Hide Me Among the Graves

radiances of the few candles in the room were not enough for her dazzled eyes to see anything.

“Maria, let go!” she gasped, and Maria’s hand was gone. “Gabriel, William, are you here?”

From across the table came a croaked “Yes” that might have been either of them. “Yes,” came a second assent, this one recognizably Gabriel’s breathless voice.

“Ach!” coughed Maria from behind Christina’s chair. “Why did I touch you? Our terrible uncle! I must wash my hand.”

“Gabriel,” said Christina, “light, for God’s sake.”

One of the figures on the other side of the table blundered to its feet, and she heard the rattle of a matchbox.

“I,” said William, “saw none of you there.”

A match flared, and then Gabriel had lit a gas jet on the wall and turned the valve all the way open. Christina squinted in the relative glare as the cabinets and wallpaper of the familiar room became visible again. She looked over her shoulder and saw Maria scowling.

“Where were you?” Gabriel asked.

“A room,” said William, rubbing his eyes, “in a tower, I think. It was full of scrolls, poetry, and I could read them all. And I knew—” He stopped and shook his head. “And I can’t remember any of the verses now — and they were all beautiful.”

Like Coleridge unable to remember the unwritten bulk of Kubla Khan, thought Christina — and suddenly she was sure that, in William’s vision, he himself had been the author of the vanished verses. Recalling his real-world attempts at poetry, Christina winced now in pity.

“I was on a beach made of glass,” said Gabriel. He shuffled carefully to the next gas jet and struck another match. “There was an ocean, and it was made of water, but the waves … walked, toward me.” He shivered visibly, and had to strike another match.

William dropped his hands and blinked at Christina.

She hesitantly described her own vision but found that she had finished without having mentioned their uncle’s presence in it.

“Into my head,” came Maria’s voice from behind Christina, “against my will! — he projected a view of the interior of a — a skull, an enormous skull. I seemed to be standing inside it. And he was there, and he said filthy things to me.”

“What did he say?” asked William, but Maria just shook her head.

Christina wondered if their uncle had been in all their visions, and only Maria was innocent enough to mention it.

And she wondered if he had said, to each of them, Talk to me — you know how.

Maria was still staring at her hand, which had been gripping Christina’s shoulder when the visions began. “All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand,” Maria said, perhaps to herself.

“You shouldn’t have touched me during it,” said Christina crossly. Then she shook her head and said, “I’m sorry, Maria! You’re always getting into trouble trying to help me.”

William cleared his throat. “This … statue,” he said, “is evidently still in our father’s grave. We need to — you say we need to — get it.”

“And destroy it,” added Maria.

Now Gabriel strode to the windows and pulled them closed, and Christina saw him peer fearfully outside as he latched them.

And she wondered if his son was out there — how had he described him? A boy, like a starved corpse galvanized.

JOHANNA SNAPPED AWAKE WHEN the air was suddenly cold and metallic in her nose and the light brightened beyond her closed eyelids, and her hand was on the old leather grip of her knife in the same moment that she opened her eyes.

And she flinched back in the bed, but it wasn’t a bed — she was on a curved, hard ivory slope that was broken at the top edge, and though two figures stood forty feet away on the opposite side of the bumpy ivory bowl, her gaze was helplessly caught by what was moving outside and above the broken-edged rim.

What seemed to be a tower as tall as a mountain stood in the yellow sky — but it was just perceptibly broader in the middle, and she knew it was a wheel viewed from directly in front. It was too far away for its motion to be immediately visible, but she knew that it was rushing in her direction at horrifying speed.

Knowing what she would see, she nevertheless looked up to left and right, and saw sky-scraping wheels in those directions too; and, looking straight up, she saw the miles-high rim of another above the cracked edge of this wide ivory cup.

She had been here before, and she remembered that the wheels never did actually arrive or roll past — that in fact it became difficult, if you watched them, to know in which direction any one of them was turning, though they were palpably spinning at mind-withering speeds — and that soon it would be possible to make out eyes like stars along their rims.

She shivered and drew her knife, panting. It had been a long time since she had felt at home in this place.

Her gaze snapped back down then, for one of the figures on the other side of the bowl had begun to move.

She had never seen it before; it was a skeletal boy in an overcoat of something like dead leaves, and his eyes and white teeth protruded from the gray skin stretched tightly over his skull.

He was hopping toward her over the bumps and hollows of the skull bottom, and Johanna quickly got up in a crouch and held her knife ready.

The boy paused, his eyes gleaming at her above his wide, helpless grin.

“Josephine, my daughter,” came Polidori’s leaden voice from behind the insectlike figure.

Johanna decided not to correct him again about her name. She breathed rapidly and kept her eye on the swaying mummified boy.

“This is your betrothed,” Polidori went on, “consecrated to Boadicea as you are consecrated to me. Together you will have an offspring that will fulfill her purpose, break the land.”

Without looking away from the terrible lean face that was now only a few yards from her, Johanna was peripherally aware that the remote eyes were glaring in the wheels; and then she did glance up quickly, for the sky had gone darker.

And she was viewing a city from all directions at once, no part farther or nearer than any other part, and she could trace the old buried rivers and tunnels and pipes and the towers and bridges and the decorative brass plates around doorknobs.

And then the wheels were visibly turning — and the city was moored to them and began to tear apart. The buried rivers opened to take the towers, and gravity pulled in a hundred directions.

And the boy was upon her. At the first impact of his bony knees and shoulders she lashed out convulsively with her knife, and a cold exhalation like the burst of gas from a rupturing deepwater fish was in her nostrils; then one knobby fist had bounced off the socket of her left eye, and a moment later the boy was rolling away down the ivory slope.

She blinked away tears and looked past the figure flailing in the central depression now, straight at Polidori.

He seemed somehow less distinct than he had when she had been a child and he had been her lord — she could see the eyes and the mustache, but his outline seemed to churn in her vision like an afterimage of glare.

“You will be glad to bear his child,” Polidori said, “after you invite me back.” Suddenly he was closer. “Invite me back.”

She flipped the knife and caught it by the tip, then drew it back and flung it toward the boiling center of him.

And her bed crashed to the floor in darkness, and Johanna was cursing shrilly as she scrambled out of it and wrenched open the bedroom door.

By the time she had scuffed barefoot down the stairs to the landing there was a light under her father’s