The Stress of Her Regard

by Tim Powers

  But it stopped warping itself, and stood up and faced him and Josephine, and his heart sank to see that it had taken the form of Julia, Crawford’s long-dead wife.

  “Look at me, Josephine,” said Julia’s mouth. “Look at me and relax.”

  “Don’t listen to it,” Crawford wheezed, hiking himself up on one elbow, “don’t look into its eyes …”

  But Josephine already had, and was staring into the eyes of the thing that still had power over her.

  “Who am I, Josephine?”

  “You’re …Julia.”

  The woman figure nodded and walked forward, smiling. “My poor little sister! Look at your hand, and your eye! What have they done to you?”

  Josephine lowered her head jerkily and held up her skeletal arms. She looked as inorganic as the bronze men on the clock tower, and the knife she still clutched in her hand looked as if it had been cast with her arm. “They’ve,” she said in a rusty voice, “taken away nearly all of my flesh.”

  “Did you want them to?”

  Josephine shook her head, and Crawford bared his teeth in empathic pain to see the tears in her eyes. “I don’t remember,” she said. “I couldn’t have … wanted it, though, could I?”

  “They’ve used you up,” the shape of her sister said.

  “Yes. They’ve used me up.”

  “You’ve always wanted to be me,” said the Julia-thing. “You can have it now.” Its tone was infinitely comforting. “You can be me.” It took another couple of steps, and was now standing in front of Josephine. Its smile was radiant, and even for Crawford it evoked dim memories of the house in Bexhill-on-Sea.

  “I have always wanted to be you,” Josephine said softly. “But …”

  The thing was reaching out white hands toward her. “But what, dear?”

  Josephine took a deep breath.

  And the dagger lashed forward so quickly that the thing had no chance to get out of the way, and to Crawford it looked as though the obstruction of the hilt was all that prevented Josephine from driving her fist right through the figure.

  “But I hate you!” Josephine screamed, falling to her knees with the figure of Julia and dragging the blade upward through the abdomen. “You wanted me to worship you, and live only as a … a reflection in one of your mirrors! You loved it when I’d dress up as you and pretend to be you, so that you could … have everybody make fun of me, expose me as horrible little Josephine, and you could drink up the bit of yourself I’d made!” She pulled the dagger out and drove it into one of the struggling figure’s eyes. “I’m like Keats and Shelley—I was born into submission to a vampire!”

  The figure had stopped struggling, and was clicking and creaking under her, and moving only as its shrinking limbs were drawn in, and Josephine tugged the dagger free and slowly got to her feet.

  Crawford gathered his remaining strength and then made himself stand up and cross to where she stood. He approached her cautiously until she looked at him and he saw recognition in her eyes.

  “It wasn’t really Julia,” he said, putting his arm around her shoulder.

  “I know,” said Josephine, staring down at the little statue on the floor. “But everything I said was true. How … could I not ever have known, until now, that all of that was true?”

  Crawford pulled her away, and together they turned and slowly walked over to the glass case against the wall. The figure within it shifted weakly on its ornately embroidered mattress, and seemed to chuckle.

  For one moment Crawford thought it must be a terribly old woman, with one hip shoved into a hole in the wall, who had somehow become pregnant—the face was as wrinkled and collapsed as a sun-dried apple, but the belly was tightly distended as if with a huge baby. Then he noticed the wispy beard, and the scar on the abdomen and, finally, tucked away like forgotten schoolboy textbooks in an old man’s basement, the withered male genitalia.

  The scar was stretched by the swollen belly, but he recognized it—he had noticed it on the flat stomach of the von Aargau duplicate whose wound he had sewn up in a canal-side café, so long ago.

  “Good evening, Werner,” Crawford said unsteadily. “Do you know who this lady is? She’s the nurse who you tried to get me to poison in Rome two years ago.”

  “Look at the ceiling,” the appallingly old man said.

  Crawford looked up.

