Hide Me Among the Graves

name?”

Three raps. No.

“Do you have a name?”

Three more raps.

William looked up at his brother and sister and shook his head in evident bafflement.

A thought occurred to Christina. “Can you spell?” she asked.

Three more knocks sounded in reply.

William shrugged. “I don’t know how much we can learn from this spirit, with just yes and no and maybe.”

It’s not Uncle John, thought Christina — he can write whole stories. “Can you draw,” she asked, “if one of us holds the pencil?”

A single knock sounded in reply. Yes.

“Christina,” called Maria from the other end of the room, “don’t give it your hand!”

But Christina had already picked up the pencil, and Gabriel tore the top sheet of paper off the pad.

“Draw yourself,” said Christina.

Her hand dropped the pencil and then picked it up again, holding it now as if it were a lever; and then it lunged toward the pad and quickly outlined two crude figures, one tall with circles for breasts and a rank of lines for long hair, the other figure shorter and stick-thin. Then four lines and a zigzag made a broken window behind them.

It’s Lizzie again, thought Christina; no, Boadicea — but her hand drew a circle around the head of the smaller figure.

“Damn me,” whispered Gabriel, “it’s that starved child-ghost!”

“How do you know,” asked William, “that the statue is still in our father’s grave?”

Christina’s hand was beginning to ache from its awkward grip of the pencil, which now again moved jerkily, outlining a horizontal rectangle and, inside it, a quick back-and-forth squiggle that seemed to be a recumbent body — and between the round head-loop and the oval of the chest it ground a black dot into the paper.

“That’s our father’s coffin!” whispered Gabriel. “And that dot is in his throat.”

“But how do you know?” persisted William. “Who are you?”

Christina winced as her hand now drew another rectangle directly above the first one.

“I wish he could hold a pencil properly!” she gasped.

More slowly, the pencil outlined another supine body in profile, inside this second rectangle. Peering past her own hand, Christina saw a curve indicating a bosom and another curve, bigger … pregnancy? A coffin directly over our father’s … that must be meant to represent Lizzie’s body.

Her hand drew a little spidery asterisk inside the pregnancy curve, then circled the asterisk shape and drew a line from it to the circle it had drawn around the head of the stick-thin figure in the first drawing.

Gabriel gave a choked gasp and pushed himself back from the table. “Merciful God!” he whispered. “It’s my child; it’s the child Lizzie was carrying when she died!”

William leaned back quickly, half raising a hand, and Christina knew that her own face must be as stiff with horror as his was.

But her hand would not release the pencil, and she could not pull it away from the paper.

The pencil lifted and returned to the figure of the pregnant woman — and though the point was getting blunted, it drew a curve from the spidery fetus to the bottom line of the coffin, and there it drew a series of Xs along that line; then the point made a line straight up, right out of the coffin rectangle and off the top of the paper.

Perhaps because it was her own hand making the picture, Christina understood it. “It broke the mirrors,” she said softly, “and carried the pieces away to the surface.”

“He,” said Gabriel in a hollow tone. “Not it.”

A hand on Christina’s shoulder made her jump, but it was just Maria, who had at some point walked up behind her.

And now Christina’s hand sprang open, dropping the pencil, and she pulled it back and massaged it with her left hand.

“Destroy that drawing,” said Maria, and her voice was oddly low in pitch, and getting lower: “and … the … pencil…”

Sudden gray light dazzled Christina, and her chair shifted as if in an earthquake; she grabbed for the table but fell forward and her outstretched hands slapped against a horizontal plank, and she wasn’t in the chair at all but sitting on a similar plank; and when she squinted quickly around herself she saw gunwale rails and rope rigging, and realized dazedly that she was sitting alone in a boat.

And the boat was swaying from side to side, but with the keel swinging most widely, as if the boat were a pendulum. She gasped and leaned back, gripping the thwart she was sitting on, and the cold wind that fluttered her hair smelled of steamy smoke, like a fire doused with water.

She looked upward to see what moored the top of the mast, but saw only gray sky above it.

Then she wasn’t alone. “It won’t fall,” said a heavy voice from in front of her.

She gasped and lowered her head and was not entirely surprised to see the young man sitting now on the thwart across from her. The deep eyes and curly dark hair and mustache were of course familiar from the portrait that had hung on the wall of every house she’d lived in. But he was hunched over and deathly pale.

For one flickering moment the figure was the squat, eyeless form of Mouth Boy, and then it was John Polidori again.

Christina could hear her pulse throbbing in her temples.

“You crave two things,” he said. “Your poetry and me. And we are one thing. You have found my attention again, but not yet my help again. You must let me help you. And therefore you must help me.”

Three lines of one of her poems occurred to her: There’s blood between us, love, my love, / There’s father’s blood, there’s brother’s blood, / And blood’s a bar I cannot pass.

And though she had only thought the lines, he gave her a stiff smile that did nothing to change the humorless cast of his eyes.

“You use my gift to say me no,” came his voice, and she noticed that the sound of it lagged behind the motion of his lips, as if he were far away.

“I am a jealous god,” he went on, “and I offer you the same. Will you be jealous if I take … your sister, Maria?”

“Maria,” Christina said hoarsely, gripping the thwart under her, “is consecrated to your adversary.”

Polidori opened his mouth, and now he quoted four lines of a poem of Gabriel’s:

Of the same lump (as it is said)
For honour and dishonour made,
Two sister vessels. Here is one.
It makes a goblin of the sun.

“Help me,” he said. “I have always loved you best. Maria is not who I want.”

Christina’s heartbeat had slowed, since the impossible boat did appear to be securely moored somehow, and she ventured a glance out over the gunwale — in the middle distance, winged things with bodies like octopi and jellyfish flapped heavily through the humid air, and dimly in the remoter grayness she could just make out tall mountains or towers.

Maria would recoil from any whiff of this, she thought. And I will at least turn away.

“No,” she said, blinking back tears. “I can live without me — I mean, without you.”

“What you can do without me,” he said sadly, “is die. Talk to me — you know how.”

And then she was sitting at the table in Gabriel’s dimly lit dining room again, panting hard and clutching the seat of her chair and wincing at Maria’s tight grip on her shoulder. She glanced around wildly, but the pinpoint