Hide Me Among the Graves

CHAPTER ONE

SNOW WHIRLED DOWN out of the gray sky, and the young woman who was crouched behind the big letters of the ENO’S FRUIT SALT sign high over Tudor Street pressed her back against the warm chimney bricks and began the song once again, singing loudly against the wind:

It occurred to her that she was in her own garden of snow up here, with rounded white drifts at various levels all around her, and icicles fringing roof edges and the projecting rims of cold chimneys.

The metal pattens on her boots were braced against the shingled roof of a tiny gable that poked out of the main slanting roof, and she wondered if anyone within might hear her; but the window would certainly be closed in this weather, and the little garret room probably wasn’t heated — the chimney at her back wasn’t radiating warmth from any hearth within a dozen vertical yards. She felt as if she were on the lowest-hanging skirt of some slow-moving airship, hidden by the snow and the fog from the earthbound city so far below.

She shivered and fished a flask from under her outermost coat and unscrewed the cap with trembling gloved fingers, then pulled the scarf down from her face and took a sip. The whisky was warm, and she exhaled a plume of aromatic steam before pulling the scarf back up.

She still couldn’t hear a reply to her singing, and she hoped this unseasonably late winter weather had not diverted them from their usual early-March routine: go to the rooftops to watch for churning black clouds rushing over the skyline. She recalled seeing several of the things during her years as a Lark — sometimes the weirdly distinct little clouds were elongated perpendicular to the direction of travel, and waving at the ends like wings.

And in the moment before her recent singing was answered from another roof, she saw one — a rolling black shape nearly invisible in the snow-veiled distance to the northeast; it dipped and disappeared behind some paler building that blended into the uniform whiteness. I’ll have to mention it to them, she thought, when they get here.

Only because she knew the song was she able to recognize the lyrics audible now from some nearby roof:

She pulled down the scarf for another warming sip of the whisky and then screwed the cap back onto the flask and tucked it away.

She was twenty years old now, far removed from the deep perceptions and narrow lives of the Larks — even seven years ago she had had difficulties dealing with them. She wondered if she would even be able to convey the news of the black flier over Fleet Street.

She hesitated, for she could hear the muffled clatter of them scrambling across the far side of this roof, then sang the last line:

Crouching on the roof now and squinting back up its slope, with one arm braced against the chimney, she saw three shapeless hats, then a fourth and a fifth, poke up from the roof crest above her against the marble sky. The lean faces under the floppy hat brims were in shadow.

“I need to see the old man,” she called. “He sent for me.”

“Bugger that,” one of them growled. He or she was holding a long-bladed knife in one raggedly gloved fist.

“And I saw one of the black fliers just now,” she went on. “It went down over Fleet Street, very near here. Did any of you sorry lot see it? He’ll want to know about it.”

The line of heads wobbled uncertainly, and another of them spoke up. “You got the Neffy smell on you.”

“So do you, each of you. I used to be one of you, damn it. He sent for me, call him.”

For several seconds the shadowed faces just peered down at her. Then regular clanking sounded from the far shoulder of the building; at least one person of adult weight was ascending the iron ladder from the adjoining rooftop. Could it be the old man already?

But she recognized the voice that called “Johanna!” and her eyes widened in dismay.

The Larks had ducked away out of sight on the far side of the roof, and Johanna scrambled up to the peak and glared down at where they were crouched in the lee of an advertising sign overlooking Whitefriars Street.

“Call the old man!” she said fiercely.

After a moment, one of the ragged Larks dug a clay egg out of a pocket and blew the remembered low, mournful note; it rolled away through the snowy air, seeming to shake the spinning snowflakes.

Johanna stared unhappily to her right, at a ridge between two nearby chimneys in the direction opposite the gang of Larks, and soon two bundled-up figures began to appear by labored degrees from behind it, and Johanna recognized her mother’s overcoat, and then her father’s cough. Her mother was forty-one now, and her father fifty-three, and Johanna blinked rapidly to keep tears from spilling down her cheeks and freezing on the scarf. They should both be sitting by the fire back in the rented house in Cherbourg, she thought furiously.

Her father was holding her mother’s hand as she stepped carefully down a snow-covered slope of shingles, the pattens on her boots scraping up shavings of ice, and as he followed her McKee was facing the Mud Larks across the flat section of roof that was hidden from the streets below.

“Where is our daughter?” she demanded. “We heard her singing with you.”

“Up here,” called Johanna through clenched teeth. She pounded a gloved fist against the roof peak, loosening a little avalanche. “I told you not to come after me! I begged you to stay home, in my note! I’m — an adult now!”

“So are we,” gasped her father, waving his arms to keep his balance on the squeaking icy roof. “And then some.”

Johanna hiked herself up to sit astride the roof peak. “How did you … find me?” she called down to them.

“We followed the Larks,” said her father, looking around the rooftop clearing in evident bewilderment.

“Why now?” wailed McKee, squinting up at Johanna. “Cherbourg was safe!”

The Lark blew the little whistle again, and the flat note stretched out over the rooftops.

“Safe for the last what, month?” retorted Johanna. “Just as Rouen was, or Amiens, or St. Brieuc, or — how long do you think it would have been before he found me in Cherbourg too?”

“But,” McKee said, “with no preparation, in the winter — in the middle of the night!”

“And a dreadful day for a Channel crossing,” said her father; he paused to cough, and then he went on, “We caught the first boat out of Le Havre, but you weren’t on it. You must have found one right at the docks in Cherbourg.” He coughed again. “What kind of springtime weather is this?”

Johanna sighed through her ice-crusted scarf, and was about to answer her mother, when a new voice intruded:

“I called her.”

A lean figure in a black Inverness cape and a slouch hat stepped out from behind the tallest chimney, on the far side of the low square area below Johanna.

And she caught a hint of echo in her own head, a leftover of the mental connection that had conveyed his message to her in a dream two nights ago.

Her mother now had her back to Johanna, staring up at the newcomer.

“Are you — a ghost?” asked McKee.

The question seemed to irritate Trelawny — he swept his hat off and flung his head back, his white hair blowing around his dark face in the snow, and said in a booming voice, “I wish to God I were! It’s a bad world that brings an old man out onto the roofs on a day like this. Back down to the streets, now — we’re fools to talk under the bare sky, let alone all clustered together.”

“I saw a flier two minutes ago,” said Johanna. She waved a hand north. “It went to earth a street or two away northeast, probably in the Strand around St. Bride’s or Ludgate Circus.” In spite of everything, she smiled behind her scarf, pleased that she still remembered London geography after having been away for seven years.

“Fliers!” cried Trelawny. “So close! And such as you are on the roofs! Down, now. If we’re not—”

“He called you?” interrupted McKee, though she was walking back toward the roof slope she had just descended, and the ladder on the far side. “How?”

“He can reach me in dreams,” said Johanna, swinging a boot over the roof peak and sliding down to the surface her parents stood on, “just like the other can.” She stepped across the icy tarred surface and stood worriedly beside her father. The bitter chill couldn’t be good for his lungs.

Trelawny had skated down from his perch to join them, and now he raised his gloved hands. “Reach her from the opposite spiritual direction,” he clarified. “These, you recall, are the hands that baptized her.” He turned to the mute Larks on the other side of the flat roof and said, “Good. Resume your patrol.”

“You called our daughter back to London?” said her father, who hadn’t moved.

Trelawny’s face was shadowed as he pulled his old hat back over his head. “I tried Chichuwee, day before yesterday,” he said gruffly, “but he could provide no help.”

“Help in what? Never mind, it doesn’t matter — our daughter is leaving with us on the next boat back to France.”

“You and Mother take it,” said Johanna. She squeezed his hand through two layers of glove leather. “This is for me to do. You two will just get killed if you stay — wait for me in”—belated caution kept her from again saying the name of the city—“in the place we’ve been living.”

“What’s for you to do?” burst out McKee.

“He,” said Johanna, not wanting to pronounce the name Polidori out here either, “has got himself another girl. She’s fourteen, just a year older than I was when that dead boy came after me, wanting to — to have a child, some sort of child, by me. She’s to be his bride, since I fled.”

“My granddaughter, that is,” said Trelawny. “Rose, Rose Olguin. I will—not have her digging her way up out of a grave and”—he added with a shudder—“and having congress with that dead thing.”

“You said your children were in America,” protested Johanna’s mother.

“Argentina,” said Trelawny impatiently, “one of them. Others stayed here and died. Of course. But the daughter in Argentina moved back to London two years ago, in spite of my warnings, and now her fourteen-year-old daughter—”

Johanna noticed that the Larks had disappeared over a low wall to the left; and a moment later the roof moved sideways under her boots. She hopped to keep her balance, but her father sat down and her mother crouched and braced one hand against the roof surface. Patches of snow slid down all the roof slopes, and she heard a low rumble roll across the City.

And then something buzzed past her ear, and when she jerked back, she saw a wasp swinging away through the moving veils of snow.

A wasp, she thought, in the middle of a snowstorm? Only after that did she think: An earthquake? In London?

“Follow me!” yelled Trelawny, moving now away from the way McKee and Crawford had come, toward the roof-edge wall beyond which the Larks had disappeared.

The roof was still swaying, and Johanna helped her father to his feet, waving away another wasp, and before hurrying after Trelawny she glanced back the other way.

A figure stood now beside the chimney where her mother and father had first appeared; its face under a tall silk hat was shiny black, and at the end of each of its long arms it waved a thin bamboo stick as if conducting an enormous orchestra.

“Where where where?” it called, in such a melodious voice that Johanna thought it had begun to sing.

A loud, hard pop shook the air, and the figure bowed and thrashed its sticks wildly but didn’t lose its balance; looking the other way, Johanna saw Trelawny lowering a smoking pistol.

“Mere de Dieu!” she exclaimed, halting. “What are you doing?”

“Get over here!” yelled Trelawny, tucking the pistol away.

Johanna hustled her father to the far edge of the roof where Trelawny was waiting impatiently, and then the four of them climbed over the low wall and dropped six feet into a narrow snow-filled gully between two projecting gables.

The footprints and handprints of the Larks were visible in the snow to the left, and had presumably extended up the shingle slope on that side before the shaking of the earthquake, but Trelawny led them through the knee-deep snow the other way, up and between a pair of cupolas and down into another snow-choked trough, this one thickly hazed with black smoke from a rank of chimneys at the downhill end.

Crawford was coughing before they had moved three paces, and when Trelawny stopped, Johanna yelled, “Get us out of this smoke!”

“In a minute,” the old man called back hoarsely. “The smoke will repel the wasps, and they’re how he sees.”

From somewhere behind among the slopes and peaks and chimneys, Johanna heard again the nearly musical Where where where? Had Trelawny’s pistol ball missed the man with the sticks?

“Christina Rossetti—” began Trelawny, then paused to cough himself before going on, “blinded him seven years ago.”

Crawford managed to choke out, “Can we — get down this way?”

Johanna could hardly see her companions through the stinging billows of smoke.

“We can get farther away,” said Trelawny. “I don’t know about down. Follow me.”

Beyond the next gable ridge, blessedly out of the worst of the smoke now, they found a row of windows overlooking Whitefriars Street extending away to their right, and the sills were a foot-wide stone ledge over the sheer drop. Trelawny began shuffling along it, facing the building and edging to his left, gripping the eaves that projected at shoulder height above the windows. Over the sighing of the wind, Johanna could faintly hear the rattle of wagons and carriages eight floors below.

Johanna quickly unstrapped the wobbly pattens from her boots and saw her mother doing the same. They wouldn’t fit in the pocket of her coat, so she dropped them on the roof.

Then, her ears ringing with fright, she shuffled out onto the ledge after the old man, her gloved hands holding tightly to the eaves and her boots scuffing in the tracks Trelawny’s had cleared in the snow. Her father was right behind her.

“Hang on,” she said to him over her right shoulder, earnestly and unnecessarily. “Walk carefully.”

“You too.”

The wind was from the north, sweeping straight down Whitefriars Street, and it kept funneling between her torso and the window lintels and trying to push her outward. Every new grip on the eaves shingles was tight enough for her fingers to feel the grain of the wooden ridge through the leather of her gloves, and she scraped her boots slowly along the ledge, very aware of the glaze of ice.

“Who,” she panted through clenched teeth, speaking mainly to distract herself from the abyss an inch behind her heels, “is he? The blind wasp man?”

Trelawny’s snow-dusted hat twisted around, and for a moment she caught the gleam of one eye above the scar-twisted lips.

“You should know him,” he said, looking forward again. “He’s the dead boy who hoped to have his way with you.”

“But — he’s a blackamoor now!”

“It’s paint.”

Johanna looked back to her right and was relieved to see the silhouettes of her father and mother slowly shuffling single file along the ledge behind her.

“Why is he — here?” called Johanna.

“Speaking of hear,” growled Trelawny, “he’s not deaf.”

Polidori used to call me Josephine sometimes, she thought. That was my grandmother’s name, and she was supposed to be a particular favorite among his victims fifty years ago, though she got away from him in the end.

I’ll bet Polidori — and his dead boy — would rather have me than Trelawny’s granddaughter, if given a choice. All things considered! I’m in what Polidori would think of as his chosen family, and she’s not. He might let the granddaughter go, if he had me.

“Is that why you called me here, in the dream?” she asked, speaking into the wind in a normal tone so that Trelawny might or might not hear.

But he had heard. “Would you have stayed in France, either way?”