  And his chest went cold. The ceiling was a checkerboard of heavy, square stone blocks, and Crawford’s very spine cringed with the sudden awareness that there weren’t enough pillars to support it.

  “Now look at me.” The old man waved a skeletal hand toward his own left hip, which at first glance had looked as though it had been thrust into a hole in the wall. When Crawford looked more closely, though, peering over the tight expanse of the abdomen, he saw that the pelvis and thigh seemed to have been pared down nearly to the spine, and the body then somehow spliced to the stone.

  He and the building are joined at the hip, Crawford thought. It’s like the two women on that little cake that Josephine was supposed to break when I married her sister.

  And Crawford thought of a line from Shakespeare, from Macbeth, that Shelley had frequently quoted: like two spent swimmers that do cling together and choke their art; and for a moment it seemed to him that he, and Josephine, and all the poets, had also consisted of two persons intolerably joined. Werner, and the women portrayed on the oatcake, were simply more obvious examples, and thus a concealment of the subtler forms of it.

  “I’m a part of the building,” said Werner. “It’s my continuing vitality alone that prevents the ceiling from falling.” From webs of wrinkles in the ancient skin of the face the two gleaming eyes stared up at him. “Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” said Crawford. “If you die, we die.”

  The crumpled, papery mouth worked: “Those are the facts of the case. So you can forget your ideas about cutting the statue out of me. And my offer nonetheless still stands: leave now and I will instruct the nephelim to forget all of you forever.”

  Crawford was trembling, but he forced a laugh. “I know what their word is worth. Percy Shelley put it to the test recently.”

  I could force Josephine to leave, he thought, and then do it, cut it out of him.

  Then he remembered her promise to drown herself if she were not allowed to accompany him in this. He knew he would not be able to force her to leave.

  For a moment he considered taking Werner’s offer—but he knew Josephine would not ever agree to that either.

  Perhaps Werner was bluffing about the ceiling?

  Crawford glanced up, and then shudderingly looked down again. No, he was not bluffing.

  He was snapping his fingers, and he avoided looking at either Werner or Josephine.

  And you don’t have infinite time, he told himself. You’ve got to do something.

  He stared down into the glass case at the ancient scar that stretched across von Aargau’s distended belly, and then very slowly he turned to Josephine. “You’ve been a nurse for how many years?” “Six,” she whispered.

  “How many times do you think you’ve—” He had to pause and take a deeper breath. “How many times do you think you’ve assisted at a caesarian birth?”

  Werner was saying something quickly, but Josephine’s voice overrode his. “Say, six times.”

  “Good—because you’re about to do it again.”

  Crawford climbed into the glass case and, ignoring Werner’s bony hands plucking weakly at his trousers, began carefully breaking the glass walls outward with the butt of his pistol—he and Josephine would need room to work.

  Werner’s frail shouting stopped consisting of words when Crawford, holding the dagger wrapped in cloth so as to be able to grip it near the point, pinched up a tight fold of flesh and made the first incision.

  And though Werner’s struggling became even more violent then, Josephine had tied him down well, and was able to hold him still with one arm and use the other hand to blot up the flowing bloo
d with a piece of cloth soaked in brandy from Crawford’s flask. Every few seconds she held the flask to the old man’s lips—after the first cut he had stopped refusing it.

  Exhaustion was beginning to darken Crawford’s vision, and it took a powerful effort of will to keep his hand from trembling or cutting too deeply. He kept forgetting that he was not in a hospital delivering a baby, and more than once he irritably asked Josephine for a bistoury or probe-scissors.

  He forced himself to remember the series of drawings he had seen in The Menotti Miscellany, the drawings that had been miscatalogued as illustrations of a caesarian section but had actually been a record of the operation in which the statue had been inserted into Werner. He remembered where the incisions had originally been made in the membrana adiposa and the peritoneum, and he tried to cut in the same places.

