The Stress of Her Regard

by Tim Powers

  He was crying, remembering having given her the same desperate, frightened examination after the two of them had been shot in a street in Rome; then too there had been the powerful reek of garlic and blood, but then it had been because she had kissed him to save him from giving in to the lamia.

  He tore a strip from his shirt and tied it around her head so that there would be pressure on the cut. Her hair stuck up ludicrously in all directions.

  “She should really be in a hospital,” he was mumbling, more or less to Byron, “she’s bleeding and she hasn’t been eating, you can see that—God knows what that fit was, it was like the convulsions you get if you eat strychnine, but at least it’s worn off for now, apparently—”

  “Aickman,” said Byron, swaying unsteadily, “that wasn’t a convulsion.”

  “You must not have been looking, man! I’m a physician, but anybody could see—”

  “It was,” said Byron, his voice weak but very clear, “a suicide attempt. She learned that the Polidori-thing wants her dead, and so she tried to comply. It’s a good thing you had her tied up—otherwise we’d be out in the sea right now trying to catch her.”

  Crawford laid her head down gently. “… Oh.” He stood up, absently grateful for the cold wind in his sweat-drenched hair. “I suppose it could … I suppose that was it. Yes.”

  Byron leaned, then caught himself with a quick forward step and sat down hastily. “I, however,” he whispered, “may shortly be able to show you a genuine convulsion.” Both his hands were palm down on the ground, and Crawford could see the blood coursing steadily down his neck.

  Crawford shambled over to him, sat down and, hopelessly, lifted one of Byron’s hands and put his fingers on the man’s wrist. The pulse was fast and thready, and the skin was hot. The characteristic fever of a newly bit vampire victim was already setting in, building on the fever Byron had already had.

  Crawford dropped the hand and sat back, at last recognizing the huge, unalterable fact that had changed the evening, made their efforts and heroics pointless.

  “You can’t physically make it to Venice, can you?” he asked, his voice flat with the effort of concealing the bitter resentment he felt; he would never know if Byron had secretly wanted the evening to end this way, but he vividly remembered the two opportunities Byron had had to shoot the vampire—before its first metamorphosis, and in the instant when it was again a man rushing down the hill at them—before it could bite him. And Crawford knew Byron was a good enough marksman to have made either shot. “Over the Apennines, and down the Po Valley … especially starting tonight—which,” he added with a bleak look up at the hillside, “I’m afraid we would have to do.”

  All for nothing, he thought. My shredded hand, Josephine’s cracked head.

  Byron put his hand back on his throat and shook his head. “I’m sorry. I’m nearly certain I’ll die if I try it now.” He glanced across at Josephine’s sprawled form, and sighed. Then he looked back at Crawford, and all of the usual bluster was gone from his eyes. “But let’s put it to the test.”

  Crawford blinked at him, a little ashamed now of his earlier suspicions, but still angry. “No. Thank you, but no.” He tried to think. “Maybe I could do it without you,” he said, knowing even as he spoke that it wasn’t true.

  “No, you couldn’t. You don’t know … nearly enough about the eye, and the Graiae. For one thing, the eye isn’t usually free to jump—it was jumping in 1818 because Shelley was right there when they woke up, but ordinarily it stays with one of the columns. There are a number of chants that will free it up, but you have to be able to gauge a number of factors to know which chant will work on the night you’re there. I studied these things at an Armenian monastery there for months, but I’m not even sure I could do it.”

  After a moment Crawford nodded reluctantly. He knew Byron was right.

  There was a word Crawford was trying to think of, something with the dryness of a legal term, but which had come to have a physically unpleasant meaning for him … a taste of iron and vinegar.

  Then he had it. “Proxy,” he said, his voice hollow with hope and nausea.

  “Proxy?”

  “You can be there—enough to advise me, and to draw the attention of Lord Grey and then lose him—and still be here. How’s your neck bleeding?”