She shuffled along after him, tense and careful, without answering.

No, she thought, even if I’m just back here to be a red flag to distract a devil bull from a young girl, I’ll do it, I’ll be that. I can’t bear to think of another girl going through what I went through.

“You’re still a bastard,” she said.

“Now and forevermore,” Trelawny agreed. He had halted, his cape blowing around him more violently now. “We’re at the corner,” he said. “We can’t go any farther.”

At that, Johanna’s resolutely sustained control deserted her. Can’t go any farther? Her arms and legs tingled with sudden fright, and the ledge seemed narrower — the way back to the gable roof and the smoky chimneys seemed impossibly long and precarious, and her mother and father were blocking the way and might panic and refuse to move—!

And what if the earthquake wasn’t quite finished?

Breathing rapidly, she gripped the slanting eaves in front of her with no intention of ever letting go.

“So,” said Trelawny, “we’ll take the stairs down.” He swung one leg back, out over Whitefriars Street so far below, and then drove his knee forward into the top of the windowpane in front of him.

It shattered inward, the noise muffled and blown away by the wind.

Johanna realized that the first person to climb in would have no one to grab his hands and clothes while he crouched, but Trelawny let go of the eaves and squatted on the icy ledge with no evident qualms, and in the moment before he would have tipped over backward he reached out with his right hand, broke a wedge of glass out of the window frame, and then gripped the frame just as his weight came on it. Then his left hand gripped the opposite side and he hiked his legs forward into the dark room beyond. He disappeared inside, and she heard his boots knock on a wooden floor.

A moment later his squinting white-bearded face and one hand were back out in the wind.

“A little farther, child,” he said.

“I’m right behind you,” came her father’s strained voice.

In her panicky state it seemed suicidal to release her iron grip, but Johanna exhaled and took a deep breath, and was able to let go of the eaves she was clinging to and reach out to take hold of the one over Trelawny; the move made ice water of her guts, but she gritted her teeth and followed it with a shuffle forward, and then Trelawny had a firm hold of her waist.

“Lift your feet,” he said.

She did, and a moment later she was standing beside the old man in an unlighted slant-ceilinged room, hugging him and trembling.

“Still a bastard,” she whispered. He patted the top of her hat and then turned to the window to help her father in.

When all four of them were safely in the room, peering nervously at the cobwebby banks of wooden filing cabinets that hid all the walls, her father finally took off his hat and glared at Trelawny.

“Did you mean to trade Johanna for your granddaughter?”

“Keep — your voice down,” said Trelawny, panting. “We’re trespassing here, wherever this is.” He flexed his shaking fingers. “No, you fool, I don’t want that thing to have any bride at all. You think I want London destroyed? But I’m eighty-four years old — I can’t sprint across rooftops anymore, or swim the river, or — and your daughter knows his places.”

McKee went to the short door and opened it; after peering into the hallway beyond, she shut the door and stepped back to the middle of the room and sat down on the floor. “Nobody about. But do let’s be quiet.” She turned to Trelawny, and the expression on her narrow face was one of concern. “You love your granddaughter.”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” said the old man. He lowered himself carefully to the floor and stretched his legs out. “Ah! I’ve only seen her twice, and the second time was when her mother was ordering me out of her house. Still, she’s a nice child.” He sighed. “It’s more that she’s my granddaughter, you see.”

“You … care about her, then, as much as you care about anything.”

Trelawny shrugged and nodded. “That sums it up.”

“Let my husband cut that stone out of your throat.”

Trelawny smiled at McKee. “No.”

“You’ll be saving two girls, Johanna here and your granddaughter, this girl Rose.”

“There’s other ways to stop Polidori,” said Trelawny irritably, “without killing me.”

“My husband is a skilled surgeon—”

Trelawny raised a hand to interrupt her. “And we need to find Rose in any case,” he said. “We can’t leave her clean but down a well somewhere.” He sighed and rubbed his eyes. “We need to get hold of the damned Rossettis again.”

Johanna sat down too. “I am helping in this,” she told her parents as she brushed out her short brown hair with her gloved fingers. “I can’t not.”

Crawford sighed and joined them on the floor. “The Rossettis? Are they still alive? What can they do?”

Trelawny lowered his hands and stared at the dim ceiling. “Five years ago! — I gave William Rossetti a protection. He had put together a book of Shelley’s poems, and I knew Shelley, and I helped William with the book and got to know him. I admire him, he’s a friend. And he was thinking about asking a woman to marry him, and he had … no conception of the peril he’d be putting her into, much less any children they might have. His brother and sisters knew, and I suppose they tried to tell him, but he was skeptical. Scientific. So I gave him my piece of Shelley’s jawbone, scorched from the funeral pyre. It deflects the attention of … those things.”

Johanna blinked at him. “You never offered me that.”

“I thought you were off to America. If you’d all just go to America and stay there, I wouldn’t have all these problems.”

“You wouldn’t have problems!” said Crawford, and he began coughing again.

“So William has the Shelley jawbone?” said McKee quickly.

“That’s right. He gave it back to me at first, after showing it around to his friends as if it were a — a morbid relic or souvenir—he told me he really had no use for it. It was unsanitary. But three years ago he finally did get married, and his wife started having nightmares, when she could sleep at all, and their first child miscarried, and her brother whom they were both fond of flopped down dead at the age of nineteen — and William came back to me then, and begged me to give it back to him! I did, and now his wife’s recovered and he’s got a baby daughter who seems healthy.”

“‘London destroyed,’” echoed Crawford belatedly. “How would the dead boy destroy London, just by getting a bride?”

“The dead boy is a child, or product, at any rate, of Miss B.,” said Trelawny. “You remember her, I’m sure! She had largely assumed that poor woman Rossetti married, Dizzy or some such name; you remember her funeral. And if Polidori can raise up from the dead a girl who’s a member of his family — and he’s choosy about that! — the two can, if we stretch the term, marry.”

McKee started to interrupt, but Trelawny frowned and went on, “The thing that is Miss B. is British, as British as the Cotswold Hills; in a sense she is the Cotswold Hills! And the thing that is Polidori is European, specifically Alpine. The offspring of their families, of their continents, would exert an actual physical tug across the Channel.” He nodded at Crawford. “Earthquake.”

“To destroy London?” said Crawford. “There are never earthquakes in London.” He paused. “Well, until today.”

“A minor local one,” agreed Trelawny, “just from your daughter and the dead boy being in proximity. And Rossetti’s house shook, if you recall, when they were briefly in proximity in his bedroom seven years ago! And she, Miss B., destroyed London with an earthquake eighteen hundred years ago, when her resurrected British daughter gave birth to a child, so to speak, by a resurrected Roman soldier. She’d very much like to do it again.”

“Did the … child live?” asked McKee.

“The child was the earthquake,” said Trelawny. “It lived less than a minute.”

Johanna could see that her parents didn’t believe this story, but she remembered a vision she’d had seven years ago, in which astronomically vast wheels had pulled a city apart, rupturing underground rivers and toppling towers.

“I don’t have those hide shoes anymore,” she said. “Let’s get this jawbone before sundown.”

CHAPTER TWO

IN THE DIMMING daylight to the west, Christina Rossetti could see the Charing Cross Hotel and railway station, and she remembered the Hungerford Market that had stood where the hotel and railway station were now.

Her dress, shawl, and bonnet were black.

“Oh, I’ve outlived my London,” she said, turning to William, who was holding her elbow. “With Maria gone, I feel like a ghost myself. This modern London is for people like your new son, not for me.”

They were here so that she could show him the spot where she had talked with their father’s ghost fourteen years earlier, and the two of them were standing below the central arch of the York water gate — but the stairs that had once led her down to the watermen’s shed on the river shore now ended, after only two steps, at a wide gravel pavement, beyond which stretched a broad landscape of snow-covered lawns and paths. The new Victoria Embankment had pushed the river shore a hundred yards out from this spot, and from here she couldn’t see the water at all.

“It was … there,” she told William, pointing at the snowy ground to her right, “about twenty feet below the surface now, where I talked with the watermen. I wonder if their shed is still down there, buried!”

She remembered the old waterman, Hake, telling her, We’re well after being ghosts ourselves, and she shivered now in the cold.

“And I saw Papa … a bit farther on.”

She hobbled down the steps, leaning on William’s arm as he matched her pace. After walking several yards through the snow, she stopped and pointed down.

“About here.”

William obediently stared down at the frozen grass for a moment, then peered around at the leafless trees and lampposts standing up from the whiteness.

“I expect he’s at peace now,” he muttered.

“He was, from the moment of his death,” said Christina. “I’m sure he went directly to Heaven. But I trust his ghost has dissipated by now — certainly I don’t sense him at all here. One of the watermen told me it was remarkable that Papa’s had lasted eight years — and it’s been nearly a quarter of a century now.”

William steered her back toward the arch. “Thank you for showing it to me,” he said, “but we should find a cab and get you home. This winter doesn’t seem as if it ever means to make way for spring.”

Christina sighed and nodded. William had brought this outing on himself, by quizzing her this afternoon about what dangers their uncle might still pose to his growing family. Only two days ago his wife, Lucy, had given birth to their second child, a healthy boy they had named Gabriel Arthur Madox Rossetti.

The discussion had started with Maria’s ghost.

Their sister, Maria, had died three months earlier, of cancer, at the All Saint’s convent in Margaret Street, and the sisters had refused permission to Christina and her mother to view the body in the coffin, or even to enter the convent mortuary. Christina assumed it was because the sisters recognized the ineradicable Nephilim mark on her soul and therefore feared that she would try to capture Maria’s ghost — and in fact Christina had worried about Maria’s ghost, cut off from the Heaven-bound soul and perhaps swimming about disconsolately in the cold river. All fear one another, her father’s ghost had told her, fourteen years ago; river worms now… Ugly, crushed, blind … this waits for you all too, remember.

Christina had no doubt that it waited for herself and Gabriel and William, but she had been unable to bear the thought of even a half-sentient fragment of gentle Maria drifting fearfully in the cold river at night, part of what they had called the Sea-People Chorus…

And so she had been inexpressibly grateful when poor, silly, gallant old Charles Cayley had, on New Year’s Day, given her Maria’s captured ghost.

Cayley had said, with fastidious embarrassment, that he was distressed to see Christina so unhappy, and that he had learned from her that there was another London behind the one he had grown up in. And so he had consulted a series of “spiritualists” who had pointed him eventually to one of several magicians living in the sewers — and, through a hired intermediary, Cayley had had to deliver several cages full of songbirds to the magician in exchange for the peculiar sea creature that contained Maria’s ghost.

Cayley had given it to her preserved in a wine bottle filled with brandy. It was a kind of worm called a “sea mouse,” or more properly an example of Aphrodita aculeata.

It was a little oval thing no bigger than a baby’s shoe, furred with fine crystalline hairs that shifted from blue to green to red as one turned the bottle in the light.

Cayley had provided the magician with various items to draw the ghost to shore, where it could be netted — a copy of a book Maria had written, Letters to My Bible Class, and an old hairbrush of hers, and a sliver from the wooden floor of the old family house on Charlotte Street, which was now a City Registrar’s office — and Cayley had not been cheated. Though the creature itself was dead, swirling in the amber brandy, Christina could clearly feel her sister’s presence when she held the bottle.

Christina kept the bottle in her bedroom, and sometimes read Tennyson to it by candlelight when the night beyond the windows was especially cold and stormy.

This afternoon in Christina’s parlor, William had again obediently held up the bottle and peered into it, though he never sensed any presence of Maria in it. Then he had asked her whether a captive ghost—“I mean a contained and protected ghost,” he had added hastily, putting the bottle down — might be a protection for his new family against the lethal attentions of their uncle. Christina had for three years known about the piece of Shelley’s jawbone, which seemed so far to be effectively serving that purpose, and William had wondered aloud whether its evident power might derive from some fragment of Shelley’s ghost still adhering to it.

Christina had told him that ghosts weren’t supposed to last nearly that long, and she had described her nighttime river-side encounter in 1862 with their father’s ghost; and William had said, “I’d like to see that spot sometime.”

Intrigued by the idea herself, she had got up and fetched her overcoat and shawl and bonnet, and within minutes they had been in a cab bound for the Victoria Embankment.

And in the end she had been able to show him only expanses of frozen dirt where the river shore had once been. Feeling antique and irrelevant now, she let him lead her back to the cab rank by Gatti’s Restaurant on Villiers Street.

“I wish your friend Trelawny had more bits of Shelley to give away,” she said as a sedate old hackney coach bore them back up Tottenham Court Road toward the house Christina now shared with her mother and two aunts. The streetlamps were already lit and made passing halos on the coach’s window glass. “I believe that to some extent our terrible uncle is punishing Gabriel and I for our renunciation of him.”

Six years earlier, Christina had nearly died of some ailment that had swelled her throat and made her eyes protrude and permanently darkened her skin; it was tentatively diagnosed as Graves’ disease, and she had somewhat recovered since, though her hands shook almost too badly to write, and she still had little energy. The following year Gabriel had tried to kill himself with an overdose of laudanum, perhaps in mimic expiation of his guilt at Lizzie’s death; and though he had not died, he now believed that enemies were perpetually spying on him, and he had built partitions in his studio to keep them from peering in at him while he worked. And he took ever-increasing doses of chloral hydrate in brandy in a vain attempt to be able to sleep more than a couple of hours a night.

