by Tim Powers
“Josephine,” said Crawford loudly. His voice disappeared in the vast night like wine spilled on sand. “Josephine!” he shouted. “I need you!”
For several moments the only sounds were the continuing rustle of the wind in the pines and the waves crashing at his back. Crawford looked up at the terrace railing, remembering how Shelley would lean there, staring out at the Gulf waters, during the long June evenings.
Then in the pauses between the waves he could hear a soft but echoing shuffling from the darkness behind the ground-floor arches—and a moment later a figure in a tattered dress was visible standing in the central arch, the arch through which Josephine had single-handedly dragged the rowboat on the day she had saved him from drowning.
“Michael,” said Josephine hoarsely. Some dark substance was caked around her mouth, as if she’d been eating, but she looked weak and starved, and her eyes were enormous.
Crawford took a step forward, and she instantly disappeared back into the darkness. “Don’t … approach me,” she called. “I’m not supposed to let people approach me.”
“Fine,” said Crawford, backing away with his palms held out. “Look, I’m way back here—you can come out again.”
For several moments there was silence—he and Byron exchanged tense glances—then Crawford heard sandy scuffling inside, and, very slowly, she re-emerged into the flickering orange light. Crawford tried to see if she looked pregnant, but wasn’t able to tell.
“Can you approach us?” Crawford asked.
She shook her head.
“Not even so that we can talk? Maybe I want to rejoin the flock. Byron here is … one of you, I’m sure you can see it in him.” He felt Byron shift beside him, and he could tell from a wobble in the light that he had moved the torch from one hand to the other. Crawford prayed that he wasn’t getting impatient, wasn’t going to say anything.
“I can’t do anything for you,” Josephine said. “You know that. You need one of them to look favorably on you.” She smiled, and he could see what her skull would someday look like. “They will, though, Michael. Find one of them and ask for forgiveness. They’ll give it. I’m forgiven for … for what you and I did.”
Her bare feet on the flagstones looked like white crabs.
Crawford blinked back tears. “I want you to come with me, Josephine. I love you. I—”
She was shaking her head. “I think I loved you,” she said, “but now I love someone else. We’re very happy.”
He squeezed the rope, the useless rope. “Listen to me,” he said desperately.
“No,” she said. “The sun is down, and he’s waiting for me.” She started to turn.
“You’re pregnant,” he said loudly.
She had paused. Crawford thought he had heard a sound on the dark hillside, something different from the hiss of the sea wind in the branches, but he didn’t look away from her.
“Think about it,” he went on quickly, “you were a nurse, you know the symptoms. It’s our baby, yours and mine. Maybe this … life is what you want for yourself, but is it what you want for our child?”
For several long seconds she didn’t speak. “You’re right,” she said finally, wonderingly. “I think I must be pregnant.” Her face was expressionless, but tears gleamed now on her hollowed cheek.
Again there was a faint sound from the hillside. Crawford glanced up there for a moment but couldn’t see anything among the dimly lit pines.
She turned back toward the sea and took a hesitant step out from the arch, and Crawford broke the twine that held the rope to his belt; the coiled rope was in his hand now.
She had noticed Byron now, and was staring at him as anxiously as a half-tamed cat.
Byron waited until a wave had crashed on the rocks and receded. “It’s all right,” he said, just loudly enough for her to hear. “Two times two is four, two times three is six, two times four is eight.” His voice was almost harsh with compassion, and Crawford wondered if he was remembering her rescue of them on the peak of the Wengern.
“Come with us,” said Crawford.
“Two times five is ten,” said Byron, softer now, as if reciting a lullaby to a child, “two times six is twelve …”
She opened her mouth to answer, but was interrupted by a loud, musically resonant voice from the darkness on the hill.
“No,” it said. “You’re mine, and your child is mine. I’m the father.”
“Christ,” grated Byron, sliding his free hand into his pocket, “that sounded like Polidori.”
