by Tim Powers
Page 60
The sound struck Crawford as a very familiar one in a different context, and a moment later he recognized it as hoofbeats - striking more lightly than was natural in the wet sand, but unmistakable, and he heard the whicker of breath blown through a horse's lips.
The hoofbeats drew alongside, apparently trampling the human ghosts, to judge by the crackling and faint wails.
Crawford leaned to the right and reached out with the hand that held the pot, but encountered nothing, though the sound of hooves striking the sand came from no more than a yard away from his boots. He drew his arm back and found that he was only reassured by this new spectral escort. McKee seemed to feel the same thing and let their desperate pace slow to a fast walk.
In his exhaustion, Crawford almost imagined he could see the graceful creatures pacing on either side of his party - the rippling flanks and tossing manes and bright intelligent eyes.
The ghost horses paced alongside until the slope leveled out and the faint high arch showed in front of them; then the hoofbeats seemed to break into a barely audible gallop and diminish to silence ahead, where a mist briefly blurred the glow that Crawford remembered was reflected moonlight.
McKee led Crawford and Johanna around the left-side edge of the tall arch. Ahead of them, clearly visible in the diffuse white radiance after so much time in total darkness, the stonework wall of the fallen Roman building stretched up like a ramp.
"The light is coming in through a hole in Portugal Street," McKee whispered to Johanna as she started walking up the side of the building, skirting the long box that was a tilted balcony. "It's an easy climb up from here. "
The three of them trudged up the slanted wall, sometimes using hands as well as feet in traversing buckled sections, and soon they were all seated on the rounded ridge that was a fallen turret. Wavering moonlight slanted in through the rectangular hole twenty feet overhead.
"Horses?" said McKee once they had all caught their breaths. "Horse ghosts?"
"Like the cats?" ventured Johanna. "Old friends?"
Crawford was surprised by the thought, and he hoped it was so.
Then his smile relaxed into a frown. "I met Trelawny's Miss B. ," he said hesitantly, "in one of the other tunnels. She - "
"You went into another tunnel?" exclaimed McKee. It seemed to require an effort on her part not to draw away from him. "And you met her?"
"She was all - in pieces, and there were broken bits of black stone and sand on a table. Corresponding. " His heart was thumping again just recalling it, and he peered nervously back the way they'd come. "You remember Christina said that Trelawny had shrunk and hardened her and put her in a box. I believe he broke her up with a hammer too. She wanted my blood, and I ran out. "
"She must have been pretty sure she could talk you into it," said Johanna thoughtfully. "She wouldn't spend herself so much to become visible just on an off chance. "
Crawford heard unvoiced insight in his daughter's remark, and he reminded himself that she too had experienced the dark elation of being severed from human concerns.
"She told me I'm Polidori's son," he said. "She said that in the summer of '22, my mother - "
"Josephine," said Johanna.
"Yes. I didn't believe her. "
"Oh, why didn't you wait for us at the Spotted Dog?" asked McKee.
"I did, I even napped for a bit, but the tough lads started to want the bottle. " He braced his feet on a window lintel and sighed. He thought of putting the pot down in some secure niche, then decided they'd have trouble finding it again. "I've never been so glad in my life as I was when you two dropped down the well back there. "
"We were glad to find you," said Johanna. "Very. "
"We caught another cab," said McKee, "right after that big boom, and went back to Tottenham Court Road, to - to see - " She paused and exhaled, shaking her head.
"We were sure we'd find you dead in the street," said Johanna in a small voice. "Smashed flat. "
"Maria saved me," he said, touching the bottle that was still in his coat pocket. Nuns and horses, he thought.
McKee pushed her hair back with both hands. "We looked," she began, but her voice cracked; she took a deep breath and went on, "We looked around the area, but there was no sign of you. "
"Nor of the tall black-painted thing," said Johanna with a shiver. "We kept our eyes out for it. "
"Sister Christina was probably giving it soup," said McKee bitterly.
"But we - met - Rose," said Johanna. "She had followed that thing, and she jumped at us from out of an alley. "
"Rose? Good God, Trelawny's granddaughter? Was she - alive, still?"