William was still as responsible and competent at forty-seven as he had ever been, and he was a devoted husband and father — but Christina sometimes sensed a wistful sadness in him, as if he too had chosen to make some never-referred-to but profound sacrifice for the sake of his family.

“I’ll ask Trelawny,” said William now with a gentle smile. “He always speaks highly of you. He calls you ‘Diamonds.’”

The coach had turned in to Torrington Place, and lights glowed in the windows of most of the houses in the row; Christina and her mother and aunts had moved here six months ago, but Christina still sometimes had trouble identifying which of the similar steps and doors were hers.

This evening she was able to tell immediately. “I think you can ask him right now,” she said, suddenly very tired.

Four people stood in the lamplight on her doorstep. Though they were shapeless bulks of winter clothing, the white-bearded one was clearly Trelawny himself, and she was pretty sure that two of the others were Adelaide McKee and her husband.

The cab slithered to a stop on icy cobblestones, and William climbed out and helped Christina step down; and he kept hold of her elbow as they nodded to the visitors and made their way carefully up to the lamplit door.

After unlocking it, Christina turned to McKee and said, “I’m afraid I’m not up to guests at the moment, Adelaide. If you would write to me tomorrow—”

“Actually, Miss Rossetti,” interrupted Trelawny, “it’s William we came to see.”

William glanced at his sister, and she sighed and nodded. “Do come in. William can be your host.”

“Just for a couple of minutes,” said William. “I’ve got to be getting home myself.”

They all trooped up the steps and into the entry hall, where there was another little snowstorm as everyone unwound scarves and took off hats and shrugged out of overcoats, and then William had fetched in another chair from the dining room so that they could all sit in the parlor. Trelawny made quick introductions.

“I’ll just join you all in a cup of tea,” said Christina, “and then I’ll have to ask you all to excuse me.” She smiled at Johanna, who now looked very much like her mother did when Christina had first met her at the Magdalen Penitentiary, nineteen years ago. “It’s so good to see you again, Johanna!” she said. “You were still a child when I saw you last.”

Johanna, sitting between her mother and father on a sofa by the fireplace, nodded and returned the smile. “I remember that you fired two shots from a revolver in my father’s surgery.”

William, sitting closer to the fire, had clearly been about to ask Trelawny what his business was, but at this he turned to stare at Christina.

She shrugged. “It was a stressful afternoon. And the second shot was just because I dropped the pistol.”

Trelawny stood up. “We’ve come,” he said bluntly to William, “to ask you for that piece of Shelley’s jawbone that I gave you three years ago.”

William blinked up at him, his mouth open. “But — but Edward, surely you know why I can’t give it back!”

“We were just talking about it,” exclaimed Christina. “Did you know William’s wife gave birth to a son two days ago?”

Trelawny bared his teeth in a pained grimace, but he went on, “It was a loan. I’m calling it back now.”

William’s eyes were wide, and his beard was shaking along with his chin. “I’d be killing my children — and my wife — if I gave it up! Just as I killed our first child, and my wife’s brother, when I refused it at first, foolishly!”

“You’ve had benefit of it,” said Trelawny. “Now my grandchild has been taken by your uncle! — the uncle you,” he said, turning on Christina, “quickened!”

Christina’s face was hot, and she took a breath but then couldn’t think of anything to say.

McKee and her husband were looking away, but Johanna — who must be twenty now! — was listening avidly, her blue eyes bright in the glow of the gas-jet chandelier overhead.

“I thought,” began Christina. William and Trelawny both swung to face her, so she went on weakly, “I thought we had reached a working truce. William had the fragment of jawbone to protect his family; you,” she said, nodding at Trelawny, “were in a favored position; and Adelaide, I thought you three had fled overseas!”

“My idiot daughter moved back to England,” said Trelawny, “and now her daughter is a captive of your damnable relative.”

“As I was,” murmured Johanna.

“As you’re likely to be again,” snapped McKee, “if we don’t get you into a foreign-bound boat damn quick!”

“I can’t leave,” said Johanna, “while a fourteen-year-old girl is in the trap I was in.” She gave Christina a look that was almost merry. “You’re the one who saved me, with your mirror trick.”

To Trelawny, Christina said in a whisper, “She’s fourteen?”

The old man nodded grimly.

“I was fourteen too,” Christina said softly, “when I fell into his trap.”

“My son is two days old,” said William, standing up.

“We’ve been friends, William,” said Trelawny, “but I will have that bit of bone.” He drew a revolver from under his coat, hesitated, then stepped to Christina’s chair and pointed it diagonally down, straight at her face.

She found herself looking up the barrel, which was only inches in front of her nose — she noticed spiral grooves in the bore, and in that tense moment the only thing in her mind was remote curiosity about whether all guns had that feature.

Trelawny glared sideways at William. “The first incentive I offer,” he said, “is the life of your sister. Forfeiting that, you’ll find I can bring further incentives to bear.”

“I have another idea,” Christina said.

CRAWFORD HOPED SHE DID. The Rossettis’ mother was in some nearby room preparing tea, and Trelawny might very well be capable of blowing Christina Rossetti’s head off right here in the parlor.

Crawford’s ears were ringing as if in anticipation of the shot, and Trelawny was too far away across the carpet for Crawford to hope to spring up from the sofa and catch the old man’s arm before he could shoot, and William’s chair was on the other side of the sofa from Trelawny.

“My sister, Maria,” said Christina evenly, “died three months ago. Two months ago a friend acquired her ghost for me. It’s in my room upstairs.”

“And your idea is…?” grated Trelawny, not lowering the gun barrel.

“Maria always claimed — that is, she never denied — that she had found a way, in her studies, to stop our uncle. She would never tell us what it was, because it apparently involved us committing some mortal sin, and she didn’t want to be a party to us damning our souls.”

William, almost as pale as his shirt, nodded jerkily. “That’s right.”

Christina’s face had somehow darkened and sagged since Crawford had last seen her, but when she smiled, it was the face he remembered. “She had scruples, do you see?” she said. “While she was living. But ghosts don’t have scruples.”

For several seconds the clock on the mantel ticked and no one spoke. Then Trelawny lowered the pistol and tucked it back under his coat.

“Three months? Not too diminished, then. We’ll bank on that, God help us, and I can certainly commit one more mortal sin.” He frowned at Christina. “I could not have shot you, Diamonds. I abjectly apologize for pretending that I would.”

The couch and chairs creaked as the Crawfords and Rossettis began hesitantly to relax.

Christina closed her eyes and breathed deeply. “You pretend very well,” she said; then she opened her eyes and gave him a frail smile. “But I can respect your concern for your grandchild.”

She got unsteadily to her feet. “I’ll fetch the bottle,” she said, and she made her way to the hall; soon they could hear her shoes bumping on stairs. Crawford reflected that she looked much older and gaunter than the intervening seven years could justify.

Johanna nodded. “A drink first would be a splendid idea.”

“The bottle contains the ghost,” said William, slumped back in his chair and rubbing his face. “Edward,” he burst out, “all this will make further literary consultations between us mightily awkward.”

“I don’t see that as necessarily so,” said Trelawny, who seemed shaky now himself. “Friends do have disagreements.”

Crawford barely had time to dig out a handkerchief and wipe his forehead, and exchange wide-eyed glances with his wife and daughter, before they heard Christina clumping with painful haste back down the stairs.

“Paper and pencil, William!” she panted as she reappeared in the parlor doorway. She was holding a corked glass bottle full of some pale brown liquid. “I told Mama not to bother with tea, and that we’re not to be interrupted.”

William stood up from his chair and crossed to an old slant-front desk against the wall. A framed picture hung over it, and he muttered a curse and flipped it around to face the plaster, then grabbed a paper and pencil and hurried back to the others.

Christina had pulled the low table closer to her chair and more squarely under the chandelier, and now she took the pencil and paper from her brother and laid the paper on the tabletop beside the bottle.

She sat down and waved Trelawny into a chair, and then she started to write a series of capital letters on the paper; but her hand shook too violently, and she pursed her lips and gave the pencil to William. He hiked his chair forward and quickly finished the row of letters.

“Silence, now,” said Christina, “everyone.” Then she lifted the pencil and said, “Maria, are you there?”

Crawford jumped then, and felt Johanna beside him twitch too, for there was some furry little thing in the bottle, and it had moved. The half-dozen gas jets on the chandelier overhead made a fan of the bottle’s shadow, and the thing in the bottle glimmered like mother-of-pearl.

But after a few moments, Christina frowned. “Are you there, Maria? We need you.”

William was looking uneasy. “No knocks,” he whispered.

The room seemed distinctly colder. Crawford exhaled but couldn’t see his breath.

“Maria!” Christina went on. “Communicate with us, please! This is your sister and your brother asking!”

The overlapping shadows of the bottle on the table were waving slightly back and forth across the wood surface.

Johanna had shifted around on the sofa, and when Crawford glanced at her, he saw that she was looking toward the hallway arch.

Then she turned to Christina. “Did you lock the door?”

“Shh,” said Christina. “Maria, let us know you hear us!”

A loud, wavering buzzing distracted Crawford now; looking up, he saw a wasp looping through the air around the gas flames, and the chandelier was swaying on its chain.

Trelawny saw the wasp and struggled to his feet, pulling the heavy revolver out of his coat again.

“What now?” exclaimed William, shoving himself back from the table in alarm.

“This time,” Trelawny wheezed, “I blow off his damned block and tackle!” He took a step to catch his balance, bumping the table.

“Yes,” agreed Johanna in a high-pitched voice as she stood up and drew a knife from inside her blouse.

Everybody was leaping up in confusion, and the table went over with a bang — the ghost jar was rolling across the carpet, and the swinging chandelier threw bobbing shadows across the walls.

“He can’t actually get in,” said Johanna, watching the windows. “He hasn’t been invited.”

The air in the parlor was now very cold, and drafty, and carried the smoke-and-horse smell of the street. Crawford heard scuffling in the hall and the clattering bang of a framed picture hitting the floor.

He shot a glance at Christina, and her brown old face was a mask of dismay.

“You have invited him in!” he exclaimed incredulously. He could see the steam of his breath now, and wasps were darting back and forth around the rocking chandelier and through the streaks of glowing dust sifting down from new cracks in the ceiling plaster.

“He was my,” Christina choked, “his soul was my child, before it was Lizzie’s!” She was wringing her gnarled hands and blinking around at her shaking house. “I baptized him!”

“You blinded me!” came a musical voice from the hall, and then the thing stepped into the parlor.

It was tall, and made to seem taller by the silk hat on its narrow black head, but its arms were so long and slack that its white-gloved hands crouched on fingertips on the floor like crabs. Its face was covered with tarry black paint, shiny in the lamplight, and its eyes had been painted over so thickly that there was scarcely any indentation between the eyebrows and the cheekbones. “I have to paint my face to hide the baptism stains!”

The floor was moving back and forth, and bits of plaster were falling from the ceiling now.

“You promised!” shrilled Christina, rushing at the thing. “You promised—”

William caught her around the waist and pulled her back, without taking his wide eyes off the intruder.

“You promised you’d only visit when I was alone!” There was an inarticulate cry from a nearby room, and Christina screamed, “Mama, don’t come in here!”

Trelawny had aimed his pistol at the creature, then raised the barrel toward the ceiling when Christina had got in the line of fire, and now he aimed it again.

“I am welcome and assured of no harm in this house,” sang the blind thing, its mouth open in a wide smile that bared rows of white teeth against the coal-black lips, “and I have come to claim my proper bride.” He moved into the shaking center of the room with one rapid long-legged step.

Christina saw Trelawny’s pistol and shouted, “No, I gave him my word—”

But Trelawny fired, the stunning explosion of the shot momentarily compressing the air. The front of the thing’s trousers exploded in a spray of what appeared to be sawdust, and the figure bent double, still lunging forward.

“Gave me her word—!” it squealed, as William threw himself against the dining-room door to keep his mother from coming into the room.

Johanna struck one of its hands aside with a convulsive slash of her knife, and a finger, still gloved, flew through the dusty air and leaping shadows, and Trelawny fired again, and then once more, and Crawford thought the windows must break out into the street before the hammering blasts.

Johanna danced back away from the thing’s tumbling hat, and with her free hand she juggled a little jar out of her coat pocket and flung it hard onto the floor, and it shattered right under the bent-over creature’s face; the long-limbed thing recoiled away, and a moment later Crawford smelled garlic.

Trelawny caught his eye and jerked his head urgently toward the hall; Crawford nodded and grabbed McKee by the elbow and then caught Johanna by the shoulder and shoved them both toward the hallway door. Glancing back, he saw that Trelawny had paused only to bend and pick up the ghost bottle before hurrying after him.

The street door was wide open to the night, and the hall leading to it was a mess — either because of the earthquake or because of the blind thing’s blundering passage through it — with furniture overturned and pictures knocked off the walls.

“Down!” Trelawny yelled loudly, and Crawford didn’t have to push his wife and daughter to the floor, but simply fell on top of them.

Something rushed over his head, swirling the cold air and leaving a smell of clay and cologne in its wake — looking up cautiously after it had passed, he saw a contained black cloud rush out across the pavement of the street and sweep up out of sight beyond the door lintel.

A tangle of coats and hats and scarves was scattered across the floor. Hastily Crawford grabbed his own things and made sure that McKee and Johanna took somebody’s.

Then they were out on the dark street, hurrying away on foot down Tottenham Court Road as they hastily buttoned coats and pulled on scarves in the intensely cold wind.

