Hide Me Among the Graves

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