

  “God help me,” Keats whispered, then dipped his finger into the dirty water in Josephine’s palm and scrawled with it on the open page.

  The woman retreated still farther when his finger touched the paper, and the room was suddenly level again—and then Josephine was toppling forward and, in catching herself, she pushed her wet fingertips across Keats’s waxy forehead. At that instant the inhuman woman disappeared, with a thin wail that made Crawford’s teeth ache.

  The music had stopped, though the air still seemed to ring with it, and they could hear Severn blundering about in confusion in the next room. “John?” Severn called. “Are you all right? I seem to have fallen asleep….” Clearly the cat-woman thing had disappeared from his shoulder.

  Keats’s eyes were closed, but his lips were moving; Crawford leaned closer. “Thank you, both of you,” Keats said softly. His eyes opened for a moment and he looked at Crawford. The water that ran down from his forehead found and filled the pain-wrinkles around his eyes and, after a moment, coursed down his cheeks like tears. “I told you once that I might … someday need a favor from a reluctant neff-host.” He sighed, and turned to the wall. “Now please go. And send Severn in—I want to tell him what my … epitaph is to be.”

  Severn nodded when Crawford delivered Keats’s message and, though there were tears in his eyes and he started forward at once, he waved toward the couch. “Sit down,” he called softly over his shoulder. “I’ll have Dr. Clark right over to look at you two.”

  But when Severn had gone into Keats’s room and closed the door, Crawford took Josephine’s elbow and started toward the door. “We can’t stay,” he whispered clearly to her, hoping she was capable of understanding him. “Anywhere else would be safer—men will be coming here who’ll kill both of us.”

  To his relief, she nodded.

  He led her down the hall toward the stairs—several people were staring fearfully out past doors open only a crack, and crossed themselves as the two wet, battered figures limped past—and then down the stairwell to the street and the still saintless steps that fretted the Pincian Hill.

  He didn’t pause when they left the building, but propelled Josephine quickly out across the square, past the boat-shaped Bernini fountain, to an alley on the far side. He relaxed a little then, but nevertheless made Josephine hurry south along the alley; for when the Austrian forces found that Crawford and she had already got out of the building, they’d certainly search the nearby area.

  Luminous gray had begun to infuse the sky to the east, and the long clouds were like wet bandages slowly absorbing blood as the first rays of dawn touched the steeples and towers overhead. Crawford had found a rolling, half-up-on-the-toes gait that eased some of the pain in his left
thigh, though he still found himself putting a lot of his weight on the uncomplaining Josephine. Both of them suffered occasional violent fits of shivering, sometimes so bad that they had to stop.

  At the Church of San Silvestro he paused to rest and, as he leaned against the stone wall and let his hot lungs slow down, he read a plaque on the wall claiming that the head of John the Baptist was kept somewhere on the premises. It reminded him of Keats’s poem Isabella, and he wondered feverishly what the priests watered the head with, and what they hoped would grow.

  “The convent here,” began Josephine suddenly, startling him, “is the post office now. I went there for Keats and Severn yesterday, to see if any of Keats’s friends in England had sent him money. Nobody had.”

  “It would have been too late anyway,” Crawford observed. He stared at her. She seemed to be lucid, and he wondered who she thought she was. “How did you wind up here? It wasn’t because of me, was it?”

  “No,” she said. “Originally it was for haruspication.” She leaned against the wall next to him and stared into the brightening sky. The white of her eye was blotted with bright red. “A doctor told me that word, when he figured out why I was a nurse. He made me leave. That was in … I don’t know, Fabriano, Firenze…. I’m a nurse everywhere I go now. I need to be.”

  Even in his pain and exhaustion Crawford vividly remembered her brief stint as a nurse in St. Thomas’s Hospital four years ago, and he wondered if she had discovered this necessity then. “So what’s … haruspication?”

  “Divination by the examination of entrails,” she said, clearly reciting a phrase she’d been told. “I get a lot of jobs because most nurses don’t like to work surgery; I need to, though, I—need to look in there.”

  Crawford knew he’d be having trouble following this even if he’d been alert and uninjured. “To … what, see the future?”