  His fingers seemed to remember their old skill, and moved with increasing deftness, and in only a few minutes he was able to press aside the split skin and muscle layers and see the statue.

  It had grown during its centuries inside Werner, and was now about the size of a two-year-old child, but he recognized it from the drawing in the ancient manuscript. Like a real baby it was curled up head-downward, its feet and hands up around its cheek, and Crawford had to remind himself that this form was stone, and that he wouldn’t be cutting an umbilical cord. He carefully worked his hand in behind the slippery head.

  “Carefully now,” he said tightly. “Here it comes.”

  He began lifting.

  “Hemorrhage, Doctor,” said Josephine urgently.

  Crawford had been blinking sweat out of his eyes and staring at the statue’s head; now he looked down and saw that purple venous blood was flowing in strong spurts from under his probing hand.

  Werner’s gasps sounded like weak laughter now.

  “Get your hand in under mine,” Crawford told Josephine, “and push against the area of the bleeding.”

  Crawford kept his own hand behind the statue’s head as Josephine’s blood-slick fingers wormed in under his knuckles. For a moment he was afraid that the stretching of the incision might cause more bleeding from somewhere else, but Josephine was skilled at her job—her hand moved quickly but carefully, probing and testing the tension of the tissues, and in seconds the bleeding had slowed.

  “Good,” Crawford said between clenched teeth. “We’ll have to sew that up soon, or tie it off or something, but that’s good for now.”

  He began lifting the stone head.

  The statue flexed, making its stone substance squeal in stress. It was resisting him, trying to tense itself wider and stay in the fleshy nest it had occupied for eight hundred years.

  “The tissues are too tight,” said Josephine quickly, “something’ll tear if it keeps that up.” She glanced up at Crawford and gave him a haggard smile. “The mother’s life is definitely endangered.”

  Crawford instinctively winced, for in childbirths that sentence generally meant that the baby would have to be sacrificed, killed and brought piecemeal out of the womb.

  The statue had had to soften its substance to move, but nevertheless Crawford could see cracks, filled with Werner’s blood, where its stony substance had given way.

  One stretched across the thing’s neck, and he inserted the point of his blade into it, and pushed.

  The thing stopped moving. He pushed harder, and felt the knife blade slide a little farther into the stone as it extended the crack.

  The statue blinked at him from its upside-down face, and its mouth opened and, in a bird-shrill voice, said something rapidly in German.

  Crawford hadn’t caught what it had said, and he passionately didn’t want to hear what the thing might say; he pushed harder, ignoring Werner’s screams and the pain in his own left hand, wedged under the statue’s head—

  —And the tip of the knife blade broke off. Crawford managed to yank his hand back before the jagged end of the knife could do more than slightly nick the exposed peritoneum.

  The statue was frozen now with the eisener breche in its throat. Its mouth was still open.

  Crawford put down the broken knife and resumed pulling at the stone head. He tried to hold Werner’s incised tissues apart with his free hand.

  The old man had fainted, but he was still breathing, and Crawford knew that if his pulse had begun to weaken Josephine would have told him.

  He could feel his own strength failing, so he cursed and braced himself, and then gave the statue one very strong tug—and a moment later he fell over backward onto the floor with the horrible thing in his arms.

  The room shook ponderously, and the chandeliers were swinging, and he could hear a roaring from outside the building as the city of Venice rocked in the grip of an earthquake.

  Josephine had fallen too, and her eyes were clenched shut in pain and she was pressing her bloody forearms across herself. Crawford guessed that the nephelim twin was dying inside her.

  He rolled the statue away and, after an anxious glance at the ceiling, he leaped back to his patient.

  The broken vein had started spurting again when Josephine had fallen, but he found it and pinched it off. Werner’s breathing was fast but regular and deep, and Crawford let himself relax for a moment with his left hand inside the ancient man’s abdomen.

  Josephine slowly sat up, opening her arms cautiously, as if too fast a move might bring the pain back.

