Hide Me Among the Graves
Page 29

And then the imagined readjusted pliers were brought to bear and closed in and something began to go wrong with his mind. Memories intruded forcefully into his narrowed attention, broken and jammed together, like roof beams crashing into a bedroom under an unsustainable weight: the image of his son Girard replaced a dog that Crawford was cutting open for surgery; and he saw the heads of his parents on crows flying over the London Bridge; and his wife Veronica's face instead of his own staring at him from a mirror, and then the mirror sprang forward and shattered against his forehead and Veronica's mind was leaking into his.
Her memories were brutal - a hot haze of drunkenness veiled a dim view of naked men with the heads of bulls and birds of prey, and a wailing baby that was carried away by animated skeletons, and fingers tense on the wet grip of a knife -
And his flickering awareness grasped that these were not a distortion of Veronica's memories, but of McKee's -
Adelaide! he thought.
The psychic pressure increased, and he caught one last image from her smothered mind - it was of McKee in a white wedding dress in a church, and Crawford was standing beside her on the altar.
And then his mind was too compressed to sustain consciousness.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Now, sweet daughter, but one more sight,
And you may lie soft and sleep to-night.
We know in the vale what perils be:
Now look once more in the glass...
- Dante Gabriel Rossetti, "Rose Mary"
AT FIRST CHRISTINA thought the sense of constriction signaled the onset of a headache or some distress in her stomach, and she shifted on the leather carriage seat and looked away from Cayley to face the window and take deep breaths of the cold fresh air. The carriage had passed under the stone arch of Highgate Cemetery's entrance and rocked in a left turn onto the road, and she dreaded the shaking of the increased speed that was sure to follow.
But the uncomfortable tightness was somewhere else, not in her - somewhere in the oppressive and unceasing attention of her uncle.
"Are you well, my dear?" asked Cayley, leaning forward solicitously.
Polidori's disembodied attention was all to do with squeezing and crushing something, and Christina had to breathe deliberately just to convince herself that she could. She held up her hand to put off answering Cayley.
And then it was gone. She had apparently moved at last out of the sphere of Polidori's ground-state attention, and she felt all at once lighter and younger. The increasing headwind sluicing through the open window as the horses quickened their pace was pleasantly cooling on her damp forehead.
"Yes, Charles," she said, her voice lively with surprised relief, "I'm fine."
Deeply and gladly she inhaled the cold air, and she stretched her fingers on her lap, feeling as though she had at last shed a pair of gloves that she'd worn for decades.
His attention was always on me to some extent, she thought, during these seventeen years, and it's finally completely gone.
I'm alone on my own.
LIKE A TAUT ROPE suddenly cut, the stretched awareness of the thing that was largely John Polidori snapped back - and then reflexively reached out again to reestablish the broken connection; and its attention fixed on what seemed to be its goal but was instead only streaks of familiar blood in grooves cut into a cluster of mirrors...
And the wave-form that was the Polidori thing's identity was reflected back onto itself and instantly fragmented into a turbulence of nullifying contradictions and meaningless emphases.
A BOOMING CRASH OF collapsing masonry and the thudding of tons of dirt jarred Crawford, and he rolled over painfully on a wet floor, blinking at shadowed stone walls and coughing grit out of his throat. He could feel hot blood running from his nose and clotting in his mustache and beard, and he peered around him in the darkness, assuming that he was in a building that had partially collapsed.
He knew vaguely that there were a number of ages he might be, but he had no idea which of them might include this experience, whatever it was.
He could hear water rushing in a roofed channel very close by, and now he could dimly see that someone was lying on the stone floor near him - a woman. Had she been injured in the collapse? Had he? He tried to stop coughing and think.
Memories prickled in his consciousness, opening one clear area after another. He was older than he would have guessed, and he was wearing the torn ruins of a linen shirt and creased woolen trousers - he had been at a funeral! - and the dim radiance filtering down the shaft overhead was probably the light of a far-off overcast sky; the woman lying beside him was ... was the mother of his daughter!