  “Steadily, thank you.” Some of the old irritability was seeping back into Byron’s voice. “Aren’t you supposed to know about bandages and such things?”

  “I’ll put a bandage on it in a moment. First, give me your jar of garlic.”

  Byron dug it out and handed it to him, and Crawford opened it and with his fingers dug out as much of the minced garlic as he could and dropped the stuff onto the pavement. Then he held the jar against the skin of Byron’s neck. “I just need a bit of your blood.”

  For a moment Byron looked as if he would resist—then he just nodded weakly and lifted his chin and turned away so that Crawford could hold the jar to the bite.

  When the jar was half full, Crawford shut it and set about bandaging Byron’s neck.

  “When I drink this blood,” he began.

  “Drink it?” Byron exclaimed. “You spent too much time in that nefando den!”

  “Just enough time, actually. I remember thinking that when those men drank my blood I was able to look out of their eyes, see myself on that cross, if only dimly and fitfully, from the other side of the room. And when I drank Shelley’s blood—”

  Byron gagged. “You really are a neffer, Aickman.”

  “When I drank Shelley’s blood,” Crawford went on steadily, “I was able to see and feel everything he did, and I was even able to talk to him, converse with him.”

  Byron was interested in spite of himself. “Really? I wonder if something similar may be the original basis for the Christian Eucharist.”

  Crawford rolled his eyes impatiently. “Conceivably. So when I drink this, I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to be you, to some extent, and you be me. So you’ll know when I’ve got there, and am ready to start. Now listen, I’ll spill what I don’t drink, so Lord Grey will come rushing to your rescue in Venice as surely as my lamia rushed to where I’d spilled Shelley’s and my blood. The thing is, and do pay attention to this, you must not be visible to him anywhere else when I do it, or he won’t be fooled. Shelley made himself invisible to his half sister by being out in the boat—seawater, right? So you have Fletcher or Trelawny or somebody bring a tub of seawater into your room, and you make sure you’re immersed in it when I spill your blood in Venice.”

  They set out for the road above the house, where Trelawny had left the carriage.

  Byron held the torch and Crawford half carried, half dragged the unconscious Josephine, and they managed to work their way to the back of the house in only a few minutes.

  The upward sloping path behind the house was more difficult; Byron couldn’t climb more than a few feet before needing to sit down and breathe deeply for a while, and Crawford found, to his confused horror, that the only way he could get Josephine up the slope was to tie a fresh length of the rope around her ankles and loop it around a higher trunk and then lean into the free end, so that his own weight dragged her up the hill backward; though it delayed them still further, he couldn’t help pausing frequently to go to her and pull her skirt back up over her knees.

  His heart was pounding alarmingly, and not just from the physical effort; he kept imagining that he heard Polidori whispering over the crash of the surf and the rustle of the branches and the scuffing and slithering and panting of his own progress, and during one of the pauses for rest he was sure he heard a soft chuckling from the darkness beyond the torch’s frail light.

  At last he had got Josephine up to the road, and had rolled, hiked and folded her into the carriage. Byron followed her inside and Crawford climbed slowly up to the driver’s bench with the torch, which he wedged into a bracket in the luggage rail. The two horses harnessed to the carriage seemed impatient to be gone.

&nbs
p; The clouds had broken up, and the moonlight was bright enough so that he was able to drive at a fairly good speed; within minutes they had reached the streets and overhanging buildings of Lerici, and he reined in the horses in front of a house a few hundred feet from the inn where Byron’s party was staying.

  Crawford climbed down and opened the door, and Byron got out, as carefully as someone’s great-grandfather. Crawford couldn’t help remembering the vital young man he’d first met in a Geneva street in 1816.

  The paving stones ahead were streaked with light, and faintly on the breeze they could hear music and laughter. “Trelawny will be carousing,” said Byron hoarsely, “and the Hunts will probably have already gone to bed, in their sensible way. I should be able to get to my room without anyone asking me about this bandage.” He reached back into the carriage and pulled out a cane, which he handed to Crawford. “You remember it?”