Trelawny was moving more slowly than the other three, and panting. “Here,” he said, thrusting the bottle at Crawford. “Get to Chichuwee — he can boil her out — that pencil-and-paper stuff, table knocking, that’s — fine, if the ghost wants to talk to you.” He stopped and leaned against a lamppost and bent over and gripped his knees as he blew out quick puffs of steam. “Boiling—forces ’em.”

Johanna touched the old man’s arm. “We’ll get you into a cab,” she said.

“No,” snarled Trelawny weakly, “there’s no time. The three of you — separate, now! Meet at dawn. All of us. At”—he glanced apprehensively into the sky before going on—“at the place where you were married.” He straightened up and pushed away from the lamppost and began shuffling carefully away. “Don’t die in the meantime,” he added over his shoulder, “or I’ll — have your ghosts for breakfast.”

Two horses harnessed to an old four-wheeled clarence cab were clopping down the street in their direction, and Trelawny waved the driver toward the Crawfords.

“It’s got a roof — and four walls!” the old man yelled.

“Right,” snapped McKee, stepping into a patch of yellow streetlamp radiance in the cab’s path and waving her arms. “We cannot be together under a night sky. In, quick.”

The cab swerved to a halt, and McKee had opened the door before the old vehicle had stopped rocking on its springs, and she boosted Johanna inside and scrambled in herself and reached out a hand for Crawford.

Crawford was two steps away and hurrying forward when the thing struck.

CHAPTER THREE

THE ABRUPT ROAR of it was like mountains crashing together at the end of the world, and the sheer sudden air pressure of the sound blew Crawford’s hat away and drove him to his knees.

The cab slid away sideways across the shaking pavement, and the cab horses bolted, pulling the slewing cab after them in terrified acceleration down Tottenham Court Road.

Crawford rolled through the snow to the gutter, and he found himself staring straight up into the sky.

The stars were perceptibly moving outward from around a dark shape that was leaning down toward him; a number of wings or limbs radiated out from the central blackness of it, and it was rushing toward him at astronomical speed.

Instinctively he raised his arms to block it, and then he was seeing the thing over the top of the bottle that he still gripped in his hand.

The terrible roaring stopped so suddenly that Crawford almost felt weightless, and the bottle in his upraised hand was glowing now, blue and green and gold. He blinked against the dazzling light, but his view of the sky was now blocked by a broad figure in a black robe and a wide hood, facing away from him.

“I’m Clubs,” said the figure in a clear, resonant voice, and Crawford dazedly realized that it was a woman — a nun, in fact.

Beyond her he saw a flickering in the sky, and the air seemed to shiver and surge.

“I belong to your family,” the nun went on, “but not to you.”

For a moment the air was still — and then a gust of wind whipped down the street, so strongly that it rolled Crawford over onto his face.

He hugged the bottle and scrambled to his hands and knees and scuttled across the pavement to an iron fence, and when he dimly realized that he was trying to crawl between the close-set iron bars he sat back, coughing and shivering violently, and quickly swung his gaze in every direction.

The sky was empty except for stars. More lights were on in nearby windows, but nobody had yet burst out into the street to see what the terrible noise had been, and though it should have frightened all the horses in this dozen streets, several cabs were wheeling along the street sedately enough. By the dimming glow of the bottle he still held, Crawford saw the round-faced nun standing near him in the street, and she smiled.

“Poor man,” she said, and then as she sighed, he was able to see windows and walls across the street through the space where she had been.

Crawford got weakly to his feet, gasping and still shivering, for the cold wind had found his sweat-damp shirt and hair. Cabs and carriages whirred past, the horses’ hooves clattering on the icy road, and the drivers were all too bundled up in hats and scarves to even glance at where Crawford stood.

The bottle had stopped glowing. He raised it against the glare of a streetlamp, and the furry little thing still bobbed inside.

He lowered the bottle and peered away through the traffic down Tottenham Court Road. The coach with his wife and daughter in it had at least apparently not capsized; and McKee knew where he would be going next.

Looking the other way, Crawford saw the high wheels of a hansom cab rolling in his direction.

He stepped out and waved, and the driver reined to the curb, but the man frowned at the sight of Crawford’s disheveled clothes and bottle.

“It’s not — liquor,” Crawford managed to say. “Oh hell — five shillings if you’ll take me to the — to the Spotted Dog in Holywell Street.”

That was the way to Chichuwee’s underground chamber, and McKee would know to meet him there.

HE REMEMBERED TO HAVE two pennies in his hand when he pushed open the door of the Spotted Dog, and he laid the brown coins on the counter of the little window in the entry hall and took his dented tin card before stepping through the open doorway into the remembered wide kitchen. And for nearly a minute he just stood on the flagstone floor and let the warmth sting his face and hands.

Under the glaring gas jets between the ceiling beams, men and women stood around the black iron stove in the corner or sat with plates on the shelf-like bench that ringed all four walls, and as he shuffled farther inside Crawford wondered if any of them might have been here on that night fourteen years ago when McKee had brought him to this place.

Again the room’s warm air smelled of onions and bacon, and this time he crossed to the door in the far side of the room and hung his coat on one of the hooks in the hall beyond it, then shambled back into the kitchen, still holding the bottle, and joined the queue by the stove. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast at a seaside pub in Southend, and McKee and Johanna would probably be arriving here soon.

He looked down at himself — the knees of his trousers were torn, and black stains mottled the front of his white shirt. With his free hand he tried to brush his hair flat.

A gritty voice behind him said, “When you going to open the bottle, then, eh?”

Crawford turned and saw a toothless old fellow already taking hold of the bottle Crawford held.

“It’s not liquor,” said Crawford hastily, pulling it away. “It’s a, a laboratory specimen, in formaldehyde, a…” He glanced at the thing. “A platypus. A … baby one.”

“A baby patty-puss!” exclaimed the old man, vastly impressed. “Can you shake it out?”

“No,” Crawford said desperately, “it would — crumble on exposure to air.”

“Those things dance, I’ve heard,” put in a haggard-looking girl in front of him. “Make it dance.”

“A dancing panda-puss!” said the old man, nearly beside himself now with excitement.

“Won’t make much of a dinner,” advised another man. “It’ll render down even more when they cook it. Two bites and it’s gone.”

“It’s a nun!” exclaimed a thin young girl in old leather trousers and a stained apron, who had crouched to peer at the bottle. “It’s a baby nun! You can’t cook her!”

Crawford was sweating in his damp shirt now. Why couldn’t Christina have kept the damn thing in an opaque jar? He frowned and looked worriedly toward the street door. And what the hell had become of McKee and Johanna?

“It’s not a nun,” he said dizzily, “and I’m not going to cook it.” Several pairs of bloodshot eyes were still looking at him hopefully, and he added, “And it doesn’t dance.”

One by one, the people ahead of him in line were served plates of some steaming stuff, and when it was his turn to stand in front of the stove he paid four pence for a plate of half-burned ham and potatoes with strings of onion all over it. A man next to the stove was tilting mugs under the open tap of a beer cask, and Crawford paid another tuppence for a filled mug, which he gripped in the same hand that was holding the ghost bottle. He found an empty stretch of the bench and sat down. Some of the people in the room were still staring at him, hopefully or disapprovingly, but he concentrated on his plate.

No one appeared to have any forks or spoons, so he set to with his fingers, and when he had wiped the plate clean and licked his finger and wiped his hand on his shirt, and drained the last of the beer, he wondered when he had ever found a dinner as satisfying — and then he remembered the ham and cheese and raw onion repast he had shared with Johanna in his basement on the first night he had met her. Met her to speak to, at any rate.

She and her mother should have got here by now.

Anything might have happened to them.

He carried the bottle outside to stand for several minutes shivering in the dark snowy street, but he saw no pair of figures approaching, and then since he had left his tin card in his coat in the back room, he had to pay another tuppence to get back inside, glad all over again for the stove-warmed air in the kitchen.

He resumed his place on the long bench, and after a few moments he tucked the bottle inside his shirt and leaned back against the wall.

Movement of the bottle against his undershirt brought him awake, and he caught the wrist of the person who had tried to steal it.

It was the girl who had thought the panda-puss ought to dance.

“Mine,” he croaked at her, his voice still scratchy with sleep. Coughing as he looked past her, he saw several people watching, apparently hoping that she would succeed in getting the bottle. Clearly he hadn’t slept for very long.

Crawford stood up, only clearing his throat now, and a couple of rough-looking men stepped toward the street-side door as if to block his exit. Crawford pretended not to notice, and he carried the bottle across the room away from them, toward the back wall, where he made a show of reading the posters tacked up on the white-painted wood.

Very aware of the doorway to his right, which led to the coat room and the remembered stairs that led down to the ancient well, Crawford absently read that Peter the Great Wikinsmill would soon be appearing at the Waterloo Music Hall, performing his signature song, “All Round My Hat, or Who Stole the Donkey?”

Christina had said that Maria had been dead for three months; Trelawny had said her ghost should not have diminished too much in that time — and certainly it had been solid enough an hour ago in Tottenham Court Road! But what if that appearance had nearly used her up? Maria’s ghost was apparently their last hope for saving Johanna — and Trelawny’s granddaughter — and the last shreds of the ghost’s vitality might be evaporating right now!

After one more glance toward the street-side door — McKee and Johanna had still not appeared, and the bullyboys were still eyeing him — Crawford stepped through the doorway and grabbed his damp coat and walked directly to the wooden stairs and started down them. He remembered the smells of clay and smoke on the draft that welled up from the dimness below him. He recalled that there would be climbing to do, so he pulled on his coat and tucked the ghost bottle into a deep side pocket.

Soon he was in total darkness, but the echoes of the thump of his boots on the stairs told him that he was in a narrow stairway; after forty or fifty steps, the banister he had been alternately clutching and releasing ended in a ragged stump, and after that he proceeded more slowly, dragging his hand along the gritty bricks.

He was expecting it when the stairs ended and he found himself on a flat, slanted stone surface. His shuffling boots and panting breath echoed in a bigger space now — and after groping his way for several yards through the lightless chamber, he heard a distant windy groaning.

It’s got some Latin name, he told himself firmly, it’s just pressure differences equalizing in the uneven levels of remote tunnels; but his outstretched hands were trembling, and he didn’t realize that he was holding his breath until he let it all out in relief when his palms brushed the rim of the old well.

He leaned over the edge, and the remembered smell like sourly fermented seaweed faintly stung his nostrils. He ran his hands around the curved inner surface and then he edged around the well until he felt the topmost iron rung. He sighed unhappily and swung one leg over the coping and carefully lowered his leg until his foot found the rung. There was a muffled clunk as the bottle in his pocket rapped the stone.

Only then did the lingering thought Latin name remind him that McKee had recited some kind of ritual phrase before entering the well.

He paused with both hands on the well rim and both boots on the rung, and across fourteen years he tried to remember what the phrase had been. There had been a mnemonic nursery rhyme to remind one of it, but he couldn’t remember the nursery rhyme either. Something about frogs and snails? Sugar and spice?

For a moment he thought of climbing out again and waiting in the total darkness by the well for McKee to make her way down here, but the whistling wail sounded again, perhaps not quite so far away now, and he just gritted his teeth and lowered one foot to feel for the next rung down.

He had descended down six of the rungs, about twelve feet, when something stung him painfully in the neck. It jolted him, but he clung to the rungs as his face suddenly chilled with sweat; and a moment later his left hand was stung twice. He let go of the rung to swat at the fluttering insects, and in that moment he remembered the nursery rhyme.

“Oranges and — damn it — lemons,” he gasped, turning his face away from another pair of invisible brushing wings. “Say the bells of St. Clement’s.”

And at that prompting the Latin came to him too. “Origo lemurum, you bastards!” he yelled.

He climbed down as rapidly as he dared, panting against the close brick wall, but perhaps the invocation had worked — he wasn’t stung again.

But though his hands and feet continued to grip and press against the iron bars, his eyes gradually registered a glow that was not vision, for it was in front of him no matter which way he turned his head. He kept palpably climbing down the iron brackets moored in the brick wall as the sour draft from below continued to whisper up around him, but what he was seeing became a wide landscape — he saw a pillared temple and stone buildings with towers, surrounded by straight streets and low white houses with plaster walls and arched gateways and red tile roofs; there was a broad river, with a lone long timber bridge spanning it, and ships with short masts and curved sternposts were moored along wooden wharves. Smaller rivers slanted through the city, and boats with sails moved slowly up and down them.

Into his head came the thought that this was London when it was called Londinium by these invaders from overseas, before the tributary rivers were roofed over to become sewers. Farms stretched in green squares outside the city wall.

And now the fields were overrun by men in furs whose faces and arms were dyed blue and who carried black iron swords; the Romans fought them with spears and shields and short steel swords, but the wild Celts vastly outnumbered them, and the Romans fled; but the Celts retreated too — and then the city began to ripple like lilies on a disrupted pond. The towers and houses fell, and the river rose and swept the bridge away, and clouds of tan dust shaken up from the low hills mingled with black smoke as the broken city burned.

The vision faded, but he was dimly able to see his hand on the rung in front of him; and it occurred to him that the vision had been in his mind alone, not in front of his eyes, or he wouldn’t have been able to see anything at all in this near-total blackness right afterward.

He held still, remembering having glimpsed fragments of this vision before. Clearly what he had just seen was the destruction of Roman London — by Boadicea in A.D. 60, according to Trelawny. And it had certainly involved an earthquake. She’d very much like to do it again, Trelawny had said this afternoon.

