Hide Me Among the Graves

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

And the old streets come peering through

Another night that London knew

And all as ghostlike as the lamps.

— Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “Jenny”

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