  Crawford nodded, a faint, sad smile touching his bearded face. “Your sword cane. I remember you waving it around in a lightning storm at the foot of the Wengern.”

  “It’s yours now. Twist the metal collar of it, that ring there, and you can draw it. It’s good French steel.” Byron seemed ill at ease. “You know where the money and guns are in the carriage. And poor Shelley’s heart. And I’ve got my passport and you’ve got yours. I don’t imagine you’ll—”

  He stopped, and took Crawford’s good hand in both of his. “I’ve been a lot of trouble, haven’t I? During these, what, six years.”

  Crawford was embarrassed, and glad that the flaring torch was above and behind Byron so that he couldn’t see if there were tears in the lord’s eyes. “A lot of trouble,” he agreed.

  Byron laughed. “You’ve been a good friend. It’s not terribly likely that we’ll see each other again, so I do want you to know that. You’ve been a good friend.”

  “Oh hell.” Crawford freed his hand and hugged the man, and Byron pounded him on the back. “You’ve been a good friend too.”

  Clearly embarrassed himself, Byron stepped back. “Do you think it’s midnight yet?”

  Crawford laughed softly. “It feels like tomorrow’s midnight—but no, it can’t be past ten.”

  “In two hours it will be Michaelmas. St. Michael’s day.” Byron waved clumsily. “Kill our dragon for us, Michael.”

  “You’ll know,” said Crawford. “You’ll be there, in all but the flesh.”

  Byron nodded dubiously. “That’s right. Jesus. Don’t go getting us up too early in the morning.” He turned and began limping away, toward the inn.

  Crawford leaned into the carriage and made sure Josephine’s pulse and breathing were still steady, then closed and latched the door, wearily climbed back up onto the bench and snapped the reins.

  He drove northeast until he’d crossed the arching stone bridge over the Vara River, and then he took the old road that paralleled the Marga River, between high mountain shoulders that were a deeper black than the starry sky.

  The road was getting steeper as it curled up into the Apennines, but the moon was high and the horses were fresh, and Crawford felt better with every mile he put between the carriage and the stony thing that lay injured but aware somewhere on the hillside behind the Casa Magni.

  Finally it was the cold and his own exhaustion that made him stop. The torch had long since burned out.

  Seven miles northeast of the Vara a stream flowed into the Marga from up in the mountains, and around the bridge over the stream were clustered the light-less wooden buildings of a little village called Aulla. Crawford found a stable and banged on the broad door until a light appeared in a window overhead, and the door was eventually unlocked and slid open by an old man with a lantern.

  Crawford paid him to take the two horses out of harness and groom them,

  and to fetch a cup of vinegar from somewhere, and to ignore the fact that Crawford and his companion chose to sleep in the carriage.

  When everything had been done and the old man had returned upstairs, Crawford checked Josephine—her breathing and pulse were still regular—and then carefully poured about a tablespoonful of the vinegar into the jar of Byron’s blood, to prevent its clotting, and closed the jar and tucked it safely into one of the bags on the floor.

  Josephine was lying on the rear seat, and he lay down on the front one; in order to fit he had to tuck his legs up and bend his head down over his knees, but he managed it, and was asleep in seconds.

  He woke again, hours later, feeling painfully constricted and breathless. He had sat up, and gingerly stretched his legs out and rearranged his clothing and loosened his belt, before it became clear to him, to his dull astonishment, that it was sexual excitement that had forced him awake.

  He looked at the dark form of Josephine, only a yard away, and after a moment he realized that the glints of light in her face were reflections of the dimly moonlit stable in her open eyes. He smiled at her, and started to get up.

  Then he noticed that she was hunched up on one elbow, and staring out of the carriage window and not at him. Crawford followed the direction of her gaze—and jumped when he saw several erect forms standing on the straw-covered stable floor outside the carriage.