Josephine had stopped. Her tattered dress was fluttering in the chilly breeze.
She was staring at Crawford intently. He smiled at her—and then flipped the rope out away from his side and tossed the loop over her shoulders.
She turned and lunged for the arch and the darkness beyond it, and Crawford was pulled off balance and fell painfully onto his knees; but he pulled her strongly back, and she fell across him.
She was struggling furiously, and even though Byron knelt on her—awkwardly, for he wouldn’t drop the torch or take his hand out of his pocket—Crawford wasn’t able to get another loop of the rope around any part of her. He could hear something scrambling down the hillside, and in desperation he hauled back his maimed hand and slapped her very hard across the face.
It rocked her head and she went limp, and as Byron stood up Crawford hurriedly rolled her over and tied her wrists together tightly.
The hand he’d hit her with was gritty with clay. The stuff smeared around her mouth was clay. Had she been eating it?
When he looked up, Byron had drawn his pistol and was pointing it past Crawford, toward the trees. His free hand held the torch steadily.
Crawford looked in the direction the muzzle was pointing. A man stood on the pavement beside the house.
He was dressed in a shirt and trousers as shabby as Josephine’s dress; but, unlike Josephine, he looked well fed, with a visible paunch and the beginnings of a double chin.
He was smiling coldly at Crawford. “I,” he said, “have not ever hit a woman. I’m proud to have resigned from a race whose members would.”
Josephine was recovering from the blow, and flexing weakly under Crawford, and he ran the rope back from her wrists and looped it around her ankles and drew it tight. He began tying a knot, with trembling fingers.
“Polidori,” called Byron, his voice a little unsteady. “The ball in this pistol is Carbonari issue—silver and wood.”
Crawford drew the knot tight, and looked up.
With an explosive tearing pop that made Crawford jump, Polidori’s clothing flew away in rags in all directions—and to judge by the way the torchlight guttered and flared, Byron had been startled too—but when the light steadied, Crawford saw that a serpent with buzzing wings hung now in midair where
Polidori had been standing.
It curled heavily in the air, its metallic-looking scales glittering in the torchlight. Its long snout opened, showing a white brush of teeth, and its glassy eyes swivelled from Byron to Crawford, and then down to where Josephine lay on the stones.
“Don’t shoot now,” said Crawford hastily. “I’ve seen them in this form before—pistol balls just bounce off them.”
“My darling!” breathed Josephine, staring at the serpent.
The thing rose up into the air, buzzing loudly, and then sailed off into the darkness toward the hillside.
Crawford had wrestled the resisting Josephine halfway to her feet when the musical voice sounded again from among the trees.
“Your ball wouldn’t have killed me,” it said, and though its tone was urbane, Crawford could clearly hear anger in the precision of the syllables, “but it would have hurt me. You hurt me before, Mister Crawford, in the Alps. Do you recall?”
Crawford couldn’t hold up the struggling Josephine any longer; but he knelt under her as he let her fall, so that it was his already bleeding knees, and not her head, that cracked against the stone. “Why the hell didn’t you shoot when you h
ad the chance?” he asked Byron, his voice an exhausted sob.
Then he took a deep breath and looked up. “No,” he shouted, answering the voice.
He was glad the thing apparently wanted to talk, for he needed time to think. Could he and Byron drag Josephine into the surf, and use the insulating qualities of seawater to keep the thing away from them until dawn? It would be, he thought hysterically, like children swimming in a pond, ducking under water when a hornet was hovering near.
Josephine was panting, staring up into the dark trees.
“With the mirror,” said the voice. “When you reflected sunlight onto me.”
Crawford did remember it. “But that wasn’t Polidori,” he panted. “Polidori only killed himself last year.”
“We’re not such divided entities as humans,” came the voice. It laughed, a harsh ringing like bronze bells. “'What you have done to the least of my brethren, you have done to me.'”
“How,” demanded Byron, “do you dare to quote Scripture?”