"Yes - same as I was, when you saw me at Highgate Cemetery," said Johanna. "Not dead and resurrected. And she - knows me, hates me. Tried to kill me. "
McKee took her daughter's hand and said to Crawford, "She had a knife, but I blocked her first stab, and then we held her off with our own. " She barked out two syllables of a strained laugh. "We didn't want to hurt her, but she surely wanted to hurt us. "
Crawford anxiously tried to see the faces and hands of his wife and daughter. "Were either of you cut?"
"No," said Johanna, "nor her either. Well, maybe her hand. It was hard to see. There was no way to talk to her at all, much less grab her. We outran her - she's not very strong now. I remember how that is. "
"Rose is," said McKee, "furiously jealous that. . . Christina's uncle . . . would apparently rather have Johanna. We really couldn't hope to capture her - so we just - left her there. "
"And then we went off separately," Johanna added, "to meet up at the Spotted Dog. By the time we both got there, you had already gone below. "
"Can I see the pot?" asked McKee.
"No, actually," said Crawford, carefully handing it across, "but you can hold it. His boy tossed it to me, across the pit where Chichuwee's place used to be. The boy said 'the big vampire' wiped out all the Hail Mary artists Wednesday night. "
"The same night the Mud Lark man came to me in my dream," said Johanna.
"And William Rossetti's son was born on Wednesday," recalled McKee.
The glow from above was fading.
"Moon's moving on," said Crawford. "It'll get pretty dark down here. "
"I think we're better off down here than out under the night sky," said Johanna.
"Too right," agreed McKee. "We'll climb out when we can see daylight. Here's the pot back," she added, handing the thing to Crawford and not letting go of it till he had both hands on it. "Don't lose that. "
"I'm keeping my knife in my hand till dawn," said Johanna.
THEY HAD TO KNOCK so much snow aside to crawl out of the hole in Portugal Street next morning, and the sky was so heavily overcast, that McKee said they were lucky to have seen the daylight at all.
All three of them had lost their hats during the night's confusions, and McKee and Johanna had left their overcoats at the Spotted Dog, so Crawford gave Johanna his coat, and they were all shivering when a cab let them out at the corner of Bozier's Court.
"Good Lord, it's after seven o'clock!" said Crawford, peering down the street at the clock over the Oxford Music Hall.
"Hold your cab," came Trelawny's voice from the shadows under the pub awning. As Crawford waved at the driver, the old man hobbled out into the gray daylight and added, "It's nearly half past seven. I had to sit through dawn Mass. " He wore no hat, and his collar was open.
"I wish we had," said Johanna.
"Did the ghost speak?" asked Trelawny, holding the cab door for McKee and Johanna as they climbed back in, and then he called an address in Pelham Crescent to the driver and got in himself.
"Not yet," said Crawford after he had stepped up last and sat down inside the cab next to Trelawny. The vehicle jolted into motion. "But we can boil it at your house. I've still got the ghost, and this," he said, holding up his two spread hands, "is Chichuwee's boiling pot.
"
Trelawny simply reached out and tapped the invisible pot, then nodded. "You took it?"
"His assistant threw it to me, over the pit where Chichuwee's chamber used to be. Polidori visited him right after you did. Lethally. "
"All the old Hail Mary men," added Johanna.
Trelawny pursed his scarred lips, deepening the lines in his face, and Crawford reflected that the old man must be in his eighties by now.
Trelawny pulled the bell cord, and when the cab slowed, he half stood and pushed the door open, letting a gust of chilly air into the cab. "To the river, first," he called up to the driver. "Steps, we want to get down to the water. "
He pulled the door shut and sat down again beside Crawford. "We need river water to boil," he explained.
Johanna squinted tiredly at the old man. "My mother and I saw Rose last night, in the Tottenham Court Road. She's still alive, not resurrected. "
Trelawny was still, staring at her. At last he said, "You didn't - catch her?"