Crawford resumed climbing downward, and soon his reaching foot found no lower rung, so he lowered himself joltingly by his hands alone to the bottom-most rung, swung for a moment, and then dropped.

He fell about ten feet into damp sand and managed not to fall over or bang his chin on his knee, and he patted his pocket and was reassured to feel that the bottle was still there. When he straightened up, he could see the faint round-topped vertical glows of at least four arched doorways around him — he had forgotten that there were more than one, and he didn’t have an ave to guide him.

He paced from one arch to another in the near-total gloom, listening carefully for the chirping of birds. At one arch he heard a distant susurrus like rushing water, and at another the remote windy groaning, and so he brushed his hair back from his face with both hands, took a deep breath, and ducked into one of the silent tunnels.

It curved to the left, which was familiar, but soon, instead of the broad glow of Chichuwee’s chamber, he saw a dot of yellow light ahead. It seemed some yards away at first, but quickly dropped in apparent height as he approached it, and when it disappeared in the moment before his groping hands brushed a wall of upright planks — and then his fingers felt down the length of it to a pitted doorknob — he realized that the tiny glow was a keyhole.

He crouched to peer through it and saw, perhaps twenty feet beyond the door, a lamplit row of high desks at which visored young clerks wrote with pens in big ledger books.

Crawford sat back on his heels, frowning. Could this be the deepest sub-basement of some enormous bank? He straightened up and tried to twist the doorknob, but it didn’t move at all.

Crouching again, he put his mouth to the keyhole and called, “Hello! I wonder if any of you could direct me?”

Quickly he put his eye to the keyhole again, and he had to blink — this time the lamplight was much dimmer, and the clerks were bent with age, their beards long and white.

“Still here?” called one of them wearily. “On your way and face your sins, phantom, we can erase no names.”

Crawford recoiled and sat down on the sandy tunnel floor, nearly losing the bottle, then got to his feet and hurried away, back to the central chamber below the well, and he made his way down another of the tunnels.

This one did not bend, but he didn’t remember whether Chichuwee’s did right away or not, so he followed it for a few yards before concluding that it wasn’t the right one either; but ahead of him now he could see a faint vertical streak of emerald light that widened and narrowed, as if it were a gap between a curtain and a wall, and he stole forward to peek at what might lie beyond.

But as he hesitantly touched the curtain, a woman’s voice said, faintly, “Oh, help me, please, brother!”

He froze, and a moment later shook his head and started to turn around, and then was appalled to realize that he could not in good conscience walk away from it; and so he braced himself and pushed the curtain aside.

The room beyond was wide and lit from some undetectable source in flickering green, as if it were under sunlit water. The floor was polished stone. Immediately in front of Crawford stood a glass table with a handful of black gravel and sand on it, and against the far wall was a long couch flanked by two chairs, with shelves above it.

At first he couldn’t see the woman who had spoken. He took two steps forward. “Er … hello?” he said.

Then she spoke, and he saw that she was reclining on the couch amid a tumble of cushions. Her face, turned toward him, was narrow and youthful.

“Save me,” she said, “please.”

“How?” asked Crawford nervously. “From what?”

Then he jumped, for something had moved on one of the high shelves. He peered at it, and his stomach went cold when he realized that the object was a severed hand, pointing.

It was pointing at the table.

“Bless my broken body with some of your living blood,” said the face on the couch.

Crawford’s face was tingling, and he spread his hands and took a long, careful step backward, not looking at her.

Quickly she added, “You are Polidori’s son; that’s why he wants you. In the summer of 1822, in Italy, your mother, Josephine, belonged to him. Come to me, give me yourself.”

He looked at her now — and he saw that there was no body reclining there, just the speaking head. Her eyes were enormous and glittered in the green glow.

With a choked shout, he spun toward the curtain, but a slim severed arm lay in the way now, and it immediately began a furious convulsing like an energetic fish hauled up onto a dock; the knocking of the elbow and the slapping of the hand against the floor were as rapid as a fast drumbeat.

He stepped back in horror, and, as other pieces of a woman’s body stirred to life in various parts of the room, the head on the couch said, “My insect fingers permitted me to show you my one-time power. You would have seen more, been stung many more times, if you had not spoken to the Roman gods. I can save you and all you love. Only give me your blood.”

Crawford had leaped to the side while she was speaking, the bottle swinging wildly in his coat, but the arm flipped over in that direction, blocking him. The fingers on the jumping hand were spasmodically curling and snapping out straight.

“Your blood already remembers the way,” the woman said, speaking more loudly to be heard over the drumming of the arm. “My sweet Swinburne is lost to me, and I hold all the verses he would write — he writes only dead lines now under his unkindly master. Heal me, join my family, kill my enemies.”

Crawford hesitated, trying to place himself for a jump over the flailing arm, when she added, “You know the way back.”

The way back—

And, as he sometimes did very late on sleepless nights in one French city or another, Crawford remembered how he had felt after McKee’s common-law husband had bitten him seven years ago: light and restless, eager to be striding quickly down dark streets. He had had no responsibilities or worries, hardly even any thoughts.

No home waited for him now, up there on the surface. His wife and child were lost.

His relaxing hand brushed the bottle in his pocket, but it was the lively face of Johanna that sprang into his head. And he remembered her clapping her hands when McKee agreed to marry him seven years ago and saying happily, Oh, well done, you two! And on the day they married, she had said, I’ll kill myself before I’ll let him have me again.

He gripped the bottle and told himself, No — you can’t relax yet.

He said, clearly, “No,” and vaulted straight over the flexing arm into the curtain.

He ducked, hoping the fabric would slow his fall, but the green glow winked out while he was in midair and he landed hard on the sandy floor of the tunnel, clanking the bottle alarmingly.

He scrambled to his feet, wincing at new pains in his shoulder and hip, and looked fearfully behind him — but he could see nothing in the darkness, and there was no sound except for his fast breath echoing away in a void, and there was no curtain underfoot.

The creature was lying, he told himself. I am not a vampire’s son. My parents told me that they had wondered about that themselves, and concluded that it was not so.

And even if I am — I will save Johanna from him.

He felt the bottle and exhaled in relief to find that it was not broken.

He limped back to the central chamber and blindly stumbled into the next tunnel; its low ceiling was familiar, as was the deeper sand underfoot, and it curved perceptibly to the left. As he trudged along through the unseen damp sand, the curve became more pronounced.

But he remembered seeing lamplight on McKee’s hair as she had preceded him down the tunnel fourteen years before, and he remembered the chittering of birds; this tunnel was dark and silent, and the draft from ahead smelled of the river, not birdcages.

When the tunnel came to an end, and he felt the open doorway to his left, he almost stepped out onto the remembered floor, but something was wrong about the echoes.

He crouched and waved his hand past the lip of the tunnel, but didn’t feel the floor boards; so he stretched his legs out backward and lay on his stomach and reached down as far as he could — and there was no floor.

Then he jumped and scuttled back, squinting, for a light had sprung up somewhere ahead. He peered out, and by the glare of a paraffin lantern on the far wall he saw that he was looking into a wide stone shaft that extended away into darkness above and below.

Crawford recalled Trelawny saying that he had consulted Chichuwee on Wednesday, two days ago; had he consulted him here?

Now Crawford could make out a small white face next to the paraffin lantern fifteen feet away across the abyss, and he recalled that there had been a boy attending the old Hail Mary dealer fourteen years ago.

“I — want to see Chichuwee,” Crawford called.

The boy pointed downward, and Crawford automatically looked in that direction, into what seemed an infinite pit. He slid a little farther back into the tunnel.

“But two days ago,” he called, “a man named Trelawny consulted him?”

The face nodded, and the boy said, “And then the big vampire. It stopped the dice.”

Crawford squeezed tears out of his stinging eyes and felt like just throwing the ghost bottle down the shaft.

“But I’ve — your name is—” What had it been? “Sam! Right?”

“George,” the boy corrected him. “There might have been a Sam once.”

Of course, Crawford thought, impatient with himself, the boy we saw would be grown up by now.

“I’ve got a ghost,” he said desperately, reaching back to be sure he still had the bottle in his pocket. “I wanted to get it … boiled, so I could ask it some questions.”

The boy just pointed down the pit again. “The word is,” he said, “all the great old Hail Mary artists got jacked Wednesday night.”

The lantern was extinguished, and Crawford heard the boy scuffling away down the tunnel on the other side.

“Polidori doesn’t want ghosts answering questions,” said Crawford bleakly. In a louder voice, he added, “Specifically this ghost!”

He began to push himself backward, away from the open doorway to nothing, but the light on the other side of the pit flared back on again.

“What’s your ghost?” the boy called.

“It’s Maria Rossetti,” Crawford answered. “Two arches to the right of this tunnel is the way back up, as I recall? — to Portugal Street?”

“If you’re lucky. Who was Maria Rossetti?”

“She was the niece of Polidori. She knew of a way to kill him, but she was too religious to tell anybody because doing it would involve some dire sin. I hoped that her ghost could tell us the trick.”

“Wait.” The boy’s face disappeared from the lantern glow, then after a few seconds was back again. “I’ll throw something to you.”

“Throw something? How can I — what is it?”

The boy was standing up in the opening on the other side, swinging his arm back and forth. The shadow swooped up and down the wall of the shaft.

“It’s invisible,” the boy called. “Drop it and there’s no hope. Stand up.”

Crawford got carefully to his feet, but he found it supremely difficult to stop looking at the abyss an inch in front of his boot toes.

“Look at me,” called the boy.

Crawford made himself lift his eyes and squint steadily across the shaft.

“Can’t you—” he began, but the boy had flung his arm up and opened his hand.

Swaying on the ledge, Crawford held his arms out over the drop — and a moment later something heavy bounced off his forearm and the inside of his elbow and he caught it in his hands before it could rebound away. He had begun to tip forward, and he flung out one hand sideways and clawed the rock wall to pull himself back, and he wound up sitting in the sand trembling and panting, still holding the thing the boy had thrown.

He could feel that it was round and rough, but when he looked down at his arms, he saw only his arms.

The light went out again, and he heard the boy say, “Good,” before scuttling away down the other tunnel.

Crawford got wearily to his feet in the renewed darkness and, after taking anxious care that he was facing the right way, plodded back down the decreasingly curving corridor.

In the central chamber, he felt along the wall to the right of the tunnel he had just come out of, shuffled past the next open arch — from the depths of which he seemed to hear some distant but enormous person snoring — and then stepped through the next one. This tunnel widened out, and the sandy floor was indeed sloping perceptibly upward.

Behind him, distorted by echoes, he heard a voice call, “Origo lemurum.”

He paused and turned back, glad now of the total darkness.

He could hear boots scuffing on the iron rungs; more than one set of boots. The sound grew louder.

He crouched, taking deep breaths to quell his noisy panting, and he clutched the thing that the boy had thrown to him, which seemed to be a light iron pot. In the darkness, he began to doubt that it really was invisible.

After listening, for a longer time than he would have expected, to the boots descending the rungs, he heard the hard chuff of someone dropping to the sand in the central chamber, and then he heard McKee say, hoarsely, “John? Are you down here?”

“Yes!” he said, aloud so that she would know it really was him, and not some lonely whispering ghost. He shuffled carefully back down the unseen slope to the dimly visible chamber of arches.

His groping hand found hers in the darkness, and a moment later another pair of boots impacted the sand and then Johanna had found him and was hugging him.

CHAPTER FOUR

DIRECTLY BEHIND ME,” he whispered, “is the tunnel that leads up to the surface. I just came back out of it.”

“I heard you,” McKee whispered back. “I can walk to it from right here. But you were leaving? What happened with Chichuwee?”

“Dead and gone — floor, wagon, and everything. But I’ve got his invisible boiling pot.”

He felt her hand brush the thing and then jiggle the bottle in his coat pocket. “How—? No, later. Quiet now.”

She started forward, taking his left hand — and Johanna’s right hand, he gathered, for he could hear her footsteps now too — and soon the three of them were trudging up the inclined sand slope.

The sand underfoot was wetter than he remembered, and his right hip and both knees were soon aching at each labored uphill step. He was about to whisper a suggestion that they rest, when he gasped and involuntarily squeezed McKee’s hand.

Someone else was stepping along, very lightly, a few yards to his right. And then he could hear the faint crunch and slither of other footsteps beyond those. None seemed to impose much weight on the sand.

McKee gripped his hand more tightly, clearly conveying Don’t pause or speak.

He remembered encountering the ghosts of his first wife and his son Richard down here, last time, and, as sweat chilled his face and he forced himself to inhale and exhale evenly, he wondered if they were among the things pacing them here.

He could hear footsteps now on the far side of Johanna too; and ahead of them, and behind them. The windy vox cloacarum moaning started up, and it was faint only because the voices were very soft this time, not because its source was far away at all. Crawford could almost feel the mingled breaths from the cold throats on his right hand.

Pressure — differences! he thought furiously as his aching legs kept pushing him up the slope.

And then he was aware of weak plucking at his sleeve, and fragments of whispers: “whatcha got … lemme just … ye spare a bit of…”

These seemed to be a frailer sort of ghost than those of Veronica and Richard had been, perhaps because they didn’t have any intrinsic psychic power over him from which to draw virtual substance, but there seemed to be hundreds of them.

And McKee was pulling him strongly ahead and up, and her grip on his hand was still tight.