“How do you dare to publish poetry as your own?” returned the voice, its rage abruptly very evident. “The great Lord Byron! Secretly sucking away at the Gorgon’s teat! Presuming to despise anyone who hasn’t found their way to it! My poetry may not have been brilliant"—the voice was shrill—"but at least it was my own!”
Byron still had the pistol in his hand, and he laughed now and swept its muzzle across the hillside. “Poetry,” he said good-naturedly, “was the least of the things in which I excelled you.”
A scream sounded from the hillside, and for a moment Crawford glimpsed a naked man rushing toward them between the trees, and Byron levelled the pistol; but an instant later the buzzing curdled the air again and it was the winged serpent that flew at them.
Byron’s pistol went off just before the thing hit him, and the ball ricocheted off the serpent and the house wall as the torch spun through the air and hit the stones, scattering sparks.
The light was gone, and over the ringing in his ears Crawford could hear Byron’s panicky gasping and the slither and heavy slap of the serpent’s coils; then there was a sharp, tortured wheeze, and he knew that the thing had wrapped itself around Byron and was squeezing the breath out of him.
Crawford had taken one step toward the sea—the only thought in his mind being to swim out as far as he could—when he saw that the torch was not quite extinguished. It lay on the stones a couple of yards to his left, and the head of it was still smoldering.
Still not giving up the idea of fleeing, he snatched it up and whirled it in a circle in the air. It flared back into flame, and the first thing he could see was Josephine’s face staring anxiously toward Byron and the serpent.
Her concern, he realized, was not for Byron’s safety but for her lover’s—and Crawford’s panic hardened into a leaden, despairing rage.
He turned away from her.
The thing had Byron down, its long rippling body coiled around him, holding his arms helpless against his constricted ribs, and even as Crawford stepped forward it lowered its head to Byron’s neck and delicately lanced its narrow teeth into the man’s corded throat.
Byron’s eyes clenched shut and his lips pulled back from his teeth in a snarl of pain and rage and humiliation—but of reluctant pleasure, too—and Crawford leaned down and thrust the torch against the serpent’s eyes.
Josephine screamed, and the flames licked Byron’s cheek and withered the gray hair at his temple, but the reptile’s eyes just rolled upward to look at Crawford incuriously as the scaled throat worked, swallowing Byron’s blood.
Still holding the torch in one hand, Crawford pulled the jar of minced garlic out of his coat pocket and lashed it down onto the stones, then scooped up a handful of glass and garlic and, shivering with revulsion, leaned down to scour it across the reptile’s eyes. Shards of glass lanced into his palm, but the chance that it might hurt Josephine’s new lover made him ignore the pain.
The snake-thing convulsed, hissing and spitting out a spray of blood and blinking its huge eyes. Its coils loosened, and Byron shook them off and rolled weakly away, sobbing and whooping.
Crawford backed away from the monster, toward Josephine, as the gold-foil wings began thrashing and buzzing, blowing sand away across the flagstones.
The thing that had been Polidori rose up into the air again, its weight apparent in the ponderous swinging of its body. For a moment the head swung back and forth in the chilly breeze, peering uselessly through the blood and glass and garlic that fouled its eyes.
Then, hanging in the air at shoulder height, the thing shuddered, and its face began squirming, reshaping itself. The snout crumpled inward and widened and, grotesquely, became a fleshy human mouth in the reptilian face. “Where is the child?” said the mouth. Its voice was hoarse and breathless, as if the creature had not had time to mold more than rudimentary vocal organs. “Where are you, Josephine?”
Suddenly Crawford guessed that the child was terribly important to it, much more important than Josephine; that children who were born into submission, as Keats and Shelley had been, were a particular victory for its species. He crouched over Josephine and clamped his bleeding hand over her mouth, but she squirmed away from under him with surprising strength.
“Here,” she gasped. “Take me.”
The thing’s head snapped around toward her hungrily, and as the long body shot forward through the air Crawford grabbed Josephine around the waist with his free arm and, with an effort that seemed to dislocate his shoulder and spine, heaved her back.