"We were lucky to keep her from killing us. No. "
Trelawny closed his eyes and shook his head. "He's holding off, then, in hopes of getting you. That's good - he'll be like the dog in the fable, getting neither bone. " He opened his eyes and looked warily at Johanna. "No offense meant. "
"And," Crawford said hastily, "I spoke to your Miss B. , down the sewers. She's in fragments, and wanted me to give her some of my blood. "
Trelawny looked at him, then looked away and sighed. "Poor old girl, though I'm glad to hear she hasn't recovered. But she wasn't just scattered in some mud puddle, I hope?"
Crawford blinked at McKee and Johanna, sitting across from Trelawny and himself. "No," he said. "Er . . . very nice room. Couch. "
Trelawny nodded, squinting out the cab window at the white-fretted buildings. "Can't help being a bit fond of her still. "
Johanna's face was stern, and she looked older than her twenty years when she said, "I bet you could help it, if you tried. I'm not fond of mine at all. "
The old man scowled at her, then grinned. "You've grown up since I saw you last, my dear. "
"You," said Johanna, "have not. "
"True, true. Bit late to start, now. But perhaps the hour calls for one truly immature soul. "
At a set of marble stairs below Savoy Street the driver waited while Crawford hurried down to the river shore and dipped the invisible pot into the muddy shallows and then wrapped it in his scarf to keep the river-side loiterers from becoming curious about it. Within five minutes he was back in the cab, holding the thing in his lap.
It sloshed when the cab got moving again, dousing his trousers in very cold river water; soon the interior of the cab was steamy with a smell like the Billingsgate pavement at the end of a market day.
"Your cologne, sir - " began Trelawny.
"Could be yours too in a few seconds," Crawford said through clenched teeth.
Trelawny shut his mouth.
Johanna had been yawning, but now she abruptly giggled; instantly she stopped and waved her hand in apology, and then she was sobbing quietly, frowning as if disgusted with herself.
McKee patted her daughter's knee. "It would have been something to see those two splashing each other. "
Conversation lagged while the cab wound through the already crowded streets of Soho and Mayfair and Belgravia, and then rocked along at a good speed down the King's Road to Chelsea, where it made its way up Sydney Street past the Gothic bell tower of St. Luke's to Pelham Crescent.
Trelawny unlatched the cab door when the vehicle creaked to a halt in front of one in the long row of imposing white houses.
"Hand me the pot," he said when he was standing on the street, and Crawford was glad to lean out and let Trelawny take hold of it. It now looked like a glass pot half full of muddy water. The cab driver looked on curiously but didn't appear to note anything unnatural.
"Bring the girls, living and dead," Trelawny said. "Luckily the neighbors are accustomed to seeing unsavory characters at my house. "
"I hope you've got a fire going," said Crawford as he climbed out of the cab.
"I know how to boil water," Trelawny assured him testily.
"In the fireplace," said Crawford. He took Johanna's hand as she stepped down to the slushy pavement, then reached for McKee's. "The three of us are half frozen. "
Trelawny nodded, conceding the point. "I'll lay on more coal. "
Once inside, Crawford retrieved his coat from Johanna and they pulled chairs up around Trelawny's fireplace, where the flames waved tall and blue with a new shovelful of coal. The old man even provided brandy when Crawford asked if he had any, and Crawford and Johanna each gulped a glass of the liquor.
Trelawny's house was spartan, with only a few chairs and bookcases against the spotless white walls, and fussily clean.
After a few minutes, Trelawny said, sternly, "My granddaughter is almost certainly not having brandy by a fire. Adjourn we to the kitchen. "
They all crossed through the dining room to the stairs, Trelawny carefully carrying the half sphere of brown river water, and when they had clumped down to the basement kitchen, Crawford was again struck by the old man's neatness. Somehow Crawford could not imagine that Trelawny employed servants, but the red linoleum floor of the kitchen was swept and dry, and there were no damp clothes hanging over the stove or dirty dishes in the scullery beyond; Crawford peeked into the pantry and saw dust-free glasses and china plates in neat rows, and the pantry sink's lead lining was undented. Small windows in the area-side wall, unsmudged by soot, let in gray daylight.