Then with a mental expansion that felt like his ears popping, he remembered it all, and he quickly rolled over to peer across the rushing stream; but through a haze of dust he saw that the stone platform and bridge-end that had been on that far side were gone now, buried under a new slope of jagged rock and freshly turned earth.
Johanna had been standing over there, with the Polidori thing.
He tilted his head back to stare up at the hole in the arched ceiling over the stream; the ceiling was high, and the light that touched the stone edges of the hole was very faint. He turned to look behind him, in the direction from which they'd come, but could see nothing.
He reached across and shook the woman's shoulder. "Adelaide!" he whispered.
Her shoulder was yanked away and he heard her scramble into a crouch, suddenly panting.
"I've got a knife," she gasped. "Come near me and I'll kill you."
"Adelaide, listen to me." He got to his feet and reached toward her - then snatched his hand back and heard the blade whistle through the air where it had been.
"Keep back!" she said. "I'll kill you and that Carpace bitch, both. Tell her - "
"Adelaide," he interrupted, "Carpace is dead. I killed her. I'm John Crawford."
She hesitated. "Killed her? What place is this? Strike a light."
"I can't. We're underground, under Highgate Cemetery." And our daughter is dead, he thought.
"Highgate - do you work at the Magdalen Penitentiary?"
"No, you've been out of there for ... two years, I think you said."
"What year is this?"
"1862. And we have to - "
"Ach, so old, all at once? And who are you?"
"John," he said, "Crawford. I - "
"John!" For several seconds she didn't move, and then her head whipped around to stare at the spot across the stream where the other stone platform had been.
And she wailed and fell to her knees when she saw the new slope of churned earth and rubble over there.
"Johanna!" she screamed; and then she screamed it again, making Crawford wince, but the third time her voice broke into sobbing.
After a few seconds, she caught her breath and choked, "What happened?"
"I don't know!" He too was staring at the tumbled stone and dirt across the stream. "I - I believe I slowed him down, in his attack on you, when I interposed my head in his psychic vise - and then he began to crush us both - but I lost consciousness and revived only a moment before you did."
"This is Sister Christina's stroke," said McKee softly. "It was her stroke that stopped him from crushing our minds, and crushed him instead - and my daughter."
Our daughter, thought Crawford.
"There's nothing more we can do," he said. "We need to get out of here, back up to daylight."
Slowly, panting as if she'd been running, McKee straightened and peered around in the darkness. To the right, the ledge they were on slanted uphill for at least some distance before it was lost in shadows, and he took her elbow.
She shook it off. "I saw into your head, when he was crushing us - you must have seen into mine."
"I think so." He remembered now the image of a wedding, but only said, "Just - distorted fragments."
"That's - all?"
"Yes. We've - "
"You're sure?"
"Yes!" He spread his fingers and then clenched his fists and repeated, "We've got to get out of here!" He reached out and fumbled for her hand, but she snatched it away.
"Don't touch me," she said.
"Wha - why?"
"Why do you think?" She was still panting. "We tried to save Johanna, and we failed, she died. I failed, which is shameful, and you failed, which is shameful."
"For God's sake, Adelaide," he said, starting forward along the ledge and then pausing, "what more could we have done? Damn me, how is it that we did as much as we did?"
McKee stared again for several moments at the jagged slope on the other side of the stream. Then, "Let me lead the way," she said quietly, stepping around him, "and please don't speak unless you perceive some danger along our course."
