Hide Me Among the Graves

by Tim Powers

Page 42

 

  From not too far away, Crawford now heard high piping voices taking turns reciting something in a nursery-rhyme cadence - he was able to make out the words When the sky began to roar -

  Abruptly the goldfinch in Johanna's bag cheeped, and half a dozen seagulls that had been standing at the edge of the pier spread their long gray-and-white wings and flapped away into the sky.

  "Larks coming," said Johanna tensely. "I know some of 'em, a bit. "

  Crawford looked back up the street, between the gate pillars; and he glimpsed a couple of children dart from one side of George Street to the other, and then a third child scampered back the other way. They were all ragged little scarecrows, with lean, blackened limbs flexing in tattered clothes. They seemed to move as rapidly as spiders.

  Crawford was suddenly afraid that they might stressfully remind Johanna of the skeletal boy in her vision. He glanced at her out of the corner of his eye, but she was already shaking her head reassuringly at him.

  "These are alive," she told him.

  "They shouldn't hurt us," said McKee. "We're not infected. "

  "I was," said Johanna, "and I'm sure you two still carry the smell of Neffy attention. " She touched the knife hilt under her coat. "And the Larks are crazy. I was. "

  Now three of the wild children scuffed barefoot out onto the flagstones of the pier, their knees bent and their scrawny arms held out from their sides; their faces held no expression. Crawford shivered, remembering the morning he and McKee had eluded a previous generation of these children seven years ago.

  And then he shivered violently enough to click his teeth together, and his chest suddenly felt cold and empty - for he remembered thinking then that his lost daughter would be the same age as those eerie children; and now, for the first time, it had occurred to him that she might very well have been one of them.

  Johanna was scanning the dirty, vacuous faces. "Where's Nancy?" she called.

  A boy came out from behind the pillars and joined the first three in the gray daylight. He mumbled something.

  "Down, sick or dead," muttered Johanna to her parents. "This boy hasn't got many words. "

  More loudly, she said, "You see that we're clean. Take us to the old man. The old man, right?"

  Her brown hair was blowing around her face, and Crawford was struck by the contrast between her evident health - even with the black eye - and the wasted faces of the Mud Larks. She gave Crawford an uncertain grin. "I think they know I was one of them once. They knew it yesterday, at least. "

  The boy said something that sounded to Crawford like a chicken gobbling.

  "I'm as clean as you are," Johanna said scornfully; and Crawford suppressed a reflexive nervous smile at the apparent inappropriateness of the remark. Johanna waved a hand around her head. "Are you already too old to see?"

  The boy shrugged and stepped back, and another one of the children took an egg-shaped clay ball out of a pocket and blew into it.

  It produced a prolonged low note that seemed to vibrate in Crawford's abdomen, and he realized that he had heard this same sound on many mornings and assumed it was some sort of maritime signal.

  OVER A SCANTY BREAKFAST this morning - in the surgery, since the carpenter was making too much noise for comfortable talk anywhere else - Johanna had told her parents that the Mud Larks between Hungerford and Blackfriars Bridges, unlike their brethren farther up or down-river, didn't make much of their living by grubbing in the Thames mud at low tide for tools and brass nails dropped overboard by shipfitters. These local ones ventured out into the mud mainly to bag the awkward fishes and river worms that had become inhabited by recently deceased ghosts, which they passed along to the old man who provided them in return with food and a boat to sleep in. "And we used to - well, they still do - range inland before dawn as far as Covent Garden, to watch for the glow of bitten people and follow them to where they lived. The old man would pay silver for an address like that. "

  And she had pointed out, in a matter-of-fact tone Crawford found unnerving, that if the old man could be induced to provide one of those addresses today, the three of them might be able to "ambush the vampire with silver bullets when he next visits that place. "

  McKee had paced Crawford's surgery, chewing a piece of toast and glancing at the holes made by silver bullets in his wall and cabinet, and finally said, "We have to try it. We've clearly got no real way of eluding Sister Christina's damned uncle. "

  THE CHILD ON THE old stone pier blew into the clay egg again, and once more the penetrating low note rolled away up through the city streets and out across the river.