Crawford’s sleeve was snagged, and when he shook off the thing that clung to it, he felt a tug and heard cloth tear; then his boots were tangled in something that audibly gnawed at his boot before he could kick it away. He heard sharp breaths and scuffles from McKee and Johanna too.

We don’t dare fall, he thought as the three of them kept plodding uphill, all of them panting audibly. How much farther?

Little cold hands were tugging at the bottle in his pocket, and the whispered voices were now saying, “Give us the nun, we need a nun … she’s in brandy, we need that too … and your blood, your blood…”

McKee had just whispered, “If any of us falls — throw the bottle—” when a new sound intruded from behind them.

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.

Trelawny knelt by the stove and opened the firebox door, and after dumping one small shovelful of coal onto the fire, he got to his feet with resolute ease and no grunt of effort. He retrieved the invisible pot from the kitchen table and placed it with a clank squarely on the front iron cook-lid.

He gestured toward the four wooden chairs around the table, and McKee and Johanna sat down.

“Give up the ghost,” Trelawny said with a kinked grin as he held out his hand, and Crawford fetched the bottle out of the pocket of his coat.

Trelawny held it up to the window light judiciously. “Well, you’ve got the sediment roiled up — probably a good thing. I should remember her name.”

“Maria,” said Crawford, remembering that Christina’s sister had been unfailingly kind to him when he had been so often imposing himself on the Rossettis in the spring of 1862, after McKee had disappeared; and last night her ghost had shielded him from Polidori.

The brown river water was already boiling and steaming, and Crawford remembered Chichuwee’s claim that the pot was actually up in the Alps, where the air pressure was lower. Trelawny twisted the cork out of the bottle’s neck.

“Intelligent woman, as I recall,” he said, “and dead only three months — let’s hope for the best.”

Crawford stood beside him at the stove. “Let me talk to her,” he said.

“As you please.” The old man poured several splashes of the clouded brandy into the boiling water — and the steam immediately gathered itself in to form an oval.

“Maria,” said Crawford to the steam. He glanced nervously at McKee, who nodded.

“Maria,” he said again, more loudly. The kitchen smelled now of brandy and fish.

The bubbling of the water produced a whisper: “Where is Christina? She was reading ‘The Lady of Shallot’ to me.”

“Christina is at home, and thriving,” Crawford said, wondering how true that might be. “We need to know how to banish your uncle, John Polidori.”

“We … stopped him with mirrors,” said the bubbles slowly as the face in the steam bobbed. “I learned it from the … the old Jewish books. I can’t remember their titles.”

“That was good,” said Crawford. Sweat and condensed steam beaded his face and tickled in his gray beard. “But that didn’t work forever. We need to know how to stop him forever.”

“Cut the stone out of Edward John Trelawny’s neck,” said the steam.

“Barring that,” put in Trelawny.

“I gathered you know of another way,” pursued Crawford.

“I might,” spoke the slow bubbles. “‘The mirror cracked from side to side; / “The curse is come upon me,” cried / The Lady of Shallott.’” The bubbles seemed to sigh. “It would damn souls.”

“How would it be done?” asked Johanna.

“I never would say, while I lived.”

“But you’re not living now,” said Crawford gently. “You can say, now.”

“I was in the river Purgatory for long cold days and nights. Catholics knew about that. Now I … live with Christina? An indulgence?”

“Yes,” said Crawford. “We’ll return you to her as soon as you’ve told us.”

He hadn’t anticipated being ashamed of questioning this ghost, but he found that he was. Maria had been a deeply devout Christian, and more intelligent than him, and nevertheless kind to him; and he was taking advantage of the limitations of this poor malodorous little fragment of her … which had stepped out to save him last night.

“I told you — I was in the infinite dark river, with the worms.”

“No, when you’ve told us the other way to banish your uncle.”

The steam said, “Oh — someone would have to cut Christina, so that she bled — she couldn’t do it herself. She would have to appear to be threatened. And then she would have to call for him, our uncle, as if for rescue. She would have to invite him back to herself. She would not want to do that, because she has always wanted to do that.”

The bubbles popped and the steam oval nodded.

“That — would not stop him,” put in McKee.

“No,” agreed the evanescent bubbles. “But he would come to her, in his human body — vulnerable, by daylight, not the … monster in the sky. And then there would have to be a death.”

For several seconds no more words came out of the bubbling brandy and river water, and Crawford cast a worried glance at McKee and opened his mouth, but the steam spoke again.

“I don’t want Christina to die,” it said.

“Well — no,” agreed Crawford.

“If she died there, and he were confined in the right sort of pentagram in daylight, I believe he would die too. Blood relatives, and the diabolical link. But for this, if she is to be able to keep me, and read to me—”

Again there was silence, and Crawford waited it out.

“I believe there would have to be a murder,” said the bubbles, and the emotionless monotone voice seemed grotesque now, “and Christina could catch the new ghost and use its agitated mental strength to double her own — and, still linked with our uncle by blood relation and her will, she could then stop our uncle, hold him in his human form. Forcibly. For a little while. He wouldn’t be able to fly away, as long as she was able to keep imposing his human form on him. He could still run — but I think he could be killed then, and stopped forever with silver and wood and cremation.”

Crawford was feeling nauseated, and he realized that it was a reaction to having made this frail phantom violate Maria’s principles by divulging this. But he remembered something McKee had said fourteen years ago: People who have let themselves be bitten by these devils can sometimes catch a very fresh ghost, ingest it, and it supposedly gives them extra psychic strength — lets them control the people around them for a minute or so.

“If it didn’t work,” said Johanna nervously, “we would — everybody present would be in big trouble.” She blinked. “Even if it did work.”

“‘Who is this?’” whispered the steam, and before anyone could answer, it went on, clearly quoting again, “‘and what is here? / And in the lighted palace near, / Died the sound of royal cheer; / And they crossed themselves for fear…’”

The steam oval dissolved in the air, and at the same moment Trelawny fumbled the bottle and got a fresh grip on it, as if it had moved in his hand. Crawford took it from him and shoved the cork back in the neck and set it on the table.

“We’ll return that to Christina,” he said.

“Yes,” McKee agreed weakly.

Crawford and Trelawny sat down at the table, both of them staring at the bottle.

After a while, “How can we … kill a person, to do this?” asked Johanna. “Plain murder.”

“I could do it,” said McKee in an unsteady voice. “If it was a stranger, and — and if I was drunk again.”

Crawford said quickly, “No, you couldn’t, Adelaide.”

Trelawny smiled at her, his eyes half closed. “I named you Rahab, not Jael.”

Crawford recalled that Jael had been the woman who, in the Book of Judges, had saved Israel by pounding a tent stake through the head of a Canaanite general.

“I could — to save Johanna,” McKee insisted. Her face was pale.

“And my granddaughter.” Trelawny sat back and looked around at the cupboards and the boiler and the racked knives as if he couldn’t recall how he had got here.

Johanna touched her mother’s hand. “I’ll do it. It won’t,” she added, staring at the bottle, “be the first time I’ve killed a person.”

“Is it not a couple of wild Bacchantes!” said Trelawny, smiling crookedly. “Ready to tear the head off a stranger! But no, children — I’m — eighty-four years old, as of last November.”

He stood up and crossed to the brick street-side wall and leaned against it between two of the gray-glowing windows, so that his expression was hard to make out.

“Have any of you read my book, Adventures of a Younger Son?” he asked. “No? Well, I never took you for a literate lot. It concerned my desertion from the British navy in India, and my subsequent career as a pirate on the Indian Ocean. In it I described my rescue of an Arab princess, Zela, and how I married her, and how she died in my arms. I know Byron always thought the whole thing was a bundle of lies.”

He sighed. “And — though I can still call poor lovely, loyal Zela up in my memory more clearly than I can my last wife—” He paused and then laughed softly. “Byron was right! This is difficult for me to admit, even to myself, after all these years, but — I didn’t desert the navy. I was honorably discharged at the age of twenty, in Bristol, because of having caught cholera. I was never a pirate, never met or married any Zela. I can hardly get my memory past the fictions now, all the sea battles and piracies, but I do know that they are fictions.”

He laced his fingers behind his head and stared at the ceiling.

“But then in Pisa in ’22 I met Shelley, and Byron, and became their friend. And after Shelley drowned, I sailed with Byron to Greece to fight for that nation’s independence from Turkey. Byron died in ’24, but I allied myself with a mountain bandit-king whose lair was a cave on Mount Parnassus. And I married his young sister — so in a way my imaginary Zela was really just a … premonition! And when we had a daughter, I named her Zella, slightly different spelling, to honor that dear figment.

“But — my bride’s brother, the mountain bandit — was one of several powerful men vying for the leadership of Greece in those days, and he was resolved to establish an alliance with the — the stony children of Deucalion and Pyrrha.”

Evidently stung by Trelawny’s assessment of her literacy, McKee explained stiffly to Johanna, “In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Deucalion and Pyrrha survived the great flood by setting sail in an ark, and they repopulated the earth afterward by throwing stones behind them, and the stones grew into people.”

“Into things that looked like people, sometimes, at any rate,” said Trelawny, nodding. “Deucalion and Pyrrha resurrected the Nephilim, pre-Adamite godlike monsters. By 1824, the Nephilim had been banished, but this chieftain was determined to call them up again and become something like a god himself.”

Trelawny rubbed one hand over his white-bearded face. “I — was young! — and I wanted the same, and I was willing to commit the large-scale human sacrifice the Nephilim required. In Euboea I killed … many Turks. Men, women, and children.” For several seconds he was silent. Then, “And I was betrayed,” he went on. “I was shot in the back with one of the living stones, so that I would merely become the bridge between the two species. The ball was fired clay, and it broke against my bones, but”—he paused to touch the base of his throat—“as you know, it’s been growing back, and with it the power of the Nephilim.”

Crawford was sure the old man was about to volunteer to kill someone in order to perform the procedure Maria’s ghost had described.

Instead, Trelawny stepped forward into the light and glared at him and said, “Cut it out of my throat.”

CHAPTER FIVE

CRAWFORD BLINKED, AND his mouth was open for several seconds before he spoke. “Very well,” he said. “Where?”

“Right here in the kitchen. Where did you suppose, out in the street? You’ve got hot water in the boiler, there’s brandy in the cupboard — and I can fetch my sewing kit for you to stitch me up with afterward.”

Crawford pushed his chair back and stood up, wishing that he had got some sleep last night. “You’ll be fine,” he said, with more confidence than he felt. “I’ve cut around dozens of horse arteries without losing the patient.”

“Horse arteries,” echoed Trelawny. “Excuse me while I fetch needle and thread.”

The old man turned and clumped away up the stairs, shaking his head.

“It’s brave of him,” said Johanna.

“At this point,” said McKee, “it would have been cowardice not to do it.”

“Well, that’s what I said. There’s no neutral place.”

Crawford had stepped across to the knife rack, and after looking over the variously sized blades, he just picked up a whetstone and was rubbing his thumb across it.

“Go through the drawers in the pantry too,” he said. “See if you can find a knife with a short blade. These here are all for hacking joints apart.”

“Well, that would do,” said McKee, standing up and walking into the pantry.

Trelawny came downstairs carrying a small leather box. “I’ve got a pocketknife with a short blade,” he said. “I’d just as soon not have you hacking joints.” His voice was light, but Crawford saw the pallor under the old man’s eternal tan. “I’m not afraid,” Trelawny added.

“I’ll go out and find a chemist’s,” said Crawford, “and fetch some ether. I’d rather use that than chloroform.”

“It’s not even half an inch deep!” said Trelawny scornfully. “Just cut, I promise not to flinch.”

“No, cutting so close to the vein, I—”

“And what’s happening to Rose, while we wait for you to find a chemist’s? Just cut; I won’t move.”

Crawford frowned at the defiant old man, then shrugged.

“Would you,” ventured Johanna, “like me to return a favor? I could … baptize you.”

“Me loyal old Lark,” said Trelawny, turning to her with a smile. “No, thank you, my dear, though I—” He shut his mouth, and after taking a deep breath and letting it out, he said, “I appreciate the thought behind the offer, more than I can say.”

Crawford eventually settled on one of the short blades in Trelawny’s bone-handled pocketknife, and when Johanna had lit a candle and brought it to the table, he held the blade in the flame.

“Open your shirt and lie down across the table,” he told Trelawny. His eyes were stinging from not having slept last night, and he squeezed them shut and then opened them wide; he looked at his hands and was reassured to see that they were not trembling.

The old man took his shirt off, exposing a broad chest matted with white hair and shoulders still corded with muscle. He touched a spot on his throat just above his collarbone, on the left side. “Here’s your target, Doctor.”

The lump did appear to be firmly stuck in place, very close to the jugular vein.

Crawford took off his coat and rolled his sleeves up past the elbow. “Pour a lot of brandy over my hands,” he told Johanna, “and then soak a towel in it and—”

“—Scrub where you’re going to cut,” said Johanna.

“That’s it.” He looked up at Trelawny’s drawn face. “I’d really like to get some ether. This is likely to hurt quite a bit.”

“I don’t mind hurt,” said the old man through his teeth. “Me and hurt go way back.”

Crawford shook his head. “As you please. Just, whatever you do, don’t twitch.”

When Crawford had rubbed his hands in the sluicing brandy and Johanna had swabbed the old man’s throat with the soaked towel, Crawford held the lump in Trelawny’s throat with his left hand and reached out with the knife in his right—

— and the blade stopped abruptly, two inches above Trelawny’s skin, and would move no closer.