  With his free hand Crawford had now begun mopping blood away from the edges of Werner’s gaping wound, but he took a moment to glance at Josephine. “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “I … think so,” she said, resuming her place beside him.

  “Be ready with the sutures,” he said, and Josephine picked up one of the long strings into which they’d torn the ribbons from his ankles.

  He took it from her and, after cutting the vein free of the surrounding flesh with the edge of his broken knife blade, he one-handedly tied the ruptured vein off between where it was split and where his left thumb and forefinger were squeezing it shut.

  He let his cramping fingers relax—the vein bulged against the knot of ribbon, but nothing broke. If blood was leaking through the constriction of the knot, it was doing it very slowly.

  He turned his attention to closing up the incision.

  “Josephine,” he said thoughtfully, handing her the truncated knife, “do you think you could break the heel off one of your shoes, and then use the edge of this knife to pry one of the nails free?”

  Josephine looked at her shoe, then at the knife. “Yes.”

  Within a minute she had handed him a nail, and he went to work.

  His attention hanging agonizedly on each inhalation and exhalation of the old man, Crawford carefully used the point of the cobbler’s nail to poke holes into the edges of the cut tissues—then he took one of the ribbon-strips from Josephine, sucked the end of it to stiffen it, and began lacing up the deepest incision.

  After a long minute of the delicate work he drew each successive inch of it tight, so that the incision in the peritoneum had been drawn closed, and nothing gave way.

  He breathed a sigh and held out his hand for another piece of ribbon.

  When they had stitched up the muscle layer and finally the skin, Werner was still breathing, though he hadn’t recovered consciousness. Blood was seeping from the incision, but not at an alarming rate.

  Crawford stood up, his scalp itching with awareness of the ceiling stones six yards over their heads. He crouched by the blood-smeared statue, got his hands under it, and then made himself straighten his legs and stand, though the effort darkened his vision and started his nose bleeding again. “Out,” he gasped. “Quickly, the way we came.”

  Josephine snatched up the leather bag, and they reeled and limped toward the door that led to the wide hall.

  The statue just fit through one of the narrow windows that had had the glass blown out of it by the Austrian cannon. Not trusting his own battered ears, Crawford wouldn’t move on until Josep
hine assured him several times that she had heard it splash into the canal below.

  At last he nodded, took her hand, and started toward the stairs.

  Figures were running back and forth across the square, and twice Crawford heard the boom of gunfire echo back from the lacy pillared wall of the Doge’s Palace, but no one approached them until they had limped and shuffled past the massively tall but inert Graiae columns and had started toward the stairs and the gondolas.

  A man stepped out of one of the shadowed arches of the palace and held up his hand. Crawford raised his sword and his still unfired pistol.

  “I’m Carbonari,” the man said quickly, and when Crawford made his eyes focus he recognized the bearded face. It was the leader of the group of Carbonari they had met in the hall upstairs.

  “There’s a boat to take you to the Lido,” the man said, speaking quietly and quickly, “in the little canal below the Drunkenness of Noah.” He stepped behind Crawford and Josephine and began pushing them along by their elbows.

  He marched them down the length of the south face of the palace, with the broad waters of the Canale di San Marco stretching away a quarter of a mile wide on their right, and just at the foot of the Ponte della Paglia he pushed them to the left, away from the stairs and between two of the pillars of the palace. Ahead lay the canal into which Carlo had jumped earlier, and Crawford saw a gondolier waiting for them with one foot up on the pavement and the other on the stern of his narrow craft.

  “The Austrians are in confusion,” their guide said tersely, “and the guards of their secret king have gone mad. We are grateful to you.” He gave them one last forward shove. “But don’t ever come back to Venice,” he added.

  Crawford looked up, and belatedly realized what his guide had been referring to, a minute earlier—above the pillars at this southeast corner of the building was a sculpture of Noah reeling below a grapevine, spilling wine from a cup and about to lose the robe that was loosely bunched around his waist.