THEY GROPED THEIR WAY through pitch-blackness, in silence except for the scuff and stumble of their boots on stone and in mud, and when they came to cross-tunnels, or broad areas that seemed spacious judged by the echoes of their breathing, McKee shuffled around until she had found the uphill direction, and they followed that - though several times it crested out and led them farther down. Twice Crawford saw hints of reflected firelight far away down what must have been side corridors, and at one point, when he and McKee were edging along a narrow ledge over a pit, he heard monotonous singing or chanting far below. They clambered blindly over heaped stones that sometimes felt as if they'd been shaped by tools, and made their way up out of waist-deep pools by climbing ancient stone stairs, and edged around boulders made of rusted-together pieces of metal - Crawford's fingers traced corroded spoons and sword hilts and coins of unguessable age all stuck together like clusters of barnacles.
After at least an hour, he and McKee found themselves walking along a concave floor that was straight and smooth but very slippery - the smell was now very bad, like full chamberpots and rotten eggs - and Crawford heard McKee patting a wall.
"This is modern brick," she whispered. "The Northern High Level Sewer between Hampstead and Stoke Newington, it must be. There'll be a ladder."
And there was, though to find it they had to climb over two chest-high brick walls that McKee called diversion dams. The ladder rang faintly when McKee's groping hand collided with it.
Crawford gingerly patted his way around McKee and then preceded her up the new iron ladder, and when his head bumped a metal grating, he felt along the bars of it until he was touching the latch, and he managed to climb a few rungs back down as he lowered it on its hinges with one hand.
Above that was a square of solid iron, but it was hinged too, and he trusted the new ladder not to break under his boots when he braced his shoulders under the manhole cover and forced it upward. It squeaked up - he braced his hands in dazzling gray daylight on the steel rim embedded in the street pavement, and pushed - and then the cover fell away behind him with a loud clang that echoed between close housefronts.
He didn't hear hooves or wheels bearing down on him, so before looking around, he scrambled out of the shaft and reached down for McKee's hand. And when they had both got to their feet on the crushed stone of the street surface, and he had swung the iron cover back into place, and he and McKee had stumbled to a curb, he saw through narrowed eyes that they were in front of a pastry shop window.
"Would you like a cup of tea?" he croaked. "I've got some money."
Then he flinched at a woman's harsh voice from behind them. "Breaking into cellars, then, were you?"
Crawford turned toward the voice. In the gray but blinding daylight, an enormous woman in an apron was striding across the street toward them.
"You're the ones made off with my pig, eh?" she went on loudly.
"No, no," called Crawford hoarsely, "street collapsed in Highgate - women and children swept into the sewers - "
"Come along," muttered McKee, grabbing his arm and pulling him into a trot.
"Get help!" yelled Crawford for verisimilitude over his shoulder. "Ropes, ladders!"
He had at least succeeded in baffling the woman, who had stopped and was looking uneasily at the manhole cover.
McKee had yanked Crawford around a corner and the two of them were now walking, as briskly as they could in their clinging wet clothes, against a bone-chilling headwind that made his eyes water. She had let go of his arm.
"Tea!" she said scornfully. "We look like we crawled out of a cesspool!"
Crawford looked at her as she strode along, then glanced down at himself.
It was true. Her dress and his shirt and trousers were slimed with what he hoped was just black mud, though in truth both of them smelled pretty horrible. His beard was stiff with dried blood, and McKee's dark hair looked like a plundered bird's nest.
They had been walking south down the middle of a rutted dirt road between old overhanging Tudor houses, stared at with disfavor but with no active interference by a couple of cart drivers who passed them, but now McKee stopped, hugging herself and shivering.
She faced Crawford and spoke clearly. "Our daughter is dead - and thank God she will at least stay dead, with the resurrecting devil killed too." She took a deep breath and let it out. "I'm leaving London. There's nothing I can hope for in this city." She squinted at him, as if to fix his face in her memory. "This village is Lower Clapton - I know it well, I've often caught birds near here. Kingsland Road is that way," she said, waving to the east, "and if you walk south along it for two or three miles, you'll get to the river at London Bridge. I suggest you jump right in."
"Can I - " he began; then he shook himself and just said, "I wish you would stay."