Hide Me Among the Graves

door, and he opened it just in time for her to leap into his arms, nearly making him drop the newly lit candle.

“He’s found me,” she gasped into the shoulder of his nightshirt. “And he’s got—”

She couldn’t describe the skeletal boy right now, and just clung to her father. He patted her back and started carefully toward the stairs, for he knew she’d want to spend the rest of the night in the cellar.

CHAPTER SIX

To-day, while it is called to-day,

Kneel, wrestle, knock, do violence, pray;

To-day is short, to-morrow night:

Why will you die? why will you die?

— Christina Rossetti, “The Convent Threshold”

WITH INADVERTENT IRONY, the window of his office at the Board of Inland Revenue gave William Rossetti a close-up view of the triangular pediments over the second-floor western windows of King’s College. If he stood up from his desk and moved around to the left side of it, he would be able to see, off to the right, a slice of the brown Thames and a warehouse or two on the south shore; but when he was sitting at the desk and reviewing his daily lot of orders and petitions, he was confronted by the school he had attended, negligently, from the ages of eight to fifteen. And he was forty now.

This morning the sight was somehow especially maddening. Last night he had, albeit in what had apparently been a hallucination, unrolled a scroll and read verses as sublime as any his brother or sister had written, and they were in his own handwriting! And there were dozens of scrolls, and he had known that all of them contained poetry he was destined to write—

But the — the librarian had come in before he could look at any more. And William had recognized the intruder from the picture his mother always kept on the parlor wall, wherever they lived.

A confident atheist, William dismissed belief in Heaven and Hell as archaic superstitions, but at a number of seances he had seen evidence that personalities did survive physical death — though the spirits who could be contacted that way always seemed to have become imbecilic, scarcely able to comprehend questions or frame answers — like Lizzie, last night, simply trying to spell out her own name!

But Polidori had offered William a different sort of survival, a virtual immortality, one in which he might seal his own identity and intellect against erosion, albeit at the cost of … well, at an abominable cost.

William pushed away the document he had been reading — a petition requesting a Civil Service pension for the widow of a deceased Excise officer — and closed his eyes to better remember the vision.

The attraction of his uncle’s offer did not lie primarily in survival of death.

What might be written on those other scrolls? What unimaginable, radiant odes, sonnets, ballads?

Gabriel and Christina, and Swinburne too, accepted William as an equal in education and appreciation of literature and art, but he was always aware of a dimension the three of them shared, lived in, that he could not enter. Their verses would be read and admired for centuries, while his translations of Dante and his edition of Shelley’s works would surely be superseded long before he even retired from the Board of Inland Revenue.

He had not moved very far from that school outside his office window.

His hand had been twitching, and looking down he saw to his alarm that he had scrawled words across the widow’s petition. He must make another copy, get her solicitor to sign it—

Then he read what he had written:

not as thyself alone,
But as the meaning of all things that are;
A breathless wonder, shadowing forth afar
Some heavenly solstice, hushed and halcyon

He felt the hairs on his arms standing up, and he blinked away tears; these were lines from the scroll he had read in the vision last night, and he could almost remember the next line … something, and then furthest fires oracular…

It was gone.

His uncle — for it was his uncle too — had asked for help, and said, Talk to me — you know how.

“Uncle John,” he whispered, “are you there?” and he reached out to touch an A in the petition, and then a B—

And then all at once the air on his face and hands was hot, and he was standing and stumbling forward to keep his balance in deep dry sand, squinting against a glaring sun.

He gasped in surprise and felt the hot dry air parching his lungs.

After a moment of dazed incomprehension, he clapped his hands just to hear the sound of it and feel the faint sting; and he experienced both sensations. This was as evidently real a place as his office had been a moment before.

Before him stretched an infinity of serrated dunes under the empty blue sky, and the silence was profound; no slightest breeze flicked the ridges of sand. He slid his shoes through the mounded grains to get a full-circle view—

And he gasped again. Half a mile behind him a black stone cathedral stood up as tall as St. Paul’s, taller, with nothing behind or around it except more empty miles of tan dunes.

Its pillars and arches and remote dome were rounded by centuries or millennia of erosion — and then he saw that the thing wasn’t a building at all, but a vast weathered statue: towering legs, buttresses that might have been wings, and a promontory head with no features remaining.

Eyeless, it nevertheless seemed to stare with antediluvian defiance at the sun and the wasteland.

Into William’s head came Shelley’s lines: Round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away.

He was shivering, but at the same time his tie and waistcoat and woolen trousers were smothering him.

He tore loose his tie and collar, but the sense of heavy oppression only intensified, and he realized that all of this, the sun and the heat and the desert, were being projected onto him by a watchful identity in the stone colossus; and the colossus itself was a projection of that identity.

A thought appeared forcefully in his mind, and he translated it into words: Help me. There was a task to be done, and of it William got only a blurred impression of blood smeared across black stone, but on the far side of it were the poems that had been written on the scrolls he had seen last night.

He tried to concentrate on that required task, to open it to articulate elaboration; and he was able to find words to convey it: The blood of my—something like onetime hosts; strayed children, adopted ones; canceled clients? — is redundant, just … repetition — reiteration! of myself. I am—again there was a cluster of applicable words: broken, ill-defined, illogically phrased— and — I cannot, impossible to, restore myself as I need to be restored.

William was shown two images: of a man and a tiny black statue, and also a series of images in between: seen left to right, the images showed the man shrinking and darkening, but viewed right to left they traced the expansion of the statue into the man.

Another thought: I need to be fully restored. Fully.

That had been conveyed clearly!