  McKee was frowning at the ragged clothes and soot-stained faces of the Larks. "I gather this old man isn't much concerned with the welfare of his young employees!"

  Johanna peered up at her. "You take one in sometime and try to civilize him! We - they're all stepped on by the vampires and lucky to have got away. We wouldn't look at a bath, we ate like dogs, and new clothes wouldn't have stayed new long in the river mud. " She shifted on the pavement, peering up the street. "I was lucky to find that costermonger family that needed help, after I got too old to see the way the Larks do. I was a young wreck - afraid to bathe, always hiding food in odd places around the house, hardly able to speak English. The costers had a lot of patience - gave me a bit of refinement. "

  Crawford looked out over the rippling water, not wanting to meet McKee's eyes.

  And so he saw the canoe slanting in toward the water gate a moment before its keel scraped against the ancient ramp, and with a chill that tightened his scalp he recognized the old man who hopped out of the narrow craft and waded in hip boots up to the steps, holding a mooring rope.

  "The luckless Medicus and Rahab," said Trelawny with piratical cheer as he crouched to tie the rope around a rusted cleat. He stood up and stretched. He was hatless this morning, his white hair and beard all blown outward into spikes, and his collar was open. "And," he began, glancing at Johanna - but the derisive smile unkinked from his scarred lips. "Ah," he said, squinting and frowning intently now, and he snapped his fingers; "Johanna!" He stared at her. "I'm glad to see you well, girl, except for that aubergine eye. " He jerked a thumb toward Crawford and McKee. "You're with these two? You could do better. "

  "And worse," said Johanna cautiously.

  "You're the, the Mud Lark man?" asked Crawford.

  "I serve that purpose," the old man said.

  "Samson," said McKee, and it took Crawford a baffled moment to remember the name Trelawny had given them on that day in Regent's Park - My spiritual hair has almost completely grown back, I believe - "we need to get the address of one of the Polidori vampire's currently living subjects. "

  Trelawny sighed. "Who are you looking for? My Larks only monitor - "

  "Any subject," McKee interrupted. "We simply want to know an address he's likely to arrive at - a place he's been invited into. "

  The old man nodded. "You want to cripple him down, as Mr. Hearts did to Miss B. that day with his silver bullets. That's a prohibitive lot of risk to take, my dear, just to buy a few days of his absence. "

  McKee nodded. "Nevertheless. "

  Trelawny looked away up the river, then back at her. "Well, I - " He blew out a breath, and the laugh that followed was rueful. "I'm afraid I wrecked any chance of an ambush at the only address I knew of, as it happens. Five days ago I tried that myself, but I wasn't able to get a clear shot, and he fled. He won't go back there, and his - his subject, poor old creature, has certainly moved by now. "

  "You," said Crawford cautiously, "weren't able to get a clear shot. "

  The old man scowled at him. "You weren't there! You think you could have done better? My eye is still better than - "

  He shook his head, then crouched beside Johanna and patted her arm.

  "It does me good to see you so healthy these days, child. But who gave you the black eye then? Not one of these two, I hope for
their sakes! And what business have you got with them?"

  "These are my parents. "

  "Ah!" he said, straightening up. "Yes, it was mentioned that they had a daughter. "

  "And I got the black eye - " she began, but McKee shushed her.

  "He needs to know it," Johanna insisted. "The Polidori vampire came to me in a vision last night. . . " Her voice trailed off.

  Trelawny seemed to notice the cluster of Mud Larks by the pillars, and he dismissed them with an angry wave. When they scattered, he pointed at Johanna. "You were one of his, weren't you, before he went into eclipse? I suppose he wants you back again. "

  "Yes," she said, "but for a purpose - " And though her voice quavered and she clutched her parents' hands tightly, she described the vision, and Polidori's presentation of what he described as her betrothed husband, and the destruction that their anticipated offspring would accomplish.

  Trelawny's face went blank and came to look much older as she spoke, and when she had finished, he stepped back and turned toward the river.

  "I wonder what went wrong with Diamonds's damned mirrors," he said quietly. Then he added, "I should have put three or four rounds through old Gretchen right away. "

  McKee caught Crawford's eye and shrugged with one eyebrow.

