in a single solid sheet; the bottle and its spilled contents cratered into the mud surface, which then collapsed back to the pit in the floor.
CHRISTINA NOTICED THAT SWINBURNE kept looking back toward the grave as the funeral party trudged away toward the stairs that led down toward the yard and the chapel and the waiting coaches. Does he think we left someone behind? she wondered.
When the group had descended the stairs from the lawns to the crushed-stone yard, Swinburne exhaled and shoved his hands into his coat pockets and looked around at the mourners — and then his eyes widened and he stepped back toward the rear of the group.
Christina looked in the direction Swinburne had been facing and saw that Trelawny was staring after him.
Trelawny caught her gaze and fell into step beside her. The white-bearded old man’s back was straight and his shoulders were almost militarily squared — in something like defiance, Christina thought.
“Who is the young poet?” he asked.
Christina glanced back after Swinburne. “He
“One of your damned crowd? I should have expected it.”
“He’s a friend,” said Christina, “an especially good friend to Gabriel and Lizzie.”
“I daresay.”
“Thank you for coming,” she remembered to say.
“You mentioned, Diamonds, that you know where that statue is—”
“I don’t want to think about — I don’t want to think,” she said desperately. “‘The world is a tragedy to those that think,’” she recited at random, “‘a comedy to those that feel.’”
She had reversed Walpole’s aphorism, but Trelawny nodded, conceding the point. “Even from here I can feel his attention on you still, like heat from a fire. I won’t question you now.” He frowned for a moment, then said, “I once bought a Negro slave, in Charleston, in America, it must be thirty years ago now — shall I tell you about that?”
“Oh, yes, please,” said Christina, exhaling as if she’d been holding her breath. “As long as it’s not … relevant.”
“No, not relevant to anything this side of the Atlantic. They’re fighting a war to free the slaves over there now — well, I did my part back in, let’s see, in ’34, by buying this fellow and immediately freeing him…”
As he rambled on, Christina listened hungrily to each distracting detail, though she noted every step that took her farther away from the grave and the thing in her father’s throat. Soon, she thought, soon, our uncle’s terrible attention will fall off me like a snagged cape.
THE BLACKLY SHIMMERING FIGURE of Polidori still stood holding the little girl at the far side of the chamber.
“Garlic,” said the remaining mud figures, and then they made a rackety snuffling sound. “Sulfur, that is, and an agent that interferes with us binding ourselves to the defining spiral threads of your fabric.”
McKee had straightened up from her throw and stood beside Crawford, panting. Crawford gripped his own bottle of crushed garlic in his pocket and waited tensely for Polidori to go on, but for several seconds none of the figures in the chamber moved, and the only sound was an occasional pop from one of the torches stuck into holes high up in the domed ceiling. Polidori seemed to have stopped paying attention to the two intruders, and the little girl in his flickering arms was swinging Crawford’s watch and quietly reciting something in a nursery-rhyme cadence.
Crawford’s gaze darted around the chamber, and he noticed a wavy seam across the top of the dome, and the term that occurred to him was
On the far side of the chamber, Polidori was standing on the central ridge of the occipital bone. The mud things were standing down in the concavities of the temporal bone.
Crawford was suddenly shivering as if he were very cold, though he was able to think, objectively, We are inside a giant’s skull.
And as soon as he thought it, the light went dim and the air was moving and very cold and smelled of rust and wet stone; the floor under his feet had changed in an instant, and he skipped to keep his balance on what was now flat stone. He could hear water splashing and echoing.
His eyes were still dazzled by the vanished torchlight, and he took hold of McKee’s hand and peered ahead. The only light was a dim gray glow, possibly daylight reflecting down a shaft, from a gap in the arched stone ceiling.
They were standing on a projection of cracked old masonry, a stone ramp that was broken off jaggedly a yard in front of their boots, and below it rushed a shadowed stream about twenty feet across.
The tall darkly glowing figure on the far side, which at first Crawford mistook for a streak of residual retinal glare since it almost appeared to shift when he moved his eyes, must be Polidori.
Now Crawford could see that Polidori was standing on, or was projected onto, a similar broken ramp on that side; clearly there had once been a bridge across this stream. Crawford couldn’t see Johanna, but he heard her ongoing soft recitation mingle with the rattle of water against stone.
Polidori spoke in a deep and oily voice, and Johanna’s little-girl voice spoke too, matching his, syllable for syllable; Crawford was horrified to feel his own tongue and throat twitch, as if Polidori’s will were partly eclipsing his own too, even way over here on this side of the stream.
“The child and her organic father are strangers to each other,” said the voices of Polidori and Johanna, “but her mother loves her. The mother must be snuffed out.”
Johanna’s voice alone said, “Will you unravel her?” in a tone of mild curiosity.
“No, child,” answered Polidori’s not-quite-human voice, “that would leave a ghost unquiet in the river. I will crush her identity to nothing.”
McKee called hoarsely, “I do love you, Johanna!”
Crawford pulled his own bottle of garlic out of his pocket — there were apparently no mud men here to block his throw, and his free hand darted toward the screw-on lid—
— but Polidori had raised his arm, and the air solidified around Crawford’s hands and violently twisted the bottle away; he heard it splash into the stream.
“My garlic,” he whispered bleakly to McKee. “He reached across somehow before I could open it.”
McKee just exhaled.
“I’d like to have her ghost to keep with me,” said Johanna.
“You shall have the man’s ghost, if you like. I will simply kill him.”
“Unravel him?”
Polidori raised one hand.
Crawford grabbed McKee’s arm and took a quick step backward, but he was unable to pull her after him; he peered back to see what had caught her.
A black halo encircled McKee’s head, a ring so much darker than the surrounding gloom that it seemed to glow. Her face was in deeper shadow than it should have been, and he realized that her head was in a translucent globe that only looked like a ring because he was seeing the apparent boundary curve end-on.
He stopped trying to pull her. Crawford reached for McKee’s face — and he was able to push his hand into the dark globe against resistance, though tugging at her jaw didn’t move her head at all. He felt her rapid panicky breath on his hand in the moment before he drew it back — and then he took a deep breath and simply thrust his own head in beside hers.
The globe visibly expanded to enclose his head too, and he couldn’t hear or see anything, and his body had gone completely numb — he didn’t even know if he was still standing.
He was aware of two minds existing in a nonspatial proximity to his, one female and one male; the male one was in some sense vastly more prominent, and had begun exerting inexorable pressure on the female one, but—