The serpent’s head cracked so hard against the pavement where she had been that chips of stone whistled through the air, and its body rebounded up and crashed against the top of one of the building’s pillars with an impact that made the Casa Magni resound like a vast stone drum.
The thing hung higher in the air now, about twenty feet above the pavement, and its furiously buzzing wings were blurs of reflecting gold around the downward peering face. The mouth had been shattered against the stones, and blood ran from it in a long, swaying string, but it managed to produce one word.
“Where?”
Crawford’s arm was still around Josephine, and he felt her draw in a breath to answer.
In an unreasoning burst of jealous fury he released her and snatched the pistol from his pocket, and only after he had cocked it and aimed it up at the devastated mouth that she preferred to his own did it occur to him that Polidori had compromised his invulnerability by adopting this piece of human anatomy.
Crawford pulled the trigger, and beyond the flare of the explosion he saw the serpent cartwheel away upward through the air, and over the echoes of the bang he heard it scream shrilly like blocks of stone sliding rapidly across each other.
Josephine screamed too, wrenching at her bonds so hard that Crawford thought she would break bones.
He stood up, and limped over to where Byron lay. The lord was staring blankly at the pavement under his face, but he was breathing.
“I hate you,” sobbed Josephine. “I hope this child is his. It ought to be—he and I have been living out here as husband and wife for months.”
Crawford smiled savagely at her and blew her a kiss with his bleeding, garlic-reeking palm.
CHAPTER 23
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
–T. S. Eliot,
Preludes
Byron had rolled over, his hand clamped to his bloody throat, and was staring up at the stars. “Well done,” he said hoarsely. He sat up, groaning and bracing himself on his free hand. “That won’t have killed him, you know. He’ll be petrified, and with luck he landed somewhere where the sun will shine tomorrow, but he’s not out of the picture.”
“True,” came a grating voice from the darkness, harsh with inorganic pain.
Byron and Josephine and Crawford all jumped, and the torch in
Crawford’s hand swung wildly.
“Take me!” screamed Josephine, managing to prop herself up on one elbow.
“Soon,” said the voice.
Crawford shook his head unhappily, staring at Josephine and dreading exertions to come. He looked back up at the dark hill. “And you rebuked me for having hit her! You tried to kill her!”
“Jesus, Aickman,” said Byron as he struggled to his feet. “Don’t be talking to the thing. We’ve—”
“To kill her,” came the voice, every syllable sounding as if it cost the thing unimaginable pain, “is not an insult.”
“You,” Josephine called into the night, “you want me … dead?” She had managed to get up into a wobbling crouch, with her hands behind her back.
Crawford stared at her. “Of course he wants you dead. Look at the goddamn hole in the pavement where you’d still be lying, smashed like your sis—like a bug, if I hadn’t pulled you away!”
He walked back and crouched by her. “Listen to me,” he said. “Are you listening? Good. He wants you to die and be buried so that you can hatch like an egg and give birth to the seed he’s sown in your blood, the extension of himself that will climb out of your grave. And then after a while you’d give birth to what would once have been our child, but would by this time be one of these creatures.”
He laughed grimly. “Talk about there being no ‘well-at-any-rates'! Our child would be like Shelley or Keats, condemned to nephelism by the circumstances of birth, except that this child would be deprived of ever having any human life. This may be unprecedented, at least since the good old days before Noah.”
Josephine nodded, seeming to have comprehended what he’d said, and he had begun to relax a little, and even to smile, when she suddenly arched powerfully backward, striking her head with a sickening crack against the pavement.
“God!” Crawford squeaked in horror. He lunged forward onto his aching knees and for a moment just cradled her head, his mind as blank as if it had been his own head that had hit the stones; then he laid the torch down carefully and began feeling her skull. Hot blood was rapidly clogging her already matted hair, but she was breathing and her skull was at least not broken in.