  Trelawny looked at Crawford. "I might . . . have been a bit out of breath. I had to do some running and jumping to get to where he was, you see. " He scowled again. "I doubt you could even have kept up with me. "

  "I'm sure you're right," Crawford agreed helplessly.

  For several seconds the four of them stood there in the wind at the end of the ancient pier. From away up the street Crawford could hear the whickering drone of a hurdy-gurdy playing some Scottish-sounding melody.

  "We thought - " began McKee.

  "You did not," snapped Trelawny. "Let me think. "

  Johanna started to pick her nose, and McKee pulled her hand away.

  "I know about this scheme to wreck London," Trelawny remarked absently. McKee opened her mouth to ask something, but Crawford waved at her not to interrupt. Trelawny went on, "Miss B. did it once before, successfully - she's out of the picture right now, but it seems that she had a - a child, so to speak, somehow. . . " His eyes widened. "Was Elizabeth Rossetti pregnant when she died?"

  "I don't know," said Crawford.

  "I'll lay you pounds to pinfeathers she was. Such a child would be . . . well, I have no idea what it would be. But it wouldn't be a subject of Miss B. or Polidori. Undead but never bitten! Knock either or both of them down and you wouldn't stop it. " He bared his teeth and shook his head quickly, as if to dispel nausea. "And this thing wants to - marry! - have this offspring by! - Johanna?"

  It seemed to be a rhetorical question. For another several moments the four figures stood silently on the pier.

  "You should take her to America," said Trelawny. "My daughter Zella and her husband moved there ten years ago, at my insistence and expense, and so my grandchildren are safe. The vampire things generally can't cross that much salt water, unless you carry them along with you - as I did in '33, necessitating my near-fatal swim across the Niagara River to get free of it. " He was chewing on a knuckle and frowning at Johanna. "Even France might be far enough. The Channel is a lot of water. "

  "We might do that," said McKee, surprising Crawford. "But is there anything . . . quicker? Something we could do today, tomorrow?"

  This time Trelawny was silent for so long that Crawford wondered if the man had forgotten the question.

  "There's a certain crazy trick," he said at last. "Have you ever heard of the translator men in St. Giles?"

  McKee grimaced. "Devil worshippers, I've heard. "

  "Not good Christians, certainly - not their clients, at any rate. But the trouble is that Miss Diamonds is a good Christian, and you'd need her cooperation - hell, you'd need her presence there. She should do it - she's got amends to make, like us all - but it'd be wrong to tie her up and take her there by force. " He paused and then nodded. "Yes, that would be wrong. "

  "Devil worshippers?" ventured Crawford.

  "They make shoes to hide you from God," said Johanna solemnly.

  "That's right, my dear," said Trelawny. "And their clients pay a lot too, silly fools, to hide from somebody who's not even there in the first place. But . . . if there were someone there, their trick might work. " He squinted at Johanna. "And you're in a position where there is someone there to hide from. "

  Crawford was frowning. "If you don't believe God exists," he began - Trelawny glowered but didn't contradict him, so he went on - "then why do you have the Mud Larks baptized?"

  Trelawny visibly restrained himself from throwing an angry glance at Johanna.

  "Pascal's wager," he snapped. "Dunking them and saying the words is no trouble or expense, and if there should be a God, the Larks are thus benefited. If not, I'm nothing out of pocket. If baptisms cost a penny a shot, I wouldn't bother. "

  "I presume you've been baptized yourself, then," Crawford went on.

  Trelawny spat. "I won't unmake who I am. If I thought there were more than a negligible chance of such a being existing, I'd get a pair of translator shoes myself. "

  "How do they work?" asked McKee. "These shoes. "

  "They don't, Miss Rahab - they can't, as I just now said. But what they aim to do is deflect - refract, reflect! - the special mutual awareness between redeemer and redeemed. Hah! To make the shoes, they use consecrated wine from a Catholic Church - what they believe is the blood of their Redeemer. I don't believe people have a Redeemer . . . but Polidori surely has one, and with luck you can talk her into contributing some of her blood for a special pair of shoes - the blood she rubbed on him years ago to quicken him. With that blood fixed in your daughter's shoes, your daughter will seem to his special sight to be just a stray reflection of the actual living Miss Diamonds. "