  There was a regular squeaking noise—the carriage springs. He looked back at Josephine and noticed that she was rocking her hips against the upholstered seat.

  And she was still staring out the carriage window.

  Teeth glinted in the hollow faces of the things outside, but Crawford couldn’t work up any fear; he could only look at the dim outlines of Josephine’s emaciated body under the ragged dress; he thought his own clothes must explode, the way Polidori’s had earlier in the evening, if he weren’t able to get out of them.

  He reached across the carriage and tremblingly cupped her hot right breast; the contact stopped the breath in him, and made his heart beat like a line of cannons being fired by one continuous, insanely quick-burning fuse.

  She snarled at him, and her head jerked down and her jaws clicked shut only an inch from his hand.

  Even in the dim light and the musty air it was clear that she was excited too—in fact sexual heat had flexed the whole fabric of the air to a tightly strained point, the way imminent lightning causes hair to stand up on scalps, and Crawford imagined that the horses, their very fleas, must be having erotic dreams.

  With nothing but hot jealousy Crawford looked through the glass at the creatures Josephine so very evidently found more attractive than himself—and then he remembered something that had been said to him by a young woman he’d encountered six years ago in the streets of Geneva, on the day he’d first met Byron and Shelley: “… we could share in their interest in us, Michael, and at least be interested in each other that way …”

  At least one of the forms swaying outside the glass was female—if he opened the door and gave himself to her, to the crowd, would he thus be able to have a willing Josephine at second hand, at least? Vicariously?

  By … proxy?

  The carriage already smelled of vinegar and blood, but the word brought back with extra clarity the memory of the woman with whom he had killed the lamia on the beach below the Casa Magni—the woman who had made love with him willingly, joyfully.

  He didn’t want to have her now if her attention was on someone, something, else.

  Byron had laid in a good stock of minced garlic, and Crawford opened a fresh jar and smeared the stuff around the cracks of all the windows and both doors.

  As soon as the smell began to drift outside the carriage, the figures in the stable diminished into sluglike things and crawled away across the straw-littered floor and up the wall and out through the stable window. Crawford watched until the last of them had heaved its bulk over the sill and thumped away outside into the moonlit night.

  Then he checked the knots on Josephine’s bonds, being resentfully careful not to touch her at all as he did it; and finally he sat back and opened his flask and drank himself into oblivion.

  At Michaelmas dawn the ol
d man burst into the stable with a priest, and as the stable owner harnessed the horses the priest shouted angry, incomprehensibly fast Italian sentences at Crawford, who just nodded miserably.

  The carriage was on the road again before the sun had quite cleared the mountains ahead.

  “Making friends everywhere you go, hey?” shouted Crawford from the driver’s bench to the sleeping Josephine as he snapped the reins over the horses backs. “Good policy.”

  They drove north under the blue summer sky, through the Cisa Pass between the vertically remote and snow-fouled peaks of the Apennines—the sun was rising ahead of them, and the sunlight was hot in the moments when the mountain wind was not rasping down through the sparsely wooded pass—and by mid-morning Crawford knew, from Byron’s maps and roadside markers, that they were very near the border between Tuscany and Emilia.

  The road had got narrower, and the rocky wall on his right and the abyss to his left had both grown steeper, and when he knew that they must be within a hundred yards of the border crossing, Crawford gave up on finding a place to pull over, and simply halted the carriage in the road. At least there didn’t seem to be any traffic right now. He hurriedly climbed down and opened the carriage door—and then gagged and reeled away.

  He had left the windows half-open, but the sun had nevertheless made a garlic steam-room of the carriage’s interior. Josephine was only semiconscious. He checked her pulse and breathing—they were still regular, and Crawford wondered what he would have done if they had not been.

  There was a strongbox under the front seat, and Crawford made sure that all of Byron’s pistols and all the knives from the cutlery set were in it, and that it was locked and the key in his pocket. He climbed back outside for a breath of fresh air, then leaned in for one more look around.