Peripherally Crawford noticed that Trelawny’s face was slicked with sweat.

The heady smell of brandy was overpowering. Crawford carefully increased the pressure against the invisible barrier, not wanting to spear the old man if it were suddenly to relent — but the blade simply skittered aside; as if, it occurred to him, he had tried to push it through Chichuwee’s invisible pot.

“The blade,” he said in a strained voice, “won’t get close to your throat.”

For a moment the old man just breathed in and out. Then he whispered, “Infirm of purpose, give me the pocketknife,” and took it from Crawford’s hand.

The blade was steady in Trelawny’s hand as he pressed it to the base of his own throat, but again the metal was turned aside.

“What’s this?” snapped the old man, sitting up and jabbing uselessly at his throat several more times. “I shave, sometimes!”

“Not with the intention of cutting the stone from your throat, though,” said McKee. “The stone can evidently tell the difference.”

Trelawny dropped the knife and it clattered on the floor.

“This is Polidori’s protection,” he said furiously. “It seems the Nephilim won’t permit any human to cut the man who is the bridge between the species. But it shouldn’t protect me from me; I’m not just any human.” He glared around at the others. “I wouldn’t have confessed my sins here if I’d thought I wasn’t going to die.”

He picked up his shirt — which had got liberally splashed with the brandy — and tugged it on.

His face was grim as he added, “It seems we must rescue my granddaughter by Maria’s means.”

“And who’ll commit a murder?” asked Crawford.

“Oh, who was ever going to do it?” grated Trelawny. “It will be me. I’ve got so many mortal sins on my soul that one more won’t matter. I really thought—”

He finished buttoning his shirt and tucked it into his trousers. “I really thought, there for a moment, that the universe was offering me a noble death. Expiation.”

He walked to the stairs and was halfway up when he turned. “Come along, my sad crew — I’ve got an errand to run, and you’ve got to go roust Christina out of her nest.”

THEY BORROWED HATS AND two coats from Trelawny before getting into a cab in front of his house, so Johanna had a black bowler hat that made her short brown hair stick out to the sides and McKee wore a straw boater with a flower-pattern ribbon, surely something left behind at Trelawny’s by a guest. Crawford was wearing Trelawny’s Inverness cape and a tall brown beaver hat that had probably been fashionable in 1830.

None of them made jokes about the hats on the ride east past Green Park and up the Mall to Charing Cross Road. Crawford held the bottle with the sea mouse bobbing in it, and he tried to project a mental apology to the ghost but got no sense of acknowledgment.

“We can’t let—” he began finally as the cab started up Gower Street, but McKee and Johanna both interrupted him.

“Certainly not,” said McKee.

“I could—” said Johanna, but Crawford waved her to silence.

“None of us,” he said.

His wife and daughter both looked at him uncertainly.

“If—” Crawford said, pausing to look around to be sure the cab had four walls and a roof, “if Polidori appears in vulnerable human form even for a moment, we must try to kill him in that moment. We can’t let poor old Trelawny commit a murder — nor participate in one ourselves.”

Both women seemed to relax, cautiously, though their expressions were skeptical.

“We’ll fail,” said Johanna.

“We can jump into the river,” said Crawford, “if we fail.”

“We’d be safe then,” Johanna agreed, “as long as we remembered not to come up for air.”

For a minute or so no one spoke, and Crawford stared out the window at the passing pillars and the high neoclassical pediment of the British Museum. Fourteen years ago McKee had told him about her father taking her there when she was eleven and about her fear that she might be in the room full of Egyptian mummies when the General Resurrection occurred.

“Christina won’t be happy to see us,” said Johanna, bracing herself as the cab was steered into Torrington Place.

“I don’t believe she’s ever been happy to see us,” said McKee. “And small wonder.”

Christina’s house had muslin sheets across the lower half of the front window to keep soot from blowing in, but above it Crawford saw the curtain twitch as he climbed down from the cab; he waved the bottle as a placating gesture before helping his wife and daughter down and paying the driver.

Christina herself opened the door when he knocked — she was wearing a plain black smock, and her dark and prematurely sagging face was stern.

Without a word she took the bottle from Crawford, held it up to the daylight, and then held it to her ear.

She sighed in evident relief. “Thank you. I’m sorry I can’t invite you in, but we have plasterers due to repair the ceiling—”

“We contacted Maria,” interrupted McKee. “Her ghost, that is. She told us how to banish your uncle.”

Christina shivered as she hugged the bottle to her chest. “You—forced her?”

Johanna said, “Trelawny’s fourteen-year-old granddaughter is somewhere out in the City with your uncle right now. It’s a cold day, and it’ll be a colder night.”

Christina sighed, and the steam of her breath whisked away on the chilly breeze. “Come in then, you punishments for my sins.”

She led them into the entry hall, where Crawford noticed Johanna’s coat still hanging on a hook from last night; God only knew whose coat she had left at the Spotted Dog.

The parlor still smelled of garlic from the bottle Johanna had broken under the nose of the monstrous black-painted thing, and by the gray daylight filtering in through the lace curtains he could see the new cracks in the ceiling. Christina carefully set the bottle on the table, which had been righted.

Crawford said, “I’m sorry we left so abruptly last night—”

“Say calamitously,” said Christina, nodding.

“At least,” he went on, “the thing followed us out.”

“Yes, it did,” said Christina. “Mr. Trelawny shot it — it might be dead now.”

“Much luck,” murmured Johanna.

A housemaid appeared at an inner doorway, and Christina asked her to bring a pot of tea.

“What is the required sin?” she inquired with a brittle semblance of cheer after the housemaid had withdrawn. “The one Maria’s method calls for.”

Crawford didn’t look at his two companions. “You need to let one of us cut you,” he said, “so that you bleed, and then you must summon him, call for rescue — invite him back to you.”

He hoped that was enough — she would surely balk at the proposed murder of a stranger.

He could see a strong pulse in Christina’s throat. “I—” she said. “This hardly seems — how would this aid in banishing him?”

Crawford cleared his throat. “Maria believes he will then appear, wholly, in his vulnerable human form. You’re a blood relative of his, in, er, several senses, and you might be able to forcibly hold him in that form — by mental effort — for at least a few seconds.”

“So that you can kill him,” said Christina softly, “with wooden stakes and silver bullets.”

“And cremation,” added Johanna.

“I — don’t think I can do it,” said Christina.

Maria’s ghost had said, She would not want to do that, because she has always wanted to do that.

“We need you to try,” Crawford said. “Trelawny’s granddaughter needs you to try.”

“I — well, it would indeed be a sin. Even for a praiseworthy purpose, to call up a devil — invoke his love for me—”

McKee cocked her head. “Sister Christina,” she said, “do you mean it would be a betrayal of your uncle? Do you mean it would be wrong to trick him?”

Christina frowned and shook her head impatiently; and then she stopped.

“I,” she whispered, almost wonderingly, “think I do mean that! God help me—”

McKee leaned forward. “You trick a rat when you put bait in a trap.”

“You put it so elegantly.” Christina sighed. “That will be all, Jane, thank you,” she added to the housemaid who had brought in a tray and set it down on the table.

There were eight flat biscuits in a tray beside the teapot, and Crawford made himself ignore them. McKee and Johanna each grabbed two.

“When did you people last eat?” asked Christina in sudden concern.

“I had supper last night,” admitted Crawford.

“About twenty-four hours, for me,” said McKee, and Johanna nodded to indicate the same.

“Good heavens. I’ll have Jane prepare sandwiches—”

“Sandwiches would be good,” said Crawford. “We can eat them on the way to the boat.”

“I don’t understand,” said Christina. “Boat? You’re … leaving the country?”

Johanna said, “It’s a moored boat at the Queenhithe Stairs, by Southwark Bridge. I slept aboard it for a year or so, when I was a Mud Lark.”

“It’s where Trelawny wants to trap Polidori,” said McKee. “And he wants to do it while it’s daylight. It’s cold out; you’ll want to bundle up.”

Christina lifted the teapot and filled one of the cups. “I think,” she said as she picked it up in her shaking hand — and she took a careful sip before going on—“I must do as you say. I think I always knew the day would come when I must, for the sake of my soul, betray him.”

There were tears in her eyes as she set the cup back down. It rattled against the saucer.

THEY ALL CLIMBED INTO a cab and took it to the river south of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and in Upper Thames Street Johanna had the driver let them out at Bradburn Alley, by a row of tall brick warehouses just short of Queen Street.

“Better we approach along the river,” she said as she and her mother helped Christina Rossetti down from the cab. They had eaten several cheese sandwiches on the ride and now brushed crumbs from their coats.

Stout wooden bridges connected the buildings on either side of the alley, and men leaned out of doorways high up in the walls and guided boxes and canvas sacks being raised and lowered on long ropes by pulleys. Crawford led the three women down the alley, around walls of stacked crates and casks, and several times waved them into recessed doorways when heavy-laden carts with chain traces creaked past behind horses in heavy leather collars. Smells of oranges and tobacco and quinine spiced the turbulent air.

At the far end of the alley they were out in the sea-scented wind, viewing the broad face of the river from an elevation only a few feet above the water, and out on the rippled expanse white sails and black smokestacks contrasted with the gray sky. Crawford helped Christina over a low wooden fence, which McKee stepped over and Johanna vaulted, and then they followed a set of narrow-gauge coal-wagon tracks that paralleled the shore, toward the northernmost arch of Southwark Bridge twenty yards ahead.

A chorus of shouts broke out in the alley behind them, and Crawford wondered if a broken pulley had dropped a load.

He was about to glance back when, ahead of him, Johanna jumped and nearly pitched off the tracks into a rowboat below.

She caught her balance and threw him a scared look.

“One wasp doesn’t mean—” she began.

Two wasps buzzed between them, and Crawford heard McKee curse behind him.

He looked back at her. “You and Johanna run ahead to the boat,” he said.

More shouting from the alley behind them was audible now over the wind in his face.

As McKee and Johanna sprinted away toward the shadows under the bridge, Crawford held Christina’s elbow and tried to get her to move faster; finally he said, “Excuse me, it’s an emergency,” and picked her up in his arms and began striding between the coal-wagon tracks after his wife and daughter. He had to shake Christina’s lavender-scented black veil away from his hat brim twice before she noticed and tucked it behind her head.

“Wasps,” she said. “It’s my nightmare son, isn’t it?”

“So you said — last night,” agreed Crawford breathlessly. “Can you — look behind?”

She shifted in his arms. “I see men running out of that alley. Some of them are jumping into the river. No sign of … him, yet.”

Crawford’s throat ached with panting, and his knees and hip jabbed him at every jolting step; he hoped he would have enough warning before falling to set Christina down first.

“I miscarried,” she said. “To me he was born dead. But then his … soul? … his insistent soul went on to become the child of Gabriel and Lizzie.”

“He — seems to have been — born dead — there too.”

“That’s true, poor thing.”

The tracks curved sharply away inland to the left, and he stepped out from between them. He had reached the shadow of the bridge, and through stinging, watering eyes he saw Johanna and McKee on the deck of a low canal barge moored under the arching span.

“You — can walk, from here,” he gasped, lowering Christina to the stone pavement.

Together they hobbled to the wide plank that was laid from the embankment masonry to the boat’s gunwale, and McKee helped pull Christina across; when Crawford had limped across too, he lifted the plank and shoved it sideways so that it splashed into the river.

Trelawny’s head was visible in the low cabin hatch, and he clumped the rest of the way up onto the deck.

“What,” he said irritably, “something chasing you?” Then he squinted beyond them and swore. “Get below, quick,” he snapped.

Crawford stole a glance over his shoulder as he hurried Christina to the hatch.

For a moment he nearly jumped into the river along with the dockworkers. Bouncing down the coal-wagon tracks toward the bridge came rushing a figure that at first seemed to be just two very long cartwheeling gray arms, with rippling pennants of white cloth at the wrists; its black-clad torso bumped along behind, with one leg trailing and one twisted up around its neck, the toes of the bare foot holding a parasol over the rolling black head. It seemed to be singing as it flailed and bounced rapidly toward them.

“Get below!” roared Trelawny, and Crawford nodded and hustled Christina to the ladder. “Grab the swords! Do it!”

The cabin belowdecks was nearly as wide as the barge, lit by an open porthole in the starboard bulkhead. Slanted vents at the bow and stern ends of the ceiling were apparently to let fresh air in and stale air out. A stove against the port bulkhead was flanked fore and aft by rows of floor-to-ceiling bunks, and the bow end was blocked by a sleigh so big that Crawford thought two horses must once have been required to pull it.

And a short, stocky man with a drooping mustache stood halfway down the cluttered deck, staring at the newcomers in surprise.

“He’s still got the sleigh!” whispered Johanna. “I used to sleep in it.”

Christina was just blinking around in evident alarm.

The stocky man looked past them at Trelawny, who had pulled the hatch closed and was now scuffling down the ladder.

The man called, angrily, “One, you said! Not … four! Not women!”

Crawford noticed the hilts of two slim rapiers standing in an elephant-foot umbrella stand by the ladder, and he snatched one of them up and held the hilt of the other out toward McKee. She took it with a quick nod.

“Shut up, Abbas,” said Trelawny tightly, striking a match to a lantern bolted to the wall by the ladder. “I’ll — explain.”

Crawford reached up to take off his ludicrous beaver hat, but he saw Trelawny draw a pistol from under his coat — and he realized that this man Abbas was the person the old man intended to kill, to fulfill the conditions Maria’s ghost had described.

Thumping and sliding sounded from the deck overhead, and then someone was pounding at the hatch and a girl’s voice was screaming words Crawford couldn’t catch.

“That’s Rose!” whispered Johanna. “I know her voice!”

Trelawny took an uncertain step toward the ladder. “She follows that thing,” he said; then he shook his head and spat out an obscene monosyllable and turned toward the others, raising the pistol. “Abbas,” he said.

Crawford leaped at him, striking the pistol aside with his free left hand and aiming a punch at Trelawny’s chest with the sword’s basket hilt; but Trelawny tried to block the blow, and the hilt was deflected upward and rebounded at the old man’s face.

The flare and hard bang of the pistol shot flung Trelawny and Crawford apart; Crawford slammed against the port bulkhead, and Trelawny tumbled limp to the starboard-side deck.

Above and behind Crawford the hatch cracked and blew in splinters down the ladder, and a moment later a cloud of wasps swept buzzing and looping into the cabin, followed by two huge gray hands and a gleaming black head that bobbed in the air. One of the hands was missing a finger.

“Where where where?” sang the thing, twisting the eyeless face back and forth on its snakelike neck and sniffing loudly.

The bullet from Trelawny’s deflected gunshot had apparently still whistled very closely past Abbas’s head, and now the man had drawn a revolver of his own.

“Call me here to kill me?” he screamed, and, still screaming but without words now, he rushed forward and began firing indiscriminately as wasps fastened on his face and hands.

The noise of the shots was stunning in the close cabin, and Crawford’s eyes were dazzled by the fast muzzle flashes. But through the smoke and wasps he saw Johanna step into the man’s path, crouching, her knife held low for an upward thrust; Abbas saw her too, and he swung the barrel of his revolver toward her.

Crawford lunged forward, spun her aside with his left hand, and with his right he drove the rapier blade into the man’s belly.

He was face-to-face with Abbas now and their eyes met, both squinting with nearly impersonal exertion; Abbas tilted the gun barrel up, and Crawford caught the wrist with his left hand, then shuffled forward to drive the blade farther in. Liver, he thought crazily, peritoneum, superior mesenteric artery, spinal column.

The gun fired into the ceiling, and Abbas folded, his knees knocking on the deck.

Crawford had to brace his boot against Abbas’s chest to tug the blade free; he spun to face the others, and immediately he slashed at one of the snakelike gray hands that was groping toward Johanna. It contracted back, and the shiny black head twisted toward him. Suddenly wasps were clinging to Crawford’s face, and points of sharp pain flared in his cheek and forehead.

“I take my bride, oh yes, sir!” sang the wide mouth in the coal-black face.

McKee chopped with her own sword at the long gray neck, and the head whipped around toward her. A girl’s voice was screaming back by the hatch.

Christina Rossetti pushed past Crawford toward the ladder, and as he slapped at the stinging insects on his face, he glimpsed a young girl standing at the base of the ladder, backlit in the gray daylight slanting down the hatch.

Crawford’s sword blocked Christina’s path, and he twisted the blade so that she hit the edge with her hand. She gasped and paused, looking down at the blood that was already dripping from her fingers.

Crawford caught her shoulder and turned her around to face him. There were no wasps on her.

“I cut you!” he shouted. “Summon him now!” He pulled her back across the deck with him to Abbas’s sprawled body, and he crouched to lift the man’s limp hand and then wrap Christina’s bloody fingers around it.

“Catch this man’s ghost, catch his strength, and call Polidori!”

With her free hand she brushed at the wasps that still clung to his face, and tears were running down her cheeks, but she nodded. For a moment she squeezed the dead man’s hand, and then she let it fall and took a deep breath.

The girl, Rose, was rushing across the deck now at Johanna, who raised her knife.

“Uncle John!” Christina called softly.

And the air seemed to twang.

There was another man standing in the bow end of the cabin now, beyond Abbas’s body, and Crawford recognized the curly dark hair, and the mustache, and the deep alien eyes; McKee knew him too, and sprang at Polidori, driving her sword toward his chest—

But the blade flexed as it met a barrier a few inches away from Polidori’s white shirt, and the torqued blade was twisted out of McKee’s hand.

It clattered to the deck as McKee retreated a step, and Polidori stepped back and stood up straight — then paused, flexing his white-gloved hands in front of his face.

He looked at Christina. “Let go of me,” he said in a voice like rocks shifting at the bottom of a well.

“Hold him!” said Crawford. He glanced anxiously back at Johanna — she had wrestled the thrashing Rose to the deck and was fending off the gray hands and the black face with kicks and swipes of her knife.

“I will!” wailed Christina. Her fists were clenched and her eyes were shut.

“Et tu, Brute?” said Polidori to her, and then his human body crouched and picked up McKee’s dropped sword.

With no more now than a desperate hope to distract him, Crawford sprang forward in a lunge, and Polidori straightened and parried the thrust away.

“My son!” he said in his rumbling voice.

Thumps and curses and musical hooting from behind Crawford let him know that McKee had joined Johanna’s fight.

“I’m not,” panted Crawford. “I’m Michael Crawford’s son.” And he lunged again, this time disengaging his blade around Polidori’s parry.

But Polidori easily countered and parried it again and drove his left fist hard into Crawford’s chest.

The force of the blow punched the air out of Crawford’s lungs and flung him backward across the cabin; he hit the deck and slid on his back until his head collided with the aft bulkhead.

Colors spun in his vision, but he dimly saw Trelawny snatch up his hat, and then the old man had rolled him over and yanked the Inverness cape off his shoulders.

Struggling to pull air into his stunned lungs, Crawford managed to get to his hands and knees. And he saw Trelawny, wearing the beaver hat and the cape now, snatch up Crawford’s sword and advance quickly on Polidori.

The light from the porthole and the lantern were at Trelawny’s back — Polidori would see only Trelawny’s backlit silhouette in the hat and cape and must suppose it was Crawford.

“I threw you aside,” said Polidori, crouching again into an en garde, “to live, if you cared to.”

Crawford saw Trelawny lunge.

Polidori parried the thrust and riposted with a lunge of his own—

— and Trelawny caught the vampire’s darting blade on his, but instead of parrying it away, he simply nudged it upward and canted his head to the side.

And Trelawny’s head jerked as the vampire’s blade tip snagged his throat.

Then the old man had toppled backward onto the deck, and Crawford was crawling toward him, still not able to breathe.

Trelawny was breathing, though, in great gasps, and each time he exhaled, the air in the cabin rippled like heat waves over noonday pavement.

Several wasps pattered dead to the deck by Crawford’s sliding hands.

The upright figure that was Polidori was flickering in and out of visibility, and his great voice was audible only in chopped fragments: “—Trelawny — him up! — stone must not — bridge—”

Crawford glanced to the side and saw that the spidery figure of the dead boy was appearing and disappearing too — he saw Johanna drive her knife into the thing’s forehead in a moment when it was present, and when it reappeared again two seconds later, it was hunching backward away from her with dust shaking out of a hole above its gaping left eye.

McKee was kneeling on Rose, holding her wrists.

Crawford had reached Trelawny, who rolled his eyes up at him.

“Get it all the way out,” the old man whispered through bloodstained teeth, and his opened throat hissed with his words. “His protection — you see — didn’t protect me — from himself.”

Fresh blood was puddling under Trelawny’s ear and shoulder and soaking into his tumbled white hair, but it wasn’t spurting as if from a major vessel, and Crawford peered at the wound. The gash in the old man’s throat had exposed part of the trachea — air was blowing a narrow bloody spray out of a cut in it as he breathed — and a walnut-sized cyst hung between the thyroid cartilage and the jugular vein. The cyst was partly cut free, flapping back and forth with each breath.

“Johanna!” Crawford managed to gasp, and when his daughter looked up he beckoned.

She scrambled up on the other side of Trelawny, and her eyebrows went up nearly to the sweat-spiky fringe of her hair when she saw the cut.

“Give me your knife, quick.”

He forced out of his mind the otherwise disabling comprehension that this was a man, not an injured horse.

The intermittent figure of Polidori was flashing closer, and before its flickering, groping hands could reach him, he took Johanna’s knife and held his breath — and with the point he carefully cut along the narrow strip of scar tissue between the pulsing jugular vein and the cyst.

The cyst was lying bloodily across his fingers now, and he traced the knifepoint around the far side of it, freeing it from the thyroid cartilage.

The thing fell into his palm, and he could feel the heavy, nearly round stone inside it.

Polidori collapsed in a thumping swirl of dust that did not flicker away. The dead boy squeaked shrilly and then was just a puff of smoke, slowly dissipating as it drifted under the ceiling toward the stale-air vent.

“Not even anything to cremate,” said Johanna in an awed voice.

Crawford pushed the knifepoint into the cyst, and the steel grated against the fired clay.

AND THROUGH THE KNIFE’S tang in his palm, Crawford was drawn into a vision of the woman in fragments in the green-lit chamber, and he saw the separate hands and arm and wide-eyed face collapse as siftings and spillings of black sand, and the green light faded to darkness, and for a moment he saw bare trees shaking in a gust on the distant Cotswold Hills;

He glimpsed the thing that had been Polidori too, moving like a mountain through the sky, retreating east to the snowy airless heights where nothing organic could live;

And in a house in Holmwood forty miles west of London, Algernon Swinburne dropped his glass of brandy and staggered to the window, but when he had fumbled it open and thrust his head out into the cold wind, the fresh air couldn’t provide the sustenance he was now deprived of;

In Chelsea, Gabriel Rossetti stepped back from his dark, cramped painting of Astarte Syricaca and blinked around bewilderedly at the partitions that blocked his view of the garden, and then he sat down and was sobbing because he couldn’t remember why he had ever nailed them up;

William Rossetti looked up from his desk and stared through his office window at the gray walls of King’s College, and, for just one fleeting moment before returning his attention to the petition at hand, he tried in vain to recall any of the verses he had once been shown, verses that he might have written;

In Christina’s bedroom in the house in Torrington Place, the bottle on the bedroom shelf vibrated faintly, and the furry sea mouse slowly sank to the sediment at the bottom;

And across the bridges and rooftops and steeples of London, all the songbirds burst into wild chirping and trilling.

WHEN THE VISIONS ABATED, no time seemed to have elapsed; Crawford was still holding the knifepoint pressed against the stone.

He shook his head and handed the knife back to Johanna, then pulled his handkerchief out of his pocket, folded it, and gently laid it across the hissing gash in the old man’s throat.

“Pressure,” he told Trelawny, whose hand wobbled up to hold the handkerchief in place. “Not too much.”

“Let — me up,” whispered Trelawny. His face was pale under his tan and slicked with sweat.

“No! Your larynx would probably fall out on your chest.” Crawford looked across at McKee, who had wrestled Rose into a sitting position on the deck. The girl was panting and grinding her teeth.

“She’ll be pretty wild for a while yet,” commented Johanna. “As I recall.”

Christina Rossetti was gripping her cut hand. “I think she’d benefit from staying at the Magdalen Penitentiary,” she said.

“It saved me,” agreed McKee.

Rose made a sullen suggestion about what Christina might benefit from.

Christina sighed and looked down at Trelawny. “Someone should tell her parents, soon, that she’s well.”

“I’ll do it myself,” croaked the old man on the floor, but Crawford frowned and shook his head.

“I’ll send Johanna for medical supplies, and I’ll clean out the wound and sew you up. But you’re going to be living right here for a few weeks, if you live at all. And I mean right here, on the deck — I don’t think even a pillow would be a good idea for a few days. Swallowing is likely to be difficult — can your Larks cook soup?”

“My Larks,” gasped Trelawny, “are going to be busy tonight disposing of a body.”

“I can cook soup,” said Johanna. “I can stay here with him.” She looked down at the old man. “Who’s sleeping in the sleigh these days?”

“I’ll turn ’em out,” whispered Trelawny. “It was always yours.”

Crawford got to his feet, wincing at the pains in his knees and hip. He dug some coins out of his pocket and handed them to Johanna. “Alcohol,” he said. “Carbolic acid. There’s a stove here? Good. Water. A sewing kit. Thread. Bandages.” He glanced down at his scowling, sweating patient; the handkerchief Trelawny was pressing to his throat was already completely blotted and gleaming with blood, and the red puddle on the deck seemed wider. “I’d advise a Bible too, and a priest,” Crawford added uneasily.

Christina nodded. “A Catholic priest, I think, when it’s something important.” Then she bit her lip and looked down. “I’ll even — say a rosary.”

“Don’t talk more foolishness — than you need to, Diamonds,” whispered Trelawny. “This is just the … last stage of the assault I survived fifty years ago. I’ll go on surviving it.”

“No priest?” said Christina. Her eyes were anxious.

“No priest,” echoed Trelawny in a hoarsening whisper. “I married my Zela and loved her without a priest’s consent, and when I do die, it will be without one.”

Christina gave him a wan smile and then looked at the scattered dust on the deck by Abbas’s corpse. She sighed, and said, perhaps to herself, “I only loved one man, and it was my misfortune that he died nine years before I was born.”

Crawford stared at her and opened his mouth, then shut it and turned to Johanna. “You’d better hurry up getting those supplies.”

Johanna nodded and started toward the ladder. “He won’t die of this,” she called back over her shoulder. “He’d scorn to.”

“She was always the best of the Larks,” whispered Trelawny.